Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  Then he heard the footsteps, coming in his direction along the road. He was only ten meters off the road, well concealed, but with a good field of vision in the direction of the camp, and he could see the Americans coming when they were quiet a distance off. He watched them curiously, with no emotion for the moment. They were walking steadily, and they had rifles. One of them, the larger of the two, was carrying his in his hand, and the other had his slung over his shoulder. They were wearing those absurd helmets, although there would be no danger of shrapnel until the next war, and they weren’t looking either to the left or the right. They were talking to each other, quite loudly, and it was obvious that they felt safe, at home, as though no notion that any German in this neighborhood would dare to do them any harm had ever crossed their minds.

  If they kept coming this way they would pass within ten meters of Christian. He grinned without amusement, thinking of it. Silently he brought up his machine pistol. Then he thought better of it. There were probably hundreds of others all around by now, and the shots would bring them running, and then there wouldn’t be a chance for him. The generous Americans would not stretch their generosity to include snipers.

  Then the Americans stopped. They were perhaps sixty meters away, and, because of a little bend in the road, they were directly in front of the small hummock behind which he was lying. They were talking very loudly. One of the Americans, in fact, was shouting, and Christian could even hear what he was saying. “Human beings!” The American kept shouting, over and over again, inexplicably.

  Christian watched them coldly. So much at home in Germany. Strolling unaccompanied through the woods. Making speeches in English in the middle of Bavaria. Looking forward to summering in the Alps, staying at the tourist hotels with the local girls, and there no doubt would be plenty of them. Well-fed Americans, young, too, no Volkssturm for them, all young, all in good condition, with well-repaired boots and clothing, with scientific diets, with an Air Force, and ambulances that ran on gasoline, with no problems about whom it would be better to surrender to … And after it was all over, going back to that fat country, loaded with souvenirs of the war, the helmets of dead Germans, the Iron Crosses plucked off dead breasts, the pictures off the walls of bombed houses, the photographs of the sweethearts of dead soldiers … Going back to that country which had never heard a shot fired, in which no single wall had trembled, no single pane of glass been shattered …

  That fat country, untouched, untouchable …

  Christian could feel his mouth twisting in a harsh grimace of distaste. He brought his gun up slowly. Two more, he thought, why not? The grimace turned into a smile. He began to hum to himself softly, as he brought the nearest one, the one who was yelling, into his sights. You will not yell so loud in a moment, Friend, he thought, putting his hand gently on the trigger, humming, remembering suddenly that Hardenburg had hummed at another time which had been very much like this one, on the ridge in Africa, over the British convoy at breakfast … He was amused that he remembered it. Just before he pulled the trigger he thought once more of the possibility that there were other Americans around who might hear the shots and find him and kill him. He hesitated for a moment. Then he shook his head and blinked. The hell with it, he thought, it will be worth it …

  He fired. He got off two shots. Then the gun jammed. He knew he’d hit one of the bastards. But by the time he looked up again after working fiercely to clear the jammed cartridge, the two men had vanished. He’d seen one start to go down, but now there was nothing on the road except a rifle which had been knocked out of the hands of one of the Americans. The rifle lay in the middle of the road, dark blue, with a pinpoint of sparkling sunlight reflecting off a spot near the muzzle.

  Well, Christian thought disgustedly, that was a nicely botched job! He listened carefully, but there were no sounds along the road or in the forest. The two Americans had been alone, he decided … And now, he was sure, there was only one. Or if the other one, who had been hit, was alive, he was in no shape to move …

  He himself had to move, though. It wouldn’t take too long for the unwounded man to figure out the general direction from which the shot had come. He might come after him, and he might not … Christian felt that he probably wouldn’t. Americans weren’t particularly eager at moments like this. Their style was to wait for the Air Force, wait for the tanks, wait for the artillery. And, for once, in this silent forest, with only a half hour more light remaining, there would be no tanks, no artillery to call up. Just one man with a rifle … Christian was convinced that a man wouldn’t try it, especially now, with the war so nearly over, when it was bound to seem to him like such a waste. If the man who had been hit was dead by now, Christian reasoned, the survivor was probably racing back right now to whatever unit he had come from, to get reinforcements. But, Christian figured, if the man who had been hit was only wounded, his comrade must be standing by him, and, anchored to him, not being able to move quickly or quietly, would make a beautiful target …

  Christian grinned. Just one more, he thought, and I shall retire from the war. He peered cautiously down the road at the rifle lying there, scanned the slightly rising, bush-and-trunk obscured ground ahead of him, shimmering dully in the dying light. There was no sign there, no indication.

  Crouching over, moving very carefully, Christian moved deeper into the forest, circling …

  Michael’s right hand was numb. He didn’t realize it until he bent over to put Noah down. One of the bullets had struck the butt of the rifle Michael had been carrying, and, whirling it out of his hand, had sent a hammerblow of pain up to his shoulder. In the confusion of grabbing Noah and dragging him off into the woods, he hadn’t noticed it, but now, bending over the wounded boy, the numbness became another ominous element of the situation.

  Noah had been hit in the throat, low and to one side. He was bleeding badly, but he was still breathing, shallow, erratic gasps. He was not conscious. Michael crouched beside him, putting a bandage on, but it didn’t seem to stop the blood much. Noah was lying on his back, his helmet in a small pale bed of pink flowers growing very close to the ground. His face had resumed its expensive, remote expression. His eyes were closed and the blond-tipped lashes, curled over his pale-fuzzed cheek, gave the upper part of his face the old, vulnerable expression of girlishness and youth.

  Michael did not stare at him long. His brain seemed to be working with difficulty. I can’t leave him here, he thought, and I can’t carry him away, because we’d both buy it then, and fast, moving clumsily through the woods, perfect target for the sniper.

  There was a flicker in the branches above his head. Michael snapped his head back, remembering sharply where he was and that the man who had shot Noah was probably stalking him at this moment. It was only a bird this time, swinging on a branch-tip, scolding down into the cooling air under the trees, but the next time it would be an armed man who was anxious to kill him.

  Michael bent over. He lifted Noah gently and slid the rifle from Noah’s shoulder. He looked down once more, then walked slowly into the forest. For a step or two, he could still hear the shallow, mechanical breathing of the wounded man. It was too bad, but Noah had to breathe or not breathe, unattended, for awhile.

  This is where I probably catch it, Michael thought. But it was the only way out. Find the man who had fired the two shots before the man found him. The only way out. For Noah. For himself.

  He could feel his heart going very fast, and he kept yawning, dryly and nervously. He had a bad feeling that he was going to be killed.

  He walked thoughtfully and carefully, bent over, stopping often behind the thick trunks of trees to listen. He heard his own breathing, the occasional song of a bird, the drone of insects, a frog’s boom from some nearby water, the minute clashing of the boughs in the light wind. But there was no sound of steps, no sound of equipment jangling, a riflebolt, being drawn.

  He moved away from the road, deeper into the forest, away from where Noah was lying with the hole
in his throat, his helmet tilted back away from his forehead on the bed of pink flowers. Michael hadn’t figured his maneuver reasonably. He had just felt, almost instinctively, that sticking close to the road would have been bad, would have meant being pinned against an open space, would have made him more visible, since the forest was less dense there.

  His heavy boots made a crunching noise on the thick, crisp, dead leaves underfoot and on the hidden, dead twigs. He was annoyed with himself for his clumsiness. But no matter how slowly he went, through the thickening brush, it seemed to be impossible to make no noise.

  He stopped often, to listen, but there were only the normal late-afternoon woodland sounds.

  He tried to concentrate on the Kraut. What would the Kraut be like?

  Maybe after he’d fired, the Kraut had just packed up and headed straight back toward the Austrian border. Two shots, one American, good enough for a day’s work at the tail end of a lost war. Hitler could ask no more. Or maybe it wasn’t a soldier at all, maybe it was one of those insane ten-year-old kids, with a rifle from the last war dragged down out of the attic, and all hopped up with the Werewolf nonsense. Maybe Michael would come upon a mop of blonde hair, bare feet, a frightened nursery-expression, a rifle three sizes too large … What would he do then? Shoot him? Spank him?

  Michael hoped that it was a soldier he was going to find. As he advanced slowly through the shimmering brown and green forest-light, pushing the thick foliage aside so that he could pass through, Michael found himself praying under his breath, praying that it was not a child he was hunting, praying that it was a grown man, a grown man in uniform, a grown man who was searching for him, armed and anxious to fight …

  He switched the rifle to his left hand and flexed the fingers of his numbed right hand. The feeling was coming back slowly, in tingling, aching waves, and he was afraid that his fingers would respond too slowly when the time came … In all his training, he had never been instructed about how to handle something like this. It was always how to work in squads, in platoons, the staggered theory of attack, how to make use of natural cover, how not to expose yourself against the skyline, how to infiltrate through wire … Objectively, always moving ahead, his eyes raking the suspicious little movements of bushes and clustered saplings, he wondered if he was going to come through. The inadequate American, trained for everything but this, trained to salute, trained for close-order drill, advancing in columns, trained in the most modern methods of the prophylactic control of venereal disease. Now, at the height and climax of his military career, blunderingly improvising, facing a problem the Army had not foreseen … How to discover and kill one German who has just shot your best friend. Or maybe there were more than one. There had been two shots. Maybe there were two, six, a dozen, and they were waiting for him, smiling, in a nice orthodox line of rifle pits, listening to his heavy footsteps coming nearer and nearer …

  He stopped. For a moment he thought of turning back. Then he shook his head. He did not reason anything out. Nothing coherent went through his mind. He merely transferred the rifle back into his tingling right hand, and kept on, in his thoughtful, rustling advance.

  The log that had fallen across the narrow gully looked strong enough. It had rotted a little here and there, and the wood was soft, but it looked thick. And the gully was at least six feet across and quite deep, four or five feet deep, with mossy stones half buried in broken branches and dead leaves along the bottom. Before stepping out onto the log, Michael listened. The wind had died down and the forest was very still. He had a feeling that no human beings had been here for years. Human beings … No, that would be for later …

  He stepped out onto the log. He was halfway across when it buckled, tearing, turning slipperily. Michael waved his hands violently, remembering to keep silent, then plunged down into the gully. He grunted as his hands slithered along the rocks and he felt his cheekbone begin to ache immediately where it had slammed against a sharp edge. The splintering log had made a sharp, cracking sound, and when he had hit the bottom it had been with a dull crash and a crackling of dried twigs, and his helmet had bounced off and rapped loudly against some stones. The rifle, he was thinking dully, what happened to the rifle … He was groping for the rifle on his hands and knees, when he heard the swift rushing sound of footsteps running, running loudly and directly toward him.

  He jumped up. Fifty feet away from him a man was crashing through the bushes, staring straight at him, with a gun at his hip, pointing toward him. The man was a dark, speeding blur against the pale-green leaves. As Michael stared, motionless, the man fired from his hip. The burst was wild. Michael heard the slugs thumping in, right in front of his face, throwing sharp, stinging pellets of dirt against his skin. The man kept running.

  Michael ducked. Automatically, he tore at the grenade hanging on his belt. He pulled the pin and stood up. The man was much closer, very close. Michael counted three, then threw the grenade and ducked, slamming himself wildly against the side of the gully and burying his head. God, he thought, his face pressed against the soft damp earth, I remembered to count!

  The explosion seemed to take a long time in coming. Michael could hear the bits of steel whining over his head and thumping into the trees around him. There was a fluttering sound in the air as the torn leaves twisted down over him.

  Michael wasn’t sure, but he thought, with the noise of the explosion still in his ears, that he had heard a scream.

  He waited five seconds, and then looked over the edge of the gully. There was nobody there. A little smoke rose slowly under the overhanging branches and there was a torn patch of earth showing brown and wet where the leaves and mold had been torn away, but that was all. Then Michael saw, across the clearing, the top of a bush waving in an eccentric rhythm, slowly dying down. Michael watched the bush, realizing that the man had gone back through there. He bent down and picked up the rifle, which was lying cradled against two round stones. He looked at the muzzle. It hadn’t been filled with dirt. He was surprised to see that his hands were covered with blood, and when he put his hand to touch his aching cheekbone, it came away all smeared with dirt and blood.

  He climbed slowly out of the gully. His right arm was giving him a considerable amount of pain, and the blood from his torn hand made the rifle slippery in his hand. He walked, without attempting to conceal himself, across the clearing, past the spot where the grenade had landed. Fifteen feet farther on, he saw what looked like an old rag, hanging onto a sapling. It was a piece of uniform, and it was bloody and wet.

  Michael walked slowly to the bush which he had seen waving.

  There was blood all over the leaves, a great deal of blood. He is not going far, Michael thought, not any more. It was easy, even for a city man, to follow the trail of the fleeing German through the woods now. Michael even recognized, by the crushed leaves and familiar stains, where the man had fallen once and had risen, uprooting a tiny sapling with his hands, to continue his flight.

  Slowly and steadily, Michael closed in on Christian Diestl.

  Christian sat down deliberately, leaning against the trunk of the great tree, facing the direction from which he had come. It was shady under the tree, and cool, but shafts of sunlight struck down through the other foliage and lit, in oblique gold, the tops of the bushes through which Christian had pushed himself to reach this spot. The bark of the tree felt rough and solid behind his back. He tried to lift his hand, with the Schmeisser in it, but the hand wouldn’t move the weight. He pushed annoyedly at the gun and it slithered away from him. He sat staring at the break in the bushes where, he knew, the American would appear.

  A grenade, Christian thought, who would have thought of that? The clumsy American, crashing like a bull into the gully … And then, out of the gully, a grenade.

  He breathed with difficulty. So far, he thought, so much running. Well, the running was now over. His mind seemed to slip in and out, like a faulty set of gears. The spring woods outside Paris and the dead boy from Silesia, lips staine
d with cherry juice … Hardenburg, on the motorcycle, Hardenburg with his face split away from its foundations, the stupid half-naked American firing from the mined bridge in Italy until the machine gun cut him down … Gretchen, Corinne, Francoise, the French will have us all yet … The vodka in Gretchen’s bedroom, the sherry and brandy and wine in the closet, the black lace and the garnet brooch … The Frenchman pulling Behr’s boots off on the beach after the planes, always the planes …“Listen, when a soldier joins an army, any army, there is a kind of basic contract the army makes with him …” Who said that, and was he dead, too? Fifty francs for a glass of brandy, served by an old man with rotting teeth. “The larger issue is Austria.” And, “The end justifies the means”… This was the end, and what means did it justify? Other things … The American girl on the snowy hill. Just one more and I retire … The blundering, foolishly brave American, surviving by luck, accident, God’s will … 1918 on the church wall, in chalk, the French knew, they knew all along.