Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Knuhlen walked in a dumb, scuffling manner, behind the rolling motorcycle. They walked about fifty meters in silence. Then Hardenburg stopped. “Hold this,” he said to Christian.

  Christian took the handlebars and balanced the machine against his legs. Knuhlen had stopped and was standing in the sand, staring patiently once more at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg cleared his throat as though he were going to make a speech, then walked up to Knuhlen, looked at him deliberately, and clubbed him twice, savagely and quickly, across the eyes. Knuhlen sat down backwards this time, without a sound, and remained that way, staring up dully and tenaciously at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg looked down at him thoughtfully, then took out his pistol and cocked it. Knuhlen made no move and there was no change on the dark, bloody face in the dim light.

  Hardenburg shot him once. Knuhlen started to get up to his feet slowly, using his hands to help him. “My dear Lieutenant,” he said in a quiet, conversational tone. Then he slid face down into the sand.

  Hardenburg put his pistol away. “All right,” he said.

  Then he came back to the motorcycle, and swung himself into the saddle. He kicked the pedal. This time it started.

  “Get on,” he said to Christian.

  Carefully, Christian swung his leg over and settled himself on the pillion seat of the motorcycle. The machine throbbed jumpily under him.

  “Hold on tight,” Hardenburg said. “Around my middle.”

  Christian put his arms around Hardenburg. Very strange, he thought, hugging an officer at a time like this, like a girl going for an outing into the woods with a motorcycle club on a Sunday afternoon. So close, Hardenburg smelled frightfully, and Christian was afraid he was going to vomit.

  Hardenburg put the machine into gear and it sputtered and roared and Christian wanted to say, “Please keep quiet,” because something like this should be done quietly, and it was discourteous to the thirty-seven men who had to stay behind to advertise so blatantly that they were being left alone to die and that other men would still be alive when they were bleached bones on the hill from which no escape was possible.

  Thirty-six now, Christian thought, remembering the laborious small pits facing the British, facing the tanks and the armored cars. Three dozen. Three dozen soldiers, he thought, holding tight to the Lieutenant on the jolting machine, trying to remember not to have an attack of fever or chills, three dozen soldiers, at how much a dozen.

  Hardenburg reached a level place, and he accelerated the motor. They sped across the empty plain glowing in the last level rays of the sinking moon; surrounded by the flicker of guns on all horizons. Their speed created a great deal of wind, and Christian’s cap blew off, but he did not mind, because the wind also made it impossible to smell the Lieutenant any more.

  They rode north and west for a half hour. The flickering on the horizon grew stronger and brighter as the motorcycle slithered along the winding track among the dunes and the occasional patches of scrub grass. There were some burnt-out tanks along the track, and here and there a cannibalized truck, its naked driveshaft poking up into the dim air like an antiaircraft gun. There were some new graves, obviously hastily dug, with a rifle, bayonet-down in the ground, and a cap or helmet hanging from the butt, and there were the usual crashed planes, blackened and wind-ripped, with the bent propellers and the broken wings vaguely reflecting glints of the moon from their ragged metal surfaces. But it wasn’t until they reached a road considerably to the north, running almost due west, that they met up with any other troops. Then they suddenly were in a long regimental convoy of trucks, armored cars, scout cars, carriers and other motorcycles, moving slowly along the narrow track, in overpowering clouds of dust and exhaust fumes.

  Hardenburg pulled off to one side, but not too far, because there was no telling, with all the fighting that had gone back and forth over this ground, where you might run over a mine. He stopped the motorcycle and Christian nearly dropped off with the tension of speed no longer holding him to the seat. Hardenburg swung around and held Christian, steadying him.

  “Thank you,” Christian said formally and light-headedly. He was having a chill now, and his jaws were clamped in a cold spasm around his swollen tongue.

  “You can get into one of those trucks,” Hardenburg shouted, waving with a ridiculous expenditure of energy, to the procession slowly droning past. “But I don’t think you should.”

  “Whatever you say, Lieutenant.” Christian smiled with frozen amiability, like a drunk at a polite and rather boring garden party.

  “I don’t know what their orders are,” Hardenburg shouted, “and they may have to turn off and fight at any moment …”

  “Of course,” said Christian.

  “It’s a good idea to hold onto our own transportation,” Hardenburg said. Christian was vaguely grateful that the Lieutenant was being so kind about explaining everything to him.

  “Yes,” said Christian, “yes, indeed.”

  “What did you say?” Hardenburg shouted as an armored car roared past.

  “I said …” Christian hesitated. He did not remember what he had said. “I am agreeable,” he said, nodding ambiguously. “Absolutely agreeable.”

  “Good,” said Hardenburg. He unknotted the handkerchief that Christian had around his throat. “Better put this around your face. For the dust.” He started to tie it behind Christian’s head.

  Christian put his hands up slowly and pushed the Lieutenant’s hands away. “Pardon me,” he said, “for a moment.” Then he leaned over and vomited.

  The men in the trucks going by did not look at him or the Lieutenant. They merely stared straight ahead as though they were riding in a wintry parade in a dying man’s dream, without interest, curiosity, destination, hope.

  Christian straightened up. He felt much better, although the taste in his mouth was considerably worse than it had been before. He put the handkerchief up around over the bridge of his nose so that it covered the entire lower part of his face. His fingers worked heavily on the knot in back, but finally he made it.

  “I am ready,” he announced.

  Hardenburg had his handkerchief around his face by this time. Christian put his arms around the Lieutenant’s waist, and the motorcycle kicked and spun in the sand and jolted into the procession behind an ambulance with three pairs of legs showing through the torn door.

  Christian felt very fond of the Lieutenant, sitting iron-like on the seat in front of him, looking, with his handkerchief mask, like a bandit in an American Western movie. I ought to do something, Christian thought, to show him my appreciation. For five minutes, in the shaking dust, he tried to think of how he could demonstrate his gratitude to the Lieutenant. Slowly, the idea came to him. I will tell him, Christian thought, about his wife and myself. That is all I have to offer. Christian shook his head. Silly, he thought, silly, silly. But now he had thought of the idea, he could not escape it. He closed his eyes; he tried to think of the thirty-six men digging slowly in the sand to the south; he tried to think of all the beer and cold wine and ice water he had drunk in the last five years, but again and again he felt himself on the verge of shouting over the clanking of the traffic around him, “Lieutenant, I had your wife when I went on leave from Rennes.”

  The procession stopped, and Hardenburg, who had decided to remain, for safety, in the middle of the convoy, put his foot down and balanced the machine in neutral. Now, thought Christian crazily, now I am going to tell him. But at that moment, two men got out of the ambulance in front of them and dragged a body out by the feet and put it down by the side of the road. They moved heavily and wearily and dragged it by the ankles out of the way of the vehicles. Christian stared at them over the edge of his handkerchief. The two men looked up guiltily. “He is not alive,” one of the men said earnestly, coming over to Christian. “What’s the sense of carrying him if he is not alive?”

  Then the convoy started and the ambulance ground into first speed. The two men had to run, their water bottles flapping against their hi
ps, and they were dragged for quite a distance before they managed to scramble into the body of the ambulance over the other legs jutting out through the torn door. Then it was too noisy to tell Hardenburg about his wife.

  It was hard to remember when the firing started. There was a ragged crackling near the head of the column and the vehicles stopped. Then Christian realized that he had been hearing the noise for what seemed like a long time without understanding what it was.

  Men jumped heavily from the thin-skinned vehicles and scattered into the desert on both sides of the road. A wounded man fell out of the ambulance and crawled, digging his fingers into the ground, dragging one useless leg, to a little clump of grass ten meters to the right. He lay there, busily hollowing out a little space in front of him with his hands. Machine guns started all around them and the armored vehicles swung without any recognizable plan to both sides and opened fire wildly, in all directions. A man without a cap walked swiftly up and down near them alongside the deserted trucks, with their motors still going, bellowing, “Answer it! Answer it, you bastard.” He was bald and capless and his dome shone whitely in the moonlight. He was waving a swagger stick insanely in the air. He must be at least a colonel, Christian thought.

  Motor shells were dropping sixty meters away. A fire started in one of the carriers there. In the light Christian could see men being dragged roughly away from the road. Hardenburg drove the motorcycle alongside the ambulance and stopped it. He peered sharply across the desert, the little v of the handkerchief whipping around his chin like a misplaced beard.

  The British were using tracers in their machine guns and and light artillery now. The lazy, curving streaks were sweeping in, seeming to gather speed as they neared the convoy. It was impossible for Christian to figure out where they were firing from. It is very disorderly, he thought reproachfully, it is impossible to fight under ridiculous conditions like this. He started to get off the motorcycle. He would merely walk away from this and lie down and wait for something to happen to him.

  “Stay here!” Hardenburg shouted, although he was only twelve inches from him. More disorder, Christian thought, resentfully sitting back on the pillion. He felt for his gun but he did not remember what he had done with it. There was an acrid, biting smell of disinfectant coming from the ambulance, mixed with the smell of the dead. Christian began to cough. A shell whistled in and hit nearby and Christian ducked against the metal side of the ambulance. A moment later he felt a tap on his back. He put his hand up, knocking a hot spent fragment of shrapnel from his shoulder. In reaching back, he found his gun slung over his shoulder. He was heavily trying to disentangle it when Hardenburg kicked the machine into movement. Christian nearly fell off. The barrel of the gun hit him under the chin and he bit his tongue and tasted the blood, salty and hot, from the cut his teeth had made. He clung to Hardenburg. The motorcycle careened off among the crouching figures and the noise and the intermittent explosions. A stream of tracers from a great distance arched toward them. Hardenburg held the bucking machine on a straight course under the tracers and they pulled out of the glare of the flaming trucks.

  “Very disorderly,” Christian murmured. Then he got angry with Hardenburg. If he wanted to go riding into the British Army, let him do it. Why did he have to drag Christian with him? Craftily, Christian decided to fall off the machine. He tried to pick up his foot, but his trouser leg seemed to be caught on a protruding strip of metal and he couldn’t lift his knee. Vaguely, ahead of them, and to one side, he saw the dark outlines of tanks. Then the tanks swung their guns around. A machine gun from one of the turrets opened on them, and there was the sickening whistle as the bullets screamed behind their heads.

  Christian bent down and pressed his head crookedly against the Lieutenant’s shoulder. The Lieutenant was wearing a leather harness and the buckles scraped against Christian’s cheekbone. The machine gun swung around again. This time the bullets were hitting in front of them, knocking up puffs of moonlit dust, and bouncing up with thick savage thuds.

  Then Christian began to cry, clinging to the Lieutenant, and he knew he was afraid, and that he could do nothing to save himself and they would be hit and he and the Lieutenant and the motorcycle would crash in a single, smoking mass, burnt cloth and blood and gasoline in a dark pool on the sand, and then there was someone shouting in English, and waving wildly nearby. Hardenburg was grunting and bending over more than ever. Then the whistles came from behind them, and suddenly they were alone on a pale streak of road, with the noise dying down far to the rear.

  Finally, Christian stopped crying. He sat up straight when Hardenburg sat up, and he even managed to look with some interest at the open road peeling out in front of the bouncing motorcycle. His mouth tasted very queer, with the vomit and the blood, and his cheek was stinging him as sand flew up under his handkerchief and ground into the bruises there. But he took a deep breath, feeling much better. For a moment, he did not even feel tired.

  Behind him the glare and the firing died down quickly. In five minutes they seemed to have the desert to themselves, all the long, quiet, moonlit waste from the Sudan to the Mediterranean, from Alamein to Tripoli.

  He held Hardenburg affectionately. He remembered that he had wanted to tell the Lieutenant something before all this had started, but, at the moment, what he had intended to say escaped him. He took the handkerchief off his face and looked around him and felt the wind whipping the spit out of the corners of his mouth, and he felt quite happy and at peace with the world. Hardenburg was a strange man, but Christian knew he could depend upon him to get him some place safely. Just where he would get him and at what time, Christian did not know, but there was no need to worry. How lucky it was that Captain Mueller, in command of their company, had been killed. If he had been alive it would have been Mueller and Hardenburg on the motorcycle now, and Christian would still be back on that hill with the three dozen other dead men …

  He breathed deeply of the dry, rushing air. He was sure now that he was going to live, perhaps even for quite a long time.

  Hardenburg handled the motorcycle very well, and they covered a good deal of ground, skidding, bouncing into the air, but steadily going north and west with the sky behind them lightening in the pink streaks of dawn. The road and the desert were empty except for the usual wreckage, all picked neat and clean by the salvage battalions. There was still the noise of firing behind them, but faraway, moaning and re-echoing in eccentric rhythms, dying down for minutes at a time.

  The sun came up. Hardenburg, now that he could see, increased the speed of the machine, and Christian had to concentrate to hold on.

  “Are you sleepy?” Hardenburg asked, talking loudly, turning his head so that Christian could hear him over the cough of the engine.

  “A little,” Christian admitted. “Not too bad.”

  “You’d better talk to me,” Hardenburg said. “I nearly fell asleep just now.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but closed it again. He tried to prepare some conversation in his head, but it was absolutely blank.

  “Go ahead,” shouted Hardenburg irritably. “Talk!”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian. Then, helplessly. “About what?”

  “Anything. The weather.” Christian looked around at the weather. It was the same weather they had had for six months. “It’s going to be a hot day,” he said.

  “Louder,” shouted Hardenburg, looking straight ahead. “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said it’s going to be a hot day,” Christian screamed into the Lieutenant’s ear.

  “That’s better,” Hardenburg said. “Yes. Very hot.”

  Christian tried to think of another subject.

  “Come on,” Hardenburg said impatiently.

  “What else would you like to talk about?” Christian asked. His mind felt drugged and incapable of this exhausting intellectual effort.

  “Good God! Anything! Did you go to the Greek whorehouse they set up in Cy
rene?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian.

  “How was it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Christian. “I waited in line and they closed up three men in front of me.”

  “Did anybody you know go?”

  Christian thought hard. “Yes,” he said, “a Corporal with a head wound.”

  “How did he like it?”

  Christian tried to remember. “I think he said the Greek girls were not much. They had no spirit. Also,” Christian remembered now, “he said it was too official. He had difficulty managing it under the time limit. And the girl didn’t do anything. Just lay there. He thought the Army ought to get volunteers, not just anybody they can put their hands on.”

  “Your friend is an idiot,” Hardenburg said viciously.

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian. He fell silent.

  “Come on.” Hardenburg waved his head sharply, as though to clear his eyes. “Keep talking. What did you do on your leave in Berlin?”

  “I went to the opera,” Christian said promptly, “and I went to the concerts.”

  “You’re an idiot, too.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian, thinking, warily, he is getting terribly light-headed.

  “Any girls in Berlin?”

  “Yes, Sir.” Christian thought carefully. “I met a girl who worked in an airplane factory.”

  “Did you have an affair with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How was it?”

  “Excellent,” Christian said loudly, peering anxiously out across the Lieutenant’s bent head at the desert stretching in a growing glitter ahead of them.

  “Good,” said the Lieutenant. “What was her name?”

  “Marguerite,” said Christian, after a slight hesitation.

  “Was she married?”

  “I don’t think so,” Christian said. “She didn’t say.”

  “Sluts,” Hardenburg said addressing the girls of Berlin. “Have you ever been to Alexandria?”

  “No, Sir,” Christian said.

  “I was looking forward to going there,” said Hardenburg.