by Irwin Shaw
He moved and, at the same moment, he felt Burnecker move beside him. A little dry, appreciative smile momentarily wrinkled the General’s mouth. “That’s it, Boys,” he said. He patted Noah’s shoulder. Noah and Burnecker ran forward fifteen yards and dropped into a hole for cover.
Noah looked back. The General was still standing on the brink of the ditch, although the fire was very heavy by now, and men all along the line were leaping up and advancing in short bursts across the field.
Generals, he thought hazily, as he turned back toward the enemy, he had never known what Generals were for, before this …
He and Burnecker leaped out of their hole, just as two more men dived into it. The Company, or the half Company that was left, was moving at last.
Twenty minutes later they had reached the line of hedge from which the enemy machine guns had been firing. Mortars had finally found the range and had destroyed one of the nests in a corner of the field, and the other sections had pulled out before Noah and the Company reached them.
Wearily, Noah kneeled by the side of the cleverly concealed, heavily sandbagged position, now blown apart to reveal three Germans dead at their torn gun. One of the Germans was still kneeling behind it. Burnecker reached down with his boot and shoved at the kneeling dead man. The German rocked gently, then fell over on his side.
Noah turned away and drank a little water from his canteen. His throat was brassy with thirst. He hadn’t fired his rifle all day, but his arms and shoulders ached as though he had caught the recoil a hundred times.
He looked out through the hedge. Three hundred yards away, across the usual field of bombholes and dead cows, was another thick hedge, and machine-gun fire was coming from there. He sighed as he saw Lieutenant Green walking toward him, urging the men out once more. He wondered hazily what had happened to the General. Then he and Burnecker started out again.
Noah was hit in the first ten feet, and Burnecker dragged him back behind the safety of the hedge.
An aid man came up with surprising speed. Noah had lost a great deal of blood very quickly and he felt cold and remote and the aid man’s face swam above him dreamily. The aid man was a little Greek with crossed eyes and a dapper moustache, and the strange dark eyes and the thin moustache floated independently in the air as the aid man gave him a transfusion, with Burnecker helping. Shock, Noah remembered fuzzily. In the last war a man would be hit and feel perfectly all right and ask for a cigarette, it had been in a magazine somewhere, and ten minutes later he would be dead. But it was different in this war. This was a high-class, up-to-the-minute type of war, with blood to spare. The cockeyed Greek aid man gave him some morphine, too. That was very thoughtful of him, above and beyond the call of the Medical Corps … Strange, to be so fond of a crosseyed man who used to be a short-order cook in a diner in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Ham and eggs, hamburger, canned soup. Now it was canned blood. His name was Markos. Ackerman, out of Odessa, and Markos, out of Athens, linked by a tube of preserved blood somewhere near the reduced city of St. Lô, in the province of Normandy, on a summer’s day, with an Iowa farmer named Burnecker crouched beside them, weeping, weeping …
“Noah, Noah,” the boy from Iowa was sobbing, “how do you feel? Are you all right?”
Noah thought he was smiling up at Johnny Burnecker, but after awhile he realized nothing much was happening on his face, no matter how hard he tried to move it. And it was getting terribly cold, very cold for summer, very cold for noon, very cold for France, very cold for July and a young man …
“Johnny,” he managed to whisper. “Don’t worry, Johnny. Take care of yourself. I’ll be back, Johnny, honest, I’ll be back …”
The war had turned out funny. No more snarling and cursing. No more Rickett, because Rickett had died in his arms, covering him with Sergeant’s blood. Now it was the soft-voiced, soft-handed, crosseyed little short-order cook, as gentle as Christ, a cockeyed, thin-moustached Christ with a strange Greek name, and it was the thin, sorrowful face of the General, who earned his pay by walking out into gunfire with a little stick in his hand, a General with a face full of tragedy and authority, whom you could not refuse anything; and it was the racked sobbing of his brother Johnny Burnecker, whom he had promised never to desert because they were lucky for each other, they would live, though the whole Company died, as of course they would, because there were so many hedges across so many fields that still lay ahead of all of them. The Army had changed, was changing, swiftly, softly, in a roaring mist of tubes and tourniquets, morphine and tears.
They lifted Noah onto a stretcher and started carrying him back. Noah raised his head. Seated on the ground, with his helmet off, abandoned to grief, sat Johnny Burnecker, weeping for his friend. Noah tried to call out to him, to assure him that all in the end would turn out well, but no sound came from his throat. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, as he was borne away, because he could not bear to see his deserted friend any more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE DEAD HORSES were beginning to bloat and smell in the strong summer sun. The odor mingled with the acrid, medicinal smell of the ruptured ambulance convoy that lay, a jumble of overturned wagons, spilled pungent powders, scattered heaps of papers, torn and useless red crosses, along the road. The dead and the wounded had been removed, but otherwise the convoy remained, curving up the long hill, just as it had been left after the strafing and dive-bombing Americans had passed over it.
Christian went by it slowly, on foot, still carrying his Schmeisser, in a straggling group of perhaps twenty men, none of whom was known to him. He had picked them up early in the morning, after he had become separated from the hastily organized platoon with which he had been posted three days before. The platoon, he was sure, had deserted to the Americans during the night. Christian felt a somber sense of relief that he was no longer responsible for them or their actions.
Looking at the dead convoy, sadly marked with the red crosses that had done no good at all, he was overwhelmed with a sense of anger and despair. Anger at the swooping, 400-mile-an-hour young Americans who had come upon the slow-moving wagons toiling up the hill with their load of broken and dying men and had, in the wanton fury of destruction, roweled it with their machine guns and rockets.
The men around him, he could tell from glancing at them, did not share his anger. All that was left was their despair. They were past anger, as they trudged, gravel-eyed and exhausted, under heavy packs, some of them with no weapons, past the ruins of the convoy, past the growing smell of the horses. They dragged slowly eastward, keeping their eyes with dull wariness on the dangerous clear sky above them, moving like a dying beast, without reason or hope, toward the final cool, sheltered place where they might lie down and die. Some of them, with crazy miserliness, through all the welter of retreat and death, still carried loot with them. One man held a violin in his hand, stolen from what music-lover’s living room no one would ever know. A pair of silver candlesticks jutted out of another man’s pack, mute and stubborn evidence that this soldier, even in this agony, had faith in a future of dinners, table-linen, food, soft lights. A huge, red-eyed man without a helmet, whose long shock of blond hair was crusted with dust, carried in his pack a dozen wooden containers of Camembert cheese. When he passed Christian, because he was a powerful man and walked with dogged swiftness, the ripe, fermenting aroma of the melting cheese made a sick marriage with the smell of the convoy.
At the head of the convoy was a wagon on which was mounted an 88 millimeter anti-aircraft cannon. The horses were dead in the traces, in wild attitudes of gallop and fear, and there was blood all over the gun and its mounting. The German Army, Christian thought dully, as he went past, horses against airplanes. At least, in Africa, when he retreated, he had retreated with the aid of engines. He remembered the motorcycle and Hardenburg, the Italian staff car, the hospital plane that had crossed the Mediterranean with him, carrying him to Italy. It seemed to be the fate of the German Army, as a war went on, to go back to more and mor
e primitive methods of fighting. Ersatz. Ersatz gasoline, ersatz coffee, ersatz blood, ersatz soldiers …
He seemed to have been retreating all his life. He had no memory any more of ever advancing any place. Retreat was the condition, the general weather of existence. Going back, going back, always hurt, always exhausted, always with the smell of German dead in his nostrils, always with enemy planes flickering behind his back, their guns dancing brightly in their wings, their pilots grinning because they were safe and they were killing hundreds of men a minute.
There was a loud blowing of a horn behind him, and Christian scrambled to one side. A small, closed car sped past, its wheels sending a fine cloud of dust over him. Christian got a glimpse of clean-shaven faces, a man smoking a cigar …
Then somebody was shouting, and there was the howl of engines above him. Christian lumbered away from the road and dove into one of the carefully spaced holes that had thoughtfully been provided by the German Army along many of the roads of France for the use of its troops at moments like this. He crouched deep in the damp earth, covering his head, not daring to look up, listening to the returning whine of the engines, and the savage tearing sound of the guns. After two passes, the planes moved off. Christian stood up. He climbed out of the hole. None of the men he had been walking with had been touched, but the little sedan was overturned, against a tree, and it was burning. Two of the men who had been in it had been thrown clear, and were lying very still in the center of the road. The other two men were burning in a welter of spilled gasoline, torn rubber and whipcord upholstery.
Christian walked slowly up to where the two men were lying face down on the road. He did not have to touch them to see that they were dead.
“Officers,” said a voice behind him. “They wanted to ride.” The man behind him spat.
The other men walked past the two dead forms and the burning car. For a moment Christian thought of ordering some of the men to help him move the bodies, but it would have meant an argument, and at the moment, it did not seem very important whether two bodies, more or less, were put to one side or not.
Christian slowly started eastward once more, feeling his bad leg shiver beneath him. He blew his nose and spat again and again to try to get the smell and the taste of the dead horses and the spilled medicine out of his mouth and throat.
The next morning he had a stroke of luck. He had pulled away from the other men during the night and had marched slowly on to the outskirts of a village, which lay across his path in the moonlight, dark, empty, seemingly lifeless. He had decided not to try to get through it by himself, at night, since it was all too possible that the inhabitants, seeing a lone soldier wandering past in the dark, might pick him off, rob him of his gun, boots and uniform, and throw him behind a hedge to rot. So he had camped under a tree, eaten sparingly of his emergency ration, and slept until dawn.
Then he had hurried through the town, almost trotting down the cobbled road, past the gray church, the inevitable statue of victory with palms and bayonets in front of the town hall, the shuttered shops. No one was stirring. The French seemed to have vanished from the face of the land as the Germans retreated through it. Even the dogs and the cats seemed to understand that it was safer for them to hide until the bitter tide of defeated soldiers passed over them.
It was on the other side of town that his luck changed. He was hurrying, because he was still in sight of the walls of the last row of houses, and his breath was coming hoarsely into his lungs, when he saw, coming around a bend in the road ahead of him, a figure on a bicycle.
Christian stopped. Whoever it was on the bicycle was in a hurry. He kept his head down and pedaled swiftly toward where Christian was standing.
Christian moved to the middle of the road and waited. He saw that it was a young boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, capless, dressed in a blue shirt and old French Army pants, racing bumpily through the cool, misty dawn light between the still rows of poplars on each side of the road, casting a soft, elongated shadow of legs and wheels on the road in front of him.
The boy saw Christian when he was only thirty yards away. He stopped suddenly.
“Come here,” Christian shouted hoarsely, in German, forgetting his French. “Walk over here.”
He started toward the boy. For a moment the two of them stared at each other. The boy was very pale, with curly black hair and dark, frightened eyes. With a swift, animal-like movement, the boy picked up the front wheel of the bicycle and whirled it around. He was running with the bicycle before Christian could unsling his gun. The boy jumped onto the bicycle. Bent over, with his blue shirt filling with wind behind him, he pedaled furiously back along the road, away from Christian.
Without thinking, Christian opened fire. He caught the boy with the second burst. The bicycle careened off into the ditch alongside the road. The boy went sliding across the road to the other side, and lay there without moving.
Christian lumbered quickly along the uneven road, his boots making a thick thudding sound in the silent morning. He bent over the bicycle and picked it up. He rolled it back and forth. It was unharmed. Then he looked at the boy. The boy’s head was twisted toward him, very pale and unmarked under the curly hair. There was a light blond fuzz of moustache under the slender nose. A red stain slowly spread across the back of the faded blue shirt. Christian made a movement toward the boy, but thought better of it. They’d have been bound to hear the shooting in the village, and if they found him there, fiddling over a dying child, they’d make short work of him.
Christian swung himself up on the bicycle and started east. After the weary days of walking, the ground seemed to spin past beneath him with charming swiftness and ease. His legs felt light; the dawning breeze against his cheeks was soft and cool; the light dewy green of the foliage on both sides of the road was pleasing to the eye. Now, he thought, it needn’t only be officers who ride.
The roads of France seemed to have been made for bicyclists, not too rough, with the paving in fair condition, and no high hills to slow a man down. Why, it was easily possible for a man to do two hundred kilometers a day, easily …
He felt youthful, strong, and for the first time since he had seen the first glider coming down out of the coastal sky that bad morning so long ago, he began to feel as though there was some hope for him. After a half hour, as he was gliding down a gentle slope between two fields of half-grown wheat, pale yellow in the morning sun, he found himself whistling, a vacation-like, holiday-like, tuneless, heart-free merry sound, rising gay and uninstructed in his throat.
All that day, he fled east along the road to Paris. He passed groups of men, walking, moving slowly in overloaded farm wagons stubbornly loaded with pictures and furniture and barrels of cider. He had passed refugees before in France, a long time ago, but it had been more natural then, because they were mostly women, children and old men, and you knew they had some reason to hold onto mattresses and kitchen pots and odds and ends of furniture because they hoped to set up domestic lives somewhere else. But it was strange to see a German Army trudging along this way, young men with guns and uniforms, who could only hope either finally to be reformed on some line by some miracle and turned around to fight—or to fall into the hands of the Americans who, it was rumored, were closing in on them from all directions. In either case, framed paintings from Norman chateaux and cloisonne lamps would do them a minimum amount of good. With set faces, past all reasonableness, the defeated men streamed slowly toward Paris on the summer roads, officerless, without formations or discipline, abandoned to the tanks and the planes of the Americans who were following them. Occasionally a wheezing French bus, with a charcoal furnace, would drag past, loaded down with dusty soldiers, who would have to get out on the hills to push. Once in a while an officer could be seen, but he would keep his mouth shut, look as lost and deserted as any of the others.
And, meanwhile, the country, in the full bloom of summer, with the geraniums high and pink and red along the farmers’ walls, was shini
ng and lovely in the long perfect days.
By evening, Christian was exhausted. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for years, and in the first hour or two he had gone too fast. Also, twice during the day, shots had been fired at him, and he had heard the bullets snipping by, past his head, and had driven himself frantically out of danger. The bicycle was wavering almost uncontrollably all over the road as he slowly pushed into the square of quite a fair-sized town at sunset. He was pleased, dully, to see that the square was full of soldiers, sitting in the cafés, lying exhausted and asleep on the stone benches in front of the town hall, tinkering hopelessly with broken-down 1925 Citroëns in an attempt to get them to move just a few more kilometers. Here, for a few moments, at least, he could be safe.
He dismounted from the bicycle, which by now was a kind of slippery enemy, raw-boned and malicious, a French machine with a sly intelligence of its own, which seemed to drag on his last strength with tenacious and murderous purpose, and which had almost thrown him four or five times on mild curves and hidden bumps in the road.
He walked stiffly beside the bicycle, his legs rigid and weak. The other men sitting and lying in the square glanced stonily at him for a moment, without interest or connection, then dropped their eyes with bleak indifference. He clutched the bicycle tightly, feeling that any one of these weary, foreign-looking, cold-eyed men would gladly murder him for the two wheels and the worn saddle if they could.
He would have liked to lie down and sleep for a few hours, but he didn’t dare. Since the two shots on the road, he refused to take the risk of stopping any place, even in the most remote and quiet spot, by himself. The only safety from the lurking French now was either in speed or numbers. And he could not lie down here, in town, among the other men, because he knew that when he awoke, the bicycle would be gone. He knew that he, himself, would have leaped at the chance to steal the machine from any sleeping comrade, even from General Rommel, himself, and there was no reason to suppose the other footsore and bloody-minded gentlemen in the town square would be more fastidious.