The Young Lions

"I gave you a direct order," Colclough said. "Go over and get those men to come here and sweep this area."

"Yes, Sir," said the Engineer. He went towards the bulldozer, past a row of sixteen corpses, laid out neatly, in blankets.

"If you don't get off this boat right away," the Naval Lieutenant said, "the United States Navy is going to lose one Landing Craft Infantry."

"Lieutenant," Colclough said coldly, "you pay attention to your business, and I'll pay attention to mine."

"If you're not off in ten minutes," the Lieutenant said, retreating up the ramp, "I am going to take you and your whole goddamned company out to sea. You'll have to join the Marines to see dry land again."

"This entire matter," said Colclough, "will be reported through proper cha

"Ten minutes," the Lieutenant shouted violently over his shoulder, making his way back to his shattered bridge.

"Captain," Lieutenant Green said, in his high voice, from half-way up the crowded ramp, where the men were lined up, peering doubtfully into the dirty green water, on which abandoned Mae Wests, wooden machine-gun ammunition boxes and cardboard K ration cartons were floating soddenly. "Captain," said Lieutenant Green, "I'll be glad to go ahead. As long as the Corporal said it was all right… Then the men can follow in my footsteps and…"

"I am not going to lose any of my men on this beach," Colclough said. "Stay where you are." He gave a slight, decisive hitch to the pearl-handled revolver that his wife had given him. The holster, Noah observed, had a little rawhide fringe on the bottom of it, like the holsters that come with cowboy suits little boys get at Christmas.

The Engineer Corporal was coming back across the beach now, with his Lieutenant. The Lieutenant was a tall, enormous man without a helmet. He was not carrying any weapons. With his wind-burned, red, sweating face and his huge, dirt-blackened hands hanging out of the sleeves of his rolled-back fatigues, he didn't look like a soldier, but like a foreman on a road gang back home.

"Come on, Captain," the Engineer Lieutenant said. "Come on ashore."

"There's a mine in here," Colclough said. "Get your men over here and sweep the area."

"There's no mine," said the Lieutenant.

"I say I saw a mine."

The men behind the Captain listened uneasily. Now that they were so close to the beach it was intolerable to remain on the craft on which they had suffered so much that day, and which still made a tempting target as it creaked and groaned with the swish of the rollers coming in off the sea. The beach, with its dunes and foxholes and piles of material, looked secure, institutional, home-like, as nothing that floated and was ruled by the Navy could look. They stood behind Colclough, staring at his back, hating him.

The Engineer Lieutenant started to open his mouth to say something to Colclough. Then he looked down and saw the pearl-handled revolver at the Captain's belt. He closed his mouth, smiling a little. Then, expressionlessly, without a word, he walked into the water, with his shoes and leggings still on, and stamped heavily back and forth, up to the ramp and around it, not paying any attention to the waves that smashed at his thighs. He covered every inch of beach that might possibly have been crossed by any of the men, stamping expressionlessly up and down. Then, without saying another word to Colclough, he stamped back out of the water, his broad back bowed over a little from weariness, and walked heavily back to where his men were ru

Colclough wheeled suddenly from his position at the bottom of the ramp, but none of the men was smiling. Then Colclough turned and stepped on to the soil of France, delicately, but with dignity, and one by one his Company followed him, through the cold sea-water and the floating debris of the first day of the great battle for the continent of Europe.

The Company did not fight at all the first day. They dug in and ate their supper K ration (veal loaf, biscuit, vitamin-crowded chocolate, all of it with the taste and texture of the factory in it, denser and more slippery than natural food can be), and cleaned their rifles and watched the new companies coming into the beach with the amused superiority of veterans for their jitteriness at the occasional shells and their exaggerated tenderness about mines. Colclough had gone off looking for Regiment, which was inland somewhere, although no one knew just where.

The night was dark, windy, wet and cold. The Germans sent over planes in the last twilight and the guns of the ships lying offshore and the anti-aircraft guns on the beach crowded the sky with flaming steel lines. The splinters dropped with soft, deadly plunks into the sand beside Noah, while he stared up helplessly, wondering if there ever was going to be a time when he would not be in danger of his life.

They were awakened at dawn, at which time Colclough returned from Regiment. He had got lost during the night and had wandered up and down the beach looking for the Company, until he had been shot at by a nervous Signal Corps sentry. Then he had decided that it was too dangerous to keep moving about and had dug himself a hole and bedded himself down until it was light enough, so that he would not be shot by his own men. He looked haggard and weary, but he shouted orders in rapid-fire succession and led the way up the bluff, with the Company spread out behind him.

Noah had a cold by then, and was sneezing and blowing his nose wetly. He was wearing long woollen underwear, two pairs of wool socks, a suit of ODs, a field-jacket, and over it all the chemically treated fatigues, which were stiff and wind-resistant, but even so he could feel his chilled bones within his flesh as he made his way through the heavy sand past the smoke-blackened and ruptured German pillboxes and the dead grey uniforms, still unburied, and the torn German guns, still maliciously pointed towards the beach.

Trucks and jeeps pulling trailers loaded with ammunition bumped and skidded past the Company, and a newly arrived tank platoon clanked up the rise, looking dangerous and invincible. MPs were waving traffic on, Engineers were building roads, a bulldozer was scraping out a runway for an airfield, jeep ambulances, with wounded on stretchers across the top, were sliding down the rutted road between the taped-off minefields to the clearing stations in the lee of the bluff. In a wide field, pocked with shell-holes, graves registration troops were burying American dead. There was an air of orderly, energetic confusion about the entire scene that reminded Noah of the time when he was a small boy in Chicago and had watched the circus throwing up its tents and arranging its cages and living quarters.

When he got to the top of the bluff Noah turned round and looked at the beach, trying to fix it in his mind. Hope will want to know what it looked like, and her father, too, when I get back, Noah thought. Somehow, pla

The beach, strewn with the steel overflow of the factories of home, looked like a rummage basement in some store for giants. Close offshore, just beyond the old tramp steamers they were sinking now for a breakwater, destroyers were standing, firing over their heads at strong-points inland.

"That's the way to fight a war," Burnecker said beside Noah.

"Real beds, coffee is being served below, Sir, you may fire when ready, Gridley. We would have joined the Navy, Ackerman, if we had as much brains as a rabbit."