The Young Lions

Noah and Burnecker went past the man in the foxhole. He threw them their dogtags and looked at them curiously.

"How was it back there?" he asked.

"Great," said Noah.

"More fun than a strawberry social," said Burnecker.

"I bet," said the man from Georgia.

Half an hour later, dressed in a uniform three sizes too large for him that had been taken from a dead man outside the Company CP, Noah was standing in front of the Division G2. The G2 was a grey-haired, round, little Lieutenant-Colonel with purple dye all over his face, staining his skin and grizzled beard. The G2 had impetigo and was trying to cure it while doing everything else that was expected of him.

Division CP was in a sandbagged shed and there were men sleeping everywhere on the dirt floor. It still wasn't light enough to work by and the G2 had to peer at the map Noah had drawn by the light of a candle, because all the generators and electrical equipment of Headquarters had been sunk on the way in to the beach.

Burnecker was standing dreamily beside Noah, his eyes almost closed.

"Good," the G2 was saying, nodding his head again and again, back and forth, "good, very good." But Noah hardly remembered what the man was talking about. He only knew that he felt very sad, but it was hard to remember just why he felt that way.

"Very good, boys," the man with the purple face was saying kindly. He seemed to be smiling at them. "Above and beyond the… There'll be a medal in this for you boys. I'll get this right over to Corps Artillery. Come around this afternoon and I'll tell you how it came out."

Noah wondered dimly why he had a purple face and what he was talking about.

"I would like the photograph back," he said clearly. "My wife and my son."

"Yes, of course," the man smiled even more widely, yellow, old teeth surrounded by purple and grey beard. "This afternoon, when you come back. C Company is being re-formed. We've got back about forty men, counting you two. Evans," he called to a soldier who seemed to be sleeping standing up against the shed wall, "take these two men to C Company. Don't worry," he said, gri

The first man they saw was Lieutenant Green, who took one look at them and said, "There are some blankets over there. Roll up and go to sleep. I'll ask you questions later."

On the way over to the blankets they passed Shields, the Company Clerk, who had already set up a small desk for himself, made out of two ration boxes, in a ditch under the trees along the edge of the field. "Hey," Shields said, "we got some mail for you. The first delivery. I nearly sent it back. I thought you guys were missing."

He dug into a barracks bag and brought out some envelopes. There was a brown Manila envelope for Noah, addressed in Hope's handwriting. Noah took it and put it inside the dead man's shirt he was wearing and picked up three blankets. He and Burnecker walked slowly to a spot under a tree and unrolled the blankets. They sat down heavily and took off the boots that had been given them. Noah opened the Manila envelope. A small magazine fell out. He blinked and started to read Hope's letter.

"Dearest," she wrote, "I suppose I ought to explain about the magazine right off. The poem you sent me, the one you wrote in England, seemed too nice to hold just for myself, and I took the liberty of sending it…"

Noah picked up the magazine. On the cover he saw his name. He opened the magazine and peered heavily through the pages. Then he saw his name again and the neat, small lines of verse.

"Beware the heart's sedition," he read. "It is not made for war…"

"Hey," he said, "hey, Burnecker."

"Yes?" Burnecker had tried to read his mail, but had given up, and was lying on his back under the blankets, staring up at the sky. "What do you want?"

"Hey, Burnecker," Noah said, "I got a poem in a magazine. Want to read it?"

There was a long pause, then Burnecker sat up.

"Of course," he said. "Hand it over."

Noah gave Burnecker the magazine, folded back to his poem. He watched Burnecker's face intently as his friend read the poem. Burnecker was a slow reader and moved his lips as he read. Once or twice he closed his eyes and his head rocked a little, but he finished the poem.

"It's great," Burnecker said. He handed the magazine to Noah, seated on the blanket beside him.

"Are you on the level?" Noah asked.

"It's a great poem," Burnecker said gravely. He nodded for emphasis. Then he lay back.

Noah looked at his name in print, but the other writing was too small for his eyes at the moment. He put the magazine inside the dead man's shirt again and lay back under the warm blankets.

Just before he closed his eyes he saw Rickett. Rickett was standing over him and Rickett was shaved clean and had on a fresh uniform. "Oh, Christ," Rickett said, off in the distance high above Noah, "oh, Christ, we still got the Jew."

Noah closed his eyes. He knew that later on what Rickett had said would make a great difference in his life, but at the moment all he wanted to do was sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THERE was a sign on the side of the road that said YOU ARE UNDER OBSERVED SHELLFIRE FOR THE NEXT ONE THOUSAND YARDS. KEEP AN INTERVAL OF SEVENTY-FIVE YARDS.

Michael glanced sideways at Colonel Pavone. But Pavone, in the front seat of the jeep, was reading a paper-covered mystery story he had picked up in the staging area in England while they were waiting to cross the Cha

Michael stepped on the accelerator and the jeep spurted swiftly down the empty road. On the right there was a bombed-out aerodrome, with the skeletons of German planes lying about. There was a strip of smoke further off in front, lying in neat folds over the wheatfields in the bright summer afternoon air. The jeep bounced rapidly over the macadam road to the shelter of a clump of trees, and over a little rise, and the thousand observed yards were crossed.

Michael sighed a little to himself, and drove more slowly. There was a loud, erratic growling of big guns ahead of them, from the city of Caen, that the British had taken the day before. Just what Colonel Pavone wanted to do in Caen, Michael didn't know. In his job as a roving Civil Affairs officer, Pavone had orders which permitted him to wander from one end of the front to another, and with Michael driving him, he cruised all over Normandy, like a rather sleepy, good-humoured tourist, looking at everything, when he wasn't reading, nodding brightly to the men who were fighting at each particular spot, talking in rapid, Parisian French to the natives, occasionally jotting down notes on scraps of paper. At night Pavone would retire to the deep dugout in the field near Carentan, and type out reports by himself, and send them on somewhere, but Michael never saw them, and never knew exactly where they were going.

"This book stinks," Pavone said. He tossed it into the back of the jeep. "A man has to be an idiot to read mystery stories." He looked around him, with his perky, clown's grimace. "Are we close?" he asked.

A battery concealed behind a row of farmhouses opened fire. The noise, so near, seemed to vibrate the windshield, and Michael had, once again, the expanding, tickling, concussion feeling low down in his stomach, that he never seemed to get over when a gun went off near-by.

"Close enough," Michael said grimly.

Pavone chuckled. "The first hundred wounds are the hardest," he said.