The Young Lions

Pavone started the jeep again and drove thoughtfully down what had once been a main thoroughfare. "I came here for a week-end in 1938," Pavone said, looking back, "with a friend of mine who produced movies, and two girls from one of his companies." He shook his head reflectively. "We had a very nice week-end. My friend, his name was Jules, was killed right away in 1940." Pavone peered at the jagged shop-fronts. "I can't recognize a single street."

Fantastic, Michael thought, he is risking my life for the memory of a week-end with a couple of players and a dead producer six years ago.

They turned into a street in which there was considerable activity. There were trucks drawn up alongside a church and three or four young Frenchmen with FFI armbands patrolling along an iron fence and some Canadians helping wounded civilians into one of the trucks. Pavone stopped the jeep in a little square in front of the church. The pavement was piled high with old valises, wicker hampers, carpet-bags, net market sacks stuffed with linen, sheets and blankets in which were rolled an assortment of household belongings.

A young girl in a light blue dress, very clean and starched, went by on a bicycle. She was pretty, with lively blue-black hair. Michael looked at her curiously. She stared at him coldly, hatred and contempt very plain in her face. She is blaming me, Michael thought, for the bombings, for the fact that her house is down, her father dead, perhaps, her lover God knows where. The girl flashed on, her pretty skirt billowing, past the ambulance and the shell-marked stone. Michael would have liked to follow her, talk to her, convince her… Convince her of what? That he was not just an iron-hearted, leering soldier, admiring pretty legs even in the death of a city, that he understood her tragedy, that she must not judge him so swiftly, in the flashing of an eye, must have mercy in her heart for him, and understanding, just as she must expect mercy and understanding in return…

The girl disappeared.

"Let's go in," said Pavone.

The inside of the church was very dark after the brilliant sunlight outside. Michael smelled it first. Mixed with the slight, rich odour of old candles and incense burned in centuries of devotion, there was a smell of barnyard and the sick smell of age and medicine and dying.

He blinked, standing at the door, and listened to the scuffle of children's feet on the great stone floor, now strewn with straw. High overhead there was a large, gaping shell-hole. The sunlight streamed down through it, like a powerful amber searchlight, piercing the religious gloom.

Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw that the church was crowded. The inhabitants of the city, or those who had not yet fled and not yet died, had assembled here, numbly looking for protection under God, waiting to be taken away behind the lines. The first impression was that he was in a gigantic religious home for the aged. Stretched out on the floor on litters and on blankets and on straw heaps were what seemed like dozens of wrinkled, almost evaporated, yellow-faced, fragile octogenarians. They rubbed their translucent hands numbly over their throats; they pushed feebly at blanket ends; they mumbled with animal squeaky sounds; they stared, hot-eyed and dying, at the men who stood over them; they wet the floor because they were too old to move and too far gone to care; they scratched at grimy bandages that covered wounds they had received in the young men's war that had raged in their city for a month; they were dying of cancer, tuberculosis, hardening of the arteries, nephritis, gangrene, malnourishment, senility; and the common smell of their disease and their helplessness and their age, collected together like this in the once-shelled church, made Michael gasp a little as he regarded them, lit here and there in a mellow and holy beam of sunlight, dancing with dust-motes and shimmering over the wasted, fiercely hating faces. Among them, between the straw palliasses and the stained litters, between the cancer cases and the old men with broken hips who had been bedridden for five years before the British came, between the old women whose great-grandchildren had already been killed at Sedan and Lake Chad and Oran, among them ran the children, playing, weaving in and out, swiftly and gaily shining for a moment in the golden beam from the German shell-hole, then darting like glittering water-flies into the rich pools of purple shadow, the high tinkle of their laughter skimming over the heads of the grave-bound ancients on the stone floor.

"Well, Colonel," Michael said, "what has Civil Affairs to say about this?"

Pavone smiled gently at Michael and touched his arm softly, as though he realized, out of his greater age and deep experience, that Michael felt somehow guilty for this and must be forgiven for his sharpness because of it. "I think," he began, "we had better get out of here. The British got this, let them worry about it…"

They passed the convent wall, but the boy from Toronto was gone. Pavone stepped hard on the accelerator and they sped out of town. It was lucky they had not stopped before the convent, because they hadn't gone three hundred yards when they heard the explosion behind them. There was a whirling cloud of dust squarely in the road where they had been.

Pavone turned to look, too. Michael and he glanced at each other. They did not smile and they did not speak. Pavone turned back and hunched over the wheel.

They crossed the marked thousand yards, where the road was under observed shellfire, without incident. Pavone stopped the jeep and signalled for Michael to come up and take the wheel.

As he climbed over the seat Michael halted and looked back. There was no sign that a city, ruined or unruined, lay over the horizon.

He started the jeep, feeling better to be at the wheel, and they drove slowly without speaking through the yellow afternoon sun towards the American lines.

Half a mile further on they saw troops coming up on both sides of the road, in single file, and they heard a strange, skirling noise. A moment later they saw that it was a battalion of infantry, Scotch-Canadian, each company led by a bagpiper, walking slowly towards a road that led off into wheatfields to the left. Other troops could be seen, just their heads and weapons showing above the wheat, marching slowly down towards the river.

The noise of the bagpipes sounded wild and comic and pathetic in the open, deserted country. Michael drove very slowly towards the approaching troops. They were walking heavily, sweating dark stains into their heavy battledress, loaded down with grenades and bandoliers and boxes of machine-gun ammunition. In front of the first Company, just behind the bagpiper, strode the Commanding Officer, a large, red-faced young Captain, with a swooping red moustache. He carried a small swagger-stick and he stepped out strongly in front of his troops, as though the crying, thin music of the pipes were a joyous march.

The officer gri

But as the jeep came abreast of the officer he gri