The Young Lions

They walked slowly, in the rain, the water dripping from their helmets, the muzzles of their carbines held low, pointing groundward, to keep the wet out.

"I'll tell you something," Keane said. "A couple of weeks ago, when the Germans nearly broke through here, and there was talk about our being set up as part of a defensive line, I'll admit to you, I was praying they would break through. Praying. So we would have to fight."

"You're a goddamn fool," Michael said.

"I could be a great soldier," Keane said harshly, belching.

"Great. I know it. Look at my brother. We were full brothers, even if he was twenty years older than me. Pavone knows it. That's why he takes a perverted pleasure in keeping me back here at a typewriter, while he takes other people out with him."

"It would serve you damned well right," Michael said, "if you got a bullet in your head."

"I wouldn't care," Keane said flatly. "I wouldn't give a damn. If I get killed, don't give my regards to anyone."

Michael tried to see Keane's face, but it was impossible in the dark. He felt a wave of pity for the constipated, brother-and-hero-haunted man with the frigid wife.

"I should have gone to OCS," Keane went on. "I would have made a great officer. I'd have my own company by now, and I guarantee I'd have the Silver Star…" His voice went on, mad, grating, sick, as they walked side by side under the dripping trees. "I know myself. I'd have been a gallant officer."

Michael couldn't help smiling at the phrase. Somehow, in this war, you never heard that word, except in the rhetoric of the communiques and citations. Gallant was not the word for this particular war, and only a man like Keane would use it so warmly, believing in the word, believing that it had reality and meaning.

"Gallant," Keane repeated firmly. "I'd show my wife. I'd go back to London with the ribbons on me and I'd cut a path a mile wide through the women there. I never had any luck there before because I was a private."

Michael gri

"My wife knew it," Keane complained. "That's why she persuaded me not to become an officer. She had it figured out, and then when I saw what she'd done to me, it was too late, I was overseas."

Michael was begi

"What's your wife like?" he asked maliciously.

"I'll show you her picture tomorrow. Pretty," Keane said.

"Very well formed. She looks like the most affectionate woman in the world, always smiling and lively when anybody else is around. But let the door close, let us be alone, and it's like the middle of a glacier. They trick you," Keane mourned in the wet darkness, "they trick you, they trick you before you know what's happening… Also," he went on, pouring it out, "she takes all my money. And it's awful here, because I just sit around and I remember all the things she did to me, and I could go crazy. If I was in combat I could forget. Listen, Whitacre," Keane said passionately, "you're in good with Pavone, he likes you, talk to him for me, will you?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Either let him transfer me to the infantry," said Keane, and Michael's mind registered, This one, too, and for what reasons!

"Or," Keane went on, "let him take me with him when he leaves camp. I'm the sort of man he needs. I'm not afraid of being killed, I have nerves of steel. When the jeep was strafed and the other men were hit, I just watched them as coolly as if I was sitting in a movie looking at it on the screen. That's the sort of man Pavone needs with him…"

I wonder, Michael thought.

"Will you talk to him?" Keane pleaded. "Will you? Every time I start to talk to him, he says, 'Private Keane, are those lists typed yet?' And he laughs at me. I can see him laughing at me," Keane said wildly. "It gives him a distorted pleasure to think that he has the brother of Gordon Keane sitting back in the Communication Zone typing rosters. Whitacre, you've got to talk to him for me. The war will be over and I will never be in a single battle if someone doesn't help me!"

"OK," Michael said. "I'll talk to him." Then, harshly and cruelly because Keane was the kind of man who invited cruelty from everyone he spoke to, "Let me tell you, though, if you ever get into a battle I hope to God you're nowhere near me."

"Thanks, Boy, thanks a lot," Keane said heartily. "Gee, Boy, it's great of you to talk to Pavone about me. I'll remember you for this, Boy, I really will."

Michael strode off ahead of Keane and for a while Keane took the hint and stayed behind and they did not talk. But near the end of the hour, just before Keane was due to go in, he caught up with Michael, and said, reflectively, as though he had been thinking about it for a long time, "I think I'll go on sick call tomorrow and get some Epsom salts. Just one good bowel movement and it may start it, I may be a new man from then on."

"You have my heartiest best wishes," Michael said gravely.

"You won't forget about talking to Pavone now, will you?"

"I won't forget. I will personally suggest," Michael said, "that you should be dropped by parachute on General Rommel's Headquarters."

"It may be fu

"I'll talk to Pavone," Michael said. "Wake Stellevato up and turn in. I'll see you in the morning."

"It was a great relief," said Keane, "to be able to talk to someone like this. Thanks, Boy."

Michael watched the brother of the dead Medal-of-Honour wi

Stellevato was a short, small-boned Italian, nineteen years old, with a soft dark face, like a plush sofa cushion. He came from Boston, where he had been an iceman, and his speech was a mixture of liquid Italian sounds and the harsh long 'a's of the streets adjoining the Charles River. When he served as a sentry, he stood in one place, leaning against a jeep hood, and nothing could make him move. He had been in the infantry in the States and he had developed such a profound distaste for walking that now he even got into his jeep to ride the fifty yards to the latrine. Back in England he had fought the entire Medical Corps in a stubborn, clever battle to convince the Army that his arches were bad and that he was not fit to serve any longer on foot. It was his great triumph of the war, one that he remembered more dearly than anything else that had happened since Pearl Harbour, that he had finally prevailed and had been assigned to Pavone as a driver. Michael was very fond of him and when they were on duty together like this they both stood lounging against the jeep hood, smoking surreptitiously, exchanging confidences, Michael digging into his mind to remember random meetings with movie stars whom Stellevato admired hungrily, and Stellevato describing in detail the ice-and-coal route in Boston, and the life of the Stellevato family, father, mother and three sons in the apartment on Salem Street.

"I was havin' a dream," Stellevato said, slouched into his raincoat, with all the buttons torn off, a squat, unsoldierly silhouette with a carelessly held weapon angling off its shoulder, "a dream about the United States when that son of a bitch Keane woke me up. That Keane," Stellevato said angrily, "there's somethin' wrong with him. He comes over and smacks me across the shins like a cop kickin' a bum off a park bench, and he makes a helluva racket, he keeps sayin', loud enough to wake up the whole Army, 'Wake up, Boy, it's rainin' outside and you got some walkin' to do, come on, wake up, Boy, you got to walk in the cold, cold rain.'" Stellevato shook his head aggrievedly. "He don't have to tell me. I can see it's rainin'. He enjoys makin' people miserable, that feller. And this dream I was havin', I didn't want it to break off in the middle…" Stellevato's voice grew remote and soft. "I was on the truck with my old man. It was a su