The Young Lions

Good, Noah thought, it is going to be a parade. Ever since his return from the days behind the enemy lines, he had kept to himself as much as he could, remaining reticent, trying, in the days of rest which had been permitted him, and the more or less uneventful hours in the line, to develop a new attitude, a philosophy of aloof detachment, to protect him once and for all from the hatred of Rickett and any other men in the Company who felt as Rickett did about him. In a way, as he watched the planes roar above him, and heard the thunder of their bombs out in front of him, he was grateful to Rickett. Rickett had absolved him from the necessity of proving himself, because he had demonstrated that no matter what Noah did, if he took Paris single-handed, if he killed an SS brigade in a day, Rickett would not accept him.

He watched the planes with interest.

Abstractedly, squinting out in front of him through the hedge towards the enemy's lines, shaking his head to clear his ears of the shock of the percussion of the bombs, he felt sorry for the Germans behind the imaginary fall line of the Air Force. On the ground himself, armed with a weapon that carried a two-ounce projectile a pitiful thousand yards, he felt a common hatred for the impersonal killers above him, a double self-pity for those helpless men cowering in holes, blasted and sought out by the machine age with thousand-pound explosives. He looked at Burnecker beside him and he could tell from the pained grimace on the thin young face that something of the same thoughts were passing through his friend's brain.

"God," Burnecker whispered, "why don't they stop? That's enough, that's enough. What do they want to do, make mince-pie?"

By now, the German anti-aircraft guns had been silenced and the planes wheeled calmly overhead, as safely as though they were engaged in manoeuvres.

Then there was a whistling around him, a roaring and upheaval of the green earth. Burnecker grabbed him and dragged him down into the hole. They crouched together as far down as they could get, their legs jumbled together, their helmets touching, as bomb after bomb hit around them, deafening them, covering them with a pelting shower of earth, stones and broken twigs.

"Oh, the bastards," Burnecker was saying, "oh, the murdering Air Force bastards."

They heard screams on all sides of them and the cries of the wounded. But it was impossible to get out of the hole while the bombs poured down in a rattling, closely spaced barrage. Overhead, Noah could hear the steady, droning, business-like roar of the planes, untouched, untouchable, going calmly about their business, the men in them confident of their skill, pleased, no doubt, for the time being, with the results they imagined they were achieving.

"Oh, the miserable, easy-living, extra-pay murderers," Burnecker was saying. "They won't leave one of us alive."

This will be the final thing the Army will do to me, Noah thought, it will kill me itself. It won't trust the Germans to do the job. They mustn't tell Hope how it happened. She mustn't ever know the Americans did it to me…

Then, miraculously, the bombing stopped. The noise of engines still continued above them, but somehow, a correction had been made, and the planes were moving on to other targets.

Burnecker slowly stood up and looked out. "Oh, God," he said brokenly, at what he saw.

Trembling, feeling his knees weak beneath him, Noah began to stand, too. But Burnecker pushed him down.

"Stay down," Burnecker said harshly. "Let the Medics clean ' em up. They're mostly replacements anyway. Stay where you are." He pushed Noah forcibly back and down. "I bet those bloody idiots'll come back and start dropping things on us again. Don't get caught out in the open. Noah…" He bent beside Noah and gripped Noah's arms passionately with fierce hands. "Noah, we've got to stay together. You and me. All the time. We're lucky for each other. We'll take care of each other. Nothing'll ever happen to either of us if we hang on to each other. The whole damn Company'll die, but you and me, we'll come out… we'll come out…"

He shook Noah violently. His eyes were wild, his mouth was working, his voice was hoarse with the intensity of his belief, tested now so many times, on the water of the Cha

"You got to promise me, Noah," Burnecker whispered, "we don't let them break us up. Never! No matter how hard they try! Promise me!"

Noah began to cry, the tears rolling down his cheeks softly and helplessly at his friend's need and mystic faith. "Sure, Joh

Twenty minutes later what was left of the Company got up from the line of foxholes and advanced to the positions from which they had withdrawn to give the planes a margin for error. Then they broke through the hedge and started across the bomb-marked field towards where the Germans were theoretically all dead or demoralized.

The men walked slowly, in a thin, thoughtful line across the cropped pasture grass, holding their rifles and tommy-guns at their hips. Is this the whole Company, Noah thought with dull surprise, is this all that's left? All the replacements who had been put in the week before, and who had never fired a shot, were they already gone?

In the next field, Noah could see another thin line of men, walking with the same slow, weary thoughtfulness towards an embankment with a ditch at its bottom that made a sharp traversing line across the green landscape. Artillery was still going over their heads, but there was no small-arms fire to be heard. The planes had gone back to England, leaving the ground littered with shining silver bits of tinsel that they had dropped to confuse the enemy's radar equipment. The sun caught the strips of brightness in sparkling pin-points among the rich green of the grass, attracting Noah's eye again and again as he walked side by side, close to Joh

It seemed to take the line a long time to get to the cover of the embankment, but finally they were there. Automatically, without a signal, the men threw themselves into the small ditch, against the safe grassy slope of the shielding embankment, although there still hadn't been a shot fired at them. They lay there, as though this had been a dear objective and they had fought for days to reach it.

"Off your arse!" It was Rickett's voice, the same tone, the same vocabulary, whether he was snarling at a man to clean a latrine in Florida or to charge a machine-gun post in Normandy.

"The war ain't over. Get up over that there ditch."

Noah and Burnecker lay slyly, with heads averted, against the soft sloping grass, pretending that Rickett was not there, that Rickett was not alive.

Three or four of the replacements stood up, with a jangle of equipment, and started climbing heavily up. Rickett followed them and stood at the top shouting down at the rest of the men.

"Come on, off your arse, off your arse…"

Regretfully, Noah and Burnecker stood up and clambered up the slippery six feet. The rest of the men around them were slowly doing the same thing. Burnecker, who reached the top first, helped Noah. They stood for a moment, peering ahead of them. A long field, dotted with blown-up cows, stretched ahead of them towards a row of hedges, spaced with trees, in the distance. It still seemed very quiet. The three or four replacements who had been the first to climb up were tentatively walking out ahead, and Rickett was still snarling away.

As he took the first few steps across the quiet field, following the other men, Noah hated Rickett more fiercely than he ever had before.