The Young Lions

Twenty minutes later they had reached the line of hedge from which the enemy machine-guns had been firing. Mortars had finally found the range and had destroyed one of the nests in a corner of the field, and the other sections had pulled out before Noah and the Company reached them.

Wearily, Noah kneeled by the side of the cleverly concealed, heavily sandbagged position, now blown apart to reveal three Germans dead at their wrecked gun. One of the Germans was still kneeling behind it. Burnecker reached down with his boot and shoved at the kneeling dead man. The German rocked gently, then fell over on his side.

Noah turned away and drank a little water from his canteen. His throat was brassy with thirst. He hadn't fired his rifle all day, but his arms and shoulders ached as though he had caught the recoil a hundred times.

He looked out through the hedge. Three hundred yards away, across the usual field of bomb-holes and dead cows, was another thick hedge, and machine-gun fire was coming from there. He sighed as he saw Lieutenant Green walking towards him, urging the men out once more. He wondered hazily what had happened to the General. Then he and Burnecker started out again.

Noah was hit before they had advanced three yards, and Burnecker dragged him back behind the safety of the hedge.

A first-aid man came up with surprising speed. Noah had lost a great deal of blood very quickly and he felt cold and remote and the first-aid man's face swam above him dreamily. The man was a little Greek with crossed eyes and a dapper moustache, and the strange dark eyes and the thin moustache floated independently in the air as the man gave him a transfusion, with Burnecker helping. Shock, Noah remembered fuzzily. In the last war a man would be hit and feel perfectly all right and ask for a cigarette – it had been in a magazine somewhere – and ten minutes later he would be dead. But it was different in this war. This was a high-class, up-to-the-minute type of war, with blood to spare. The cross-eyed Greek gave him some morphine, too. That was very thoughtful of him, above and beyond the call of the Medical Corps… Strange, to be so fond of a cross-eyed man who used to be a short-order cook in a diner in Scranton, Pe

They lifted Noah on to a stretcher and started to carry him back. Noah raised his head. Seated on the ground, with his helmet off, abandoned to grief, sat Joh

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE dead horses were begi

Christian went by it slowly, on foot, still carrying his Schmeisser, in a straggling group of perhaps twenty men, none of whom was known to him. He had picked them up early in the morning, after he had become separated from the hastily organized platoon to which he had been posted three days before. The platoon, he was sure, had surrendered during the night. Christian felt a sombre sense of relief that he was no longer responsible for them or their actions.

Looking at the dead convoy, sadly marked with the red crosses that had done no good, he was overwhelmed with a sense of anger and despair. Anger at the swooping, 400-mile-an-hour young airmen who had come upon the slow-moving wagons toiling up the hill with their load of broken and dying men and had, in the wanton fury of destruction, rowelled it with their machine-guns and rockets.

At the head of the convoy was a wagon on which was mounted an 88-millimetre anti-aircraft gun. The horses were dead in the traces, in wild attitudes of gallop and fear, and there was blood all over the gun and its mounting. The German Army, Christian thought dully, as he went past, horses against aeroplanes. At least, in Africa, when he retreated, he had retreated with the aid of engines. He remembered the motor-cycle and Hardenburg, the Italian staff car, the hospital plane that had crossed the Mediterranean with him, carrying him to Italy. It seemed to be the fate of the German Army, as a war went on, to go back to more and more primitive methods of fighting. Ersatz. Ersatz petrol, ersatz coffee, ersatz blood, ersatz soldiers…

He seemed to have been retreating all his life. He had no longer any memory of ever advancing anywhere. Retreat was the condition, the general weather of existence. Going back, going back, always hurt, always exhausted, always with the smell of German dead in his nostrils, always with enemy planes flickering behind his back, their guns dancing brightly in their wings, their pilots gri

There was a loud blowing of a horn behind him, and Christian scrambled to one side. A small, closed car sped past, its wheels sending a fine cloud of dust over him. Christian got a glimpse of clean-shaven faces, a man smoking a cigar…

Then somebody was shouting, and there was the howl of engines above him. Christian lumbered away from the road and dived into one of the carefully spaced holes that had thoughtfully been provided by the German Army along many of the roads of France for the use of its troops at moments like this. He crouched deep in the damp earth, covering his head, not daring to look up, listening to the returning whine of the engines and the savage tearing sound of the guns. After two passes, the planes moved off. Christian stood up. He climbed out of the hole. None of the men he had been walking with had been touched, but the little car was overturned, against a tree, and it was burning. Two of the men who had been in it had been thrown clear, and were lying very still in the centre of the road. The other two men were burning in a welter of spilled petrol, torn rubber and whipcord upholstery.

Christian walked slowly to where the two men were lying facedown on the road. He did not have to touch them to see that they were dead.

"Officers," said a voice behind him. "They wanted to ride." The man behind him spat.

The other men walked past the two dead forms and the burning car. For a moment Christian thought of ordering some of the men to help him move the bodies, but it would have meant an argument, and at the moment it did not seem very important whether two bodies, more or less, were put to one side or not.

Christian slowly started eastward once more, feeling his bad leg shiver beneath him. He blew his nose and spat again and again to try to get the smell and the taste of the dead horses and the spilled medicine out of his mouth and throat.

The next morning he had a stroke of luck. He had pulled away from the other men during the night and had marched slowly on to the outskirts of a town, which lay across his path in the moonlight, dark, empty, seemingly lifeless. He had decided not to try to get through it by himself, at night, since it was all too possible that the inhabitants, seeing a lone soldier wandering past in the dark, might pick him off, rob him of his gun, boots and uniform, and throw him behind a hedge to rot. So he had camped under a tree, eaten sparingly of his emergency ration, and slept until daybreak.