The Young Lions

Then he had hurried through the town, almost trotting down the cobbled road, past the grey church, the inevitable statue of victory with palms and bayonets in front of the town hall, the shuttered shops. No one was stirring. The French seemed to have vanished from the face of the land as the Germans retreated through it. Even the dogs and the cats seemed to understand that it was safer for them to hide until the bitter tide of defeated soldiers had passed.

It was on the other side of the town that his luck changed. He was hurrying, because he was still in sight of the walls of the last row of houses, and his breath was coming hoarsely into his lungs, when he saw, coming around a bend in the road ahead of him, a figure on a bicycle.

Christian stopped. Whoever it was on the bicycle was in a hurry. He kept his head down and pedalled swiftly towards where Christian was standing.

Christian moved to the middle of the road and waited. He saw that it was a boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, capless, dressed in a blue shirt and old French Army trousers, racing bumpily through the cool, misty dawn light between the still rows of poplars on each side of the road, casting a soft, elongated shadow of legs and wheels on the road in front of him.

The boy saw Christian when he was only thirty yards away. He stopped suddenly.

"Come here," Christian shouted hoarsely, in German, forgetting his French. "Walk over here."

He started towards the boy. For a moment the two of them stared at each other. The boy was very pale, with curly black hair and dark, frightened eyes. With a swift, animal-like movement, the boy picked up the bicycle by the front wheel and whirled it round. He was ru

Without thinking, Christian opened fire. He caught the boy with the second burst. The bicycle careered into the ditch alongside the road. The boy went sliding across the road to the other side, and lay there without moving.

Christian lumbered quickly along the uneven road, his boots making a thick thudding sound in the silent morning. He bent over the bicycle and picked it up. He rolled it back and forth. It was unharmed. Then he looked at the boy. The boy's head was twisted towards him, very pale and unmarked under the curly hair. There was a light fuzz of moustache under the slender nose. A red stain slowly spread across the back of the faded blue shirt. Christian made a movement towards the boy, but thought better of it. They'd have been bound to hear the shooting in the town, and if they found him there, they'd make short work of him.

Christian swung himself up on the bicycle and started east. After the weary days of walking, the ground seemed to spin past beneath him with wonderful swiftness and ease. His legs felt light; the dawning breeze against his cheeks was soft and cool; the light dewy green of the foliage on both sides of the road was pleasing to the eye. Now, he thought, it needn't be only officers who ride.

The roads of France seemed to have been made for bicyclists, with the paving in fair condition, and no high hills to slow a man down. It would be easy for a man to do two hundred kilometres a day… He felt youthful, strong, and for the first time since he had seen the first glider coming down out of the coastal sky that bad morning so long ago, he felt as though there was some hope for him. After half an hour, as he was gliding down a gentle slope between two fields of half-grown wheat, pale yellow in the morning sun, he found himself whistling, a vacation-like, holiday-like, tuneless, heart-free, merry sound, rising gay and natural in his throat.

All that day, he fled east along the road to Paris. He passed groups of men, walking, moving slowly in overloaded farm wagons stubbornly loaded with pictures and furniture and barrels of cider. He had passed refugees before in France, a long time ago, but it had been more natural then, because they were mostly women, children and old men, and you knew they had some reason to hold on to mattresses and kitchen pots and odds and ends of furniture because they hoped to set up domestic lives somewhere else. But it was strange to see a German Army trudging along in this way, young men with guns and uniforms, who could only hope either finally to be re-formed on some line and by some miracle turned around to fight – or to fall into the hands of the enemy who, it was rumoured, were closing in on them from all directions. In either case, framed paintings from Norman chateaux and cloiso

And, meanwhile, the country, in the full bloom of summer, with the geraniums high and pink and red along the farmers' walls, was shining and lovely in the long perfect days.

By evening, Christian was exhausted. He hadn't ridden a bicycle for years, and in the first hour or two he had gone too fast. Also, twice during the day, shots had been fired at him, and he had heard the bullets snipping by, past his head, and had driven himself frantically out of danger. The bicycle was wavering almost uncontrollably all over the road as he slowly pushed into the square of quite a fair-sized town at sunset. He was pleased, dully, to see that the square was full of soldiers, sitting in the cafes, lying exhausted and asleep on the stone benches in front of the town hall, tinkering hopelessly with broken-down 1925 Citroens in an attempt to get them to move just a few more kilometres. Here, for a few moments, at least, he could be safe.

A drink, he thought, a drink will give me a breathing spell, a drink will keep me going.

He walked stiffly through the open door of a cafe, wheeling the bicycle at his side. There were some soldiers sitting at the back of the room and they looked at him briefly and without surprise, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for German sergeants to enter cafes wheeling bicycles, or leading horses, or at the controls of armoured cars. Christian carefully put the bicycle against the wall and placed a chair against the back wheel. Then he sat down slowly in the chair. He gestured to the old man behind the bar. "Cognac," he said. "A double cognac."

Christian looked around the shadowy room. There were the usual signs in French and German, with the rules for the sale of alcohol on them, and the legend that only aperitifs would be sold on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was a Thursday, Christian remembered hazily, but the special nature of this particular Thursday might be said to countermand even the regulations of a Minister of the French Government at Vichy. At any rate, the Minister who had delivered himself of the regulations was no doubt ru

The old Frenchman shuffled over with a small glass of brandy. The old man had a beard like a Jewish prophet and his teeth smelled terribly of decay, Christian noticed irritably. Was there no escaping, even in this cool dark place, the odours of ferment and mortality, the scent of dying bone and turning flesh?