The Young Lions

"What are you laughing at?" Brandt looked at him suspiciously, and Christian straightened his face, because he had the feeling that if he antagonized Brandt, Brandt would withhold valuable information from him.

"Nothing," Christian said. "Honestly, nothing. I'm a little tired. I have just won the cross-country nine-day all-European bicycle race, and I'm not exactly in control of myself. I'll be all right."

"Well?" Brandt asked querulously. Christian could tell from the timbre of the photographer's voice that he was very near the thin edge of breaking, himself. "Well, what do you intend to do?"

"Bicycle back to Berlin," Christian said. "I expect to equal the existing record."

"Don't joke, for the love of God," Brandt said.

"I love pedalling through the historic French countryside," Christian said light-headedly, "conversing with the historic natives in their native costumes of hand-grenades and Sten guns, but if something better came up, I might be interested"

"Look here," Brandt said, "I have a two-seater English car in a farmer's barn one mile from here…"

Christian became very cool and all tendency to laugh left him.

"Keep moving!" Brandt snapped, under his breath. "I told you not to stop. I want to get back to Paris. My idiotic driver left last night. We were strafed yesterday and he got hysterical. He went towards the American lines about midnight."

"Well…?" Christian asked, trying to seem very keen and understanding. "Why've you been hanging around here all day?"

"I can't drive," Brandt said bitterly. "Imagine that, I never learned how to drive a car!"

This time Christian couldn't keep his laughter down. "Oh, my God," he said, "the modern industrial man!"

"It isn't so fu

What a century, Christian thought, enjoying this sudden advantage over a man who had before this done so well out of the war, what a century to pick to be highly strung! "Why didn't you get one of these fellows…" Christian gestured towards the men lounging on the town hall steps, "to drive you?"

"I don't trust them," Brandt said darkly, with a glance around him. "If I told you half the stories I've heard about officers being killed by their own troops in the last few days… I've been sitting in this damned little town for nearly twenty-four hours, trying to think what to do, trying to find a face I really could trust. But they all travel in groups, they all have comrades, and there's only two places in the car. And, who knows, by tomorrow the enemy may be here, or the road to Paris will be closed… Christian, I confess to you, when I saw your face in that cafe, I had to hold on to myself to keep from crying. Listen…" Brandt grabbed his arm anxiously. "There's nobody with you? You're alone, aren't you?"

"Don't worry," Christian said. "I'm alone."

Suddenly Brandt stopped. He wiped his face nervously. "It never occurred to me," he whispered. "Can you drive?"

The anguish plain on Brandt's face as he asked the simple, foolish question that at this moment, at the time of the crumbling of an army, had become the focal point and tragedy of his life, made Christian feel grotesquely and protectively full of pity for the thin, ageing ex-artist. "Don't worry, comrade." Christian patted Brandt's shoulder soothingly. "I can drive."

"Thank God," Brandt sighed. "Will you come with me?"

Christian felt a little weak and giddy. Safety was being offered here, speed, home, life… "Try and stop me," he said. They gri

"Let's start at once," Brandt said.

"Wait," said Christian. "I want to give this bicycle to someone else. Let someone else have a chance to get away…" He peered at the shadowy figures stirring around the town hall, trying to devise some i

"No." Brandt pulled Christian back towards him. "We can use the bicycle. The Frenchman at the farm will give us all the food we can carry for that bicycle."

Christian hesitated, but only for a second. "Of course," he said evenly. "What could I have been thinking of?"

With Brandt looking back nervously over his shoulder to make certain they were not being followed, and Christian wheeling the bicycle, they walked out of the town, back over the road Christian had traversed just half an hour before. At the first turning, where a dusty road slid out into the main highway between banks of flowering hawthorn bushes, fragrant and heavy in the still evening air, they turned off. After walking for a quarter of an hour, they reached the comfortable, geranium-bordered farmhouse and the large stone barn in which, under a pile of hay, Brandt had hidden the two-seater.

Brandt had been right about the bicycle. When, under the first stars of evening, they started out along the narrow road leading from the farmhouse, they had with them a ham, a large can of milk, half a large cheese, a litre of Calvados and two of cider, half a dozen thick loaves of coarse brown bread and a whole basketful of eggs that the farmer's wife had hard-boiled for them while they were taking the hay off the car. The bicycle had proved most useful.

With full stomach, relaxed behind the wheel of the small, humming, well-conditioned car, riding past the pale glow of the hawthorns into the main road in the moonlit evening, Christian smiled gently to himself. Meeting the boy in the blue shirt on the empty road early that morning, he reflected, had proved considerably more profitable than he had expected. They drove back through the town without stopping. Someone shouted at them as they sped through the square, but whether it was a command to halt or an appeal for a ride or a curse because they were going too fast and were endangering the men on foot, they never found out, because Christian accelerated as much as he dared. A moment later, they were sliding out on the dim ribbon of road that stretched ahead of them across the moonlit countryside towards the city of Paris two hundred kilometres away.

"Germany is finished," Brandt was saying, his voice thin and weary, but loud, so as to be heard against the rush of night wind that piled across the open car. "Only a lunatic wouldn't know it. Look at what's happening. Collapse. Nobody cares. A million men left to shift for themselves. A million men, practically without officers, without food, plans, ammunition, left to be picked up by the enemy when they have time. Or massacred, if they're foolish enough to make a stand. Germany can't support an army any longer. Perhaps, somewhere, they'll collect some troops and draw a line, but it will only be a gesture. A temporary, bloodthirsty gesture. A sick, romantic Viking funeral. Clausewitz and Wagner, the General Staff and Siegfried, combined for a graveyard theatrical effect. I'm as much of a patriot as the next man, and God knows, I've served Germany in the best way I knew, in Italy, in Russia, here in France… But I'm too civilized for what they're doing to us now. I don't believe in the Vikings. I'm not interested in burning on Goebbels's pyre. The difference between a civilized human being and a wild beast is that a human being knows when he is lost, and takes steps to save himself… Listen, when it looked as though the war was about to start, I had my application in to become a citizen of the French Republic, but I gave it up. Germany needed me," Brandt went on, earnestly, convincing himself as much as the man in the seat beside him of his honesty, his rectitude, his good sense, "and I offered myself. I did what I could. God, the pictures I've taken. And what I've gone through to get them! But there are no more pictures to be taken. Nobody to print them, nobody to believe them, or be touched by them if they are printed. I exchanged my camera with that farmer back there for ten litres of petrol. The war is no longer a subject for photographers because there is no war left to photograph. Only the mopping-up process. Leave that to the enemy photographers. It is ridiculous for the people who are being mopped up to record the process on film. Nobody can expect it of them. When a soldier joins an army, any army, there is a kind of basic contract the army makes with him. The contract is that while the army may ask him to die, it will not knowingly ask him to throw his life away. Unless the government is asking for peace this minute, and there are no signs that that is happening, they are violating that contract with me, and with every other soldier in France. We don't owe them anything. Not a thing."