The Young Lions

Ever since Pavone had so savagely put him in his place that night on sentry duty in Normandy, Michael had almost given up any hope of being useful in the war. Now, he felt, in lieu of that, I should at least understand it…

But nothing fell into generalities in his brain, he could not say "Americans are thus and so and therefore they are wi

All the violence, all the shouting, ran together in his brain, in a turbulent, confused, many-threaded drama, a drama which endlessly revolved through his mind, kept him from sleeping, even in these days of heat and exhaustion, a drama which he never would get rid of, even at a time like this, when his life perhaps was silently being jeopardized in this quiet, grey, lifeless town on the road to Paris.

The soft noise of the water going by between its banks mingled with the soft, busy scratching of Keane's pencil. With his eyes closed, leaning against the stone wall, drowsy from all the lost hours of sleep, but not surrendering to sleep, Michael sifted through the furious events of the month just passed… The names… The names of the sunlit towns, like a paragraph out of Proust: Marigny, Coutances, St Jean le Thomas, Avranches, Pontorson, stretching away into the seaside summer in the magic country where Normandy and Brittany blended in a silvery green haze of pleasure and legend. What would the ailing Frenchman in the cork-lined room have said about his beloved Maritime Provinces during the bright and deadly August of 1944? What observations would he have made, in his shimmering, tidal sentences, about the changes in architecture the 105s and the dive-bombers had brought about in the fourteenth-century churches; what would have been his reaction to the dead horses in the ditches under the hawthorn bushes and the burned-out tanks with their curious smell of metal and flesh; what elegant, subtle and despairing things would M. de Charlus and Mme de Guermantes have had to say about the new travellers on the old roads past Mont St Michel?

"I have been walking for five days now," the young Middle-Western voice had said next to the jeep, "and I ain't fired a shot yet. But don't get me wrong, I ain't complaining. Hell, I'll walk them to death, if that's what they want…"

And the sour-faced ageing Captain in Chartres, leaning against the side of a Sherman tank across the square from the cathedral, saying, "I don't see what people've been raving all these years about this country for. Jesus Christ on the mountain, there ain't nothing here we can't make better in California…"

And the chocolate-coloured dwarf with a red fez dancing among the Engineers with minesweepers, at a crossroads, entertaining the waiting tankmen, who cheered him on and got him drunk with Calvados they had taken as gifts from the people along the road that morning.

And the two drunken old men, weaving down the shuttered street, with little bouquets of pansies and geraniums in their hands, who had given the bouquets to Pavone and Michael, and had saluted and welcomed the American Army to their village, although they would like to ask one question: Why it was, on July 4th, with not a single German in the town, the American Army had seen fit to come over and bomb the place to rubble in thirty minutes?

And the German Lieutenant in the First Division prisoner-of-war cage who, in exchange for a clean pair of socks, had pointed out on the map the exact location of his battery of 88s, to the Jewish refugee from Dresden who was now a Sergeant in the MPs.

And the grave French farmer who had worked all one morning weaving an enormous "Welcome USA" in roses in his hedge along the road to cheer the soldiers on their way; and the other farmers and their women who had covered a dead American along the road with banks of flowers from their gardens, roses, phlox, peonies, iris, making death on that summer morning seem for a moment gay and charming and touching as the infantry walked past, circling gently around the bright mound of blossoms.

And the thousands of German prisoners and the terrible feeling that you got from looking at their faces that there was nothing there to indicate that these were the people who had torn Europe from its roots, murdered thirty million people, burned populations in gas-ovens, hanged and crushed and tortured through 3,000 miles of agony. There was nothing in their faces but weariness and fear, and you knew, being honest with yourself, that if they were dressed in ODs, they would all look as though they came from Cinci

And the funeral of the FFI man in that little town – what was its name? – near St Malo, with the artillery going off all around it, and the procession winding behind the black-plumed horses and the rickety hearse up the hill to the cemetery, and all the people of the town in their best clothes, shuffling along in the dust, to shake the hands of the murdered man's relatives who stood at the gate in a solemn line. And the young priest, who had helped officiate at the funeral services in the church, who answered, when Michael asked him who the dead man was, "I don't know, my friend. I'm from another town."

And the fifteen-year-old boy in Cherbourg who had been furious with the Americans. "They are fools," he had said hotly.

"They take up with exactly the same girls who lived with the Germans! Democrats! Pah! I give you democrats like that! I, myself," the boy boasted, "have shaved the hair off five girls in this neighbourhood for being German whores. And I did it when it was dangerous, long before the invasion. And I'll do it again, oh, yes, I'll do it again…"

Stellevato was snoring, and the noise of Keane's pencil went on steadily. There was no sound from the grey town around them and Michael stood up and went over to the little bridge and stared down at the dark brown water eddying gently below. If the eight hundred Germans were going to put in an attack, he wished they'd do it fast. Or even better, if the task force would only show up, and Pavone with it. A war was more bearable when you were surrounded by hundreds of other men and all responsibility was out of your hands, and you knew that trained minds somewhere were busy with your problem. Here, on the old, mossy bridge over the nameless, dark stream in a forgotten, silent town, you had the feeling that you had been deserted, that no one would care if the eight hundred Germans came down and shot you, no one would care whether you fought them, surrendered to them, or ran from them… It is almost like civilian life, Michael thought, nobody gives a damn whether you live or die…

I'll give Pavone and that task force another thirty minutes, Michael decided, then I'll pull out. Go back and find an American Army to attach myself to.

He stared uneasily up at the sky. It was a pity it was so grey and threatening. There was something ominous about the swollen low clouds. All the rest of the time had been so su

Today, somehow, seemed different. It was not su

Michael turned to Keane. "Let's get into the middle of the town and see if anything's happening there."