The Young Lions

Michael got the safety-catch off his carbine. Stellevato was still sitting, his hands on the wheel, frozen in surprise. "What happened?" Stellevato whispered angrily. "What the hell's going on here?"

Michael turned. Keane was standing up behind him, his carbine in his hand, gri

Michael sighed, then looked around him. The Frenchmen were getting slowly and warily to their feet, their eyes on the wreck. Two figures lay in contorted heaps on the cobblestones. One of them, Michael noticed, was Jacqueline. Her dress was up high over her knees. Her thighs were thick and yellowish. Mrs Dumoulin was bending over her. A woman was weeping somewhere.

Michael got out of the jeep, and Keane followed him. They walked carefully across the square, their guns ready, to the overturned car.

Keane, Michael thought bitterly, his eyes on the two grey figures sprawled head down on the pavement, it had to be Keane. Faster than I, more dependable, while I was still fiddling with the catch. The Germans could've been in Paris by the time I got ready to shoot at them…

There had been four men in the car, Michael saw, three of them officers. The driver, a private, was still alive, with blood bubbling unevenly between his lips. He was trying to crawl away, on his hands and knees, with stubborn persistence, when Michael got to him. He saw Michael's shoes and stopped trying to crawl.

Keane looked at the three officers. "Dead," he reported, smiling his sick, humourless smile. "All three of them. We ought to get a Bronze Star, at least. Get Pavone to write it up for us. How about that one?" Keane indicated, with his toe, the wounded driver.

"He's not very healthy," Michael said. He bent down and touched the man's shoulder gently. "Do you speak French?" he asked.

The man looked up. He was very young, eighteen or nineteen, and the froth of blood on his caked lips, and the long lines of pain cutting down from his eyes, made him look animal-like and pathetic. He nodded. The effort of moving his head brought a spasm of pain to his lips. A gob of blood dripped down to Michael's shoes.

"Do not move," Michael said slowly, bent over, speaking softly into the boy's ear. "We'll try to help you."

The boy gently let himself down to the pavement. Then he slowly rolled over. He lay there, staring up through pain-torn eyes at Michael.

By now the Frenchmen were grouped around the wrecked car. The man with the Red Cross armband had two machine-pistols. "Wonderful," he was saying happily, "wonderful. These will be most welcome in Paris." He came over to the wounded boy and briskly yanked the pistol out of the boy's holster.

"Good," he said, "we have some.38-calibre ammunition for this."

The wounded boy stared dumbly up at the Red Cross on the Frenchman's arm. "Doctor," he said slowly, "Doctor. Help me."

"Oh," said the Frenchman gaily, touching the Red Cross, "it is just a disguise. Just for getting past your friends on the road. I am not a doctor. You will have to find someone else to help you…" He took his treasures off to one side and began to inspect them minutely for damage.

"Don't waste any time on the pig." It was the voice of Mrs Dumoulin, stony and cold. "Put him out of his misery."

Michael stared disbelievingly at her. She was standing at the wounded boy's head, her arms crossed on her bosom, speaking, Michael could tell from their harsh faces, for the men and women grouped behind her.

"No," Michael said. "This man is our prisoner and we don't shoot prisoners in our Army."

"Doctor," said the boy on the cobbles.

"Kill him," said someone from behind Mrs Dumoulin.

"If the American doesn't want to waste ammunition," another voice said, "I'll do it with a stone."

"What's the matter with you people?" Michael shouted.

"What are you, animals?" He spoke in French so that they could all understand, and it was very difficult to translate his anger and disgust in his high-school accent. He stared at Mrs Dumoulin. Inconceivable, he thought, a plump little housewife, an Irishwoman improbably in the middle of the Frenchmen's war, violent for blood, outside the claims of pity. "He's wounded, he can't do you any harm," Michael went on, furious at his slow searching for words. "What's the sense in it?"

"Go," Mrs Dumoulin said coldly, "go look at Jacqueline over there. Go see Monsieur Alexandre, that's the other one, lying there, with a bullet in his lung… Then you'll understand a little better."

"Three of them are dead," Michael pleaded with Mrs Dumoulin. "Isn't that enough?"

"It is not enough!" The woman's face was pale and furious, her dark, almost purple eyes set maniacally in her head. "Perhaps enough for you, young man. You haven't lived here under them for four years! You haven't seen your sons taken away and killed! Jacqueline was not your neighbour. You're an American. It's easy for you to be humane. It is not so easy for us!" She was screaming wildly by now, shaking her fists under Michael's nose. "We are not Americans and we do not wish to be humane. We wish to kill him. Turn your back if you're so soft. We'll do it. You'll keep your pretty little American conscience clean…"

"Doctor," the boy on the pavement moaned.

"Please…" Michael said, appealing to the locked faces of the townspeople behind Mrs Dumoulin, feeling guilty that he, a stranger, a stranger who loved them, loved their country, their courage, their suffering, dared to oppose them on a profound matter like this in the streets of their town… "Please," he said, feeling confusedly that perhaps she was right, perhaps it was his usual softness, his wavering, unheroic indecision that was making him argue like this. "It is impossible to take a wounded man's life like this, no matter what…"

There was a shot behind him. Michael wheeled. Keane was standing above the German's head, his finger on the trigger of his carbine, that sick, crooked smile on his face. The German was still now. All the townspeople stared quietly and with almost demure good ma

"What the hell," Keane said, gri

"Good," said Mrs Dumoulin flatly. "Good. Thank you very much." She turned, and the little group behind her parted so that she could walk through it. Michael watched her, a small, plump, almost comic figure, marked by childbearing and laundering and endless hours in the kitchen, rolling solidly from side to side, as she crossed the grey square to the place where the ugly farm girl lay, her skirts up, now once and for all relieved of her ugliness and her labours.

One by one, the Frenchmen wandered off, leaving the two American soldiers alone over the body of the dead boy. Michael watched them carry the man with the bullet in his lungs into the hotel. Then he turned back to Keane. Keane was bent over the dead boy, going through his pockets. Keane came up with a wallet. He opened the wallet and took out a folded card.

"His paybook," Keane said. "His name is Joachim Ritter. He's nineteen years old. He hasn't been paid for three months." Keane gri

Dumbly, Michael looked at the photograph. A thin, living boy in an amusement park peered out at him, and next to him a plump blonde girl with her young man's military cap perched saucily on her short blonde hair. There was something scrawled in ink across the face of the photograph. It was in German.

"For ever in your arms, Elsa," Keane said. "That's what it says. In German. I'm going to send it back to my wife to hold for me. It will make an interesting souvenir."