The Young Lions

"Forgive me, Madame," Michael said, almost sobbing, "I can't help…"

"You had no right to come," Mrs Dumoulin said, suddenly quiet, "unless you were prepared to stay. The tanks last night, you this morning. War or no war, you have no right to treat human beings like this…"

"Nikki," Michael said thickly, "let's get out of here! Fast!"

"It is dirty," Mrs Dumoulin was saying, speaking for the racked men and women behind her as Stellevato drove the jeep away, "it is too dirty, it is not civilized…"

Michael could not hear the end of her sentence, and he did not look back as they drove swiftly out of town, following Kramer and Morrison, in the direction of Colonel Pavone.

There were champagne bottles all over the table, catching the light of the hundreds of candles which were the only illumination in the night club. The room was very crowded. Uniforms of a dozen nations mingled with gay print dresses, bare arms, high-piled gleaming hair. Everybody seemed to be talking at once. The liberation of Paris the day before and the parade that afternoon, with the attendant interesting sniping from the rooftops, had liberated an enormous flood of conversation, most of which had to be shouted loudly to be heard over the three musicians in the corner, who were playing, very loudly, "Shuffle off to Buffalo".

Pavone was sitting opposite Michael, smiling widely, a cigar in his mouth, his arm lightly around a bleached lady with long false eyelashes. Occasionally he waved his cigar in pleasant salute to Michael, who was flanked by the correspondent, Ahearn, the man who was making a study of fear for Collier's, and a middleaged, beautifully dressed pilot in the French Air Force.

"Whitacre," Pavone said, across the table, "you're a fool if you ever leave this city."

"I agree with you, Colonel," Michael said. "When the war is over, I'm going to ask them to discharge me on the Champs Elysees." And, for the moment, he meant it. From the minute when, from among the rolling troop-filled trucks, he had seen the spire of the Eiffel Tower rising above the roofs of Paris, he had felt that he had finally arrived at his true home. Caught in the riotous confusion of kissing and handshaking and gratitude, hungrily reading the names of the streets which had haunted his brain ever since he was a boy. "Rue de Rivoli", "Place de l'Opera", "Boulevard des Capucines", he had felt washed of all guilt and all despair. Even the occasional outbursts of fighting, among the gardens and the monuments, when the remaining Germans had fired away their ammunition before surrendering, had seemed like a pleasant and fitting introduction to the great city. And the spilled blood on the streets, and the wounded and dying men being hurried away on stained stretchers by the FFI Red Cross women, had added the dramatically necessary note of poignancy and suffering to the great act of liberation.

He would never be able to remember what it had been like, exactly. He would only remember the cloud of kisses, the rouge on his shirt, the tears, the embraces, the feeling that he was enormous, invulnerable, and loved.

"I remember," Ahearn was saying next to him, "that the last time I saw you I questioned you on the subject of fear."

"Yes," Michael said, looking agreeably at the sunburned red face, and the serious grey eyes. "I believe you did. How's the market on fear these days among the editors?"

"I decided to put off writing it," Ahearn said earnestly. "It's been overdone. It's the result of the writers after the last war, plus the psychoanalysts. Fear has been made respectable and it's been done to death. It's a civilian concept. Soldiers really don't worry as much about it as the novelists would have you believe. In fact, the whole picture of war as an unbearable experience is a false one. I've watched carefully, keeping my mind open. War is enjoyable, and it is enjoyed by and large by almost every man in it. It is a normal and satisfactory experience. What is the thing that has struck you most strongly in the last month in France?"

"Well," Michael began, "it's…"

"Hilarity," Ahearn said. "A wild sensation of holiday. Laughter. We have moved three hundred miles through an enemy army on a tide of laughter. I plan to write it for Collier's."

"Good," Michael said gravely. "I shall look forward to reading it."

"The only man who has ever written accurately about a battle," said Ahearn, leaning over so that his face was just six inches from Michael's, "was Stendhal, In fact, the only three writers who have ever been worth reading twice in the whole history of literature were Stendhal, Villon and Flaubert."

"Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good," one of the musicians was singing in accented English, "oh, lady be good to me…"

"Stendhal caught the unexpected and insane and humorous aspect of war," Ahearn said. "Do you remember, in his journal, his description of the Colonel who rallied his men during the Russian campaign?"

"I'm afraid not," Michael said.

"You look like a nice, lonely soldier." It was a tall, dark-haired girl in a flowered dress whom Michael had smiled at across the room fifteen minutes before. She was standing, bent over the table, her hand on Michael's. Her dress was cut low, and Michael noticed the pleasant, firm, olive sweep of her bosom so close to his eyes. "Wouldn't you like to dance with a grateful lady?"

Michael smiled at her. "In five minutes," he said, "when my head is cleared."

"Good." The girl nodded, smiling invitingly. "You know where I'm sitting…"

"Yes, I certainly do," Michael said. He watched the girl slip through the dancers in a sinuous flowery movement. Nice, he thought, very nice for later. I should really make love to a Parisie

"There are volumes to be written," Ahearn said, "about the question of men and women in wartime."

"I'm sure there are," Michael said. The girl sat down at her table and smiled across at him.

There were shouts from the other end of the room, and four young men with FFI armbands and rifles pushed their way through the dancers, dragging another young man whose face was bleeding from a long gash over his eyes. "Liars!" the bloody young man was shouting. "You're all liars! I am no more of a collaborationist than anybody in this room!"

One of the FFI men hit the prisoner on the back of the neck. The young man's head sagged forward and he was quiet. The four FFI men dragged him up the steps past the candles in their glass holders on the maroon walls. The orchestra played louder than before.

"Barbarians!" It was a woman's voice, speaking in English. A lady of forty was sitting in the seat that the French pilot had vacated next to Michael. She had long, dark red fingernails and an elegant simple black dress, and she was still very handsome.

"They all ought to be arrested. Just looking for an excuse to stir up mischief. I am going to suggest to the American Army that they disarm them all." Her accent was plainly American and both Ahearn and Michael stared at her puzzledly. She nodded briskly to Ahearn, and more coolly to Michael, after swiftly noting that he was not an officer. "My name is Mabel Kasper," she said, "and don't look so surprised. I'm from Schenectady."

"We are delighted, Mabel," Ahearn said gallantly, bowing without rising.

"I know what I'm talking about," the lady from Schenectady said feverishly, obviously three or four drinks past cold sobriety.

"I've lived in Paris for twelve years. Oh, the things I've suffered. You're a correspondent – the stories I could tell you about what it was like under the Germans…"

"I would be delighted to hear," Ahearn began.

"The food, the rationing," Mabel Kasper said, pouring a large glass full of champagne and drinking half of it in one gulp.

"The Germans requisitioned my apartment, and they only gave me fifteen days to move my furniture. Luckily, I found another apartment, a Jewish couple's; the man is dead now, but this afternoon, imagine that, the second day of liberation, the woman was around asking me to give it back to her. And there wasn't a stick of furniture in it when I moved in, I was damn careful to have affidavits made, I knew this would happen. I have already spoken to Colonel Harvey, of our Army, he's been most reassuring. Do you know Colonel Harvey?"