The Young Lions

"I'm afraid not," Ahearn said.

"These are going to be hard days ahead of us in France." Mabel Kasper finished the glass of champagne. "The scum are in the saddle. Hoodlums, parading around with their guns."

"Do you mean the FFI?" Michael asked.

"I mean the FFI," said Mabel Kasper.

"But they've done all the fighting in the underground," said Michael, trying through all the noise to puzzle out what this woman was driving at.

"The underground!" Mabel Kasper snorted in a genteel, a

Michael watched her walk along the jumbled line of tables, in her simple, handsome black dress. "Lord," he said softly, "and out of Schenectady, too."

"A war," Ahearn said soberly, "as I was saying, is full of confusing elements."

"If there is any hope in the future," Michael heard Pavone lecturing two young American infantry officers who were AWOL from their Division for the night, "it is in France. It is not enough for Americans to fight for France, they must understand it, stabilize it, be patient with it. That is not easy, because the French are the most a

Across the room, the girl in the flowered dress, who had been watching Michael intently, smiled broadly and nodded when she caught Michael's eye.

"The irrational element in war," Ahearn said, "is the one that has been missing from all our literature. Let me remind you once more of the Colonel in Stendhal…"

"What did the Colonel in Stendhal say?" Michael asked dreamily, happily floating in a haze of champagne, smoke, perfume, candlelight, lust…

"His men were demoralized," Ahearn said sternly, his tone now martial and commanding, "and they were on the verge of ru

"Ah," said Michael regretfully, "there are no Colonels like that today."

A drunken British Captain was singing, very loudly, "We're going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line," his voice bellowing strongly, drowning the music of the orchestra. Immediately, other voices took up the song. The orchestra gave in and stopped the dance tune they were playing and began to accompany the singers. The drunken Captain, a big, red-faced man, grabbed a girl and began to dance around the room among the tables. Other couples jumped up and attached themselves to the line, weaving slowly and loudly between the paper tablecloths and the wine buckets. In a minute, the line was twenty couples long, chanting, their heads thrown back, each person's hands on the waist of the dancer ahead of him, like a triumphant snake dance in college after a football game, except that it was all enclosed in a low-ceilinged, candlelit room, and the singing was deafening.

"Agreeable," Ahearn said, "but too normal to be interesting, from a literary point of view. After all, after a victory like this, it is only to be expected that the liberators and the liberated sing and dance. But what a thing it would have been to be in the Czar's palace in Sevastopol when the young cadets filled the swimming pool with champagne from the Czar's cellar and tossed naked ballet girls by the dozen into the foam, while waiting for the arrival of the Red Army which would execute them all! Excuse me," Ahearn said gravely, standing up, "I must join this."

He wriggled out on to the floor and put his hands on the waist of the Schenectady-born Mabel Kasper, who was swaying her simple taffeta hips and singing loudly at the end of the line.

The girl in the flowered dress was standing in front of the table, looking at Michael, smiling through the clamour. "Now?" she asked softly, putting out her hand.

"Now," Michael said. He stood up and took her hand. They hitched on to the line, the girl in front of Michael, her hips living and slender under the frail silk of her gown.

By now everybody in the room was in the line, spiralling in a roaring silk and uniformed line, over the dance floor, in front of the blaring band, among the tables. "We're go

Michael sang with the loudest of them, his voice hoarse and happy in his ears, holding tight to the desirable slim waist of the girl who had sought him out of all the victorious young men in the celebrating city. Lost on a clangorous tide of music, shouting the crude, triumphant words, remembering with what savage irony the Germans had thrown those words back in the teeth of the British who had first sung them in 1939, Michael felt that on this night all men were his friends, all women his lovers, all cities his own, all victories deserved, all life imperishable…

"We'll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line," the blended voices sang among the candles, "if the Siegfried Line's still there," and Michael knew that he had lived for this moment, had crossed the ocean for it, carried a rifle for it, escaped death for it.

The song ended. The girl in the flowered dress turned and kissed him, melting into him, clutching him, making him dizzy with the smell of wine and heliotrope perfume, as the other people around him sang, like all the gay, jubilating ghosts at every New Year's party that had ever been held, the sentimental and haunting words of "Auld Lang Syne".

The middle-aged French pilot from Park Avenue, who had given the ingenious parties in 1928, and who had gone to Harlem late at night, and who had flown three complete tours in the Lorraine Squadron, and whose friends had all died through the years, and who now was finally back in Paris, was weeping as he sang, the tears unashamedly and openly streaming down his handsome, worn face… "Should old acquaintance be forgot," he sang, his arm around Pavone's shoulders, already hungry and nostalgic for this great and fleeting night of hope and joy, "and never brought to mind…?"

The girl kissed Michael ever more fiercely. He closed his eyes and rocked gently with her, the nameless gift of the free city, locked in his arms…

Fifteen minutes later, as Michael, carrying his carbine, and the girl in the flowered dress and Pavone and his bleached lady were walking along the dark Champs Elysees, in the direction of the Arch, near where Michael's girl lived, the Germans came over, bombing the city. There was a truck parked under a tree, and Michael and Pavone decided to wait there, sitting on the bumper, under the moral protection of the summer foliage above their heads.

Two minutes later, Pavone was dead, and Michael was lying on the tarry-smelling pavement, very conscious, but curiously unable to move his legs below the hips.

Voices came from far away and Michael wondered what had happened to the girl in the silk dress, and tried to puzzle out how it had happened, because all the firing had seemed to be on the other side of the river, and he hadn't heard any bombs dropping…