The Young Lions

They sat at the crowded table, in the big hall, eating warmed-up C rations, vegetable hash and thin coffee.

Michael ate with pleasure, going back over the years with Noah, filling the gaps between Florida and the Replacement Depot. He looked gravely at the photograph of Noah's son ("Twelve points," Noah said. "He has seven teeth.") and heard about the deaths of Do

Noah was very different. He didn't seem nervous. Although he was terribly frail now, and coughed considerably, he seemed to have found some i

They cleaned their mess kits and, luxuriously smoking nickel cigars from their rations, they strolled through the sharp, dark evening, towards Noah's tent, their mess kits jangling musically at their sides.

There was a movie in camp, a 16-mm version of Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl, and all the men who were billeted in the same tent with Noah were surrendering themselves to its technicolor delights. Michael and Noah sat on Noah's cot in the empty tent, puffing at their cigars, watching the blue smoke spiral softly up through the chilled air.

"I'm pulling out of here tomorrow," Noah said.

"Oh," Michael said, feeling suddenly bereaved, feeling that it was unjust for the Army to throw friends together like this, only to tear them apart twelve hours later. "Your name on the roster?"

"No," said Noah quietly. "I'm just pulling out." Michael puffed carefully at his cigar. "AWOL?" he asked.

"Yes."

God, Michael thought, remembering the time Noah had spent in prison, hasn't he had enough of that? "Paris?" he asked.

"No. I'm not interested in Paris." Noah bent over and took two packets of letters, carefully done up in string, from his kitbag. He put one packet, the envelopes scrawled unmistakably in a woman's handwriting, on the bed. "Those are from my wife," Noah said flatly. "She writes me every day. This pack…" He waved the other bunch of letters gently. "From Joh

"Oh," Michael said, trying to recall Joh

"He's got a fixation, Joh

"Why do you have to go AWOL?" Michael asked. "Why don't you go into the orderly room and ask them to send you back to your old Company?"

"I did," Noah said. "That Sergeant. He told me to get the hell out of there, he was too busy, he wasn't any goddamn placement bureau, I'd go where they sent me." Noah played slowly with the packet of Burnecker's letters. They made a dry, rustling sound in his hands. "I shaved and pressed my uniform, and I made sure I was wearing my Silver Star. It didn't impress him. So I'm taking off after breakfast tomorrow."

"You'll get into a mess of trouble," Michael said.

"Nah." Noah shook his head. "People do it every day. Just yesterday a Captain in the Fourth did it. He couldn't bear hanging around any more. He just took a musette bag. The guys picked up all the other gear he left and sold it to the French. As long as you don't try to make Paris, the MPs don't bother you, if you're heading towards the front. And Lieutenant Green, I hear he's Captain now, is in command of C Company, and he's a wonderful fellow. He'll straighten it out for me. He'll be glad to see me."

"Do you know where they are?" Michael asked.

"I'll find out," Noah said. "That won't be hard."

"Aren't you afraid of getting into any more trouble?" Michael asked. "After all that stuff in the States?"

Noah gri

"You're sticking your neck out," Michael said.

Noah shrugged. "As soon as I found out in the hospital that I wasn't going to die," he said, "I wrote Joh

"Happy landing," Michael said. "Give my regards to the boys."

"Why don't you come with me?"

"What?"

"Come along with me," Noah repeated. "You'll have a lot better chance of coming out of the war alive if you go into a company where you have friends. You have no objections to coming out of the war alive, have you?"

"No," Michael smiled weakly. "Not really." He did not tell Noah of the times when it hadn't seemed to make much difference to him whether he survived or not, some of the rainy, weary nights in Normandy when he had felt so useless, when the war had seemed to be only a growing cemetery, whose only purpose seemed the creation of new dead; or the bleak days in the hospital in England, surrounded by the mangled product of the French battlefields, at the mercy of the efficient, callous doctors and nurses, who would not even give him a twenty-four-hour pass to visit London, to whom he had never been a human being in need of comfort and relief, but merely a poorly mending leg that had to be whipped back into a facsimile of health so that its owner could be sent back as soon as possible to the front. "No," Michael said, "I don't really mind the idea of being alive at the end of the war. Although, to tell you the truth, I have a feeling, five years after the war is over, we're all liable to look back with regret to every bullet that missed us."

"Not me," said Noah fiercely. "Not me. I'm never going to feel that."

"Sure," Michael said, feeling guilty. "I'm sorry I said it."

"You go up as a replacement," said Noah, "and your chances are awful. The men who are there are all friends, they feel responsible for each other, they'll do anything to save each other. That means every dirty, dangerous job they hand right over to the replacements. The Sergeants don't even bother to learn your name. They don't want to know anything about you. They just trade you in for their friends and wait for the next batch of replacements. You go into a new Company, all by yourself, and you'll be on every patrol, you'll be the point of every attack. If you ever get stuck out some place, and it's a question of saving you or saving one of the old boys, what do you think they'll do?"

Noah was speaking passionately, his dark eyes steady and intense on Michael's face, and Michael was touched by the boy's solicitude. After all, Michael remembered, I did damn little for him in his trouble in Florida, and I was no great comfort to his wife back in New York. He wondered if that frail dark girl had any notion of what her husband was saying now on the wet plain outside Paris, any notion of what subterranean, desperate reasoning a man went through in this cold, foreign autumn so that he could one day come back and touch her hand, pick up his son in his arms… What did they know about the war back in America, what did the correspondents have to say about the replacement depots in their signed pieces on the front pages of the newspapers?

"You've got to have friends," Noah was saying fiercely. "You can't let them send you anywhere where you don't have friends to protect you…"

"Yes," Michael said gently, putting out his hand and touching the boy's wasted arm, "I'll go with you."