The Young Lions

But he didn't say it because he felt that he was the one who needed friends.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

A CHAPLAIN in a jeep picked them up on the other side of Chateau-Thierry. It was a grey day and the old monuments among the cemeteries and the rusting wire of another war looked bleak and ill-tended. The Chaplain was quite a young man, with a Southern accent, and very talkative.

It started to rain. Curtains of water poured down over the ancient earthworks and the rotting wooden posts that had supported the wire in 1917. The Chaplain slowed down, peering through the clouded windshield. Noah, who was sitting in the front seat, worked the manual wiper to clear the glass. They passed a little fenced-off plot next to the road where ten Frenchmen had been buried on the retreat in 1940. There were faded artificial flowers on some of the graves, and a little statue of a saint in a glass case on a grey wood pedestal. Michael looked away from the Chaplain, thinking vaguely of the overlapping quality of wars.

The Chaplain stopped the jeep abruptly, and backed it down the road towards the little French cemetery.

"That will make a very interesting photograph for my album," the Chaplain said. "Would you boys mind posing in front of it?"

Michael and Noah climbed out and stood in front of the neat little plot. "Pierre Sorel," Michael read on one of the crosses, "Soldat, premiere class, ne 1921, mort 1940." The artificial leaves of laurel and the dark memorial ribbon around them had run together in streaks of green and black in the long rains and the warm sun of the years between 1940 and 1944.

"I have more than a thousand photographs I've taken since the war began," said the Chaplain, busily working on a shiny Leica camera. "It will make a valuable record. A little to the left, please, Boys. There, that's it." There was a click from the camera. "This is a wonderful little camera," the Chaplain said proudly. "Takes pictures in any light. I bought it for two cartons of cigarettes from a Kraut prisoner. Only the Krauts know how to make good cameras, really. They have the patience we lack. Now, you boys give me the address of your families back in the States, and I'll make up two extra prints, and send them back to show the folks how healthy you are."

Noah gave the Chaplain Hope's address, care of her father in Vermont. The Chaplain carefully wrote it down in a pocket notebook with a black leather cover and a cross on it.

"Never mind about me," Michael said, feeling that he didn't want his mother and father to see a photograph of him, thin and worn, in his ill-fitting uniform, standing in the rain before the ten-grave roadside cemetery of the lost young Frenchmen.

"I don't like to bother you, Sir."

"Nonsense, Boy," said the Chaplain. "There must be somebody who'd be right happy with your picture. You'd be surprised, all the nice letters I get from folks whose boys' pictures I send them. You're a smart, handsome young feller, there must be a girl who would like to put your picture on her bed table."

Michael thought for a moment. "Miss Margaret Freemantle," he said, "26 West 10th Street, New York City. It's just what she needs for her bed table."

While the Chaplain scratched away in his notebook, Michael thought of Margaret receiving the photograph and the note from the Chaplain in the quiet, pleasant street in New York. Maybe now, he thought, she'll write… Although what she'll have to say to me, and what I might possibly answer, I certainly don't know. Love, from France, a million years later. Signed, Your interchangeable lover, Michael Whitacre, Army Speciality Number 745, from the grave of Pierre Sorel, ne 1921, mort 1940, in the rain. Having a wonderful time, wish you were…

They got into the jeep again and the Chaplain drove carefully along the narrow, high-backed, slippery road with the marks of tank treads and a million heavy army wheels on it.

"Vermont," the Chaplain said pleasantly to Noah, "that's a pretty quiet section of the country for a young feller, isn't it?"

"I'm not going to live there," Noah said, "after the war. I'm going to move to Iowa."

"Why don't you come to Texas?" the Chaplain said hospitably. "Room for a man to breathe there. You got folks in Iowa?"

"You might say that," Noah nodded. "A buddy of mine. Boy by the name of Joh

"Newspaperman, eh?" the Chaplain nodded sagely. "That's the lively life. Rolling in money, too."

"Not this newspaper, " Noah said. "It comes out once a week. It has a circulation of 8, 200."

"Well, it's a start," said the Chaplain agreeably. "A springboard to bigger things in the city."

"I don't want a springboard," said Noah quietly. "I don't want to live in a city. I haven't any ambition. I just want to sit in a small town in Iowa for the rest of my life, with my wife and my son, and my friend, Joh

"Oh, you'll get tired of it," the Chaplain said. "Now that you've seen the world, a small town will seem pretty dull."

"No, I won't," said Noah, very firmly, working the manual wiper with a decisive flick of his arm. "I won't ever get tired of it."

"Well, you're different from me, then." The Chaplain laughed. "I come from a small town and I'm tired in advance. Though, to tell you the truth, I don't think I'll have anybody much waiting for me at home." He chuckled sympathetically to himself. "I have no children, and my wife said, when the war began, and I felt I had the call to join up, 'Ashton,' she said, 'you have got to make your choice, it is either the Corps of Chaplains or your wife. I am not going to sit home by myself for five years, thinking of you travelling around the world, loose as a humming-bird, picking up with God knows what kind of women. Ashton,' she said, 'you don't fool me not for a minute.' I told her she was unreasonable, but she's a stubborn woman. The day I come home I bet she starts proceedings for a divorce. I had quite a decision to make, I can tell you that. Oh, well," he sighed philosophically, "it hasn't been so bad. There's a very nice little nurse in the 12th General, and I have managed to assuage my sorrows." He gri

"Where do you get all that film?" Michael asked, thinking of the thousand pictures for the album, and knowing how difficult it was to get even one roll a month out of any PX.

The Chaplain made a sly face and put his finger along his nose. "I had some trouble for a while, but I have it taped now, as our English friends say. Oh, yes, it's taped now. It's the best film in the world. When the boys come in from their missions, I get the Engineering Officer of the Group to let me clip off the unexposed ends in the gun cameras. You'd be surprised how much film you can accumulate that way. The last Engineering Officer was begi

"How did it work out?" Michael asked.

"The Engineering Officer went on a mission. He was a good flier, oh, he was a crackerjack flier," the Chaplain said enthusiastically, "and he shot down a Messerschmitt, and when he came back to the field he buzzed the radio tower to celebrate. Well, the poor boy miscalculated by two feet, and we had to sweep him together from all four quarters of the field. I tell you, I gave that boy one of the best funerals anybody has ever had from the Corps of Chaplains in the Army of the United States. A real, full-sized, eloquent funeral…" The Chaplain gri