The Young Lions

There was a bright flash in the distance and a fire sprang up, surprising and troubling in the blacked-out countryside, where people on your own side would fire at you if you struck a match after dark because it exposed your position to the enemy.

"I sat there, holding Joh

"The doctor was very nice," Noah's voice took up in the darkness. "He was a pretty old man from Tucson. He'd been a specialist in tuberculosis before the war, he told me. He told me what was the matter with Joh

Michael and Noah stood side by side, leaning against the flaking, damp, cold stone wall of the CP, behind which Captain Green was worrying about trench-foot. In the distance, the fire was growing brighter, as it took hold more strongly on the timbers and contents of the German farmer's home.

"I told you about the feeling Joh

"Yes," said Michael.

"We went through so much together," said Noah. "We were cut off, you know, and we got through, and we weren't hurt when the LCI we were on was hit on D-Day…"

"Yes," said Michael.

"If I hadn't been so slow," Noah said, "if I'd got up here one day earlier, Joh

"Don't be silly," Michael said sharply, feeling: Now this is too much of a burden for this boy to carry.

"I'm not silly," Noah said calmly. "I didn't act quickly enough. I took my time. I hung around that replacement depot five days. I was lazy, I just hung around."

"Noah, don't talk like that!"

"And we took too long on the trip up," Noah continued, disregarding Michael. "We stopped at night, and we wasted a whole afternoon on that chicken di

"Shut up!" Michael shouted thickly. He grabbed Noah and shook him hard. "Shut up! You're talking like a maniac! Don't ever let me hear you say anything like that again!"

"Let me go," Noah said calmly. "Keep your hands off me. Excuse me. There's no reason why you should have to listen to my troubles. I realize that."

Slowly Michael relinquished his grip. Once again, he felt, I have failed this battered boy…

Noah hunched into his clothes. "It's cold out here," he said pleasantly. "Let's go inside."

Michael followed him into the CP.

The next morning Green assigned them to their old platoon, the one they had been in together in Florida. There were still three men left out of the forty who had been in the original platoon, and they welcomed Michael and Noah with heartwarming cordiality. They were very careful when they spoke of Joh

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

"So they asked this GI, what would you do if they sent you home?" Pfeiffer was saying. He and Noah and Michael were squatting on a half-submerged log against a low stone wall, their meat balls, spaghetti and ca

"No," Michael said politely to Pfeiffer.

Pfeiffer nodded, pleased. "First, the GI said, I'd take off my shoes. Second, I'd lay my wife. Third, I'd take off my pack." Pfeiffer roared at his joke. He stopped suddenly. "You sure you haven't heard it before?"

"Honest," said Michael. "That's a hell of a fu

"I thought you'd like it," Pfeiffer said with satisfaction, wiping up the last thick juice of the meat balls, spaghetti and peach syrup. "What the hell, you have to laugh every once in a while."

Pfeiffer industriously scrubbed his mess kit with a stone and a piece of toilet paper he always carried in his pocket. He got up and wandered over to the dice game that was going on behind a blackened chimney that was all that was left of a farmhouse that had survived three wars before this. There were three soldiers, a Lieutenant, and two Sergeants from a Communications Zone Signal Corps message centre, who had somehow arrived here in a jeep on a tourist visit. They were playing dice, and they seemed to have a lot of money which would do more good in the pockets of the infantry.

Michael lit a cigarette, relaxing. He wiggled his toes automatically, to make certain he could still feel them, and enjoyed the sense of having eaten well, and being out of danger for an hour. "When we get back to the States," Michael said to Noah, "I will take you and your wife out to a steak di

"Hope doesn't like it very rare," Noah said, seriously.

"She will have it any way she wants it," Michael said. "Antipasto first, then these steaks, charred on the outside and they sigh when you touch a butter knife to them, and you get spaghetti and green salad and red California wine, and after that, cake soaked in rum and cafe expresso, that's very black, with lemon peel. The first night we get home. On me. You can bring your son, too, if you want, we'll put him in a high chair." Noah smiled. "We'll leave him at home that night," he said.

Michael was gratified at the smile. Noah had smiled very seldom in the three months since they had returned to the Company. He had spoken little, smiled little. In his taciturn way, he had attached himself to Michael, watched out for him with critical, veteran eyes, protected him by word and example, even when it had been a full-time job trying to keep himself alive, even in December, when it had been very bad, when the Company had been loaded on trucks and had been thrown in hurriedly against the German tanks that had suddenly materialized out of the supposedly exhausted Army in front of them. The Battle of the Bulge, it was now called, and it was in the past, and the one thing Michael really would remember from it for the rest of his life was crouching in a hole, which Noah had made him dig two feet deeper, although Michael had been weary and a