The Young Lions

Hardenburg was shaking him roughly. He opened his eyes and looked up. He knew that it would be impossible to sit up, then stand up, then take one step after another. He wanted to say, "Please leave me alone," and drop off again to sleep. But Hardenburg grabbed him by his coat, at his neck, and pulled hard. Somehow Christian found himself standing. He walked automatically, his boots making a noise like his mother's iron over stiff and frozen laundry at home, and helped Hardenburg move the motor-cycle. Hardenburg swung his leg over the saddle with great agility and began kicking the starting pedal. The machine sputtered again and again, but it did not start.

Christian watched him working furiously with the machine in the waning moonlight. It wasn't until the figure was close to him that Christian looked up and realized that they were being watched. It was Knuhlen, the man who had been weeping in the truck, who had stopped shovelling and had followed the Lieutenant up the slope. Knuhlen didn't say anything. He just stood there, watching blankly as Hardenburg kicked again and again at the pedal.

Hardenburg saw him. He took a slow, deep breath, swung his leg back and stood next to the machine.

"Knuhlen," he said, "get back to your post."

"Yes, Sir," said Knuhlen, but he didn't move.

Hardenburg walked over to Knuhlen and hit him hard on the nose with the side of his fist. Knuhlen's nose began to bleed. He made a wet, snuffling sound, but he did not move. His hands hung at his sides as though he had no further use for them. He had left his rifle and his entrenching tool at the hole he had been digging down the slope. Hardenburg stepped back and looked curiously and without malice at Knuhlen, as though he represented a small problem in engineering that would have to be solved in due time. Then Hardenburg stepped over to him again and hit him very hard twice. Knuhlen fell slowly to his knees. He kneeled there looking blankly up at Hardenburg.

"Stand up!" Hardenburg said.

Slowly Knuhlen stood up. He still did not say anything and his hands still hung limply at his hips.

Christian looked at him vaguely. Why don't you stay down? he thought, hating the baggy, ugly soldier standing there in silent, longing reproach on the crest of the moonlit rise. Why don't you die?

"Now," Hardenburg said, "get back down that hill."

But Knuhlen just stood there, as though words no longer entered the cha

"All right," Hardenburg said, "come with me."

He took the motor-cycle handle-bars and trundled it down the other side of the rise away from the shovellers below. Christian took a last look at the thirty-six men scraping at the desert's face in their doped, rhythmic movements. Then he followed Hardenburg and Knuhlen along the down-sloping path.

Knuhlen walked in a dumb, scuffling ma

Christian took the handle-bars and balanced the machine against his legs. Knuhlen had stopped and was standing in the sand, staring patiently once more at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg cleared his throat as though he were going to make a speech, then walked up to Knuhlen, looked at him deliberately, and clubbed him twice, savagely and quickly, across the eyes. Knuhlen sat down backwards this time, without a sound, and remained that way, staring up dully and tenaciously at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg looked down at him thoughtfully, then took out his pistol and cocked it. Knuhlen made no move and there was no change on the dark, bloody face in the dim light.

Hardenburg shot him once. Knuhlen started to get up to his feet slowly, using his hands to help him. "My dear Lieutenant," he said in a quiet, conversational tone. Then he slid face-down into the sand.

Hardenburg put his pistol away. "All right," he said.

Then he came back to the motor-cycle, and swung himself into the saddle. He kicked the pedal. This time it started.

"Get on," he said to Christian.

Carefully, Christian swung his leg over and settled himself on the pillion seat of the motor-cycle. The machine throbbed jumpily under him.

"Hold on tight," Hardenburg said. "Around my middle."

Christian put his arms around Hardenburg. Very strange, he thought, hugging an officer at a time like this, like a girl going for an outing into the woods with a motor-cycle club on a Sunday afternoon. So close, Hardenburg smelled frightfully, and Christian was afraid he was going to vomit.

Hardenburg put the machine into gear and it sputtered and roared and Christian wanted to say, "Please keep quiet," because something like this should be done quietly, and it was discourteous to the thirty-seven men who had to stay behind to advertise so blatantly that they were being left alone to die and that other men would still be alive when they were bleached bones on the hill from which no escape was possible.

Thirty-six now, Christian thought, remembering the laborious small pits facing the British, facing the tanks and the armoured cars. Three dozen. Three dozen soldiers, he thought, holding tight to the Lieutenant on the jolting machine, trying to remember not to have an attack of fever or chills, three dozen soldiers, at how much a dozen?…

Hardenburg reached a level place, and he accelerated the motor. They sped across the empty plain glowing in the last level rays of the sinking moon, surrounded by the flicker of guns on all horizons. Their speed created a great deal of wind, and Christian's cap blew off, but he did not mind, because the wind also made it impossible to smell the Lieutenant any more.

They rode north and west for half an hour. The flickering on the horizon grew stronger and brighter as the motor-cycle slithered along the winding track among the dunes and the occasional patches of scrub grass. There were some burnt-out tanks along the track, and here and there a truck, its naked driveshaft poking up into the dim air like an anti-aircraft gun. There were some new graves, obviously hastily dug, with a rifle, bayonet-down in the ground, and a cap or helmet hanging from the butt, and there were the usual crashed planes, blackened and wind-ripped, with the bent propellers and the broken wings vaguely reflecting glints of the moon from their ragged metal surfaces. But it wasn't until they reached a road considerably to the north, ru

Hardenburg pulled off to one side, but not too far, because there was no telling, with all the fighting that had gone back and forth over this ground, where you might run over a mine. He stopped the motor-cycle and Christian nearly dropped off with the tension of speed no longer holding him to the seat. Hardenburg swung round and held Christian, steadying him.

"Thank you," Christian said formally and light-headedly. He was having a chill now, and his jaws were clamped in a cold spasm around his swollen tongue.

"You can get into one of those trucks," Hardenburg shouted, waving, with a ridiculous expenditure of energy, at the procession slowly droning past. "But I don't think you should."

"Whatever you say, Lieutenant." Christian smiled with frozen amiability, like a drunk at a polite and rather boring garden-party.