The Young Lions

Then the planes had come in low from the sea, the drumming of their engines drowning the slow roar of the armour on the climbing road. They came in regular, arrow-like formation, like stunt-fliers at a carnival. They looked slow and vulnerable. But somehow, no one was firing at them. Christian could see the bombs dropping in twisting, curling arcs. Then the mountainside was exploding. A truck deliberately toppled over above them, and went crashing ponderously into the ravine a hundred metres below. One boot flew in a long, tumbling curve out from it, as though it had been thrown out from the truck by a man who was resolved to save the first thing that came to his hand from the wreck.

Then a bomb hit close by. Christian felt himself being lifted, and he thought: It is not fair, after having come so far and so hard, it is not at all fair. Then he knew he was hurt, except that there was no pain, and he knew that he was going to go out, and it was quite peaceful and delicious to relax into the spi

Later, he opened his eyes. Something was weighing him down and he pushed against it, but there was no use. There was the yellow smell of cordite and the brassy smell of burned rock and the old smell of dying vehicles, burning rubber and leather and singed paint. Then he saw a uniform and a bandage and he realized that it must be Lieutenant Hardenburg, and Lieutenant Hardenburg was saying calmly, "Get me to a doctor." But only the voice and the tabs and the bandage was Lieutenant Hardenburg because there was no face there at all. There was just a red and white pulpy mass, with the calm voice coming somehow through the red bubbles and the white strips of whatever it had been that had held the inside of Lieutenant Hardenburg's face together. Dreamily, Christian tried to remember where he had seen something like that before. It was hard to remember because he had a tendency to go out again, but finally it came back to him. It was like a pomegranate, roughly and inaccurately broken open, veined and red and with the juice ru

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"THEY assure me," the voice behind the bandages was saying, "that in two years they can give me a face. I am not under any illusions. I will not look like a motion-picture actor, but I am confident it will be a serviceable face."

Christian had seen some of the serviceable faces that the surgeons patched on to the wrecked skulls delivered to their tables, and he was not as confident as Hardenburg, but he merely said, "Of course, Lieutenant."

"It is already almost definite," the voice went on, "that I will see out of my right eye within a month. By itself that is a victory, even if it was as far as they could go."

"Certainly, Lieutenant," Christian said in the darkened room of the villa on the pretty island of Capri, standing in the winter sunlight of the bay of Naples. He was sitting between the beds, with his right leg, bandaged and stiff in front of him, just touching the marble floor and his crutches leaning against the wall.

The case in the other bed was a Burn, an armoured-division Burn, very bad, and the Burn merely lay still under his ten metres of bandage, filling the high-ceilinged cool room with the usual smell, which was worse than the aroma of the dead, but which Hardenburg could not smell, because he had nothing left to smell with. An economically minded nurse had realized this fortunate fact and had placed them side by side, since the hospital, once the vacation spot of a prosperous Lyons silk manufacturer, was being crowded more and more every day with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa.

Christian was in a larger hospital down the hill, devoted to the common soldiers, but they had given him his crutches a week ago, and he now felt like a free man.

"It is very good of you, Diestl," said Hardenburg, "to come and visit me. As soon as you get hurt people have a tendency to treat you as though you were eight years old, and your brain goes to rot along with everything else."

"I was very anxious to see you," Christian said, "and tell you in person how grateful I am for what you did for me. So when I heard you were on the Island, too, I…"

"Nonsense!" It was amazing how much the same, clipped, precise, snarling, Hardenburg's voice was, although the whole facade that had shielded the voice was now gone. "Gratitude is out of order. I did not save you out of affection, I assure you."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"There were two places on that motor-cycle. Two lives could be saved that might be useful somewhere later on. If there was someone else there who I thought would be more valuable later, I would have left you behind."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, staring at the smooth, white, unfeatured bandages wrapped so neatly about the head that he had last seen red and dripping on the hill outside Solium, with the noise of the British planes dying away in the distance.

The nurse came in. She was a motherly-looking woman of about forty, with a kindly, fat face. "Enough," she said. Her voice was not motherly, but bored and business-like. "The visit is over for the day."

She stood at the door, waiting to make sure that Christian left. Christian stood slowly, taking hold of his crutches. They made a sodden, wooden noise on the marble floor.

"At least," said Hardenburg, "I will be able to walk on my own two feet."

"Yes, Sir," Christian said. "I'll visit you again, if you are agreeable, Lieutenant."

"If you wish," said the voice behind the bandages.

"This way, Sergeant," said the nurse.

Christian tapped his way out clumsily, because he had only recently learned how to handle the crutches. It was very good to be out in the corridor, where you could not smell the Burn.

"She will not be too disturbed," Hardenburg was saying through the white muffling wall of bandage, "by the change in my appearance." He was talking about his wife. "I have written to her and told her I was hit in the face and she said she was proud of me and that it would alter nothing."

No face, Christian thought, that is quite a change in appearance. But he said nothing. He sat between the two beds, with his leg out, and his crutches in their accustomed place against the wall.

Now he came to visit the Lieutenant almost every day. The Lieutenant talked, hour after hour, through the white darkness of the bandages, and Christian said, "Yes, Sir," and "No, Sir," and listened. The Burn still smelled just as badly, but after the first few gagging moments each time, Christian found himself able to bear it and even, after a while, to forget it. Locked in his blindness, Hardenburg talked calmly and reflectively for hours on end, slowly unwinding the tissue of his life for his own and Christian's benefit, as though now, in this enforced holiday, he was taking an inventory of himself, weighing himself, judging his past triumphs and errors and mapping out the possibilities of his future. It grew more and more fascinating for Christian, and he found himself spending half-days in the evil-smelling room, following the spiral, oblique uncovering of a life that he felt to be more and more significantly locked with his own. The sick-room became a combination of lecture room and confessional, a place in which Christian could find his own mistakes clarified, his own vague hopes and aspirations crystallized, understood, categorized. The war was a dream on other continents, an unreal grappling of shadows, muffled trumpets in a distant storm, and only the room with the two swathed and stinking figures overlooking the su