The Young Lions

Somehow, looking at Heims and Richter, he felt that these men could not be depended upon to do their jobs as well. They belonged, by some slight, subtle deterioration in quality, to another army, an army whose youth had left it, an army that seemed, with all its experience, to have become more civilian, less willing to die. If he left the two men now, Christian thought, they would not stay at their posts for long. Christian shook his head. Ah, he thought, I am getting silly. They're probably fine. God knows what they think of me.

The two men leaned, thickly relaxed against the stones, their eyes warily on Christian, as though they were measuring him and trying to discover whether he was going to ask them to die this morning.

"Set it up here," Christian said, pointing to a level spot between two of the boulders which made a rough V at their joining. Slowly but expertly the men set up the machine-gun.

When the gun was set up, Christian crouched down behind it and traversed it. He shifted it a little to the right and peered down the barrel. He adjusted the sight for the distance, allowing for the fact that they would be shooting downhill. Far below, caught on the fine iron line of the sight, the bridge lay in sunlight that changed momentarily to shadow as rags of clouds ghosted across the sky.

"Give them plenty of chance to bunch up near the bridge," Christian said. "They won't cross it fast, because they'll think it's mined. When I give you the signal to fire, aim at the men in the rear, not at the ones near the bridge. Do you understand?"

"The ones in the rear," Heims repeated. "Not the ones near the bridge." He moved the machine-gun slowly up and down on its rocker. He sucked reflectively at his teeth. "You want them to run forward, not back in the direction they are coming from…"

Christian nodded.

"They won't run across the bridge, because they are in the open there," said Heims thoughtfully. "They will run for the ravine, under the bridge, because they are out of the field of fire there."

Christian smiled. Perhaps he had been wrong about Heims, he thought, he certainly knew what he was doing here.

"Then they will run into the mines down there," said Heims flatly. "I see."

He and Richter nodded at each other. There was neither approval nor disapproval in their gesture.

Christian took off his coat, so that he would be able to wave it in signal to Dehn, under the bridge, as soon as he saw the enemy. Then he sat on a stone behind Heims, who was sprawled out behind the gun. Richter knelt on one knee, waiting with a second belt of cartridges. Christian lifted the binoculars he had taken from the dead lieutenant the evening before. He fixed them on the break between the hills. He focused them carefully, noticing that they were good glasses.

There were two poplar trees, dark green and funereal, at the break in the road. They swayed glossily with the wind.

It was cold on the exposed side of the hill, and Christian was sorry he had told Dehn he would wave his coat at him. He could have done with his coat now. A handkerchief would probably have been good enough. He could feel his skin contracting in the cold and he hunched inside his stiff clothes uncomfortably.

"Can we smoke, Sergeant?" Richter asked.

"No," said Christian, without lowering the glasses. Neither of the men said anything. Cigarettes, thought Christian, remembering, I'll bet he has a whole packet, two packets. If he gets killed or badly wounded in this, Christian thought, I must remember to look through his pockets.

They waited. The wind, sweeping up from the valley, circled weightily within Christian's ears and up his nostrils and inside his sinuses. His head began to ache, especially around the eyes. He was very sleepy. He felt that he had been sleepy for three years.

Heims stirred as he lay outstretched, belly down, on the rockbed in front of Christian. Christian put down the glasses for a moment. The seat of Heims's trousers, blackened by mud, crudely patched, wide and shapeless, stared up at him. It is a sight, Christian thought foolishly, repressing a tendency to giggle, a sight completely lacking in beauty. The human form divine.

Then he saw the small mud-coloured figures slowly plodding in front of the poplars. "Quiet," he said warningly, as though the Americans could hear Heims and the other man if they happened to speak.

The mud-coloured figures, looking like a platoon in any army, the fatigue of their movement visible even at this distance, passed in two lines, one each side of the road, across the binoculars' field of vision. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, forty-two, forty-three, Christian counted. Then they were gone. The poplars waved as they had waved before, the road in front of them looked exactly the same as it had before. Christian put down the glasses. He felt wide awake now, unexcited.

He stood up and waved his coat in large, delicate circles. He could imagine the Americans moving in their cautious, slow way along the edge of the ridge, their eyes always nervously down on the ground, looking for mines'.

A moment later he saw Dehn scramble swiftly out from beneath the bridge and run heavily up to the road. Dehn ran along the road, slowing down perceptibly as he tired, his boots kicking up minute puffs of dust. Then he reached a turn and he was out of sight.

Now the fuse was set. It only remained for the enemy to behave in a normal, soldierly ma

Christian put on his coat, grateful for the warmth. He plunged his hands in his pockets, feeling cosy and calm. The two men at the machine-gun lay absolutely still.

Far off there was the drone of plane engines. High, to the south-west, Christian saw a formation of bombers moving slowly, small specks in the sky, moving north on a bombing mission. A pair of sparrows swept, chirping, across the face of the cliff, darting in a flicker of swift brown feathers across the sights of the gun.

Heims belched twice. "Excuse me," he said politely. They waited. Too long, Christian thought anxiously, they're taking too long. What are they doing back there? The bridge will go up before they get to the bend. Then the whole thing will be useless.

Heims belched again. "My stomach," he said aggrievedly to Richter. Richter nodded, staring down at the magazine on the gun, as though he had heard about Heims's stomach for years.

Hardenburg, Christian thought, would have done this better. He wouldn't have gambled like this. He would have made more certain, one way or another. If the dynamite didn't go off, and the bridge wasn't blown, and they heard about it back at Division, and they questioned that miserable Sergeant in the Pioneers and he told them about Christian… Please, Christian prayed under his breath, come on, come on, come on…

Christian kept his glasses trained on the approach to the bridge. There was a rushing, tiny noise, near him, and, involuntarily, he put the glasses down. A squirrel scurried up to the top of a rock ten feet away, then sat up and stared with beady, forest eyes at the three men. Another time, another place, Christian remembered, the bird strutting on the road through the woods outside Paris, before the French road-block, the overturned farm cart and the mattresses. The animal kingdom, curious for a moment about the war, then returning to its more important business.

Christian blinked and put the glasses to his eyes again. The enemy were out on the road now, walking slowly, crouched over, their rifles ready, every tense line shouting that their flesh inside their vulnerable clothing understood that they were targets. The Americans were unbearably slow. They were taking infinitely small steps, stopping every five paces. The dashing, reckless young men of the New World. Christian had seen captured newsreels of them in training, leaping boldly through rolling surf from landing barges, flooding on to a beach like so many sprinters. They were not sprinting now. "Faster, faster," he found himself whispering, "faster…" What lies the American people must believe about their soldiers!