The Young Lions

Try what repentance can: what can it not?"

Then he was overwhelmed once more and the theatre shook and trembled in the whirling chorus of the guns.

Poor man, Michael thought, remembering all the opening nights he had ever been through, poor man, his big moment, after all these years. How he must hate the Germans!

"… O wretched state!" swam dimly out of the trembling and crashing. "O bosom black as death!"

The planes stuttered on overhead. The battery behind the theatre sent a last revengeful salvo curling into the noisy sky. The rumble of guns was taken up, further away, by the batteries in north London. Against their diminishing background, like military drums being played at a general's funeral in another street, the King went on, slow, composed, royal as only an actor can be royal, "O limed soul, that struggling to be free Art more engaged! Help, angels!" he said in the blessed quiet, "make assay; Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.

All may be well."

He knelt at the altar and Hamlet appeared, graceful and dark in his long black tights. Michael looked around him. Every face was calmly and interestedly watching the stage; the old ladies and the uniforms did not stir.

I love you, Michael wanted to say, I love you all. You are the best and strongest and most foolish people on earth and I will gladly lay down my life for you.

He felt the tears, complex and dubious, sliding down his cheeks as he turned to watch Hamlet, torn by doubt, put up his sword rather than take his uncle at his prayers.

Far off a single gun spoke into the subsiding sky. Probably, thought Michael, it is one of the women's batteries, coming, like women, a little late for the raid, but showing their intentions are of the best.

London was burning in a bright circle of fires when Michael left the theatre and started walking towards the Park. The sky flickered and here and there an orange glow was reflected off the clouds. Hamlet was dead now. "Now cracks a noble heart," Horatio had said. "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" Horatio had also said his final words on carnal, bloody and u

In Piccadilly, the tarts strolled by in battalions, flashing electric torches on passing faces, giggling harshly, calling, "Hey, Yank, two pounds, Yank."

Michael walked slowly through the shuffling crowds of whores and MPs and soldiers, thinking of Hamlet saying of Fortinbras and his men, "Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an eggshell."

What mouths we make at the invisible event, Michael thought, gri

Michael walked slowly along by the Park, thinking of the swans, settling down now on the Serpentine, and the orators who would be out again on Sunday, and the gun crews brewing tea and relaxing now that the planes had fled England. He remembered what an Irish captain on leave in London, from a Dover battery which had knocked down forty planes, had said of the London anti-aircraft outfits. "They never hit anybody," he said in a contemptuous soft burr. "It's a wonder London isn't completely destroyed. They're so busy planting rhododendrons around the emplacements and shining the barrels so they'll look pretty when Miss Churchill happens to pass by, that it's b… all gu

The moon was coming up now, over the old trees and the scarred buildings, and there was a tinkle of glass where some soldiers and their girls were walking over a window that had been blown out in the raid.

"B… all gu

There was dance-music swinging into the lobby, and the old ladies and their nephews solemnly drinking tea, and pretty girls floating through on the way to the American bar on the arms of American officers, and Michael had the feeling, looking at the scene, that he had read all about this before, about the last war, that the characters, the setting, the action, were exactly the same, the costumes so little different that the eye hardly noticed it. By a trick of time, he thought, we become the heroes in our youthful romances, but always too late to appear romantic in them.

He walked upstairs to the large room where the party was still in progress and where Louise had said she'd be waiting for him.

"Look," said a tall, dark-haired girl near the door, "a Private." She turned to a Colonel next to her. "I told you there was one in London." She turned back to Michael. "Will you come to di

Michael gri

"A real whole lemon."

Michael looked around the room. Six Generals, he noticed, and felt very uncomfortable. He had never met a General before. He looked uneasily down at his ill-fitting tunic and the not-quite-polished buttons. He would not have been surprised if one of the Generals had come over to him and taken his name, rank and serial number for not having his buttons polished properly.

He did not see Louise for the moment, and he felt shy at going up to the bar, among the important-looking strangers at the other end of the room, and asking for a drink. When he had passed his sixteenth birthday he had felt that he was finished with being shy for the rest of his life. After that he had felt at home everywhere, had spoken his mind freely, felt that he was acceptable enough, if no more, to get by in any company. But ever since he had joined the Army, a latter-day shyness, more powerful and paralysing than anything he had known as a boy, had developed within him, shyness with officers, with men who had been in action, among women with whom otherwise he would have felt perfectly at ease.