The Young Lions

"Oh," said Burnecker, who was lying on his cot with his shoes off, but his overcoat still on, "look at that Ackerman! Sharp as Saturday night in a Mexican dance hall. Those girls in London will just fall over and lay down in the gutter when they see that haircomb."

Noah gri

"He has a duchess in Sussex," Burnecker said to Corporal Unger, who was cutting his toenails near the stove. "Very private."

"No duchess in Sussex, either," said Noah. He put on his tunic and buttoned it.

"Where are you going then?"

"Dover," said Noah.

"Dover!" Burnecker sat up in surprise. "On a three-day pass?"

"Uhuh."

"The Germans keep lobbing shells into Dover," Burnecker said. "Are you sure you're going there?"

"Uhuh." Noah waved at them and went out of the tent. "See you Monday…"

Burnecker, puzzled, looked after him. "That man's troubles," he said, "have unseated his reason." He lay down and in a minute and a half he was sleeping.

Noah slipped out of the clean, old, wood and brick hotel just as the sun was rising out of France.

He walked down the stone street towards the Cha

He had locked himself in his cold, bare room and got into bed with a feeling of great luxury, alone, at ease, with no one to order him to do anything until Monday night. He had sat up in bed, writing a letter to Hope, remembering the hundreds of letters he had written to her when he first knew her. "I am sitting up in bed," he wrote, "in a real bed, in a real hotel, my own man for three days, writing this, thinking of you. I ca

"I am very well and although they have worked us very hard for the last three weeks, I have actually gained four pounds. I will probably be so fat when I get home, neither you nor the child will recognize me.

"Please do not worry about its being a girl. I'll be delighted with a girl. Honestly. I have been giving great thought to the child's education," he wrote earnestly, bent over the pad in the flickering dim light, "and this is what I have decided. I do not like the new-fangled ideas in education that are inflicted upon children today. I have seen examples of what they do to unformed minds, and I would want to save our child from them. The idea of allowing a child to do whatever comes into its head, in order to permit it free expression, seems to me to be absolute nonsense. It makes for spoiled, whining and disrespectful children," Noah wrote out of the depths of his twenty-three-year-old wisdom, "and is based, anyway, on a false notion. The world, certainly, will not permit any child, even ours, to behave completely according to its own desires, and to lead a child to believe that is the case is only to practise a cruel deception upon it. I am against nursery schools, too, and kindergartens, and I think we can teach the child all it has to know for the first eight years better than anyone else. I am also against forcing a child to read too early in life. I hope I do not sound too dogmatic, but we have never had the time to discuss this with each other and argue out any of the points and compromise on them.

"Please, darling, do not laugh at me for writing so solemnly about a poor little life that may not, at the moment I write this, have even begun. But this may be my last pass in a long time, and the last time I will be able to have the peace and quiet to think sensibly about this subject.

"I am certain, dearest," Noah wrote slowly and carefully, "that it will be a fine child, straight of limb, quick of mind, and that we shall love it very much. I promise to return to him and to you with a whole body and a whole heart. I know I shall, no matter what happens. I shall return to help, to tell him stories at bedtime, to feed him spinach and teach him how to drink milk out of a glass, to take him out in the Park on Sundays and tell him the names of the animals in the zoo, to explain to him why he must not hit little girls and why he must love his mother as much as his father does.

"In your last letter you wrote that you were thinking of calling the child after my father if he was a boy. Please do not do that. I was not very fond of my father, although he undoubtedly had his good points, and I have been trying to run away from him all my life. Call him Jonathan, after your father, if you wish. I am a little frightened of your father, but I have admired him warmly ever since that Christmas morning in Vermont.

"I am not worried for you. I know you will be wonderful. Do not worry about me. Nothing can happen to me now. Love, NOAH.

"P.S. I wrote a poem this evening before di

Beware the heart's sedition,

It is not made for war:

Fear the fragile tapping

At the brazen door.

That's the first stanza. I'll write two more stanzas today and send them to you. Write me, darling, write me, write me, write…"

He had folded the letter neatly and got out of bed and put it in his tunic pocket. Then he had put out the light and hurried back between the warm sheets.

There had been no shelling during the night. Around one in the morning the sirens had gone off, but only for some planes that had raided London and were on their way home and had crossed the coast ten miles to the west. No guns had been fired.

Noah touched the bulge of the letter under his coat as he walked down the street. He wondered if there was an American Army unit in town where he could have it censored. He always felt a twinge of distaste when he thought of the officers of his own Company, whom he did not like, reading his letters to Hope.

The sun was up by now, burning under the slight mist. The houses shone palely, swimming up into the morning. Noah passed the neatly cleaned-out foundations where four houses had been knocked down by shellfire. Now, finally, he thought, as he passed the ruins, I am in a town that is at war.

The Cha