The Young Lions

"Sergeant Diestl, Mademoiselle Giguet."

Christian nodded at the woman. She acknowledged the greeting with a brief downward flicker of her eyes.

"Mademoiselle Giguet is from Paris," Gretchen said nervously. "She is working for us in the Ministry. She is living with me until she can find an apartment. She's very important, aren't you, darling?" Gretchen giggled at the end of her sentence.

The woman ignored her. She began stripping her gloves off her square, powerful hands. "Forgive me," she said. "I must have a bath. Is there hot water?"

"Lukewarm," said Gretchen.

"Good enough." The square, heavy figure disappeared into the bedroom.

"She's very intellectual." Gretchen did not look at Christian.

"You'd be amazed how they come to her for advice at the Ministry."

Christian picked up his cap. "I must go now," he said.

"Thank you for the photograph. Goodbye."

"Goodbye," Gretchen said, pulling nervously at the collar of her wrap. "Just slam the, door. The lock is automatic."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"I SEE visions," Behr was saying, as they walked slowly along the beach, towards their boots, their bare feet sinking into the cool sand. The sound of the waves, rolling mildly in from America three thousand miles away, made a springtime murmur in the still air. "I see visions of Germany one year from now." Behr stopped and lit a cigarette, his steady, workman's hands looking enormous around the frail tube of tobacco. "Ruins. Ruins everywhere. Twelve-year-old children using hand-grenades to steal a kilo of flour. No young men on the streets, except the ones on crutches, because all the rest are in prison camps in Russia and France and England. Old women walking down the streets in potato sacking and suddenly dropping dead of hunger. No factories working, because they have all been bombed to the ground. No government, just military law, laid down by the Russians and the Americans. No schools, no homes, no future…"

Behr paused and stared out to sea. It was late afternoon, amazingly warm and tender for so early in the season on the Normandy coast. The sun was an orange ball sinking peacefully into the water. The coarse grass on the dunes barely moved in the quiet; the road, ru

"No future," Behr repeated reflectively, staring out across the stretched barbed wire to the sea. "No future."

Behr was a Sergeant in Christian's new Company. He was a quiet, powerfully built man of about thirty, whose wife and two children had been killed in Berlin in January by the RAF. He had been wounded on the Russian Front in the autumn, although he refused to talk about it, and had only come to France a few weeks before Christian had arrived there after his leave in Berlin.

In the month that Christian had known him he had grown very fond of Behr. He had seemed to like Christian, too, and they had begun to spend all their spare time together, on long walks through the budding countryside, and drinking the local Calvados and hard cider in the cafes of the village in which their battalion was based. They carried pistols in holsters at their belts when they went out because they were constantly being warned by superior officers about the activities of Maquis bands of Frenchmen. But there had been no incidents at all in that neighbourhood, and Christian and Behr had agreed that the repeated warnings were merely symptoms of the growing nervousness and insecurity of the men higher up. So they wandered carelessly through the farmyard and along the beaches, being polite to the French people they met, who seemed quite friendly, in their grave, reserved, country way.

What Christian liked best of all about Behr was his normality. Everyone else Christian had had anything to do with, ever since the bad night outside Alexandria, had seemed to be overwound, jumpy, bitter, hysterical, overtired… Behr was like the countryside, cool, self-contained, orderly, healthy, and Christian had felt himself relaxing, the snapping, malarial, artillery-worn nerves being soothed into a salutary calm.

When he had first been sent to the battalion in Normandy, Christian had been bitter. Enough, he'd thought, I've had enough. I can't do it any more. In Berlin he'd felt sick and old. He had spent his leave dozing sixteen, eighteen hours a day, in bed, not even getting up when the planes came over at night. Africa, he'd thought, Italy, the torn and never-quite-mended leg, the recurrent malaria, enough. What more do they want from me? And now, obviously, they wanted him to meet the Americans when they came on to the beaches. Too much, he'd thought, brimming with sick self-pity, they have no right to demand it of me. There must be millions of others who have barely been touched. Why not use them?

But then he'd got to know Behr, and the man's quiet unapprehensive strength had slowly cured him. In the peaceful, healthy month he had put on weight and regained his colour. He hadn't had a single headache, and even his bad leg seemed to have made its final useful adjustment to its crooked tendons.

And now Behr was walking beside him on the cool sand of the beach, and saying, disturbingly, "No future, no future. They keep telling us the Americans will never land in Europe. Nonsense. They are whistling to keep up their spirits among the tombstones. Only it will not be their tombstones, but ours. The Americans will land because they have made up their minds to land. I do not object to dying," Behr said, "but I object to dying uselessly. They will land, regardless of what you and I do, and they will go on into Germany, and they will meet the Russians there and when that happens Germany is finished, once and for all."

They walked in silence for a while. Christian felt the sand come up between his bare toes and it reminded him of the time when he was a small boy and had run barefoot in the summer, and what with the memory and the pretty beach and the slow, majestic, happy afternoon, it was hard to be as sober and as thoughtful as Behr was asking him to be.

"I listen to them over the radio, from Berlin," Behr said, "boasting, inviting the Americans to try to come, hinting about secret weapons, predicting that any day now the Russians will be fighting the British and the Americans, and I could beat my head against the wall and weep. You know why I could weep? Not because they are lying, but because the lies are so weak, so barefaced, so contemptuous. That is the word – contemptuous. They sit back there and they say anything that comes into their heads because they despise us, they despise all Germans, the people in Berlin, they know we are fools and believe anything anybody chooses to tell us, because they know we are always ready to die for any nonsense they cook up in an odd fifteen minutes between lunch and the first drink in the afternoon.

"Listen," Behr said, "my father fought for four years in the last war. Poland, Russia, Italy, France. He was wounded three times and he died in 1926 from the effects of the gas he took into his lungs in 1918 in the Argo