In Sunlight and in Shadow (60 page)

That night he would leave his stores in the clearing, take weapons, explosives, and provisions for three days, and establish himself near the railroad bridge to wait for a train rushing the 17th SS toward St. Lô. He knew neither when nor if such a train would pass over the bridge, or if the terrain would afford him a position in which he could wait and from which he could shoot, fight, and safely withdraw. But having come this far with all going well, he was confident that he would find a target.

There was a pacing to things, not least in war, a rhythm of stops and starts as if preordained. He had followed this path in Sicily, and now he could almost hear the commands: go, stop, go fast, go slow. When they ran together, as often they did, they seemed to coalesce into music. His sense was that in following it he could stay alive and that in departing from it he might not.

By nightfall he was so well rested and alone that he wondered if he were still in the army and at war. Then he moved off to the north, carefully noting how to get back. Soon he found the river. Although in places there was a path, following it was difficult, but when he exited the forest he was able to move more rapidly through the fields. Coming to a road, he crossed in the open rather than mucking around in the river under the bridge. The countryside was so deserted that he might have sung at the top of his voice without an audience other than cows and sheep.

At around midnight, as the river arced gently northwest it brought him to the junction of two roads just south of Quibou. There he saw what he assumed were Germans, although because they were in a speeding truck he wasn’t sure. The traffic was not even desultory. Five minutes after the truck came two bicycles. These, he was fairly sure, were civilians, for when they passed he had seen no gun barrels silhouetted against the sky.

This road was a lot busier than the first, so he had to weigh darting over it versus going into the water, which would be uncomfortable and possibly fatal, in that the bazooka’s rockets were electrically fused and to wet their firing mechanisms might mean both failure and death. Nor did he want to immerse either his ammunition or his grenades. He waited for five or ten minutes, during which no one passed, and decided to chance going over the road. After crawling up the bank, he stared into the distance first one way and then another. The moon had yet to rise, and he lay there, listening.

Deciding on impulse to go, he bounded up and ran across the road as fast as he could. Only halfway, and unable to check his forward momentum, not least because of all the dead weight he carried, he saw what appeared to be a complication of the darkness. The instant before he collided with this apparition, it was lit in orange as a lighter was brought to a cigarette. Though unable to modify his trajectory, he registered, in shock, two helmetless German soldiers standing astride their bicycles, about to share a light. They had pistols but not rifles, and their heads were close to the flame as they focused upon lighting up.

They were less aware of Harry than he was of them, and, because of their proximity to the flame, blinded. Harry had no time even to think “Oh no,” much less to say anything or alter his course. So, before he hit, he gave an extra push. Then he made contact, like a crashing locomotive.

He knocked the wind out of both of them and sent them flying at least five feet before they fell to the ground in a clatter of bicycles, one of which sounded its bell as it scraped along the pavement. They could not have had the faintest idea of what had hit them, and before they began to get up Harry was three hundred feet away, heart pounding, running under his combat load across a rocky field in the dark. The dumbfounded Germans didn’t know from which direction it had come, much less where it went or what it was.

He might easily have turned and shot them. But it was too early for that. The invasion fleets were unloading. The airborne divisions were deep in their assaults. Let the two bicyclists have their peace for half a day more, and let them wonder what it was that came out of the dark and struck them like an enraged bull. They would be puzzled for the rest of their perhaps short lives, and, meanwhile, he was still on track to blow up their train.

It was necessary to approach the bridge slowly lest he stumble onto a guard or a patrol walking the railbed. To cover not much more than a kilometer took him almost two hours as he zigzagged, paused to listen, and made occasional swings north, away from the railway and the road that paralleled it. Although the shortest route between one thing and another is a straight line, between an attacker and his objective it is hardly ever the best. The virtue of meandering is that it lessens the chance that an enemy will observe you, and increases the chance that you will observe him. Harry broke his time and pace so as not to fall into a pattern, and he avoided places where, although not seeing it, he felt nonetheless the potential presence of the enemy. It was as if he had senses that he could neither explain nor name, but he trusted them to lead him. Well before dawn, he reached a spot that gave him a clear view of the railroad bridge. There were no lights, but moonlight now showed it, the road beyond, and a guardhouse at either end.

Just north of the river, the ground rose to the west. This would offer the best firing position and a means of escape if he could hide in the brush until a train approached from the west, fire the two rockets, follow with a fusillade from his carbine, light the long-fused plastique, run north along the river, and then recross it to the southeast to head back to the forest. Expecting the descent of paratroopers north and west of St. Lô, the Germans, were they able to pursue, would probably stay west of the river, as they knew that heavily laden airborne troops did not make a habit of swimming.

So Harry ran a half mile up the Terrette until he came to a rocky area that wouldn’t show footprints on the bank, and there left everything but the bazooka, the two rockets, two blocks of plastique, his carbine, and four magazines of ammunition. He ferried over in four trips, and then went south toward the bridge. Though not exhausted, he was beginning to tire. As he was trying to settle on a location that would be the best compromise of cover and a good firing point, he felt the oncoming dawn. In summer, the temperature begins to change before the light. Currents of air move differently. Some animals alter the pitch of their cries, and some stop altogether. The sky is transformed in such a way that before one is able to discern the difference one is aware of it nonetheless. The coming of dawn, a knowledge that somewhere in the east the sun was hot and somewhere it was noon, that perhaps in India it was raining and people were already tired from their morning’s work, gave him a sense of urgency. It was hard to find the right place, but he chose a clump of saplings not substantial enough to block the light, so that grass had grown high between them.

He could hide there, and the bar pattern of the saplings would break the sight of any movement he might make either by necessity or inadvertently. From afar and close on, trees and brush efficiently conceal something or someone one is not primed to see, as the eye registers the expected break in consistency and then moves on. Sentries are warned of this, but they forget.

Covering himself with grass, Harry then placed the assembled and loaded bazooka to his right. On either side, the plastique was long-fused for a minute and a half, the two fuses, meeting in front of him, twisted together so they could be lit simultaneously. The loaded carbine was on his left with two magazines next to it, the one remaining magazine in a left-hand pocket. Other pockets were unbuttoned, ready to receive the three other magazines when they were empty. As he waited for full light he made some decisions. The first was that for as long as he could hold out he would neither eat nor drink the little he had. Eating was not merely eating. Were he to lie hidden for hours or days, it was also entertainment and a reward. The second was that after his fusillade he would take the time to put the three empty magazines in his pockets and button them rather than trying to do this on the run. He was certain that he could make better time that way. The third was that, if he could, he would stand for a moment in the open, so the enemy could see his uniform. He hoped anyway that the abandoned bazooka and rations containers would give the Germans cause to believe that airborne troops were active in the sector.

The sun climbed, and when it was white above the trees it hit him blindingly, which meant that he had to stay still and, while thusly illuminated, could not use his monocular to examine the target. The minute flash of a watch crystal, wedding ring, glasses, or polished button or buckle had probably, in the twentieth century alone, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers.

It was almost as uncomfortable as a staring contest, and soon grew far worse. Harry had always enjoyed the occasional skillful use of foul language, which was like a hot pepper in a dish of rice. In the right circumstances and the right hands, it could be powerful and, at times, poetic. Often the use of other words instead would have been, in fact, obscene, but the thoughtless overuse of obscenities common in the army was annoying and painful because of its persistent insufficiency of expression. In his view, people whose every other word was
fuck
were like dogs that will eat themselves to death. As a consequence, he swore less in the army than he had at home, so as not to add to the ever-swelling symphony of curses. But now, blinded by the sun, beginning to sweat, unable to move a muscle lest something flash or someone see, and looking to perhaps another bout of this the next day, he said “Shit!” And he said it out loud, but so that even he could barely hear it.

For hours and hours he listened for a train to the west, knowing that its approach would sharpen everything. Were that explained simply by adrenaline, one might attribute to adrenaline the power of opening another dimension in life, in which the color of color, the sound of sound, and the depth of field were so intensified as to impart to time a limitless velocity while simultaneously rendering it completely still. For very long, he hardly moved at all, and dreamt of the moment when the sun would move high and southwest enough so that with the monocular he could take in the details of the target.

Without the monocular, he could see soldiers at their mundane tasks, milling on the west side of the bridge, sometimes walking over it to the east side. They seemed overfamiliar with their surroundings. This he could tell, for example, from their gait as they crossed the bridge. They took the ties, which have never on any continent been spaced to fit the stride of a human being, so smoothly as to suggest perfect adaptation. One soldier, filling a bucket at the end of a rope by tossing it into the river below, did it so skillfully Harry guessed that he might have been guarding this bridge since the summer of 1940. After so long a time in which nothing had happened, and as yet uninformed of the Allied tidal wave approaching, they were such an open and easy target that he could hardly believe it.

When the sun was nearly overhead, with the angle of incidence such that only pilots could be struck by the angle of reflection, Harry lifted himself on his elbows so that air could flow beneath him. It cooled him with evaporation—for his front, which had been pressed on the mat of grass, was soaking wet. He stretched carefully. He unbuckled his chin strap and lifted his helmet so that the air could cool his head. This small pleasure was here as satisfying as any of the major sensations constantly sought in civilian life. He thought that the feeling of his forehead cooling as the wet hair that had fallen from the rim of the helmet dried in the slight breeze would be better than a night with Cleopatra.

Through the monocular, he saw that the soldiers whom he was going to kill looked much like the soldiers he himself knew and commanded, and like himself. The heat and a rarity of officers had made them careless of their uniforms. They looked depressed and lonely, and had the air of those who cannot know what will be required of them next. New roses had begun to open on a bush lodged improbably at the juncture of the riverbank and the eastern abutment of the bridge. Though the guard force could not see them, Harry could. Close up and clear in the glass of the monocular, they waved in the air flowing beneath the bridge. He counted them: twenty, perfect for a florist. Late in the morning, smoke had begun to come from a pipe projecting from a small cookhouse. When the wind carried it to Harry, he knew that they would have no meat for lunch. One of the soldiers was doing laundry. At each end of the bridge two helmeted men were on duty, with submachine guns slung from their shoulders. Not once did a sentry look toward Harry or upriver. They sometimes stared east or west along the track, but most of the time they looked down, they kicked gravel, they stopped to talk to one another or soldiers off duty. Probably at some fixed time there would be a patrol, but Harry saw that no path was worn anywhere near where he was: they would stick to the roads, the fastest and easiest way to cover ground in fulfilling their eventless obligations.

Lunch came and went, shifts changed, laughter rang out a few times, an argument, the sun cut a trail deep into afternoon, and still there was no train. The night before, Harry had judged that a long drink of water would see him through the next day, especially if he were motionless and in cover, but he had been so wrong that now he considered crawling down to the river to drink. He didn’t, but he thought of water continuously, except when, because of the heat, he was only half conscious. Then, with extraordinary fidelity, dreams carried him elsewhere.

Another June, Cambridge, on the day of his graduation. His father was there, in an old-fashioned suit which that day was by no means the only one of its kind. In a portion of the Yard that now, after three hundred years, was pompously called the Tercentenary Theater, bow ties floated like butterflies, and morning wind made young leaves in the trees seem to applaud more vigorously than the self-conscious crowd. After the ceremony, of which Harry was almost completely oblivious, they sat for a while in the Yard as it emptied, and then his father gave him instructions that he did not hear, and left to catch a train back to New York. Harry was going to stay the two weeks until his lease expired, during which he would live quietly, pack up his things, and think of what he would do next. With his diploma in hand and his robe open to the breeze, he remained as the thunderous bustle came to an end and groups broke up and disappeared like ice melting in a stream, until he himself was the very last straggler. Except for a dog or two, usually a Labrador crossing the Yard as if on an official mission, everyone was gone. All afternoon the sun tracked across stone and brick, and only the birds were busy. In the near silence, Harry heard things slight and far away: the hum of traffic on Mass. Ave., the barely registered passage of an occasional breeze, air whistling past the wings of swooping birds—a delicate sound that stops at the instant the bird touches ground, and gives way to a throbbing vibration so minor it probably is that of the bird’s beating heart. This long-ago summer was as prepossessing as storm. Nothing in his four years of study had prepared him for the stillness of the Yard when the business of the world had moved someplace else and only the shell of what once had been remained, echoing with an ocean sound, saturated with the beauties that present themselves only to solitude. He had remained there, hardly moving, his black robe pulling-in the sun, because of a presence that had filled the place and from which he could not tear himself away. At first he had thought about plans and problems, things to do and things undone, but in the end, after something had descended through the trees as invisibly as a current of cool air, after the birds had been pressed out of the branches by its passing and hopped about on the ground as if puzzled, he had no thought at all, just an awareness as taut as the string of the heaviest bow. That was when he finally understood, in language that could not be uttered, that those who are alone are never alone. And having been brought to this in such a way, with force both absolute and gentle, he was as confident of it as were the many physicists, in their laboratories nearby, of the elegant laws of nature they had so recently divined.