The Young Lions (57 page)

"But finally," the Captain was shouting, "they will have to come out of their holes. They will have to crawl out of their soft beds in England, they will have to stop depending upon their hired assassins, and they will have to come to meet us on the battlefield here like soldiers. I glory in that thought, I live for that day, I shout to them, 'Come, see what it is to fight the German like a soldier!' I face that day," the Captain said solemnly, "with iron confidence. I face it with love and devotion. And I know that each one of you feels the same identical fire."

Christian looked once more at the ranks of soldiers. They stood drearily, the rain soaking through their synthetic rubber capes, their boots sinking slowly into the French mud.

"This Sergeant," the Captain gestured dramatically to the open grave, "will not be with us in the flesh on the great day, but his spirit will be with us, buoying us up, crying to us to stand firm when we begin to falter."

The Captain wiped his face and then made place for the Chaplain, who rattled through the prayer. The Chaplain had a bad cold and wanted, before it turned into pneumonia, to get in from the rain.

The two men with spades came up and started shovelling in the dripping fresh mud piled to one side.

The Captain shouted an order, and marching erect, trying to keep his behind from waggling too much under his coat, he led his Company out of the small cemetery, which had only eight other graves in it, through the stone-flagged main street of the village. There were no civilians in the street, and the shutters of all the houses were closed against the rain, the Germans and the war.

The SS Lieutenant was very hearty. He had come over from Headquarters in a big staff car. He smoked little Cuban cigars one after another and had a bright, mechanical smile, like a beer salesman entering a rathskeller. There was also a smell of brandy about him. He sat back in the comfortable rear compartment of the car, with Christian beside him, as they sped along the beach road to the next little village, where a suspect was being detained for Christian to identify.

"You got a good look at the two men, Sergeant?" the SS Lieutenant said, nibbling at his cigar, smiling mechanically as he peered at Christian. "You could identify them easily?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"Good." The Lieutenant beamed at Christian. "This will be very simple. I like a simple case. Some of the others, the other investigators, grow melancholy when they are in an open-and-shut case. They like to pretend they are great detectives. They like to have everything complicated, obscure, so that they can show how brilliant they are. Not me. Oh, no, not me." He beamed warmly at Christian. "Yes or no, this is me man, this is not the man, that is the way I like it. Leave the rest of it to the intellectuals. I was a machine operator in a leather-goods factory in Regensburg before the war, I do not pretend to be profound. I have a simple philosophy for dealing with the French. I am direct with them, and I expect them to be direct with me." He looked at his watch. "It is now three-thirty pm. You will be back at your Company by five o'clock. I promise you. I make it fast. Yes or no. One way or another. Goodbye. Would you like a cigar?"

"No, Sir," said Christian.

"Other officers," said the Lieutenant, "would not sit in the back like this with a Sergeant, offering him cigars. Not me. I never forget that I worked in a leather-goods factory. That is one of the faults of the German Army. They all forget they ever were civilians or ever will be civilians again. They are all Caesars and Bismarcks. Not me. Plain, open and shut, you do business with me and I'll do business with you."

By the time the big car drove up to the town hall, in the basement of which the suspect was locked up, Christian had decided that the SS Lieutenant, whose name was Reichburger, was a complete idiot, and Christian would not have trusted him to conduct an investigation of a missing fountain pen.

The Lieutenant sprang out of the car and strode briskly and cheerfully into the ugly stone building, smiling his beer salesman's smile. Christian followed him into a bare, dirty-walled room, whose only adornment, besides a clerk and three peeling cafe chairs, was a caricature of Winston Churchill, naked, which was tacked on a piece of cardboard and used by the local SS headquarters detachments as a dart board.

"Sit down, sit down." The Lieutenant waved to a chair.

"Might as well make yourself comfortable. After all, you must not forget, you have been recently wounded."

"Yes, Sir." Christian sat down. He was sorry he had told the Lieutenant he could recognize the two Frenchmen. He detested the Lieutenant and didn't want to have anything more to do with him.

"Have you been wounded before?" The Lieutenant smiled at him fondly.

"Yes," said Christian. "Once. Twice really. Once badly, in Africa. Then I was scratched in the head outside Paris in 1940."

"Wounded three times." The Lieutenant grew sober for a moment. "You are a lucky man. You will never be killed. Obviously, there is something watching over you. I do not look it, I know, but I am a fatalist. There are some men who are born to be merely wounded, others to be killed. Myself, I have not been touched so far. But I know I shall be killed before the war is over." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled widely. "I am that type. So I enjoy myself. I live with a woman who is one of the best cooks in France, and on the side, she also has two sisters." He winked at Christian and chuckled. "The bullet will hit a well-satisfied man."

The door opened and an SS private brought in a man in manacles. The man was tall and weatherbeaten, and he was trying very hard to show that he was not afraid. He stood at the door, his hands locked behind him, and, by an obvious effort of the muscles of his face, wrestled a trembling look of disdain to his lips.

The Lieutenant smiled fondly at him. "Well," the Lieutenant said, in thick French, "we will not waste your time, Monsieur." He turned to Christian. "Is this one of the men, Sergeant?"

Christian peered at the Frenchman. The Frenchman took a deep breath, and stared back at Christian, his face a dumb combination of puzzlement and controlled hatred. Christian felt a small, violent tick of anger pulling at his brain. In this face, laid bare by stupidity and courage, there was the whole history of the cunning and malice and stubbornness of the French – the mocking silence in the trains when they rode in the same compartments with you, the derisive, scarcely stifled laughter when you walked out of a cafe in which there were two or more of them drinking at a corner table, the 1918 scrawled arrogantly on the church wall the very first night in Paris… The man scowled at Christian, and even in the sour grimace there was a hint of dry laughter at the corners of his mouth. It would be most satisfactory, Christian thought, to knock in those raw, yellow teeth with the butt of a rifle. He thought of Behr, so reasonable and decent, who had hoped to work with people like this. Now Behr was dead and this man was still alive, grinning and triumphant.

"Yes," Christian said. "That's the man."

"What?" the man said stupidly. "What? He's crazy."

The Lieutenant reached out with a swiftness that his rather chubby, soft body gave no evidence of possessing and clubbed the heel of his hand across the man's chin. "My dear friend," the Lieutenant said, "you will speak only when spoken to." He stood above the Frenchman, who looked more puzzled than ever, and who kept working his lips over his teeth and sucking in the little trickles of blood from the bruised mouth. "Now," the Lieutenant said, in French, "this is established – yesterday afternoon you cut the throat of a German soldier on the beach six kilometres north of this village."

"Please," the Frenchman said dazedly.

"Now, it only remains to hear from you one more fact…" the Lieutenant paused. "The name of the man who was with you."

"Please," the man said. "I can prove I did not leave the village all the afternoon."

"Of course," the Lieutenant said amiably, "you can prove anything, with a hundred signatures an hour. We are not interested."

"Please," said the Frenchman.

"We are only interested in one thing," said the Lieutenant.

"The name of the man who was with you when you got off your bicycle to murder a helpless German soldier."

"Please," said the Frenchman, "I do not own a bicycle."

The Lieutenant nodded to the SS private. The soldier tied the Frenchman into one of the chairs, not roughly.

"We are very direct," said the Lieutenant. "I have promised the Sergeant he will get back to his Company for dinner and I intend to keep my promise. I merely promise you that if you do not tell me, you will regret it later. Now…"

"I do not even own a bicycle," the Frenchman mumbled.

The Lieutenant went over to the desk and opened a drawer. He took out a pair of pliers and walked slowly, opening and closing the pliers, with a squeaking, homely sound, behind the chair in which the Frenchman was tied. The Lieutenant bent over briskly, and seized the Frenchman's right hand in one of his own. Then, quite briskly, and carelessly, with a sharp, professional jerk, he pulled out the nail of the man's thumb.

The scream had no connection with anything that Christian had ever heard before.

The execution was in the cellar of the town hall. There was a long, damp basement, lit by two bare, bright bulbs. The floor was made out of hard-packed earth and there were two stakes knocked into it near the wall at one end. There were two shallow coffins, made out of unpainted wood, that gleamed rawly in the harsh light, lying behind the stakes. The cellar was used as a prison, too, and other condemned men had written their final words to the living world in chalk and charcoal on the sweating walls.

"There is no God," Christian read, standing behind the six soldiers who were to do the shooting, and "Merde, Merde, Merde," and, "My name is Jacques. My father's name was Raoul. My mother's name was Clarisse. My sister's name was Simone. My uncle's name was Etienne. My son's name was…" The man had never finished that.

The two condemned men shuffled in, each between two soldiers. They moved as though their legs had not been used for a long time.

The Sergeant in command of the squad gave the first order. His voice sounded strange, too parade-like and official for the shabby cellar.

The shots cut the smaller man's cords and he toppled forward. The Sergeant ran up hurriedly and put the coup de grace in, first to the small man's head, then to the other man's. The smell of the powder for a moment obscured the other, damp, corrupt smells of the cellar.

The Lieutenant nodded to Christian. Christian followed him upstairs and out into the foggy grey light, his ears still ringing from the rifles.

The Lieutenant smiled faintly. "How did you like it?" he asked.

"All right," said Christian, evenly. "I didn't mind it."

"Excellent," said the Lieutenant. "Have you had your breakfast?"

"No."

"Come with me," the Lieutenant said. "I have breakfast waiting. It's only five doors up."

They walked side by side, their footsteps muffled in the pearly fog off the sea.

The Lieutenant stopped and faced Christian, smiling a little.

"They weren't the men at all, were they?" he said.

Christian hesitated, but only for a moment. "Frankly, Sir," he said, "I am not sure."

The Lieutenant smiled more broadly. "You're an intelligent man," he said lightly. "The effect is the same. It proves to them that we are serious." He patted Christian on the shoulder. "Go round to the kitchen and tell Renee I told you she was to feed you well, the same breakfast she brings me. You speak French well enough for that, don't you?"

"Yes, Sir," Christian said.

"Good." The Lieutenant gave Christian's shoulder a final pat and went in through the large solid door in the grey house with the geranium pots at the windows and in the garden in front. Christian went round to the back door. He had a large breakfast, with eggs and sausage and coffee with real cream.

"BACK in Tulsa, when I was in high school," Fahnstock was saying, between slow strokes of the hammer, "they called me Stud. From the time I was thirteen years old my prevailing interest in life was girls. If I could find me an English broad in town here, I wouldn't even mind this place." Reflectively he hammered out a nail from the weathered piece of timber he was working on and threw the nail into the tin next to him. Then he spat, a long dark spurt of tobacco juice, from the wad that seemed to be permanently attached to the inside of his jaw.

Michael took out the pint bottle of gin from the back pocket of his fatigues and took a long gulp. He put the bottle away without offering Fahnstock a drink. Fahnstock, who got drunk every Saturday night, did not drink on week-days before Retreat, and it was only ten o'clock in the morning now. Besides, Michael was tired of Fahnstock. They had been together for over two months now in the Replacement Centre Casual Company. One day they worked on the lumber pile, taking nails out and straightening them, and the next day they worked on KP. The Mess Sergeant didn't like either of them, and for the last fifteen times he had put them on the dirtiest job in the kitchen, scrubbing the big greasy pots and cleaning the stoves after the day's cooking was over.

As far as Michael could tell, both he and Fahnstock, who was too stupid to do anything else, were going to spend the rest of the war and perhaps the rest of their lives alternating between the lumber pile and the kitchen. When this realization had sunk in, Michael had thought of desertion, but had compromised with gin. It was very dangerous, because the camp was run like a penal colony and men were constantly being sentenced to years in jail for smaller offences than drunkenness on duty, but the dull, ameliorating effects of the steady flow of alcohol through his brain made it possible for Michael to continue to live, and he took the risk gladly.