The Young Lions (67 page)

"OK," Michael said. "I'll talk to him." Then, harshly and cruelly because Keane was the kind of man who invited cruelty from everyone he spoke to, "Let me tell you, though, if you ever get into a battle I hope to God you're nowhere near me."

"Thanks, Boy, thanks a lot," Keane said heartily. "Gee, Boy, it's great of you to talk to Pavone about me. I'll remember you for this, Boy, I really will."

Michael strode off ahead of Keane and for a while Keane took the hint and stayed behind and they did not talk. But near the end of the hour, just before Keane was due to go in, he caught up with Michael, and said, reflectively, as though he had been thinking about it for a long time, "I think I'll go on sick call tomorrow and get some Epsom salts. Just one good bowel movement and it may start it, I may be a new man from then on."

"You have my heartiest best wishes," Michael said gravely.

"You won't forget about talking to Pavone now, will you?"

"I won't forget. I will personally suggest," Michael said, "that you should be dropped by parachute on General Rommel's Headquarters."

"It may be funny to you," Keane said aggrievedly, "but if you came from a family like mine, with something like that to live up to…"

"I'll talk to Pavone," Michael said. "Wake Stellevato up and turn in. I'll see you in the morning."

"It was a great relief," said Keane, "to be able to talk to someone like this. Thanks, Boy."

Michael watched the brother of the dead Medal-of-Honour winner walk heavily off towards the tent near the end of the line where Stellevato slept.

Stellevato was a short, small-boned Italian, nineteen years old, with a soft dark face, like a plush sofa cushion. He came from Boston, where he had been an iceman, and his speech was a mixture of liquid Italian sounds and the harsh long 'a's of the streets adjoining the Charles River. When he served as a sentry, he stood in one place, leaning against a jeep hood, and nothing could make him move. He had been in the infantry in the States and he had developed such a profound distaste for walking that now he even got into his jeep to ride the fifty yards to the latrine. Back in England he had fought the entire Medical Corps in a stubborn, clever battle to convince the Army that his arches were bad and that he was not fit to serve any longer on foot. It was his great triumph of the war, one that he remembered more dearly than anything else that had happened since Pearl Harbour, that he had finally prevailed and had been assigned to Pavone as a driver. Michael was very fond of him and when they were on duty together like this they both stood lounging against the jeep hood, smoking surreptitiously, exchanging confidences, Michael digging into his mind to remember random meetings with movie stars whom Stellevato admired hungrily, and Stellevato describing in detail the ice-and-coal route in Boston, and the life of the Stellevato family, father, mother and three sons in the apartment on Salem Street.

"I was havin' a dream," Stellevato said, slouched into his raincoat, with all the buttons torn off, a squat, unsoldierly silhouette with a carelessly held weapon angling off its shoulder, "a dream about the United States when that son of a bitch Keane woke me up. That Keane," Stellevato said angrily, "there's somethin' wrong with him. He comes over and smacks me across the shins like a cop kickin' a bum off a park bench, and he makes a helluva racket, he keeps sayin', loud enough to wake up the whole Army, 'Wake up, Boy, it's rainin' outside and you got some walkin' to do, come on, wake up, Boy, you got to walk in the cold, cold rain.'" Stellevato shook his head aggrievedly. "He don't have to tell me. I can see it's rainin'. He enjoys makin' people miserable, that feller. And this dream I was havin', I didn't want it to break off in the middle…" Stellevato's voice grew remote and soft. "I was on the truck with my old man. It was a sunny day in the summer-time and my old man was sitting on the seat next to me, sort of sleeping and smoking one of those crooked little black cigars, Italo Balbo cigars, maybe you know them?"

"Yes," said Michael gravely. "Five for ten cents."

"Italo Balbo," said Stellevato, "he's the one who flew from Italy. He was a big hero to the Italians a long time ago and they named a cigar after him."

"I heard of him," said Michael. "He got killed in Africa."

"He did? I ought to write it to my old man. He can't read, but my girl, Angelina, comes over and reads the letters to him and my old lady. Well, he was smokin' one of these cigars," Stellevato's voice fell back into the soft Boston summer-time of the dream, "and we was goin' slow because we had to stop at every other house, and he woke up and he said, 'Nikki, take twenty-fi' cents' worth up to Mrs Schwartz today, but tell her she gotta pay cash.' I could hear his voice just like I was back on the truck behind the wheel," Stellevato murmured. "So I got off the truck and I picked up the ice, and I went up the stairs to Mrs Schwartz, and my father yelled after me, 'Nikki, come on ri' down. Don't you stay up there with that Mrs Schwartz.' He was always yelling things like that at me, and then he would go off to sleep and he wouldn't know if I stayed up there for the matinee and evening performance. Mrs Schwartz opened the door, we had all kinds of customers in that neighbourhood, Italian, Irish, Polack, Jewish, I was very popular with everybody, and you'd be surprised all the whisky and coffee cake and noodle soup I got in a day's work on that route. Mrs Schwartz opened the door, a nice, fat, blonde woman, and she patted my cheek and she said, 'Nikki, it's a hot day, stay and I'll give you a glass of beer,' but I said, 'My father is waiting downstairs and he's wide awake,' so she said come back at four o'clock, and she gave me the twenty-five cents and I went downstairs and my father looked sore, and he said, 'Nikki, you gotta make up your mind, are you a businessman or are you the farmer's prize bull?' But then he laughed and said, 'As long as you got the twenty-fi' cents, OK.' Then somehow, everybody was in the truck, the whole family, like on Sunday, and my girl Angelina, and her mother, and we were comin' home from the beach, and I was just holding Angelina's hand, she never lets me do anything else, because we're going to get married, but her old lady is a different story, and we were sitting down at the table, everybody was there, my two brothers, the one that's in Guadalcanal and the one that's in Iceland, and my old man pouring a bottle of wine he made and my old lady bringing a big plate of spaghetti… And that's when that son of a bitch Keane hit me across the shins…"

Stellevato fell silent for a moment. "I really wanted to come to the end of that dream," he said softly, and then Michael knew that he was weeping.

Michael heard the sound of a man climbing out of his tent near-by. He saw a shadowy figure approaching.

"Who's there?" he asked.

"Pavone," a voice said in the darkness, then, as a hurried afterthought, "Colonel Pavone."

Pavone came up to Michael and Stellevato. "Who's on?" he asked.

"Stellevato and Whitacre," said Michael.

"Hello, Nikki," said Pavone. "Having a good time?"

"Great, Colonel." Stellevato's voice was warm and pleased. He was very fond of Pavone, who treated him more as a mascot than as a soldier, and who occasionally traded dirty jokes and stories of the old country in Italian with him.

"Whitacre," said Pavone, "are you all right?"

"Dandy," said Michael. In the rainy darkness there was a sense of friendliness and relaxation that never could exist between the Colonel and the enlisted men in the full light of day.

"Good," said Pavone. His voice was tired and reflective as he leaned against the jeep hood beside them. Carelessly, he lit a cigarette, not hiding the match, his eyebrows shining dark and heavy in the sudden small flare.

"You come out to relieve me, Colonel?" Stellevato asked.

"Not exactly, Nikki. You sleep too much anyway. You'll never amount to anything if you sleep all the time."

"I don't want to amount to anything," Stellevato said. "I just want to get back to my ice route."

"Colonel," Michael said, emboldened by the darkness. "I'd like to talk to you for a minute. That is, if you're not going back to bed."

"I can't sleep," said Pavone. "Sure. Come on, let's take a walk."

"I wanted to ask a favour." Michael hesitated. Here, again, he thought irritably, the endless necessity of decision. "I want you to have me transferred to a combat unit."

Pavone walked quietly for a moment. "What is it?" he asked.

"Brooding?"

"Maybe," said Michael, "maybe. The church today, the Canadians… I don't know. I began to remember what I was in the war for."

"What egotism," Pavone said, and Michael was surprised by the loathing in his voice. "Christ, I hate intellectual soldiers! You think all the Army has to do these days is make sure you can make the proper sacrifice to satisfy your jerky little consciences! Not happy in the service?" he inquired harshly. "You don't think driving a jeep is dignified enough for a college graduate? You won't be content until you get a bullet in your guts. The Army isn't interested in your problems, Mr Whitacre. The Army'll use you when it needs you, don't you worry. Maybe for only one minute in four years, but it'll use you. And perhaps you'll have to die in that minute, but meanwhile don't come around with your cocktail-party conscience, asking me to give you a cross to climb on. I'm busy running an outfit and I can't take the time or the effort to put up crosses for half-baked PFCs from Harvard."

"I didn't go to Harvard," Michael said absurdly.

"Never mention that transfer to me again, soldier," Pavone said. "Good night."

"Yes, Sir," Michael said. "Thank you, Sir."

Pavone turned and strode off in the darkness towards his tent, his shoes making a sliding wet sound on the grass.

AT nine o'clock the planes started to come over. B-17s, B-24s, Mitchells, Marauders. Noah had never seen so many planes in his whole life. It was like the Air Force in the recruiting posters, deliberate, orderly, shining in a bright-blue summer sky, aluminium tribute to the inexhaustible energy and cunning of the factories of America. Noah stood up in the hole he had been living in for the past week with Burnecker and watched the smooth formations with interest.

"It's about time," Burnecker said sourly. "The stinking Air Force. They should've been here three days ago."

Noah watched without saying anything, as flak from the German guns began to bloom in black puffs among the glistening shapes so high above the lines. Here and there a plane was hit and wavered out of formation. Some of the stricken planes turned and glided down the sky, trailing smoke, making for friendly fields behind them, but others exploded in silent bursts of fire, pale against the bright sky, and hurtled down the many thousands of feet in disintegrating balls of smoke and flame. Parachutes gleamed here and there and swung deliberately over the battlefield, white silk parasols for a sunny, summer, French morning.

Burnecker was right. The attack was to have started three days before. But the weather had been bad. Yesterday the Air Force had sent some planes over, but the clouds had closed in, and after an opening bombardment the planes had gone back and the infantry had clung to its holes. But this morning, there was no doubt about it.

"It's sunny enough today," Burnecker said, "to kill the whole German Army from thirty thousand feet."

At eleven o'clock, after the Air Force had theoretically destroyed or demoralized all opposition in front of the massed troops on the ground, the infantry was to move, open a hole in the armour, and keep it open for the rolling fresh divisions which would pierce deep into the German rear. Lieutenant Green, who was now in command of the Company, had explained it all very clearly to them. While the men had on the surface kept a cool scepticism about this neat arrangement, it was impossible now, watching the terrible precision of the huge aircraft above them, not to feel that this was going to be easy.

Good, Noah thought, it is going to be a parade. Ever since his return from the days behind the enemy lines, he had kept to himself as much as he could, remaining reticent, trying, in the days of rest which had been permitted him, and the more or less uneventful hours in the line, to develop a new attitude, a philosophy of aloof detachment, to protect him once and for all from the hatred of Rickett and any other men in the Company who felt as Rickett did about him. In a way, as he watched the planes roar above him, and heard the thunder of their bombs out in front of him, he was grateful to Rickett. Rickett had absolved him from the necessity of proving himself, because he had demonstrated that no matter what Noah did, if he took Paris single-handed, if he killed an SS brigade in a day, Rickett would not accept him.

He watched the planes with interest.

Abstractedly, squinting out in front of him through the hedge towards the enemy's lines, shaking his head to clear his ears of the shock of the percussion of the bombs, he felt sorry for the Germans behind the imaginary fall line of the Air Force. On the ground himself, armed with a weapon that carried a two-ounce projectile a pitiful thousand yards, he felt a common hatred for the impersonal killers above him, a double self-pity for those helpless men cowering in holes, blasted and sought out by the machine age with thousand-pound explosives. He looked at Burnecker beside him and he could tell from the pained grimace on the thin young face that something of the same thoughts were passing through his friend's brain.

"God," Burnecker whispered, "why don't they stop? That's enough, that's enough. What do they want to do, make mince-pie?"

By now, the German anti-aircraft guns had been silenced and the planes wheeled calmly overhead, as safely as though they were engaged in manoeuvres.

Then there was a whistling around him, a roaring and upheaval of the green earth. Burnecker grabbed him and dragged him down into the hole. They crouched together as far down as they could get, their legs jumbled together, their helmets touching, as bomb after bomb hit around them, deafening them, covering them with a pelting shower of earth, stones and broken twigs.