The Young Lions (53 page)

The barge grated against the smooth beach and a second later the ramp went down. Noah leaped out, feeling his equipment banging heavily against his back and sides, feeling the cold water pouring in over his leggings. He raced for a small dune and flung himself down behind it. The other men lumbered out, spreading rapidly, ducking into holes and behind clumps of scrub grass. The riflemen opened up on the pillbox eighty yards away, on a small bluff overlooking the beach. The bangalore-torpedo men crept carefully up to the barbed wire and set their fuses, then ran back. The bangalores exploded, adding the sharp smell of their explosion to the soft, thick smell of the smoke that the plane had laid down.

Noah picked himself up, with Burnecker protecting him, and ran forward to a hole that lay near the wire. Burnecker fell in on top of him.

Burnecker was panting heavily. "Goodness," Burnecker said, "isn't dry land wonderful?"

They laughed at each other, then slowly poked their heads out of the hole. The men were working precisely, like a football team running through signals, advancing, as they had been taught, on the pale grey sides of the pillbox.

The bazooka went off again and again, in its rushing, noisy explosion, and large chunks of concrete flew up in the air from the pillbox.

"At times like this," Burnecker said, "I ask myself only one question. 'What are the Germans supposed to be doing while we go through all this?'"

Noah leaped out of the hole and dashed, crouching, holding his charges, through the opening in the wire. The bazooka spoke again and Noah threw himself to the sand, in case any of the concrete flew out towards him. Burnecker was lying beside him, panting heavily.

"And I used to think ploughing was hard," Burnecker said.

"Come on, Farmboy," said Noah, "we're on our way." He stood up. Burnecker got off the ground, groaning.

They ran to the right and threw themselves behind a six-foot-high dune. The grass on top of the dune was snapping in the wet wind.

They watched the man with the flame-thrower carefully crawl towards the pillbox. The fire from the riflemen supporting them still whistled over their heads and ricocheted off the concrete.

If Hope could only see me now, thought Noah.

The man with the flame-thrower was in position now, and the other man with him turned the cock on the cylinders on his back. It was Donnelly who carried the enormous heavy cylinders. He had been picked because he was the strongest man in the platoon. Donnelly started the flame-thrower. The fire spurted out, whipping unevenly in the strong wind, smelling oily and heavy. Donnelly sprayed the slits of the pillbox in savage, arching bursts.

"All right, Noah," said Burnecker. "Do your act."

Noah leaped up and ran lightly and swiftly to windward of Donnelly, towards the pillbox. By now the men in the box were theoretically either dead, wounded, burned or stunned. Noah ran strongly, even in the deep sand. Everything seemed very clear to him, the chipped and blackened concrete, the dangerous narrow slits, the cliff rising dark green and steep behind the beach, against the streaked, grey sky. He felt strong, able to carry the heavy charges for miles. He breathed evenly and deeply as he ran, knowing exactly where to go, exactly what he was going to do. He was smiling as he reached the pillbox. Quickly and deftly he threw the satchel charge against the base of the wall. Then he poked the other charge, on its long stick, into the ventilating hole. He was conscious as he worked that the eyes of all the men in the platoon were on him, performing expertly and well the final act in the ceremony. The fuses were spitting now, well-lit, and Noah turned and raced towards a foxhole thirty feet away. He threw himself in a long, bunched dive into the hole, and ducked his head. For a moment there was silence on the beach, except for the hiss of the wind through the spikes of sea grass. Then the explosions came, one on top of another. Chunks of concrete hurtled into the air and landed dully near him in the sand. He looked up. The pillbox was split open, smoking and black. Noah stood up. He smiled, rather proudly.

The Lieutenant who had been in charge of their training at the camp, and who had come along as an observer, was walking towards him.

"Roger," said the Lieutenant. "Good job."

Noah waved at Burnecker and Burnecker, standing now, leaning on his rifle, waved back.

There was a letter from Hope at Mail Call. Noah opened it solemnly, with slow hands.

"Darling," the letter read: "Nothing yet. I am ENORMOUS. There is a feeling here that the child will weigh a hundred and fifty pounds at birth. I eat all the time. I love you."

Noah read the letter three times, feeling adult and paternal. Then he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket, and went back to his tent to get ready for his three-day pass.

As he dug down in his barracks bag for a clean shirt, he felt secretly for the box he had hidden there. It was still there, wrapped in long Johns. It was a box of twenty-five cigars. He had bought it in the United States and carried it across the ocean with him, for the day that was now almost upon him. He had lived so much of his life without ritual or ceremony that the simple, rather foolish notion of signalizing the birth of an heir by handing out cigars had assumed solemn proportions in his mind. He had paid a great deal for the cigars in Newport News, Virginia, eight dollars and seventy-five cents, and the box had taken up precious room in his kit, but he had never begrudged either the cost or the space. Somehow, more felt than thought, Noah dimly realized that the act of giving, the plain, clumsy symbol of celebration, would make him feel the real living presence of the child, three thousand miles away, would place the child and himself, in his own mind and the minds of the men around him, in the proper normal relationship of father and son or father and daughter. Otherwise, in the ever-flowing stream of khaki, it would be so easy to make that day like every other day, that soldier like every other soldier… While the smoke still rose from the propitiatory offering, he would be more than a soldier, more than one of ten millions, more than an exile, more than a rifle and a salute, more than a helmet… he would be a father, love's creative particularized link among the generations of men.

"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 grinned, grateful to Burnecker for the familiar joke. How different this was from Florida. The closer they came to battle, the closer they got to the day when each man's life would depend upon every other man in the Company, the more all differences fell away, the more connected and friendly they all were. "I'm not going to London," he said, carefully knotting his tie.

"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 Channel. It had been a quiet night, with a thin fog. He had gone to the restaurant in the centre of the town where a three-piece band had played and British soldiers and their girls had danced on the large floor. Noah had not danced. He had sat by himself, sipping unsweetened tea, smiling shyly when he caught a girl looking at him invitingly, and ducking his head. He liked to dance, but he had decided sternly that it would have been unseemly to be whirling around a floor with a girl in his arms at the very moment, perhaps, that his wife was at her crisis of birth and agony, and the first cry of his child was heard in the world. He had gone back to the hotel early, passing the sign on the bandstand that read, ALL DANCING WILL CEASE DURING SHELLING.

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 cannot tell you where I am, because the Censor wouldn't like it, but I think I can safely tell you that there is a fog over the land tonight, that I have just come from a restaurant where a band was playing 'Among My Souvenirs', and where there was a sign that read All Dancing Will Cease During Shelling. I think I can also tell you that I love you.

"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 dinner. My first poem. It is a delayed reaction to assaulting fortified positions. Here it is. Don't show it to anyone. I'm ashamed.

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 Channel lay beneath him, grey and cold. He could see the coast of France, through the thinning haze over the water. Three British torpedo boats, small and swift, were slicing into their concrete berths in the harbour. They had been out the night before, ranging the enemy coast, in a pale, blazing wake of foam, in a swirling confusion of swinging searchlights, streams of tracer bullets, underwater torpedo explosions that had sent black fountains of water three hundred feet in the air. Now they were coming in mildly, in the Sunday morning sunlight, at quarter-speed, looking playful and holiday-like, like speedboats at a summer resort. A town at war, Noah repeated silently.