The Young Lions (78 page)

"I have a couple of things to say to you guys," the Sergeant began, "before you go slop up your supper."

A slight, almost inaudible sigh rustled through the ranks. By this stage of the war everyone knew that there was nothing a Sergeant could say that could be listened to with pleasure.

"We had a little trouble here the last few days," the Sergeant said, nastily. "We are close to Paris and some of the boys got the notion it would be nice to slip off for a couple of nights and get laid. In case any of you boys're entertaining the same idea, let me tell you they never got to Paris, they never got laid, and they are already way up front in Germany and I will give any man here odds of five to one they never come back." The Sergeant walked meditatively, looking down at the ground, his hands in his pockets. He walks like a dancer, quite graceful, Michael thought, and he looks like a very good soldier, the neat, dashing way he wears his clothes… "For your information," the Sergeant began again in a low, mild voice, "Paris is out of bounds to all GIs from this camp, and there are MPs on every road and every entrance leading into it, and they are looking at everybody's papers, very careful. Very, very careful."

Michael remembered the two men with full packs pacing slowly back and forth in front of the orderly room at Dix, in payment for going to Trenton for a couple of beers. The long continuing struggle of the Army, the sullen attempts by the caged animals to get free for an hour, a day, for a beer, a girl, and the sullen punishments in return.

"The Army is very lenient over here," the Sergeant said.

"There are no courts-martial for being AWOL like in the States. Nothing is put on your record. Nothing to stop you from getting an honourable discharge, if you live that long. All we do is, we catch you and we look up the requests for replacements, and we see, 'Ah, the Twenty-ninth Division is having the heaviest casualties this month' and I personally make out your orders and send you there. You're replacements. And there's nothing lower in this Army than a replacement, unless it's another replacement. Every day they bury a thousand like you, and the guys like me go over the lists and send up a thousand more. That's how it is in this camp, Boys, and I'm telling it to you for your own good, so you know where you stand. There's a lot of new boys in camp tonight, with the beer from the Kilmer PX still wet on their lips, and I want to put things straight for them. So don't get any fancy ideas in your head about Paris, Boys, it won't work. Go back to your tents and clean your rifles nice and neat and write your final instructions home to the folks. So forget about Paris, Boys. Come back in 1950. Maybe it will not be out of bounds for GIs then."

The men stood rigidly, in silence. The Sergeant stopped his pacing. He smiled grimly at the ranks, his jaws creasing in razored lines under his soft garrison cap with the cellophane rain-covering over it, like an officer's.

"Thanks for listening, Boys," the Sergeant said. "Now we all know where we stand. Dis-miss!"

The Sergeant walked springily down the Company street as the lines dissolved into confusion.

"Whitacre…"

Michael turned around. A small, half-familiar figure, almost lost in a raincoat, was standing there. Michael moved closer. Through the dusk, he could make out a battered face, a split eyebrow, a full, wide mouth, now curved in a small smile.

"Ackerman!" Michael said. They shook hands.

"I didn't know whether you'd remember me or not," Noah said. His voice was low and even and sounded much older than Michael remembered. The face, in the half-light, was very thin and had a new, mature sense of repose.

"Lord," Michael said, delighted, in this strange mass of men, to come across a face that he knew, a man with whom once he had been friendly, feeling as though somehow, by great luck, in a sea of enemies he had found an ally. "Lord, I'm glad to see you."

"Going to chow?" Ackerman asked. He was carrying his mess kit.

"Yes." Michael took Ackerman's arm. It seemed surprisingly wasted and fragile under the slippery material of the raincoat.

"I just have to get my mess kit. Hang on to me."

"Sure," Noah said. He smiled gravely, and they walked side by side towards Michael's tent. "That was a real little dandy of a speech," Noah said, "wasn't it?"

"Great for the morale," said Michael. "I feel like wiping out a German machine-gun nest before chow."

Noah smiled softly. "The Army," he said. "They sure love to make speeches to you in the Army."

"It's an irresistible temptation," Michael said. "Five hundred men lined up, not allowed to leave or talk back… Under the circumstances, I think I'd be tempted myself."

"What would you say?" Noah asked.

Michael thought for a moment. "God help us," he said soberly. "I'd say, 'God help every man, woman and child alive today.'"

He ducked into his tent and came out with his mess kit. Then they walked slowly over to the long line outside the mess hall.

When Noah took off his raincoat in the mess hall, Michael saw the Silver Star over his breast pocket, and for a moment he felt the old twinge of guilt. He didn't get that by being hit by a taxi-cab, Michael thought. Little Noah Ackerman, who started out with me, who had so much reason to quit, but who obviously hadn't quit…

"General Montgomery pinned it on," Noah said, noticing Michael staring at the decoration. "On me and my friend Johnny Burnecker. In Normandy. They sent us to the supply dump to get brand-new uniforms. Patton was there and Eisenhower. There was a very nice G2 in Division Headquarters, and he pushed it through for us. It was on the Fourth of July. Some kind of British-American goodwill demonstration." Noah grinned. "General Montgomery demonstrated his goodwill to me, with the Silver Star. Five points towards discharge."

They sat at the crowded table, in the big hall, eating warmed-up C rations, vegetable hash and thin coffee.

Michael ate with pleasure, going back over the years with Noah, filling the gaps between Florida and the Replacement Depot. He looked gravely at the photograph of Noah's son ("Twelve points," Noah said. "He has seven teeth.") and heard about the deaths of Donnelly, Rickett, and the break-up of Captain Colclough. He felt a surprising family-like wave of nostalgia for the old Company which he had been so happy to leave in Florida.

Noah was very different. He didn't seem nervous. Although he was terribly frail now, and coughed considerably, he seemed to have found some inner balance, a thoughtful, quiet maturity which made Michael feel that Noah somehow was much older than he. Noah talked gently, without bitterness, with none of his old intense, scarcely controlled violence, and Michael felt that if Noah survived the war he would be immensely better equipped for the years that came after than he, Michael, would be.

They cleaned their mess kits and, luxuriously smoking nickel cigars from their rations, they strolled through the sharp, dark evening, towards Noah's tent, their mess kits jangling musically at their sides.

There was a movie in camp, a 16-mm version of Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl, and all the men who were billeted in the same tent with Noah were surrendering themselves to its technicolor delights. Michael and Noah sat on Noah's cot in the empty tent, puffing at their cigars, watching the blue smoke spiral softly up through the chilled air.

"I'm pulling out of here tomorrow," Noah said.

"Oh," Michael said, feeling suddenly bereaved, feeling that it was unjust for the Army to throw friends together like this, only to tear them apart twelve hours later. "Your name on the roster?"

"No," said Noah quietly. "I'm just pulling out." Michael puffed carefully at his cigar. "AWOL?" he asked.

"Yes."

God, Michael thought, remembering the time Noah had spent in prison, hasn't he had enough of that? "Paris?" he asked.

"No. I'm not interested in Paris." Noah bent over and took two packets of letters, carefully done up in string, from his kitbag. He put one packet, the envelopes scrawled unmistakably in a woman's handwriting, on the bed. "Those are from my wife," Noah said flatly. "She writes me every day. This pack…" He waved the other bunch of letters gently. "From Johnny Burnecker. He writes me every time he has a minute off. And every letter ends, 'You have to come back here.'"

"Oh," Michael said, trying to recall Johnny Burnecker, remembering an impression of a tall, raw-boned boy with a girlish complexion and blond hair.

"He's got a fixation, Johnny," Noah said. "He thinks if I come back and stay with him, we'll both come through the war all right. He's a wonderful man. He's the best man I ever met in my whole life. I've got to get back to him."

"Why do you have to go AWOL?" Michael asked. "Why don't you go into the orderly room and ask them to send you back to your old Company?"

"I did," Noah said. "That Sergeant. He told me to get the hell out of there, he was too busy, he wasn't any goddamn placement bureau, I'd go where they sent me." Noah played slowly with the packet of Burnecker's letters. They made a dry, rustling sound in his hands. "I shaved and pressed my uniform, and I made sure I was wearing my Silver Star. It didn't impress him. So I'm taking off after breakfast tomorrow."

"You'll get into a mess of trouble," Michael said.

"Nah." Noah shook his head. "People do it every day. Just yesterday a Captain in the Fourth did it. He couldn't bear hanging around any more. He just took a musette bag. The guys picked up all the other gear he left and sold it to the French. As long as you don't try to make Paris, the MPs don't bother you, if you're heading towards the front. And Lieutenant Green, I hear he's Captain now, is in command of C Company, and he's a wonderful fellow. He'll straighten it out for me. He'll be glad to see me."

"Do you know where they are?" Michael asked.

"I'll find out," Noah said. "That won't be hard."

"Aren't you afraid of getting into any more trouble?" Michael asked. "After all that stuff in the States?"

Noah grinned softly. "Brother," he said, "after Normandy, anything the United States Army might do to me couldn't look like trouble."

"You're sticking your neck out," Michael said.

Noah shrugged. "As soon as I found out in the hospital that I wasn't going to die," he said, "I wrote Johnny Burnecker I'd be back. He expects me." There was a note of quiet finality in Noah's voice that admitted no further questioning.

"Happy landing," Michael said. "Give my regards to the boys."

"Why don't you come with me?"

"What?"

"Come along with me," Noah repeated. "You'll have a lot better chance of coming out of the war alive if you go into a company where you have friends. You have no objections to coming out of the war alive, have you?"

"No," Michael smiled weakly. "Not really." He did not tell Noah of the times when it hadn't seemed to make much difference to him whether he survived or not, some of the rainy, weary nights in Normandy when he had felt so useless, when the war had seemed to be only a growing cemetery, whose only purpose seemed the creation of new dead; or the bleak days in the hospital in England, surrounded by the mangled product of the French battlefields, at the mercy of the efficient, callous doctors and nurses, who would not even give him a twenty-four-hour pass to visit London, to whom he had never been a human being in need of comfort and relief, but merely a poorly mending leg that had to be whipped back into a facsimile of health so that its owner could be sent back as soon as possible to the front. "No," Michael said, "I don't really mind the idea of being alive at the end of the war. Although, to tell you the truth, I have a feeling, five years after the war is over, we're all liable to look back with regret to every bullet that missed us."

"Not me," said Noah fiercely. "Not me. I'm never going to feel that."

"Sure," Michael said, feeling guilty. "I'm sorry I said it."

"You go up as a replacement," said Noah, "and your chances are awful. The men who are there are all friends, they feel responsible for each other, they'll do anything to save each other. That means every dirty, dangerous job they hand right over to the replacements. The Sergeants don't even bother to learn your name. They don't want to know anything about you. They just trade you in for their friends and wait for the next batch of replacements. You go into a new Company, all by yourself, and you'll be on every patrol, you'll be the point of every attack. If you ever get stuck out some place, and it's a question of saving you or saving one of the old boys, what do you think they'll do?"

Noah was speaking passionately, his dark eyes steady and intense on Michael's face, and Michael was touched by the boy's solicitude. After all, Michael remembered, I did damn little for him in his trouble in Florida, and I was no great comfort to his wife back in New York. He wondered if that frail dark girl had any notion of what her husband was saying now on the wet plain outside Paris, any notion of what subterranean, desperate reasoning a man went through in this cold, foreign autumn so that he could one day come back and touch her hand, pick up his son in his arms… What did they know about the war back in America, what did the correspondents have to say about the replacement depots in their signed pieces on the front pages of the newspapers?

"You've got to have friends," Noah was saying fiercely. "You can't let them send you anywhere where you don't have friends to protect you…"

"Yes," Michael said gently, putting out his hand and touching the boy's wasted arm, "I'll go with you."

But he didn't say it because he felt that he was the one who needed friends.

A CHAPLAIN in a jeep picked them up on the other side of Chateau-Thierry. It was a grey day and the old monuments among the cemeteries and the rusting wire of another war looked bleak and ill-tended. The Chaplain was quite a young man, with a Southern accent, and very talkative.