The Young Lions, page 27
"Whatever you say, Lieutenant." Christian smiled with frozen amiability, like a drunk at a polite and rather boring garden-party.
"I don't know what their orders are," Hardenburg shouted, "and they may have to turn off and fight at any moment…"
"Of course," said Christian.
"It's a good idea to hold on to our own transportation," Hardenburg said. Christian was vaguely grateful that the Lieutenant was being so kind about explaining everything to him.
"Yes," said Christian, "yes, indeed."
"What did you say?" Hardenburg shouted as an armoured car roared past.
"I said…" Christian hesitated. He did not remember what he had said. "I am agreeable," he said, nodding ambiguously.
"Absolutely agreeable."
"Good," said Hardenburg. He unknotted the handkerchief that Christian had round his throat. "Better put this round your face. For the dust." He started to tie it behind Christian's head.
Christian put his hands up slowly and pushed the Lieutenant's hands away. "Pardon me," he said, "for a moment." Then he leaned over and vomited.
The men in the trucks going by did not look at him or the Lieutenant. They merely stared straight ahead as though they were riding in a wintry parade in a dying man's dream, without interest, curiosity, destination, hope.
Christian straightened up. He felt much better, although the taste in his mouth was considerably worse than it had been before. He put the handkerchief up around over the bridge of his nose so that it covered the entire lower part of his face. His fingers worked heavily on the knot behind, but finally he made it.
"I am ready," he announced.
Hardenburg had his handkerchief round his face by this time. Christian put his arms around the Lieutenant's waist, and the motor-cycle kicked and spun in the sand and jolted into the procession behind an ambulance with three pairs of legs showing through the torn door.
Christian felt very fond of the Lieutenant, sitting iron-like on the seat in front of him, looking, with his handkerchief mask, like a bandit in an American Western movie. I ought to do something, Christian thought, to show him my appreciation. For five minutes, in the shaking dust, he tried to think how he could demonstrate his gratitude to the Lieutenant. Slowly, the idea came to him. I will tell him, Christian thought, about his wife and myself. That is all I have to offer. Christian shook his head. Silly, he thought, silly, silly. But now he had thought of the idea, he could not escape it. He closed his eyes; he tried to think of the thirty-six men digging slowly in the sand to the south; he tried to think of all the beer and cold wine and cold water he had drunk in the last five years, but again and again he felt himself on the verge of shouting over the clanking of the traffic around him, "Lieutenant, I had your wife when I went on leave from Rennes."
The procession stopped, and Hardenburg, who had decided to remain, for safety, in the middle of the convoy, put his foot down and balanced the machine in neutral. Now, thought Christian crazily, now I am going to tell him. But at that moment two men got out of the ambulance in front of them and dragged a body out by the feet and put it down by the side of the road. They moved heavily and wearily and dragged it by the ankles out of the way of the vehicles. Christian stared at them over the edge of his handkerchief. The two men looked up guiltily. "He is not alive," one of them said earnestly, coming over to Christian. "What's the sense of carrying him if he is not alive?"
Then the convoy started and the ambulance ground into first gear. The two men had to run, their water-bottles flapping against their hips, and they were dragged for quite a distance "before they managed to scramble into the body of the ambulance over the other legs jutting out through the torn door. Then it was too noisy to tell Hardenburg about his wife.
It was hard to remember when the firing started. There was a ragged crackling near the head of the column and the vehicles stopped. Then Christian realized that he had been hearing the noise for what seemed like a long time without understanding what it was.
Men jumped heavily from the thin-skinned vehicles and scattered into the desert on both sides of the road. A wounded man fell out of the ambulance and crawled, digging his fingers into the ground, dragging one useless leg, to a little clump of grass ten metres to the right. He lay there, busily hollowing out a little space in front of him with his hands. Machine-guns started all around them and the armoured vehicles swung without any recognizable plan to both sides and opened fire wildly, in all directions. A man without a cap walked swiftly up and down near them alongside the deserted trucks, with their motors still going, bellowing, "Answer it! Answer it, you bastards." He was bald and capless and his dome shone whitely in the moonlight. He was waving a swagger-stick insanely in the air. He must be at least a colonel, Christian thought.
Mortar shells were dropping sixty metres away. A fire started in one of the carriers there. In the light Christian could see men being dragged roughly away from the road. Hardenburg drove the motor-cycle alongside the ambulance and stopped. He peered sharply across the desert, the little V of the handkerchief whipping around his chin like a misplaced beard.
The British were using tracers in their machine-guns and light artillery now. The lazy, curving streaks were sweeping in, seeming to gather speed as they neared the convoy. It was impossible for Christian to figure out where they were firing from. It is very disorderly, he thought reproachfully, it is impossible to fight under ridiculous conditions like this. He started to get off the motor-cycle. He would merely walk away from this and lie down and wait for something to happen to him.
"Stay on here!" Hardenburg shouted, although he was only twelve inches away from him. More disorder, Christian thought, resentfully sitting back on the pillion. He felt for his gun but he did not remember what he had done with it. There was an acrid, biting smell of disinfectant coming from the ambulance, mixed with the smell of the dead. Christian began to cough. A shell whistled in and burst near and Christian ducked against the metal side of the ambulance. A moment later he felt a tap on his back. He put his hand up, knocking a hot spent fragment of shrapnel from his shoulder. In reaching back, he found his gun slung over his shoulder. He was heavily trying to disentangle it when Hardenburg kicked the machine into movement. Christian nearly fell off. The barrel of the gun hit him under the chin and he bit his tongue and tasted the blood, salty and hot, from the cut his teeth had made. He clung to Hardenburg. The motorcycle careered off among the crouching figures and the noise and the intermittent explosions. A stream of tracers from a great distance arched towards them. Hardenburg held the bucking machine on a straight course under the tracers and they pulled out of the glare of the flaming trucks.
"Very disorderly," Christian murmured. Then he got angry with Hardenburg. If he wanted to go riding into the British Army, let him do it. Why did he have to drag Christian with him? Craftily, Christian decided to fall off the machine. He tried to pick up his foot, but his trouser leg seemed to be caught on a protruding strip of metal and he couldn't lift his knee. Vaguely, ahead of them, and to one side, he saw the dark outlines of tanks. Then the tanks swung their guns round. A machine-gun from one of the turrets opened on them, and there was the sickening whistle as the bullets screamed behind their heads.
Christian bent down and pressed his head crookedly against the Lieutenant's shoulder. The Lieutenant was wearing a leather harness and the buckles scraped against Christian's cheekbone. The machine-gun swung round again. This time the bullets were hitting in front of them, knocking up puffs of moonlit dust, and bouncing up with thick savage thuds.
Then Christian began to cry, clinging to the Lieutenant, and he knew he was afraid, and that he could do nothing to save himself and they would be hit and he and the Lieutenant and the motor-cycle would crash in a single, smoking mass, burnt cloth and blood and petrol in a dark pool on the sand, and then there was someone shouting in English and waving wildly nearby. Hardenburg was grunting and bending over more than ever. Then the whistles came from behind them, and suddenly they were alone on a pale streak of road, with the noise dying down far to the rear.
Finally, Christian stopped crying. He sat up straight when Hardenburg sat up, and he even managed to look with some interest at the open road peeling out in front of the bouncing motor-cycle. His mouth tasted very queer, with the vomit and the blood, and his cheek was stinging him as sand flew up under his handkerchief and ground into the bruises there. But he took a deep breath, feeling much better. For a moment, he did not even feel tired.
Behind him the glare and the firing died down quickly. In five minutes they seemed to have the desert to themselves, all the long quiet, moonlit waste from the Sudan to the Mediterranean, from Alamein to Tripoli.
He held Hardenburg affectionately. He remembered that he had wanted to tell the Lieutenant something before all this had started, but, at the moment, what he had intended to say escaped him. He took the handkerchief off his face and looked around him and felt the wind whipping the spit out of the corners of his mouth, and he felt quite happy and at peace with the world. Hardenburg was a strange man, but Christian knew he could depend upon him to get him to some place safely. Just where he would get him and at what time, Christian did not know, but there was no need to worry. How lucky it was that Captain Mueller, in command of their company, had been killed. If he had been alive it would have been Mueller and Hardenburg on the motor-cycle now, and Christian would still be back on that hill with the three dozen other dead men…
He breathed deeply of the dry, rushing air. He was sure now that he was going to live, perhaps even for quite a long time.
Then the handle-bars jerked to one side. The front wheel skidded round and the Lieutenant's hands bounced away from the grips. Christian felt himself falling and lunged forward, grasping the Lieutenant. The impact knocked the Lieutenant over the bucking front wheel and the machine skidded crazily off the track, the engine roaring loudly. Suddenly it dipped to one side and crashed. Christian felt himself flying through the air, screaming, but somewhere inside him a voice was saying quietly, This is too much, too much. Then he hit something and he felt a numbness in his shoulder, but he got up on one knee.
The Lieutenant was lying under the motor-cycle, whose front wheel was still spinning. The back wheel was a mass of twisted metal. The Lieutenant was lying quietly, blood spurting from a gash in his forehead, with his legs at a very queer angle under the machine. Christian walked slowly over to him, and started pulling at him. But that didn't work. So he laboriously lifted the motor-cycle and toppled it over to the other side, away from Hardenburg. Then he sat down and rested. After a minute or so, he took out his first-aid kit and put a bandage clumsily over the blood on the Lieutenant's forehead. It looked very neat and professional for a moment. But then the blood came through and it looked like all the other bandages he had ever seen.
Suddenly the Lieutenant sat up. He looked once at the machine, and said, crisply, "Now we walk." But when he tried to get up he couldn't. He looked at his legs reflectively. "Nothing serious," he said, as though to convince himself. "I assure you, it is nothing serious. Are you all right?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
"I think," said the Lieutenant, "I had better rest for ten minutes. Then we shall see." He lay back with his hands clutching the sodden bandage over his forehead.
Christian sat near him. He watched the front wheel of the motor-cycle slowly stop spinning. It had been making a small, whining noise that grew lower and lower in tone. When the wheel stopped, there was no more sound. No sound from the motor-cycle, no sound from the Lieutenant, no sound from the desert, no sound from the armies intertwined with each other somewhere else on the continent.
The face of the desert looked fresh and cool in the new sun. Even the wrecks looked simple and harmless in the fresh light. Christian slowly uncorked his canteen. He drank one mouthful of water carefully, rolling it around on his tongue and teeth before swallowing it. The sound of his swallowing was loud and wooden. Hardenburg opened one eye to see what he was doing.
"Save your water," he said, automatically.
"Yes, Sir," said Christian, thinking with admiration: That man would give an order to the devil who was shovelling him through the door of the furnace of hell. Hardenburg, he thought, what a triumph of German military education. Orders spurted from him like blood from an artery. At his last gasp he would be laying his plans for the next three actions.
Finally Hardenburg sighed and sat up. He patted the wet bandage on his head. "Did you put this on?" he asked.
"Yes, Sir."
"It will fall off the first time I move," Hardenburg said coldly, objectively criticizing, without anger. "Where did you learn to put on bandages?"
"Sorry, Sir," said Christian. "I must have been a bit shaken myself."
"I suppose so," Hardenburg said. "Still, it's silly to waste a bandage." He opened his tunic and took out an oilskin case. From the case he took a sharply folded terrain map. He spread the map on the desert floor. "Now," he said, "we'll see where we are."
Wonderful, Christian thought, fully equipped for all eventualities.
Hardenburg blinked from time to time as he studied the map. He grimaced with pain as he held the bandage on. But he figured rapidly, mumbling to himself. He folded the map and put it back briskly into the case and carefully tucked it away inside his tunic.
"Very well," he said. "This track joins with another one, leading west, perhaps eight kilometres away. Do you think you can make it?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian. "How about you?"
Hardenburg looked at him disdainfully. "Don't worry about me. On your feet," he barked, again to the phantom company he was continually addressing.
Christian rose slowly. His shoulder and arm pained considerably, and he could move the arm only with difficulty. But he knew he could walk several of the eight kilometres, if not all of them. He watched Hardenburg push himself up from the sand with a furious effort. The sweat broke out on his face and the blood began to come through the bandage on his forehead again. But when Christian leaned over to try to help him, Hardenburg glared at him, and said, "Get away from me, Sergeant!"
Christian stepped back and watched Hardenburg struggle to raise himself. He dug his heels into the sand as though getting ready to take the shock of being hit by an onrushing giant. Then, with his right elbow held rigid, he pushed ferociously, with cold purpose, at the ground. Slowly, inch by inch, with the pain shouting mutely from his livid face, he raised himself till he was half-bent over, but off the ground. With a wrench, he pulled himself upright and stood there, wavering, but erect, the sweat and blood mixed with the grime on his face in a thick, alarming compost. He was weeping, Christian noticed with surprise, the tears making harsh lines down the nameless paste on his cheeks. His breath came hard, in dry, tortured sobs, but he set his teeth. In a grotesque, clumsy movement, he faced north.
"All right," he said. "Forward march."
He started out along the thick sand of the track, ahead of Christian. He limped, and his head bobbed crazily to one side as he walked, but he continued steadily, without looking back.
Christian followed him. He was feverishly thirsty. The gun slung over his shoulder seemed maliciously heavy, but he resolved not to drink or ask for a rest until Hardenburg did so first.
They shuffled slowly, in a broken, deliberate tandem, across the sand, among the occasional rusting wrecks, towards the road to the north where other Germans might be beating their way back from the battle. Or where the British might be waiting for them.
Christian thought impersonally and calmly about the British. They did not seem real or menacing. Only two or three things were real at the moment: the coppery taste in his throat, like sour brewery mash, the crippled, animal-like gait of Hardenburg before him, the sun rising higher and higher and with increasing, malevolent heat, behind their backs. If the British were waiting on the track, that was a problem that would have to be solved in its own time. He was too occupied to grapple with it now.
They were sitting down for the second rest, stunned, sun-lacerated, their eyes dull with agony and fatigue, when they saw the car on the horizon. It was coming fast, with a swirl of dust like a plume behind it. In two minutes they saw that it was a smart open staff car, and a moment later they realized it was Italian.
Hardenburg pushed himself up with a bone-cracking effort. He limped slowly out into the middle of the track and stood there, breathing heavily, but staring calmly at the onrushing machine. He looked wild and threatening with the bloody bandage angled across his forehead, and his purple, sunken eyes. His bloodstained hands hooked ready at his sides.
Christian stood up, but did not go into the centre of the track beside Hardenburg.
The car raced towards them, its horn blowing loudly, losing itself somehow in the emptiness and sounding like the echo of a warning. Hardenburg didn't move. There were five figures in the open car. Hardenburg stood cold and motionless, watching them. Christian was sure the car was going to run the Lieutenant down and he opened his mouth to call, when there was a squeal of brakes and the long, smart-looking machine skidded to a stop an arm's length in front of Hardenburg.
There were two Italian soldiers in front, one driving and the other crouched beside him. In the rear there were three officers. They all stood up and shouted angrily at Hardenburg in Italian.
Hardenburg did not move. "I wish to speak to the senior officer here," he called coldly in German.
There was more Italian. Finally a dark, stout Major said, in bad German, "That is me. If you have anything you wish to say to me, come over here and say it."
"You will kindly dismount," Hardenburg said, standing absolutely still, in front of the car.
The Italians chattered among themselves. Then the Major opened the rear door and jumped down, fat and wrinkled in what had once been a pretty uniform. He advanced belligerently on Hardenburg. Hardenburg saluted grandly. The salute looked theatrical coming from this scarecrow in the glaring emptiness of the desert. The Major clicked his heels in the sand and saluted in return.
