The Young Lions, page 50
On one side of the road was a burned-out British tank, blackened and gaping, and there was a smell of the dead from it. Every new place you approached, every newly taken town which represented a victory on the maps and over the BBC, had the same smell, sweet, rotting, unvictorious. Michael wished vaguely, as he drove, feeling his nose burn in the strong sun, squinting through his dusty goggles, that he was back on the lumber pile in England.
They came over the brow of a hill. Ahead of them stretched the city of Caen. The British had been trying to take it for a month, and after looking at it for a moment, you wondered why they had been so anxious. Walls were standing, but few houses. Block after block of closely packed stone buildings had been battered and knocked down, and it was the same as far as the eye could reach. Tripe a la mode de Caen, Michael remembered from the menus of French restaurants in New York, and the University of Caen, from a course in Medieval History. British heavy mortars were firing from the jumbled books of the University library at the moment, and Canadian soldiers were crouched over machine-guns in the kitchens where the tripe had at other times been so deftly prepared.
They were in the outskirts of the town by now, winding in and out of stone rubble. Pavone signalled Michael to stop, and Michael drew the jeep up along a heavy stone convent wall that ran beside the roadside ditch. There were some Canadians in the ditch and they looked at the Americans curiously.
We ought to wear British helmets, Michael thought nervously. These damn things must look just like German helmets to the British. They'll shoot first and examine our papers later.
"How're things?" Pavone was out of the jeep and standing over the ditch, talking to the soldiers there.
"Bloody awful," said one of the Canadians, a small, dark, Italian-looking man. He stood up in the ditch and grinned.
"You going into the town, Colonel?"
"Maybe."
"There are snipers all over the place," said the Canadian. There was the whistle of an incoming shell and the Canadians dived into the ditch again. Michael ducked, but he could not get out of the jeep fast enough, anyway, so he merely covered his face jerkily with his hands. There was no explosion. Dud, Michael's mind registered dully, the brave workers of Warsaw and Prague, filling the casings with sand and putting heroic notes among the steel scraps, "Salute from the anti-fascist munitions workers of Skoda." Or was that a romantic story from the newspapers and the OWI, too, and would the shell explode six hours later when everyone had forgotten about it?
"Every three minutes," the Canadian said bitterly, standing up in the ditch. "We're back here on rest and every three bleeding minutes we got to hit the ground. That's the British Army's notion of a rest area!" He spat.
"Are there mines?" Pavone asked.
"Sure there're mines," the Canadian said aggressively. "Why shouldn't there be mines? Where do you think you are, Yankee Stadium?"
He had an accent that would have sounded natural in Brooklyn. "Where you from, soldier?" Pavone asked.
"Toronto," said the soldier. "The next man tries to get me out of Toronto is going to get a Ford axle across his ears."
There was the whistle again, and again Michael was too slow to get out of the jeep. The Canadian disappeared magically. Pavone merely leaned negligently against the jeep. This time the shell exploded, but it must have been a hundred yards away, because nothing came their way at all. Two guns on the other side of the convent wall fired rapidly again and again, answering.
The Canadian raised himself out of the ditch again. "Rest area," he said venomously. "I should have joined the bloody American Army. You don't see any Englishmen around here, do you?" He glared at the broken street and the smashed buildings with hatred flaring from his clouded eyes. "Only Canadians. When it's tough, hand it to Canada."
"Now…" Pavone began, grinning at this wild inaccuracy.
"Don't argue with me, Colonel, don't argue with me," the man from Toronto said loudly. "I'm too nervous to argue."
"All right," Pavone said, smiling, pushing his helmet back, so that it looked like an unmilitary chamber-pot over his bushy, burlesque eyebrows. "I won't argue with you. I'll see you later."
"If you don't get shot," said the Canadian, "and if I don't desert in the meantime."
Pavone waved to him. "Mike," he said, "I'll drive now. You sit at the back, and keep your eyes open."
Michael climbed in and sat high up on the folded-down jeep top, so that he could fire more easily in all directions. Pavone took the wheel. Pavone always took the most responsible and dangerous position at moments like this.
Pavone waved once more to the Canadian, who didn't wave back. The jeep growled down the road into the town.
Michael blew at the dust in the carbine chamber and took it off safety. He sat with the carbine over his knees and peered ahead of him as Pavone slowly drove down the battered street among the ruins.
The batteries crashed all around him. It was hard to imagine the organization, the men telephoning, jotting down numbers on maps, correcting ranges, fiddling with the delicate enormous mechanisms that raised a gun so that it would fire five miles this minute and seven the next, all going on unseen among the cellars of the old town of Caen, and behind ancient garden walls and in the living-rooms of Frenchmen who had been plumbers and meat-packers before this and were now dead. How large was Caen, how many people had lived in it, was it like Buffalo, Jersey City, Pasadena?
The jeep went slowly on, with Pavone looking interestedly around him, and Michael feeling increasingly naked at the back.
They turned a corner and came to a street of three-storey houses which had been badly mauled. Cascades of rubble swept down from the back walls of the houses to the street and there were men and women patiently bent over high in the ruins, like fruit-pickers, taking a rag here, a lamp there, a pair of stockings, a cooking-pot, out of the thick pile of rubbish which had been their homes, oblivious of English guns around them, oblivious of snipers, oblivious of the German guns across the river that were shelling the town, oblivious of everything except that these were their homes and in these torrents of stone and lumber were their possessions, slowly accumulated in the course of their lives.
In the street were wheelbarrows and baby carriages. The gleaners gathered up armloads high in the pile and slid down, balancing their dusty treasures, and put them neatly in the small conveyances. Then, without looking at the Americans who were passing them, or at the occasional Canadian jeep or ambulance that ground by, they would climb methodically up the static torrent and begin digging all over again for some remembered and broken treasure.
They came into a wide square, deserted now, and open at one end because all the buildings had been levelled completely there. The Orne River was on the other side. Beyond that, Michael knew, the Germans had their lines, and he knew that somewhere across the river there were enemy eyes peering at the slow-moving jeep. He knew that Pavone understood that too, but Pavone did not increase his speed. What the hell is the bastard proving, Michael thought, and why doesn't he go prove it by himself?
But no one fired at them, and they went on.
Pavone wound slowly about the city in and out of the strong summer sunlight and the purple French shadows that Michael had known from the paintings of Cezanne and Renoir and Pissarro long before he had ever set foot on the soil of France. Pavone stopped the jeep to look at a street sign that, untouched and municipally proud, named two streets that no longer existed. Pavone moved in a slow, interested way, and Michael divided his time between staring at the thick, healthy, brown neck under the helmet and at the gaping grey sides of the stone buildings from which at any moment his death might arrive.
Pavone started the jeep again and drove thoughtfully down what had once been a main thoroughfare. "I came here for a week-end in 1938," Pavone said, looking back, "with a friend of mine who produced movies, and two girls from one of his companies." He shook his head reflectively. "We had a very nice week-end. My friend, his name was Jules, was killed right away in 1940." Pavone peered at the jagged shop-fronts. "I can't recognize a single street."
Fantastic, Michael thought, he is risking my life for the memory of a week-end with a couple of players and a dead producer six years ago.
They turned into a street in which there was considerable activity. There were trucks drawn up alongside a church and three or four young Frenchmen with FFI armbands patrolling along an iron fence and some Canadians helping wounded civilians into one of the trucks. Pavone stopped the jeep in a little square in front of the church. The pavement was piled high with old valises, wicker hampers, carpet-bags, net market sacks stuffed with linen, sheets and blankets in which were rolled an assortment of household belongings.
A young girl in a light blue dress, very clean and starched, went by on a bicycle. She was pretty, with lively blue-black hair. Michael looked at her curiously. She stared at him coldly, hatred and contempt very plain in her face. She is blaming me, Michael thought, for the bombings, for the fact that her house is down, her father dead, perhaps, her lover God knows where. The girl flashed on, her pretty skirt billowing, past the ambulance and the shell-marked stone. Michael would have liked to follow her, talk to her, convince her… Convince her of what? That he was not just an iron-hearted, leering soldier, admiring pretty legs even in the death of a city, that he understood her tragedy, that she must not judge him so swiftly, in the flashing of an eye, must have mercy in her heart for him, and understanding, just as she must expect mercy and understanding in return…
The girl disappeared.
"Let's go in," said Pavone.
The inside of the church was very dark after the brilliant sunlight outside. Michael smelled it first. Mixed with the slight, rich odour of old candles and incense burned in centuries of devotion, there was a smell of barnyard and the sick smell of age and medicine and dying.
He blinked, standing at the door, and listened to the scuffle of children's feet on the great stone floor, now strewn with straw. High overhead there was a large, gaping shell-hole. The sunlight streamed down through it, like a powerful amber searchlight, piercing the religious gloom.
Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw that the church was crowded. The inhabitants of the city, or those who had not yet fled and not yet died, had assembled here, numbly looking for protection under God, waiting to be taken away behind the lines. The first impression was that he was in a gigantic religious home for the aged. Stretched out on the floor on litters and on blankets and on straw heaps were what seemed like dozens of wrinkled, almost evaporated, yellow-faced, fragile octogenarians. They rubbed their translucent hands numbly over their throats; they pushed feebly at blanket ends; they mumbled with animal squeaky sounds; they stared, hot-eyed and dying, at the men who stood over them; they wet the floor because they were too old to move and too far gone to care; they scratched at grimy bandages that covered wounds they had received in the young men's war that had raged in their city for a month; they were dying of cancer, tuberculosis, hardening of the arteries, nephritis, gangrene, malnourishment, senility; and the common smell of their disease and their helplessness and their age, collected together like this in the once-shelled church, made Michael gasp a little as he regarded them, lit here and there in a mellow and holy beam of sunlight, dancing with dust-motes and shimmering over the wasted, fiercely hating faces. Among them, between the straw palliasses and the stained litters, between the cancer cases and the old men with broken hips who had been bedridden for five years before the British came, between the old women whose great-grandchildren had already been killed at Sedan and Lake Chad and Oran, among them ran the children, playing, weaving in and out, swiftly and gaily shining for a moment in the golden beam from the German shell-hole, then darting like glittering water-flies into the rich pools of purple shadow, the high tinkle of their laughter skimming over the heads of the grave-bound ancients on the stone floor.
"Well, Colonel," Michael said, "what has Civil Affairs to say about this?"
Pavone smiled gently at Michael and touched his arm softly, as though he realized, out of his greater age and deep experience, that Michael felt somehow guilty for this and must be forgiven for his sharpness because of it. "I think," he began, "we had better get out of here. The British got this, let them worry about it…"
They passed the convent wall, but the boy from Toronto was gone. Pavone stepped hard on the accelerator and they sped out of town. It was lucky they had not stopped before the convent, because they hadn't gone three hundred yards when they heard the explosion behind them. There was a whirling cloud of dust squarely in the road where they had been.
Pavone turned to look, too. Michael and he glanced at each other. They did not smile and they did not speak. Pavone turned back and hunched over the wheel.
They crossed the marked thousand yards, where the road was under observed shellfire, without incident. Pavone stopped the jeep and signalled for Michael to come up and take the wheel.
As he climbed over the seat Michael halted and looked back. There was no sign that a city, ruined or unruined, lay over the horizon.
He started the jeep, feeling better to be at the wheel, and they drove slowly without speaking through the yellow afternoon sun towards the American lines.
Half a mile further on they saw troops coming up on both sides of the road, in single file, and they heard a strange, skirling noise. A moment later they saw that it was a battalion of infantry, Scotch-Canadian, each company led by a bagpiper, walking slowly towards a road that led off into wheatfields to the left. Other troops could be seen, just their heads and weapons showing above the wheat, marching slowly down towards the river.
The noise of the bagpipes sounded wild and comic and pathetic in the open, deserted country. Michael drove very slowly towards the approaching troops. They were walking heavily, sweating dark stains into their heavy battledress, loaded down with grenades and bandoliers and boxes of machine-gun ammunition. In front of the first Company, just behind the bagpiper, strode the Commanding Officer, a large, red-faced young Captain, with a swooping red moustache. He carried a small swagger-stick and he stepped out strongly in front of his troops, as though the crying, thin music of the pipes were a joyous march.
The officer grinned when he saw the jeep, and waved his swagger-stick. Michael looked past him to the men. Their faces were strained under the sweat, and no one was smiling. Their battledress and equipment were fresh and neat and Michael knew that these men were going into their first battle. They walked silently, already weary, already overburdened, with a blank, wrenched look on their crimson faces, as though they were listening to something, not to the pipes or to the distant rumble of the guns, or the weary scuffle of their boots on the road, but to some inner debate, deep within them, that reached them thinly and to which they had to pay close attention if they wished to catch its meaning.
But as the jeep came abreast of the officer he grinned widely, a twenty-year-old athlete's, white-toothed grin under the ludicrous and charming moustache, and boomed out, in a voice that could be heard for a hundred yards, although the jeep was only five feet from him, "Lovely day, isn't it?"
"Good luck," Pavone said, in the simple, not over-loud, well-modulated tone of the man who is going back from the fighting and can now control his voice, "good luck to you all, Captain." The Captain waved his stick again, in a jerky, friendly gesture, and the jeep slowly rolled past the rest of the Company, brought up at the rear by the MO, with the red crosses on his helmet, and a young, listening, thoughtful look on his face, and the first-aid kits in his hands.
The music of the bagpipes died down into fragile, gull-like echoes as the Company turned off into the wheatfield and wound deeper and deeper into it, like armed men marching purposefully and regretfully into a rustling, golden sea.
Michael woke up, listening to the growing mutter of the guns. He was depressed. He smelled the damp, loamy odour of the foxhole in which he slept, and the acid, dusty smell of the bivouac dark over his head. He lay rigid, in the complete darkness, too tired to move, warm under the blankets, listening to the sound of guns that was coming closer each moment. The usual air raid, he thought, hating the Germans, every goddamn night.
The sound of the guns was very close now and there was the soft deadly hiss of shrapnel falling near-by and the plump, solid sounds as the steel fragments hit the earth. Michael reached in behind him and got his helmet and put it over his groin. He pulled his barracks bag, which was lying next to him in the hole, stuffed with extra pants, vests and shirts, and rolled it on top of him, on his belly and chest. Then he crossed his arms over his head, covering his face with the warm smell of his flesh and the sweaty smell of the long sleeves of the woollen underwear. Now, he thought, as this nightly routine which he had worked out in the weeks in Normandy was completed, now they can hit me. He had figured out the various parts of himself which were most vulnerable and most precious, and they were protected. If he got hit in the legs or arms it would not be so serious.
He lay there, in the complete darkness, listening to the roaring and whistling above his head. He began to feel cosy and protected in the deep hole in which he slept. The inside of the hole was lined with stiff canvas cut from a crashed glider, and he had put down as a ground cloth a luminescent silk signalling panel that gave an air of Oriental luxury to the neat underground establishment.
Michael wondered what time it was, but he was too tired to try to find his flashlight and look at his watch. From three to five in the morning he was to be on guard duty and he wondered dully whether it was worth while to try to go to sleep again.
The raid went on. The planes must be very low, he thought, they're firing machine-guns at them. He listened to the machineguns and to the patient roar of the planes above. How many air raids had he been in? Twenty? Thirty? The Luftwaffe had tried to kill him thirty times, in a general, impersonal way, and had failed.
He played with the idea of being hit. A nice, eight-inch gash in the fleshy part of the leg. With a nice little fracture of the thigh-bone thrown in. Michael thought of himself hobbling bravely up the ramp of Grand Central Station in New York, fully equipped with Purple Heart, crutches and discharge papers.
