The Young Lions

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE General had come down to inspect the line, exuding confidence, so they all knew something was up. Even the Italian General in the party of ten bulky, binoculared, goggled, scarved, glittering officers had exuded confidence, so they knew it was something big. The General had been particularly hearty, laughing uproariously when he talked to the soldiers, patting them heavily on the shoulder, even pinching the cheek of an eighteen-year-old boy who had just come up as a replacement in Himmler's squad. This was a certain sign that a great many men were going to be killed, one way or another, very soon.

There were other signs, too. Himmler, who had been at Divisional Headquarters two days ago, had heard on the radio that the British had been burning papers again at their headquarters in Cairo. The British seemed to have an unlimited number of papers to burn. They had burned them in July, and then again in August, and here it was October, and they were still burning them.

Himmler had also heard the man on the radio say that the overall strategy was for them to break through to Alexandria and Jerusalem and finally to join up with the Japanese in India. It was true that this seemed a little grandiose and ambitious to men who had been sitting in the same place in the bitter sun for months, but there was a reassuring sound to the plan. At least it gave evidence that the General had a plan.

The night was very quiet. Occasionally there was a random small rattle of fire, or a flare, but that was all. There was a moon and the pale sky, crusted with the mild glitter of the stars, blended gently with the shadowy expanse of the desert.

Christian stood alone, loosely holding the machine-pistol in the crook of his arm, looking out towards the anonymous shadows behind which lay the enemy. There was no sound from them in the sleeping night, and no sound from the thousands of men all about him.

Night had its advantages. You could move about quite freely, without worrying that some Englishman had you in his glasses and was debating with himself whether or not you were worth a shell or two. Also, the smell died down. The smell was the salient fact about war in the desert. There was not enough water for anything but drinking, and not enough for that, so nobody washed. You sweated all day, in the same clothes, week in and week out, and your clothes rotted with it, and became stiff on your back, and you had a steady rash of prickly heat that itched and burned, but your nose suffered worst of all. The human race was only bearable when the obscene juices of living were being constantly washed away. You became dulled to your own smell, of course, otherwise you would kill yourself, but when you joined any group, the smell hit you, in a solid, jolting attack.

So the night was solace. There had been little enough solace since he had arrived in Africa. They had been winning, it was true, and he had marched from Bardia to this spot, some seventy miles from Alexandria. But somehow, while agreeable, victory did not have a personal quality to a soldier in the line. No doubt victory meant a great deal to the well-uniformed officers at the various headquarters and they probably celebrated over large dinners with wines and beer when towns were taken, but victories for you still meant that there was a good chance that you would die in the morning, and that you would still live in a shallow, gritty hole.

The only good time had been the two weeks in Cyrene, when he had been sent back with malaria. It had been cooler there, and green, and there was swimming in the Mediterranean.

When Himmler had reported that he had heard the expert on the radio announce that the plan of the German General Staff was to go through Alexandria and Cairo to join up in India with the Japanese, Knuhlen, who had come out with a recent draft of replacements, and who had taken over some of Himmler's old position of comedian to the company, had said, "Anybody who wants can go and join up with the Japs. Myself, if nobody minds, I'll stop in Alexandria."

Christian grinned in the darkness as he remembered Knuhlen's rough witticism. There are probably few jokes, he thought, being told tonight on the other side of the minefield.

Then there was the flash for a hundred miles, and a second later, the sound. He fell to the sand, just as the shells exploded all around him.

He opened his eyes. It was dark, but he knew he was moving and he knew that he was not alone, because there was the smell. The smell was like clotted wounds and the winter clothes of the children of the poor. He remembered the sound of the shells over his head, and he closed his eyes again.

It was a truck. There was no doubt about that. And somewhere the war was still on, because there was the sound of artillery, going and coming, not very far off. And something bad had happened, because a voice in the darkness near him was weeping and saying between sobs, "My name is Richard Knuhlen, my name is Richard Knuhlen," over and over again, as though the man were trying to prove to himself that he was a normal fellow who knew exactly who he was and what he was doing.

Christian stared up in the opaque darkness at the heavy-smelling canvas that swayed and jolted above him. The bones of his arms and legs felt as though they had been broken. His ears felt smashed against his head, and for a while he lay on the board floor in the complete blackness contemplating the fact that he was going to die.

"My name is Richard Knuhlen," the voice said, "and I live at Number Three, Carl Ludwigstrasse. My name is Richard Knuhlen and I live at…"

"Shut up," Christian said, and immediately felt much better. He even tried to sit up, but that was too ambitious, and he lay back again, to watch the sky-rocketing waves of colour under his eyelids.

The barrage had been bad the first night, but everyone was fairly well dug in, and only Meyer and Heiss had been hit. There had been flares and searchlights and the light of a tank burning behind them, and small petrol fires before them where the Tommies were trying to mark a path through the minefield for the tanks and infantry behind the barrage, small dark figures appearing in sudden flashes, busily jumping around so far away. Their own guns had started in behind them. Only one tank had got close. Every gun within a thousand metres of them had opened up on it. When the hatch was opened a minute later they saw with surprise that the man who tried to climb out was burning brightly.

The whole attack on their sector, after the barrage died down, had only lasted two hours, three waves with nothing more to show for it than seven immobile tanks, charred, with broken treads, at aggressive angles in the sand, and many bodies strewn peacefully around them. Everybody had been pleased. They had only lost five men in the company, and Hardenburg had grinned widely when he went back to battalion to report in the quiet of the morning.

But at noon the guns had started on them again, and what looked like a whole company of tanks had appeared in the minefield, jiggling uncertainly in the swirling dust and sand. This, time the line had been overrun, but the British infantry had been stopped before it reached them, and what was left of the tanks had pulled back, turning maliciously from time to time to rake them before rumbling out of range. But before they could take a deep breath, the British artillery had opened up again. It had caught the medical parties out in the open, tending the wounded. They were all screaming and dying and no one could leave his hole to help them. That was probably when Knuhlen had begun to cry and Christian remembered thinking dazedly and somehow surprised: They are very serious about this.

Then he had begun to shake. He had braced himself crazily with his hands rigid against the sides of the hole he was in. When he looked over the rim of the hole there seemed to be thousands of Tommies running at him and blowing up on mines, and those little bug-like gun carriers scurrying around them in eccentric lines, their machine-guns going, and he had felt like standing up and saying, "You are making a serious mistake. I am suffering from malaria and I am sure you would not like to be guilty of killing an invalid."

It went on for many days and nights, with the fever coming and going, and the chills in the middle of the desert noon, and from time to time you thought with dull hostility: They never told you it could last so long and they never told you you would have malaria while it was happening.

Then, somehow, everything died down, and he thought: We are still here. Weren't they foolish to try it? He fell asleep, kneeling in the hole. One second later Hardenburg was shaking him and peering down into his face, saying, "Damn you, are you still alive?" He tried to answer, but his teeth were shaking crazily in his jaws and his eyes wouldn't really open. So he smiled tenderly at Hardenburg, who grabbed him by the collar and dragged him like a sack of potatoes along the ground as he nodded gravely at the bodies lying on both sides. He was surprised to see that it was quite dark and a truck was standing there, with its motor going, and he said, quite loudly, "Keep it quiet there." The man beside him was sobbing and saying, "My name is Richard Knuhlen," and much later, on the dark board floor under the smelly canvas, in all the heavy, bone-shaking jolting, he was still crying and still saying it over and over again, "My name is Richard Knuhlen and I live at Number Three, Carl Ludwigstrasse." When finally he really woke up and saw that perhaps he was not going to die at that moment and realized that he was in full retreat and still had malaria, he thought, abstractedly: I would like to see the General now. I wonder if he is still confident.

Then the truck stopped and Hardenburg appeared at the back and said, "Everybody out. Everybody!"

Slowly the men moved towards the rear of the truck, heavily, as though they were walking in thick mud. Two or three of them fell when they jumped down over the tailboard and just lay there uncomplainingly as other men jumped and fell on them. Christian was the last one out of the truck. I am standing, he thought with deliberate triumph. I am standing.

Hardenburg looked at him queerly in the moonlight. Off to both sides there was the flash of guns and there was a general rumble in the air, but the small victory of having landed correctly made everything seem quite normal for the moment.

Christian looked keenly at the men struggling to their feet and standing in sleep-walking poses around him. He recognized very few of them, but perhaps their faces would come back to him in daylight. "Where's the company?" he asked.

"This is the company," Hardenburg said. His voice was unrecognizable. Christian had a sudden suspicion that someone was impersonating the Lieutenant. It looked like Hardenburg, but Christian resolved to go into the matter more deeply when things became more settled.

Hardenburg put out his hand and pushed roughly at Christian's face with the heel of his palm. His hand smelled of grease and gun-oil and the sweat of his cuff. Christian pulled back a little, blinking.

"Are you all right?" Hardenburg said.

"Yes, Sir," he said. "Perfectly, Sir." He would have to think about where the rest of the company was, but that would wait until later, too.

The truck started to slither into movement on the sandy track, and two of the men trotted heavily after it.

"Stand where you are!" Hardenburg said. The men stopped and stood there, staring at the truck, which gathered speed and wound loudly over the shining sand towards the west. They were at the bottom of a small rise. They stood in silence and watched the truck, with a clashing of bearings, past Hardenburg's motor-cycle, climb up the rise. It shone along the top of it for a moment, huge, rolling, home-like, then disappeared on the other side.

"We dig in here," Hardenburg said, with a stiff wave of his hand to the white glitter of the rise. The men stared stupidly at it.

"At once," Hardenburg said. "Diestl," he said, "stay with me.

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, very smart. He went over to Hardenburg, elated with the fact that he could move.

Hardenburg started up the rise with what seemed to Christian superhuman briskness. Amazing, he thought dully, as he followed the Lieutenant, a thin, slight man like that, after the last ten days…

The men followed slowly. With rigid gestures of his arm, Hardenburg indicated to each of them where they should dig in. There were thirty-seven of them and Christian remembered again that he must inquire later what had happened to the rest of the company. Hardenburg stretched them out very thin, in a long, irregular line, one-third of the way up the rise. When he had finished he and Christian turned and looked back at the bent, slow figures digging in. Christian suddenly realized that if they were attacked they would have to stand where they were, because there was no possibility of retreating up the exposed slope from the line where Hardenburg had set them. Then he began to realize what was happening.

"All right, Diestl," Hardenburg said. "You come with me."

Christian followed the Lieutenant back to the track. Without a word, he helped Hardenburg push the motor-cycle up the track to the top of the rise. Occasionally a man would stop digging and turn and peer thoughtfully at the two men working the motor-cycle slowly up to the crest of the slope behind them. Christian was panting heavily when they finally stopped pushing the machine. He turned, with Hardenburg, and looked down at the sliver of a line of toiling men below him. The scene looked peaceful and unreal, with the moon and the empty desert and the doped movements of the shovellers, like a dream out of the Bible.

"They'll never be able to fall back," he said, almost unconsciously, "once they're engaged."

"That's right," Hardenburg said flatly.

"They're going to die there," said Christian.

"That's right," said Hardenburg. Then Christian remembered something Hardenburg had said to him as far back as El Agheila.

"In a bad situation that must be held as long as possible, the intelligent officer will place his men so that they have no possibility of retreat. If they are placed so that they must either fight or die, the officer has done his job."

Tonight Hardenburg had done his job quite well.

"What happened?" Christian asked.

Hardenburg shrugged. "They broke through on both sides of us."

"Where are they now?"

Hardenburg looked wearily at the flash of gunfire to the south and the flicker further off to the north. "You tell me," he said. He bent and peered at the petrol-gauge on the motor-cycle.

"Enough for a hundred kilometres," he said. "Are you well enough to hold on at the back?"

Christian wrinkled his forehead, trying to puzzle this out, then slowly managed to do it. "Yes, Sir," he said. He turned and looked at the stumbling, sinking line of figures down the hill, the men whom he was going to leave to die there. For a moment, he thought of saying to Hardenburg, "No, Sir, I will stay here." But really, nothing would be gained by that.

A war had its own system of balances, and he knew that it was not cowardice on Hardenburg's part, or self-seeking on his own, to pull back and save themselves for another day. These men would fight a small, pitiful action, perhaps delay a British company for an hour or so on the bare slope, and then vanish. If he and Hardenburg stayed, they would not be able, no matter what their efforts, to buy even ten minutes more than that hour. That was how it was. Perhaps the next time it would be himself left on a hill without hope and another on the road back to problematical safety.

"Stay here," Hardenburg said. "Sit down and rest. I'll go and tell them we're going back to find a mortar platoon to support us."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian and sat down suddenly. He watched Hardenburg slide briskly down towards where Himmler was slowly digging. Then he fell sideways and was asleep before his shoulder touched the ground.

Hardenburg was shaking him roughly. He opened his eyes and looked up. He knew that it would be impossible to sit up, then stand up, then take one step after another. He wanted to say, "Please leave me alone," and drop off again to sleep. But Hardenburg grabbed him by his coat, at his neck, and pulled hard. Somehow Christian found himself standing. He walked automatically, his boots making a noise like his mother's iron over stiff and frozen laundry at home, and helped Hardenburg move the motor-cycle. Hardenburg swung his leg over the saddle with great agility and began kicking the starting pedal. The machine sputtered again and again, but it did not start.

Christian watched him working furiously with the machine in the waning moonlight. It wasn't until the figure was close to him that Christian looked up and realized that they were being watched. It was Knuhlen, the man who had been weeping in the truck, who had stopped shovelling and had followed the Lieutenant up the slope. Knuhlen didn't say anything. He just stood there, watching blankly as Hardenburg kicked again and again at the pedal.

Hardenburg saw him. He took a slow, deep breath, swung his leg back and stood next to the machine.

"Knuhlen," he said, "get back to your post."

"Yes, Sir," said Knuhlen, but he didn't move.

Hardenburg walked over to Knuhlen and hit him hard on the nose with the side of his fist. Knuhlen's nose began to bleed. He made a wet, snuffling sound, but he did not move. His hands hung at his sides as though he had no further use for them. He had left his rifle and his entrenching tool at the hole he had been digging down the slope. Hardenburg stepped back and looked curiously and without malice at Knuhlen, as though he represented a small problem in engineering that would have to be solved in due time. Then Hardenburg stepped over to him again and hit him very hard twice. Knuhlen fell slowly to his knees. He kneeled there looking blankly up at Hardenburg.

"Stand up!" Hardenburg said.

Slowly Knuhlen stood up. He still did not say anything and his hands still hung limply at his hips.

Christian looked at him vaguely. Why don't you stay down? he thought, hating the baggy, ugly soldier standing there in silent, longing reproach on the crest of the moonlit rise. Why don't you die?

"Now," Hardenburg said, "get back down that hill."

But Knuhlen just stood there, as though words no longer entered the channels of his brain. Occasionally he sucked in some of the blood dripping into his mouth. The noise was surprising coming from that bent, silent figure. This was like some of the modern paintings Christian had seen in Paris. Three haggard, silent, dark figures on an empty hill under a dying moon, with sky and land cold and dark and almost of the same mysterious glistening, unearthly substance all around.

"All right," Hardenburg said, "come with me."

He took the motor-cycle handle-bars and trundled it down the other side of the rise away from the shovellers below. Christian took a last look at the thirty-six men scraping at the desert's face in their doped, rhythmic movements. Then he followed Hardenburg and Knuhlen along the down-sloping path.

Knuhlen walked in a dumb, scuffling manner, behind the rolling motor-cycle. They walked about fifty metres in silence. Then Hardenburg stopped. "Hold this," he said to Christian.

Christian took the handle-bars and balanced the machine against his legs. Knuhlen had stopped and was standing in the sand, staring patiently once more at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg cleared his throat as though he were going to make a speech, then walked up to Knuhlen, looked at him deliberately, and clubbed him twice, savagely and quickly, across the eyes. Knuhlen sat down backwards this time, without a sound, and remained that way, staring up dully and tenaciously at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg looked down at him thoughtfully, then took out his pistol and cocked it. Knuhlen made no move and there was no change on the dark, bloody face in the dim light.

Hardenburg shot him once. Knuhlen started to get up to his feet slowly, using his hands to help him. "My dear Lieutenant," he said in a quiet, conversational tone. Then he slid face-down into the sand.

Hardenburg put his pistol away. "All right," he said.

Then he came back to the motor-cycle, and swung himself into the saddle. He kicked the pedal. This time it started.

"Get on," he said to Christian.

Carefully, Christian swung his leg over and settled himself on the pillion seat of the motor-cycle. The machine throbbed jumpily under him.

"Hold on tight," Hardenburg said. "Around my middle."

Christian put his arms around Hardenburg. Very strange, he thought, hugging an officer at a time like this, like a girl going for an outing into the woods with a motor-cycle club on a Sunday afternoon. So close, Hardenburg smelled frightfully, and Christian was afraid he was going to vomit.

Hardenburg put the machine into gear and it sputtered and roared and Christian wanted to say, "Please keep quiet," because something like this should be done quietly, and it was discourteous to the thirty-seven men who had to stay behind to advertise so blatantly that they were being left alone to die and that other men would still be alive when they were bleached bones on the hill from which no escape was possible.

Thirty-six now, Christian thought, remembering the laborious small pits facing the British, facing the tanks and the armoured cars. Three dozen. Three dozen soldiers, he thought, holding tight to the Lieutenant on the jolting machine, trying to remember not to have an attack of fever or chills, three dozen soldiers, at how much a dozen?…

Hardenburg reached a level place, and he accelerated the motor. They sped across the empty plain glowing in the last level rays of the sinking moon, surrounded by the flicker of guns on all horizons. Their speed created a great deal of wind, and Christian's cap blew off, but he did not mind, because the wind also made it impossible to smell the Lieutenant any more.

They rode north and west for half an hour. The flickering on the horizon grew stronger and brighter as the motor-cycle slithered along the winding track among the dunes and the occasional patches of scrub grass. There were some burnt-out tanks along the track, and here and there a truck, its naked driveshaft poking up into the dim air like an anti-aircraft gun. There were some new graves, obviously hastily dug, with a rifle, bayonet-down in the ground, and a cap or helmet hanging from the butt, and there were the usual crashed planes, blackened and wind-ripped, with the bent propellers and the broken wings vaguely reflecting glints of the moon from their ragged metal surfaces. But it wasn't until they reached a road considerably to the north, running almost due west, that they met any other troops. Then they suddenly were in a long regimental convoy of trucks, armoured cars, scout cars, carriers and other motorcycles, moving slowly along the narrow track, in overpowering clouds of dust and exhaust fumes.

Hardenburg pulled off to one side, but not too far, because there was no telling, with all the fighting that had gone back and forth over this ground, where you might run over a mine. He stopped the motor-cycle and Christian nearly dropped off with the tension of speed no longer holding him to the seat. Hardenburg swung round and held Christian, steadying him.

"Thank you," Christian said formally and light-headedly. He was having a chill now, and his jaws were clamped in a cold spasm around his swollen tongue.

"You can get into one of those trucks," Hardenburg shouted, waving, with a ridiculous expenditure of energy, at the procession slowly droning past. "But I don't think you should."

"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.

"Lieutenant," the Major said nervously, looking at Hardenburg's tabs, "we are in a great hurry. What is it you wish?"

"I am under orders," Hardenburg said coldly, "to requisition transportation for General Aigner."

The Major opened his mouth sadly, then clicked it shut. He looked hurriedly about him, as though he expected to see General Aigner spring suddenly from the blank desert.

"Nonsense," the Major said finally. "There is a New Zealand patrol coming up this road and we cannot delay…"

"I am under specific orders, Major," said Hardenburg in a sing-song voice. "I do not know anything about a New Zealand patrol."

"Where is General Aigner?" The Major looked around uncertainly again.

"Five kilometres from here," Hardenburg said. "His armoured car threw a tread and I am under specific orders…"

"I have heard it!" the Major screamed. "I have already heard about the specific orders."

"If you will be so kind," Hardenburg said, "you will order the other gentlemen to dismount. The driver may remain."

"Get out of the way," said the Major. He started back towards the car. "I have heard enough of this nonsense."

"Major," said Hardenburg coldly and gently. The Major stopped and faced him, sweating. The other Italians stared at him worriedly, but not understanding the German.

"It is out of the question," said the Major, his voice trembling.

"Absolutely out of the question. This is an Italian Army vehicle and we are on a mission to…"

"I am very sorry, Sir," said Hardenburg. "General Aigner outranks you and this is German Army territory. You will kindly deliver your vehicle."

"Ridiculous!" the Major said, but faintly.

"At any rate," Hardenburg said, "there is a road-block ahead, and the men there have orders to confiscate all Italian transport. By force if necessary. You will then have to explain what three field officers are doing at a moment like this so far from their units. You will also have to explain why you took it upon yourself to disregard a specific order from General Aigner, who is in command of all troops in this sector."

He stared coldly at the Major. The Major raised his hand in a strangled gesture. Hardenburg's expression had not changed at all. It still was weary, disdainful, rather bored. He turned his back on the Major and walked towards the car. Miraculously he even managed for these five steps not to limp.

"Furi!" he said, opening the door to the front of the car.

"Out! The driver will remain," he said in Italian. The man beside the driver looked around beseechingly at the officers in the rear of the car. They avoided the man's glance and stared nervously at the Major, who had followed Hardenburg.

Hardenburg tapped the soldier in the front seat on the arm.

"Furi," he repeated calmly.

The soldier wiped his face. Then, looking down at his boots, he got out of the car and stood unhappily next to the Major. They looked amazingly alike, two soft, dark, disturbed Italian faces, handsome and unmilitary and worried.

"Now," Hardenburg gestured to the other two officers, "you gentlemen…" The wave of his arm was unmistakable.

The two officers looked at the Major. One of them spoke rapidly in Italian. The Major sighed and answered in three words. The two officers got out of the car and stood beside the Major.

"Sergeant," Hardenburg called without looking over his shoulder.

Christian came up and stood at attention.

"Clean the back of the car out, Sergeant," Hardenburg ordered, "and give these gentlemen everything personal that belongs to them."

Christian looked into the back of the car. There were water-cans, three bottles of Chianti, two boxes of rations. Methodically, one by one, he lifted the rations and the bottles and put them at the Major's feet on the side of the road. The three officers stared glumly down at their possessions being unloaded on to the desert sand.

Christian fingered the water-cans thoughtfully. "The water, too, Lieutenant?" he asked.

"The water, too," Hardenburg said without hesitation. Christian put the water-cans beside the ration boxes.

Hardenburg went to the rear of the car, where there were rolls of bedding strapped against the metal. He took out his knife. With three swift slashes he cut the leather straps holding them on to the car. The canvas rolls dropped into the dust. One of the officers started to speak angrily in Italian, but the Major silenced him with an abrupt wave of his hand. The Major stood very erect in front of Hardenburg. "I insist," he said in German, "upon a receipt for the vehicle."

"Naturally," Hardenburg said gravely. He took out his map. He tore off a small rectangular corner and wrote slowly on the back of it. "Will this do?" he asked. He read aloud in a clear, unhurried voice. "Received from Major So and So… I am leaving the place blank, Major, and you can fill it in at your leisure… one Fiat staff car, with driver. Requisitioned by order of General Aigner. Signed, Lieutenant Siegfried Hardenburg."

The Major snatched the paper and read it over carefully. He waved it. "I will present this at the proper place," he said loudly, "in the proper time."

"Of course," Hardenburg said. He stepped into the rear of the car. "Sergeant," he said, sitting down, "sit back here."

Christian got into the car and sat down beside the Lieutenant. The seat was made of beautifully sewn tan leather and there was a smell of wine and toilet-water. Christian stared impassively ahead of him at the burned brown neck of the driver in the front seat. Hardenburg leaned across Christian and slammed the door. "Avanti," he said calmly to the driver.

The driver's back tensed for a moment and Christian saw a flush spreading up the bare neck from below the collar. Then the driver delicately put the car in gear. Hardenburg saluted. One by one, the three officers returned the salute. The private who had been sitting beside the driver seemed too stunned to lift his hand." The car moved smoothly ahead, the dust from its spinning wheels tossing lightly over the small group on the side of the road. Christian felt an almost involuntary muscular pull to turn around, but Hardenburg's hand clamped on his arm. "Don't look!" Hardenburg snapped.

Christian tried to relax into the seat. He waited for the sound of shots, but they didn't come. He looked at Hardenburg. The Lieutenant was smiling, a small frosty smile. He was enjoying it, Christian realized with slow surprise. With all his wounds and with his company lost behind him and God knows what ahead of him, Hardenburg was enjoying the moment, savouring it, delighting in it. Christian couldn't smile, but he sank back into the soft leather, feeling his racked bones settling luxuriously in his resting flesh.

"What would have happened," he said after a while, "if they had decided to hold on to the car?"

Hardenburg smiled, his eyelids half-lowered in sensuous enjoyment as he spoke. "They would have killed me," he said.

"That is all."

Christian nodded gravely. "And the water," he said. "Why did you let them have the water?"

"Ah," Hardenburg said, "that would have been just a little too much." He chuckled as he settled back in the rich leather.

"What do you think will happen to them?" Christian asked.

Hardenburg shrugged carelessly. "They will surrender and go to a British prison. Italians love to go to prison. Now," he said, "keep quiet. I wish to sleep."

A moment later, his breath coming evenly, his bloody, filthy face composed and child-like, he was sleeping. Christian remained awake. Someone, he thought, ought to watch the desert and the driver who sat rigidly before them, holding the speeding, powerful car on the road.

Mersa Matruh was like a candy-box in which a death had taken place. They tried to find someone to report to, but the town was a chaos of trucks and staggering men and broken armour among the ruins. While they were there a squadron of planes came over and dropped bombs on them for twenty minutes. There were more ruins and an ambulance train was spilled open, with men shouting like animals from the twisted wreckage, and everybody seemed intent only upon pressing west, so Hardenburg ordered the driver into the long, slowly moving stream of vehicles and they made their way towards the outskirts of the town. There was a control post there, with a gaunt-eyed Captain with a long sheet of paper mounted on a board. The Captain was taking down names and unit designations from the caked and exhausted men streaming past him. He looked like a lunatic accountant trying to balance impossible accounts in a bank that was tottering in an earthquake. He did not know where their Division Headquarters were, or whether they still existed. He kept saying in a loud, dead voice, through the cake of dust around his lips, "Keep moving. Keep moving. Ridiculous. Keep moving."

When he saw the Italian driver he said, "Leave that one here with me. We can use him to defend the town. I'll give you a German driver."

Hardenburg spoke gently to the Italian. The Italian began to cry, but he got out of the car, and stood next to the Captain with the long sheet of paper. He took his rifle with him, but held it sadly near the muzzle, dragging it in the dust. It looked harmless and inoffensive in his hands as he stared hopelessly at the guns and the trucks and the tottering soldiers rolling past him.

"We will not hold Matruh for ever," Hardenburg said grimly, "with troops like that."

"Of course," the Captain said crazily. "Naturally not. Ridiculous." And he peered into the dust and put down the unit numbers of two anti-tank guns and an armoured car that rumbled past him, smothering him in a fog of dust.

But he gave them a tank driver who had lost his tank and a Messerschmitt pilot who had been shot down over the town to ride with them, and told them to get back to Solium as fast as possible; there was a likelihood things were in better shape that far back.

The tank driver was a large blond peasant who grasped the wheel solidly as he drove. He reminded Christian of Corporal Kraus, dead outside Paris long ago with cherry stains on his lips. The pilot was young, but bald, with a grey, shrunken face, and a bad twitch that pulled his mouth to the right twenty times a minute. "This morning," he kept saying, "this morning I did not have this. It is getting worse and worse. Does it look very bad?"

"No," said Christian, "you hardly notice it."

"I was shot down by an American," the pilot said, wonderingly. "The first American I ever saw." He shook his head as though this was the final and most devastating point scored against German arms in all the campaigns in Africa. "I didn't even know they were here."

The blond peasant was a good driver. They darted in and out of the heavier traffic, making good time on the bombed and pitted road alongside the shining blue waters of the Mediterranean, stretching, peaceful and cool, to Greece, to Italy, to Europe…

It happened the next day.

They still had their car and they had siphoned petrol out of a wrecked truck along the road, and they were in a long, slow line that was moving in fits and starts up the winding, ruined road that climbs from the small, wiped-out village of Solium to the Cyrenaican escarpment. Down below, the fragments of walls gleamed white and pretty about the keyhole-shaped harbour, where the water shone bright green and pure blue as it sliced into the burned land. Wrecks of ships rested in the water, looking like the deposits of ancient wars, their lines wavering gently and peacefully in the slight ripples.

The pilot was twitching worse than ever now and insisted upon looking at himself in the rear-view mirror all the time, in an effort to catch the twitch at the moment of inception and somehow freeze it there to study it. So far he had not been successful, and he had screamed in agony every time he fell off to sleep the night before. Hardenburg was getting very impatient with him.

But there were signs that order was being restored down below. There were anti-aircraft guns set up about the town, and two battalions of infantry could be seen digging in on the eastern edge, and a General had been seen striding back and forth near the harbour, waving his arms about and delivering himself of orders.

Certain armoured elements had been held out of the column that stretched back as far as the eye could reach. They were being assembled in a reserve area behind the infantry and small figures could be seen from the height pouring fuel and handing up ammunition to the men working in the turrets.

Hardenburg was standing up in the rear of the car, surveying everything keenly. He had even managed to shave in the morning, although he was running a high fever. His lips were cracked and covered with sores, he had a new bandage on his forehead, but he looked once more like a soldier. "This is where we stop," he announced. "This is as far as they go."

Then the planes had come in low from the sea, the drumming of their engines drowning the slow roar of the armour on the climbing road. They came in regular, arrow-like formation, like stunt-fliers at a carnival. They looked slow and vulnerable. But somehow, no one was firing at them. Christian could see the bombs dropping in twisting, curling arcs. Then the mountainside was exploding. A truck deliberately toppled over above them, and went crashing ponderously into the ravine a hundred metres below. One boot flew in a long, tumbling curve out from it, as though it had been thrown out from the truck by a man who was resolved to save the first thing that came to his hand from the wreck.

Then a bomb hit close by. Christian felt himself being lifted, and he thought: It is not fair, after having come so far and so hard, it is not at all fair. Then he knew he was hurt, except that there was no pain, and he knew that he was going to go out, and it was quite peaceful and delicious to relax into the spinning, many-coloured, but painless chaos. Then he was out.

Later, he opened his eyes. Something was weighing him down and he pushed against it, but there was no use. There was the yellow smell of cordite and the brassy smell of burned rock and the old smell of dying vehicles, burning rubber and leather and singed paint. Then he saw a uniform and a bandage and he realized that it must be Lieutenant Hardenburg, and Lieutenant Hardenburg was saying calmly, "Get me to a doctor." But only the voice and the tabs and the bandage was Lieutenant Hardenburg because there was no face there at all. There was just a red and white pulpy mass, with the calm voice coming somehow through the red bubbles and the white strips of whatever it had been that had held the inside of Lieutenant Hardenburg's face together. Dreamily, Christian tried to remember where he had seen something like that before. It was hard to remember because he had a tendency to go out again, but finally it came back to him. It was like a pomegranate, roughly and inaccurately broken open, veined and red and with the juice running from the glistening, ripe globules past the knife down on to the shining ivory plate. Then he began to hurt and he didn't think about anything else for a long time.