The Young Lions

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"I SEE visions," Behr was saying, as they walked slowly along the beach, towards their boots, their bare feet sinking into the cool sand. The sound of the waves, rolling mildly in from America three thousand miles away, made a springtime murmur in the still air. "I see visions of Germany one year from now." Behr stopped and lit a cigarette, his steady, workman's hands looking enormous around the frail tube of tobacco. "Ruins. Ruins everywhere. Twelve-year-old children using hand-grenades to steal a kilo of flour. No young men on the streets, except the ones on crutches, because all the rest are in prison camps in Russia and France and England. Old women walking down the streets in potato sacking and suddenly dropping dead of hunger. No factories working, because they have all been bombed to the ground. No government, just military law, laid down by the Russians and the Americans. No schools, no homes, no future…"

Behr paused and stared out to sea. It was late afternoon, amazingly warm and tender for so early in the season on the Normandy coast. The sun was an orange ball sinking peacefully into the water. The coarse grass on the dunes barely moved in the quiet; the road, running in a black winding streamer along the beach, was empty and the pale stone farmhouses in the distance seemed to have been deserted a long time ago.

"No future," Behr repeated reflectively, staring out across the stretched barbed wire to the sea. "No future."

Behr was a Sergeant in Christian's new Company. He was a quiet, powerfully built man of about thirty, whose wife and two children had been killed in Berlin in January by the RAF. He had been wounded on the Russian Front in the autumn, although he refused to talk about it, and had only come to France a few weeks before Christian had arrived there after his leave in Berlin.

In the month that Christian had known him he had grown very fond of Behr. He had seemed to like Christian, too, and they had begun to spend all their spare time together, on long walks through the budding countryside, and drinking the local Calvados and hard cider in the cafes of the village in which their battalion was based. They carried pistols in holsters at their belts when they went out because they were constantly being warned by superior officers about the activities of Maquis bands of Frenchmen. But there had been no incidents at all in that neighbourhood, and Christian and Behr had agreed that the repeated warnings were merely symptoms of the growing nervousness and insecurity of the men higher up. So they wandered carelessly through the farmyard and along the beaches, being polite to the French people they met, who seemed quite friendly, in their grave, reserved, country way.

What Christian liked best of all about Behr was his normality. Everyone else Christian had had anything to do with, ever since the bad night outside Alexandria, had seemed to be overwound, jumpy, bitter, hysterical, overtired… Behr was like the countryside, cool, self-contained, orderly, healthy, and Christian had felt himself relaxing, the snapping, malarial, artillery-worn nerves being soothed into a salutary calm.

When he had first been sent to the battalion in Normandy, Christian had been bitter. Enough, he'd thought, I've had enough. I can't do it any more. In Berlin he'd felt sick and old. He had spent his leave dozing sixteen, eighteen hours a day, in bed, not even getting up when the planes came over at night. Africa, he'd thought, Italy, the torn and never-quite-mended leg, the recurrent malaria, enough. What more do they want from me? And now, obviously, they wanted him to meet the Americans when they came on to the beaches. Too much, he'd thought, brimming with sick self-pity, they have no right to demand it of me. There must be millions of others who have barely been touched. Why not use them?

But then he'd got to know Behr, and the man's quiet unapprehensive strength had slowly cured him. In the peaceful, healthy month he had put on weight and regained his colour. He hadn't had a single headache, and even his bad leg seemed to have made its final useful adjustment to its crooked tendons.

And now Behr was walking beside him on the cool sand of the beach, and saying, disturbingly, "No future, no future. They keep telling us the Americans will never land in Europe. Nonsense. They are whistling to keep up their spirits among the tombstones. Only it will not be their tombstones, but ours. The Americans will land because they have made up their minds to land. I do not object to dying," Behr said, "but I object to dying uselessly. They will land, regardless of what you and I do, and they will go on into Germany, and they will meet the Russians there and when that happens Germany is finished, once and for all."

They walked in silence for a while. Christian felt the sand come up between his bare toes and it reminded him of the time when he was a small boy and had run barefoot in the summer, and what with the memory and the pretty beach and the slow, majestic, happy afternoon, it was hard to be as sober and as thoughtful as Behr was asking him to be.

"I listen to them over the radio, from Berlin," Behr said, "boasting, inviting the Americans to try to come, hinting about secret weapons, predicting that any day now the Russians will be fighting the British and the Americans, and I could beat my head against the wall and weep. You know why I could weep? Not because they are lying, but because the lies are so weak, so barefaced, so contemptuous. That is the word – contemptuous. They sit back there and they say anything that comes into their heads because they despise us, they despise all Germans, the people in Berlin, they know we are fools and believe anything anybody chooses to tell us, because they know we are always ready to die for any nonsense they cook up in an odd fifteen minutes between lunch and the first drink in the afternoon.

"Listen," Behr said, "my father fought for four years in the last war. Poland, Russia, Italy, France. He was wounded three times and he died in 1926 from the effects of the gas he took into his lungs in 1918 in the Argonne Forest. Good God, we are so stupid they even get us to fight the same battles all over again, like a continuous showing in the movies! Same songs, same uniforms, same enemies, same defeats. Only new graves. And this time, too, the end will be different. Germans may never learn anything, but the others will learn this time. And it is different this time, and it is going to be much worse to lose. Last time it was a nice, simple, European-style war. Anyone could understand it, anyone could forgive it, because they'd all been fighting the same kind of war for a thousand years. It was a war within the same culture, one body of civilized Christian gentlemen fighting another body of civilized Christian gentlemen under the same general, predictable set of rules. When the war was over last time, my father marched back to Berlin with his regiment and the girls threw flowers at them along the roads. He took off his uniform and went back to his law office and started trying cases in the civil courts as though nothing had happened. Nobody is going to throw flowers at us this time," Behr said, "not even if there are any of us left to march back to Berlin.

"This time," he said, "this time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don't know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could only be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And now," Behr said in his low, even voice, "and now, after that, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war. The animal is slowly being driven into his last corner, the human being is preparing his final punishment. And now, what do you think will happen to us? I tell you, some nights I thank God my wife and my two children were killed, so that they will not have to live in Germany when this war is over. Sometimes," Behr said, staring out over the water, "I look out there and say to myself, 'Jump in! Try to swim! Swim to England, swim to America, swim five thousand miles, to get away from it.'"

They had reached their boots by now, and they stood over the heavy footgear, staring reflectively down at the dull black leather, as though the boots, hobnailed and blunt, were a symbol of their agony.

"But I cannot swim to America," Behr said. "I cannot swim to England. I must stay here. I am a German and what happens to Germany will happen to me, and that is why I am talking to you like this. You know," he said, "if you mention this to anyone, they will take me out the same night and shoot me…"

"I will not say a word," Christian said.

"I have been watching you for a month," said Behr, "watching and measuring. If I've made a mistake about you, if you're not the sort of man I think you are, it will mean my life. I would like to have taken more time, watching you, but we do not have so much more time…"

"Don't worry about me," Christian said.

"There is only one hope for us," Behr said, staring down at the boots in the sand. "One hope for Germany. We have to show the world that there are still human beings in Germany, not only animals. We have to show that it is possible for the human beings to act for themselves." Behr looked up from the boots and stared in his steady, healthy way at Christian and Christian knew the measuring process was still going on. He did not say anything. He was confused and he resented the necessity of listening to Behr, yet he was fascinated and knew that he had to listen.

"Nobody," said Behr, "not the English, not the Russians, not the Americans, will sign a peace with Germany while Hitler and his people are still in power, because human beings do not sign armistices with tigers. And if anything is to be saved in Germany, we must sign an armistice now, immediately. What does that mean?" Behr asked like a lecturer. "That means that the Germans themselves must get the tigers out, Germans themselves must take the risk, must shed their blood to do it. We cannot wait for our enemies to defeat us and then give us a government as a gift, because then there will be nothing left to govern, and nobody who has the strength or the will to do it. It means that you and I must be ready to kill Germans to prove to the rest of the world that there is some hope for Germany." Again he stared at Christian. He is spiking me down, Christian thought resentfully, with one nail of confidence after another. Still, he could not stop Behr.

"Do not think," Behr continued, "that I am making this up myself, that I am alone. All through the Army, all through Germany, the plan is slowly being formed, people are slowly being recruited. I do not say we will succeed. I merely say that on one side there is certain death, certain ruin. On the other side… A little hope. Also," he went on, "there is only one kind of government that can save us, and if we do it ourselves, we can set up that government. If we wait for the enemy to do it for us, we'll have half a dozen little governments, all of them meaningless, all of them useless, all of them, finally, no governments at all.1920 will seem, then, like Utopia compared to 1950. If we do it ourselves, we can set up a Communist government, and overnight we will be the centre of a Communist Europe, with every other nation on the Continent committed to feeding us, keeping us strong. There is no other form of government for us, no matter what the British and the Americans say, because keeping Germans from killing each other under what the Americans call democracy, for example, would be like trying to keep wolves from the sheepfold by the honour system. You don't keep a crumbling building standing by putting a new coat of bright paint on the outside; you have to go into walls and foundations and put in iron girders to do it. The Americans are naive and they have a lot of fat on their bones, and they can afford the luxury and the waste of democracy, and it has never occurred to an American that their system depends upon the warm layers of fat under their skin and not upon the pretty words they put in their books of law…"

What echo is this? thought Christian vaguely. When was this said before? Then he remembered the morning on the ski slope with Margaret Freemantle long ago, and his own voice saying the same words for another reason. How confusing and tiring it was, he thought, that we always reshuffle the same arguments so that we get the different answer we require from them.

"… we can help right here," Behr was saying. "We have connections with many people in France. Frenchmen who are trying to kill us now. But, overnight, they would become our most dependable allies. And the same thing in Poland, in Russia, in Norway, in Holland – everywhere. Overnight, we would present the Americans with a single, united Europe, with Germany at the centre, and they would have to accept it, whether they liked it or not. Otherwise… otherwise, merely pray that you get killed early in the game. Now," Behr said, "there are certain specific things that will have to be done. Can I tell my people that you will be willing to do them?"

Behr sat down suddenly in the sand and began putting on his socks. He moved with meticulous care, smoothing the wrinkles out of the socks and brushing the sand off them with detailed, unhurried movements of his hands.

Christian stared out to sea. He felt weary and baffled, weighed down by a thick, nagging anger at his friend. What choices you get to make these days! Christian thought resentfully. Between one death and another, between the rope and the rifle, the poison and the knife. If only I were fresh, he thought, if I had had a long, quiet, healthful vacation, if I had never been wounded, never been sick. Then it might be possible to look at this calmly and reasonably, say the correct word, put your hand out for the correct weapon…

"You'd better put your boots on," Behr said. "We have to get back. You don't have to give me an answer now. Think it over."

Think it over, Christian thought, the patient thinking over the cancer in his belly, the condemned man thinking over his sentence, the target thinking over the bullet that is about to smash it.

"Listen," Behr looked up thoughtfully from the sand, a boot in his hand, "if you say anything about this to anyone, you will be found with a knife in your back one morning. No matter what happens to me. I like you very much, I honestly do, but I had to protect myself, and I told my people I was going to talk to you…"

Christian stared down at the calm, healthy, guileless face, like the face of the man who would have come to repair your radio before the war or the face of a traffic policeman helping two small children across a road on their way to school.

"I told you you don't have to worry," Christian said thickly.

"I don't have to think anything over. I can tell you now, I'll…"

Then there was the sound, and Christian automatically hurled himself to the sand. The bullets went in with short, whacking thuds, into the sand around his head, and he felt the strange, painless shock of the iron tearing his arm. He looked up. Fifty feet above him, with the engine suddenly roaring again after the long glide down out of the sky, the Spitfire was shivering through the air, the colours of the roundel gleaming on the wings and the tail assembly bright silver in the long rays of the sun. The plane climbed loudly out over the sea, and in a moment was a small, graceful shape, no larger than a gull, climbing over the sun, climbing into the green and purple of the clear, surprising spring afternoon, climbing to join another plane that was making a wide, sparkling arc over the ocean.

Then Christian looked at Behr. He was sitting erect, looking down thoughtfully at his hands, which were crossed on his belly. There was blood oozing slowly out between the fingers. Behr took his hands away for a second. The blood spurted in uneven, jagged streams. Behr put his hands back, as though he were satisfied with the experiment.

He looked at Christian, and later, remembering the moment, Christian believed that Behr had been smiling gently then.

"This is going to hurt a great deal," Behr said in his calm, healthy way. "Can you get me back to a doctor?"

"They glided down," Christian said, stupidly, gazing at the two twinkling, disappearing specks in the sky. "The bastards had a few rounds of ammunition left before going home, and they couldn't bear the thought of wasting them…"

Behr tried to stand up. He got on to one knee, then slipped back again, to sit there in the sand once more, with the same thoughtful, remote expression on his face. "I can't move," he said. "Can you carry me?"

Christian went over to him and tried to lift him. Then he discovered that his right arm did not work. He looked at it, surprised, remembering all over again that he, too, had been hit. His sleeve was sodden with blood, and the arm was still numb, but already the wound seemed to be clotting in the cloth web of his sleeve. But he could not lift Behr with his one good arm. He got the man half-way up, and then stopped, gasping, holding Behr under the armpit. Behr was making a curious, mechanical noise by this time, clicking and bubbling at the same time.

"I can't do it," Christian said.

"Put me down," Behr said. "Oh, please. Oh God, put me down."

As gently as possible, Christian slid the wounded man back to the sand. Behr sat there, his legs stretched out, his hands back at the red leak in his middle, making his curious, bubbling, piston-like sound.

"I'll get help," Christian said. "Somebody to carry you."

Behr tried to say something, but no words came from his mouth. He nodded. He still looked calm, relaxed, healthy, with his sturdy blond hair in a clean mat over his sunburned face. Christian sat down carefully and tried to put his boots on, but he could not manage it with his left hand. Finally he gave it up. After patting Behr's shoulder with a false reassuring gesture, he started, at a heavy, slow, barefooted trot, towards the road.

When he was still about fifty metres from the road, he saw the two Frenchmen on bicycles. They were going at a good pace, in their regular, tireless pumping rhythm, casting long, fantastic shadows across the marshy fields.

Christian stopped and shouted at them, waving his good hand. "Mes amis! Camarades! Arretez!" The two bicycles slowed down and Christian could see the two men peer doubtfully at him from under their caps. "Blesse! Blesse!" Christian shouted, waving towards Behr, a small, collapsed package now, near the edge of the gleaming sea. "Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!"

The bicycles nearly stopped and Christian could see the two men turning inquiringly towards each other. Then they hunched lower over their handle-bars and quickly gained speed. They passed quite close to Christian, twenty-five or thirty metres away. He got a good look at them, worn, brown, cold faces, expressionless and hard under their dark blue caps. Then they were gone. They made a turn behind a high dune, which obscured the road for almost two kilometres on the other side of it, and then the road and the countryside all around Christian was empty, falling swiftly into the rich blue of twilight, with only the rim of the ocean still violent clear red.

Christian raised his arm, as though to wave at the two men, as though he could not believe that they were not still there, as though it were only a trick of his wound that had made him think they had merely pedalled away. He shook his head. Then he started to trot towards the cluster of houses he could barely see in the distance.

He had to stop after a minute, because he was panting heavily, and his arm had begun to bleed again. Then he heard the scream. He wheeled round and stared through the gathering darkness at the place where he had left Behr. There was a man crouching over Behr, and Behr was trying to crawl away in the sand, with a slow, dying movement. Then Behr screamed again, and the man who had been crouched over him took one long step and grabbed Behr by the collar and turned him over. Christian saw the gleam of a knife in the man's hand, a bright, sharp slice of light against the dull shining silver of the sea. Behr started to scream again, but never finished it.

Christian tore at the holster on his belt with his left hand, but it was a long time before he could get the pistol out. He saw the man put his knife away, and fumble at Behr's belt for the pistol. He got the pistol and stuck it in a pocket, then picked up Christian's boots, which were lying near-by. Christian took his pistol out and laboriously and clumsily got the safety-catch off with his left hand. Then he began firing. He had never fired a pistol with his left hand before and the shots were very wild. But the Frenchman started to run towards the high dune. Christian lumbered down the beach towards Behr's quiet form, stopping from time to time to fire at the swiftly running Frenchman.

By the time Christian reached the spot where Behr was lying stretched out, face up, arms spread wide, the man Christian had been chasing was on his bicycle, and, with the other man, was spurting out from behind the protection of the dune, down the black, bumpy road. Christian fired a last shot at them. It must have been close, because he saw the pair of boots drop from the handle-bars of the second bicycle, as though the man had been frightened by the whistle of the bullet. The Frenchmen did not stop. They bent low over the handle-bars of their bicycles and swept away into the lavender haze that was beginning to obscure the road, the pale sand of the beach, the rows of barbed wire, the small yellow signs with the skulls that said: ATTENTION, MINES.

Then Christian looked down at his friend.

Behr was lying on his back, staring up at the sky, with the last crooked expression of terror on his face, the blood a sticky marsh under his chin, where the Frenchman had made the long, unnecessary slash with his knife. Christian gazed down at Behr stupidly, thinking: No, it is impossible, just five minutes ago he was sitting there, putting on his boots, discussing the future of Germany like a professor of political science… The Englishman gliding down spitefully in the fighter plane, and the French farmer on his bicycle, carrying the hidden knife, had had their own notions of political science.

Christian looked up. The beach was pale and empty, the sea murmured into the sand in a small froth of quiet waves; the footprints on the sand were clearly marked. For a moment, Christian had a wild idea that there was something to be done, that if he did the single correct thing, the five minutes would vanish, the plane would not have swooped down, the two men on bicycles would not have passed by, Behr would even now be rising from the sand, healthy, reflective, whole, asking Christian to make a decision…

Christian shook his head. Ridiculous, he thought, the five minutes had existed, had passed; the careless, meaningless accidents had happened; the bright-eyed boy, going out in the evening to his pint of beer in a Devon pub after an afternoon of cruising over France, had spotted the two tiny figures on the sand; the sun-wrinkled farmer had irrevocably used the knife; the future of Germany would be decided with no further comment by Anton Behr, widower, late of Germany, late of Rostov, late coast-walker and philosopher.

Christian bent down. Slowly, panting heavily, he pulled first one boot then another from the feet of his friend. The curs, he thought as he worked, at least they're not going to get these boots.

Then, carrying the boots, he scuffed heavily through the sand towards the road. He picked up his own boots, which the Frenchman had dropped. Then, carrying all four boots against his chest in the crook of his wounded arm, he plodded, barefoot, the road feeling smooth and cool under his soles, towards Battalion Headquarters five kilometres away.

With his arm in a sling, not hurting too much, Christian watched them bury Behr the next day. The whole Company was on parade, very solemn, with their boots polished and their rifles oiled. The Captain took the occasion to make a speech.

"I promise you men," the Captain said, standing erect, holding his belly in, ignoring the thick north-coast rain that was falling around him, "that this soldier will be avenged." The Captain had a high, scratchy voice, and spent most of his time in the farmhouse where he was billeted with a thick-legged Frenchwoman whom he had brought to Normandy with him from Dijon, where he had been stationed before. The Frenchwoman was pregnant now and made that an excuse to eat enormously five times a day.

"Avenged," the Captain repeated. "Avenged." The rain dripped down his visor and on to his nose. "The people of this area will learn that we are strong friends and terrible enemies, that the lives of you men are precious to me and to our Fuehrer. We are at this moment at the point of apprehending the murderer…"

Christian thought dully of the English pilot, probably sitting this moment, because it was a wet day, unapprehended, in a snug corner of a tavern, with a girl, warming his beer between his hands, laughing in that infuriating, superior English way, as he described the crafty, profitable slide down the Norman sky the day before, to catch two barefooted Huns, out for their constitutional at sunset.

"We shall teach these people," the Captain thundered, "that these wanton acts of barbarism do not pay. We have extended the hand of friendship, and if in return we are faced with the assassin's knife, we shall know how to repay it. These acts of treachery and violence do not exist in themselves. The men who perform them are spurred on by their masters across the Channel. Beaten again and again on the battlefield, the savages, who call themselves English and American soldiers, hire others to fight like pickpockets and burglars. Never in the history of warfare," the Captain's voice went on, growing stronger in the rain, "have nations violated the laws of humanity so completely as our enemies today. Bombs dropped on the innocent women and children of the Fatherland, knives planted in the throats of our fighting men in the dark of night by their hirelings in Europe. But," the Captain's voice rose to a scream, "it will avail them nothing! Nothing! I know what effect this has on me and on every other German. We grow stronger, we grow more bitter, our resolution increases to fury!"

Christian looked around him. The other men were standing sadly in the rain, their faces not resolute, not furious, mild, subtly frightened, a little bored. The Battalion was a makeshift one, with many men who had been wounded on other fronts, and the latest culling of slightly older and slightly disabled civilians and a heavy sprinkling of eighteen-year-olds. Suddenly, Christian sympathized with the Captain. He was addressing an army that did not exist, that had been wiped out in a hundred battles. He was addressing the phantoms that these men should have been, the million men capable of fury who now lay quietly in their graves in Africa and Russia.

"But finally," the Captain was shouting, "they will have to come out of their holes. They will have to crawl out of their soft beds in England, they will have to stop depending upon their hired assassins, and they will have to come to meet us on the battlefield here like soldiers. I glory in that thought, I live for that day, I shout to them, 'Come, see what it is to fight the German like a soldier!' I face that day," the Captain said solemnly, "with iron confidence. I face it with love and devotion. And I know that each one of you feels the same identical fire."

Christian looked once more at the ranks of soldiers. They stood drearily, the rain soaking through their synthetic rubber capes, their boots sinking slowly into the French mud.

"This Sergeant," the Captain gestured dramatically to the open grave, "will not be with us in the flesh on the great day, but his spirit will be with us, buoying us up, crying to us to stand firm when we begin to falter."

The Captain wiped his face and then made place for the Chaplain, who rattled through the prayer. The Chaplain had a bad cold and wanted, before it turned into pneumonia, to get in from the rain.

The two men with spades came up and started shovelling in the dripping fresh mud piled to one side.

The Captain shouted an order, and marching erect, trying to keep his behind from waggling too much under his coat, he led his Company out of the small cemetery, which had only eight other graves in it, through the stone-flagged main street of the village. There were no civilians in the street, and the shutters of all the houses were closed against the rain, the Germans and the war.

The SS Lieutenant was very hearty. He had come over from Headquarters in a big staff car. He smoked little Cuban cigars one after another and had a bright, mechanical smile, like a beer salesman entering a rathskeller. There was also a smell of brandy about him. He sat back in the comfortable rear compartment of the car, with Christian beside him, as they sped along the beach road to the next little village, where a suspect was being detained for Christian to identify.

"You got a good look at the two men, Sergeant?" the SS Lieutenant said, nibbling at his cigar, smiling mechanically as he peered at Christian. "You could identify them easily?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"Good." The Lieutenant beamed at Christian. "This will be very simple. I like a simple case. Some of the others, the other investigators, grow melancholy when they are in an open-and-shut case. They like to pretend they are great detectives. They like to have everything complicated, obscure, so that they can show how brilliant they are. Not me. Oh, no, not me." He beamed warmly at Christian. "Yes or no, this is me man, this is not the man, that is the way I like it. Leave the rest of it to the intellectuals. I was a machine operator in a leather-goods factory in Regensburg before the war, I do not pretend to be profound. I have a simple philosophy for dealing with the French. I am direct with them, and I expect them to be direct with me." He looked at his watch. "It is now three-thirty pm. You will be back at your Company by five o'clock. I promise you. I make it fast. Yes or no. One way or another. Goodbye. Would you like a cigar?"

"No, Sir," said Christian.

"Other officers," said the Lieutenant, "would not sit in the back like this with a Sergeant, offering him cigars. Not me. I never forget that I worked in a leather-goods factory. That is one of the faults of the German Army. They all forget they ever were civilians or ever will be civilians again. They are all Caesars and Bismarcks. Not me. Plain, open and shut, you do business with me and I'll do business with you."

By the time the big car drove up to the town hall, in the basement of which the suspect was locked up, Christian had decided that the SS Lieutenant, whose name was Reichburger, was a complete idiot, and Christian would not have trusted him to conduct an investigation of a missing fountain pen.

The Lieutenant sprang out of the car and strode briskly and cheerfully into the ugly stone building, smiling his beer salesman's smile. Christian followed him into a bare, dirty-walled room, whose only adornment, besides a clerk and three peeling cafe chairs, was a caricature of Winston Churchill, naked, which was tacked on a piece of cardboard and used by the local SS headquarters detachments as a dart board.

"Sit down, sit down." The Lieutenant waved to a chair.

"Might as well make yourself comfortable. After all, you must not forget, you have been recently wounded."

"Yes, Sir." Christian sat down. He was sorry he had told the Lieutenant he could recognize the two Frenchmen. He detested the Lieutenant and didn't want to have anything more to do with him.

"Have you been wounded before?" The Lieutenant smiled at him fondly.

"Yes," said Christian. "Once. Twice really. Once badly, in Africa. Then I was scratched in the head outside Paris in 1940."

"Wounded three times." The Lieutenant grew sober for a moment. "You are a lucky man. You will never be killed. Obviously, there is something watching over you. I do not look it, I know, but I am a fatalist. There are some men who are born to be merely wounded, others to be killed. Myself, I have not been touched so far. But I know I shall be killed before the war is over." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled widely. "I am that type. So I enjoy myself. I live with a woman who is one of the best cooks in France, and on the side, she also has two sisters." He winked at Christian and chuckled. "The bullet will hit a well-satisfied man."

The door opened and an SS private brought in a man in manacles. The man was tall and weatherbeaten, and he was trying very hard to show that he was not afraid. He stood at the door, his hands locked behind him, and, by an obvious effort of the muscles of his face, wrestled a trembling look of disdain to his lips.

The Lieutenant smiled fondly at him. "Well," the Lieutenant said, in thick French, "we will not waste your time, Monsieur." He turned to Christian. "Is this one of the men, Sergeant?"

Christian peered at the Frenchman. The Frenchman took a deep breath, and stared back at Christian, his face a dumb combination of puzzlement and controlled hatred. Christian felt a small, violent tick of anger pulling at his brain. In this face, laid bare by stupidity and courage, there was the whole history of the cunning and malice and stubbornness of the French – the mocking silence in the trains when they rode in the same compartments with you, the derisive, scarcely stifled laughter when you walked out of a cafe in which there were two or more of them drinking at a corner table, the 1918 scrawled arrogantly on the church wall the very first night in Paris… The man scowled at Christian, and even in the sour grimace there was a hint of dry laughter at the corners of his mouth. It would be most satisfactory, Christian thought, to knock in those raw, yellow teeth with the butt of a rifle. He thought of Behr, so reasonable and decent, who had hoped to work with people like this. Now Behr was dead and this man was still alive, grinning and triumphant.

"Yes," Christian said. "That's the man."

"What?" the man said stupidly. "What? He's crazy."

The Lieutenant reached out with a swiftness that his rather chubby, soft body gave no evidence of possessing and clubbed the heel of his hand across the man's chin. "My dear friend," the Lieutenant said, "you will speak only when spoken to." He stood above the Frenchman, who looked more puzzled than ever, and who kept working his lips over his teeth and sucking in the little trickles of blood from the bruised mouth. "Now," the Lieutenant said, in French, "this is established – yesterday afternoon you cut the throat of a German soldier on the beach six kilometres north of this village."

"Please," the Frenchman said dazedly.

"Now, it only remains to hear from you one more fact…" the Lieutenant paused. "The name of the man who was with you."

"Please," the man said. "I can prove I did not leave the village all the afternoon."

"Of course," the Lieutenant said amiably, "you can prove anything, with a hundred signatures an hour. We are not interested."

"Please," said the Frenchman.

"We are only interested in one thing," said the Lieutenant.

"The name of the man who was with you when you got off your bicycle to murder a helpless German soldier."

"Please," said the Frenchman, "I do not own a bicycle."

The Lieutenant nodded to the SS private. The soldier tied the Frenchman into one of the chairs, not roughly.

"We are very direct," said the Lieutenant. "I have promised the Sergeant he will get back to his Company for dinner and I intend to keep my promise. I merely promise you that if you do not tell me, you will regret it later. Now…"

"I do not even own a bicycle," the Frenchman mumbled.

The Lieutenant went over to the desk and opened a drawer. He took out a pair of pliers and walked slowly, opening and closing the pliers, with a squeaking, homely sound, behind the chair in which the Frenchman was tied. The Lieutenant bent over briskly, and seized the Frenchman's right hand in one of his own. Then, quite briskly, and carelessly, with a sharp, professional jerk, he pulled out the nail of the man's thumb.

The scream had no connection with anything that Christian had ever heard before.

The execution was in the cellar of the town hall. There was a long, damp basement, lit by two bare, bright bulbs. The floor was made out of hard-packed earth and there were two stakes knocked into it near the wall at one end. There were two shallow coffins, made out of unpainted wood, that gleamed rawly in the harsh light, lying behind the stakes. The cellar was used as a prison, too, and other condemned men had written their final words to the living world in chalk and charcoal on the sweating walls.

"There is no God," Christian read, standing behind the six soldiers who were to do the shooting, and "Merde, Merde, Merde," and, "My name is Jacques. My father's name was Raoul. My mother's name was Clarisse. My sister's name was Simone. My uncle's name was Etienne. My son's name was…" The man had never finished that.

The two condemned men shuffled in, each between two soldiers. They moved as though their legs had not been used for a long time.

The Sergeant in command of the squad gave the first order. His voice sounded strange, too parade-like and official for the shabby cellar.

The shots cut the smaller man's cords and he toppled forward. The Sergeant ran up hurriedly and put the coup de grace in, first to the small man's head, then to the other man's. The smell of the powder for a moment obscured the other, damp, corrupt smells of the cellar.

The Lieutenant nodded to Christian. Christian followed him upstairs and out into the foggy grey light, his ears still ringing from the rifles.

The Lieutenant smiled faintly. "How did you like it?" he asked.

"All right," said Christian, evenly. "I didn't mind it."

"Excellent," said the Lieutenant. "Have you had your breakfast?"

"No."

"Come with me," the Lieutenant said. "I have breakfast waiting. It's only five doors up."

They walked side by side, their footsteps muffled in the pearly fog off the sea.

The Lieutenant stopped and faced Christian, smiling a little.

"They weren't the men at all, were they?" he said.

Christian hesitated, but only for a moment. "Frankly, Sir," he said, "I am not sure."

The Lieutenant smiled more broadly. "You're an intelligent man," he said lightly. "The effect is the same. It proves to them that we are serious." He patted Christian on the shoulder. "Go round to the kitchen and tell Renee I told you she was to feed you well, the same breakfast she brings me. You speak French well enough for that, don't you?"

"Yes, Sir," Christian said.

"Good." The Lieutenant gave Christian's shoulder a final pat and went in through the large solid door in the grey house with the geranium pots at the windows and in the garden in front. Christian went round to the back door. He had a large breakfast, with eggs and sausage and coffee with real cream.