The Young Lions

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE dead horses were beginning to bloat and smell in the strong summer sun. The odour mingled with the acrid, medicinal smell of the ruptured ambulance convoy that lay, a jumble of overturned wagons, spilled pungent powders, scattered heaps of papers, torn and useless red crosses, along the road. The dead and the wounded had been removed, but otherwise the convoy remained, curving up the long hill, just as it had been left after the dive-bombers had passed over it.

Christian went by it slowly, on foot, still carrying his Schmeisser, in a straggling group of perhaps twenty men, none of whom was known to him. He had picked them up early in the morning, after he had become separated from the hastily organized platoon to which he had been posted three days before. The platoon, he was sure, had surrendered during the night. Christian felt a sombre sense of relief that he was no longer responsible for them or their actions.

Looking at the dead convoy, sadly marked with the red crosses that had done no good, he was overwhelmed with a sense of anger and despair. Anger at the swooping, 400-mile-an-hour young airmen who had come upon the slow-moving wagons toiling up the hill with their load of broken and dying men and had, in the wanton fury of destruction, rowelled it with their machine-guns and rockets.

At the head of the convoy was a wagon on which was mounted an 88-millimetre anti-aircraft gun. The horses were dead in the traces, in wild attitudes of gallop and fear, and there was blood all over the gun and its mounting. The German Army, Christian thought dully, as he went past, horses against aeroplanes. At least, in Africa, when he retreated, he had retreated with the aid of engines. He remembered the motor-cycle and Hardenburg, the Italian staff car, the hospital plane that had crossed the Mediterranean with him, carrying him to Italy. It seemed to be the fate of the German Army, as a war went on, to go back to more and more primitive methods of fighting. Ersatz. Ersatz petrol, ersatz coffee, ersatz blood, ersatz soldiers…

He seemed to have been retreating all his life. He had no longer any memory of ever advancing anywhere. Retreat was the condition, the general weather of existence. Going back, going back, always hurt, always exhausted, always with the smell of German dead in his nostrils, always with enemy planes flickering behind his back, their guns dancing brightly in their wings, their pilots grinning because they were safe and they were killing hundreds of men a minute.

There was a loud blowing of a horn behind him, and Christian scrambled to one side. A small, closed car sped past, its wheels sending a fine cloud of dust over him. Christian got a glimpse of clean-shaven faces, a man smoking a cigar…

Then somebody was shouting, and there was the howl of engines above him. Christian lumbered away from the road and dived into one of the carefully spaced holes that had thoughtfully been provided by the German Army along many of the roads of France for the use of its troops at moments like this. He crouched deep in the damp earth, covering his head, not daring to look up, listening to the returning whine of the engines and the savage tearing sound of the guns. After two passes, the planes moved off. Christian stood up. He climbed out of the hole. None of the men he had been walking with had been touched, but the little car was overturned, against a tree, and it was burning. Two of the men who had been in it had been thrown clear, and were lying very still in the centre of the road. The other two men were burning in a welter of spilled petrol, torn rubber and whipcord upholstery.

Christian walked slowly to where the two men were lying facedown on the road. He did not have to touch them to see that they were dead.

"Officers," said a voice behind him. "They wanted to ride." The man behind him spat.

The other men walked past the two dead forms and the burning car. For a moment Christian thought of ordering some of the men to help him move the bodies, but it would have meant an argument, and at the moment it did not seem very important whether two bodies, more or less, were put to one side or not.

Christian slowly started eastward once more, feeling his bad leg shiver beneath him. He blew his nose and spat again and again to try to get the smell and the taste of the dead horses and the spilled medicine out of his mouth and throat.

The next morning he had a stroke of luck. He had pulled away from the other men during the night and had marched slowly on to the outskirts of a town, which lay across his path in the moonlight, dark, empty, seemingly lifeless. He had decided not to try to get through it by himself, at night, since it was all too possible that the inhabitants, seeing a lone soldier wandering past in the dark, might pick him off, rob him of his gun, boots and uniform, and throw him behind a hedge to rot. So he had camped under a tree, eaten sparingly of his emergency ration, and slept until daybreak.

Then he had hurried through the town, almost trotting down the cobbled road, past the grey church, the inevitable statue of victory with palms and bayonets in front of the town hall, the shuttered shops. No one was stirring. The French seemed to have vanished from the face of the land as the Germans retreated through it. Even the dogs and the cats seemed to understand that it was safer for them to hide until the bitter tide of defeated soldiers had passed.

It was on the other side of the town that his luck changed. He was hurrying, because he was still in sight of the walls of the last row of houses, and his breath was coming hoarsely into his lungs, when he saw, coming around a bend in the road ahead of him, a figure on a bicycle.

Christian stopped. Whoever it was on the bicycle was in a hurry. He kept his head down and pedalled swiftly towards where Christian was standing.

Christian moved to the middle of the road and waited. He saw that it was a boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, capless, dressed in a blue shirt and old French Army trousers, racing bumpily through the cool, misty dawn light between the still rows of poplars on each side of the road, casting a soft, elongated shadow of legs and wheels on the road in front of him.

The boy saw Christian when he was only thirty yards away. He stopped suddenly.

"Come here," Christian shouted hoarsely, in German, forgetting his French. "Walk over here."

He started towards the boy. For a moment the two of them stared at each other. The boy was very pale, with curly black hair and dark, frightened eyes. With a swift, animal-like movement, the boy picked up the bicycle by the front wheel and whirled it round. He was running with the bicycle before Christian could unsling his gun. The boy jumped on, bent over, with his blue shirt filling with wind behind him, and pedalled furiously back along the road, away from Christian.

Without thinking, Christian opened fire. He caught the boy with the second burst. The bicycle careered into the ditch alongside the road. The boy went sliding across the road to the other side, and lay there without moving.

Christian lumbered quickly along the uneven road, his boots making a thick thudding sound in the silent morning. He bent over the bicycle and picked it up. He rolled it back and forth. It was unharmed. Then he looked at the boy. The boy's head was twisted towards him, very pale and unmarked under the curly hair. There was a light fuzz of moustache under the slender nose. A red stain slowly spread across the back of the faded blue shirt. Christian made a movement towards the boy, but thought better of it. They'd have been bound to hear the shooting in the town, and if they found him there, they'd make short work of him.

Christian swung himself up on the bicycle and started east. After the weary days of walking, the ground seemed to spin past beneath him with wonderful swiftness and ease. His legs felt light; the dawning breeze against his cheeks was soft and cool; the light dewy green of the foliage on both sides of the road was pleasing to the eye. Now, he thought, it needn't be only officers who ride.

The roads of France seemed to have been made for bicyclists, with the paving in fair condition, and no high hills to slow a man down. It would be easy for a man to do two hundred kilometres a day… He felt youthful, strong, and for the first time since he had seen the first glider coming down out of the coastal sky that bad morning so long ago, he felt as though there was some hope for him. After half an hour, as he was gliding down a gentle slope between two fields of half-grown wheat, pale yellow in the morning sun, he found himself whistling, a vacation-like, holiday-like, tuneless, heart-free, merry sound, rising gay and natural in his throat.

All that day, he fled east along the road to Paris. He passed groups of men, walking, moving slowly in overloaded farm wagons stubbornly loaded with pictures and furniture and barrels of cider. He had passed refugees before in France, a long time ago, but it had been more natural then, because they were mostly women, children and old men, and you knew they had some reason to hold on to mattresses and kitchen pots and odds and ends of furniture because they hoped to set up domestic lives somewhere else. But it was strange to see a German Army trudging along in this way, young men with guns and uniforms, who could only hope either finally to be re-formed on some line and by some miracle turned around to fight – or to fall into the hands of the enemy who, it was rumoured, were closing in on them from all directions. In either case, framed paintings from Norman chateaux and cloisonne lamps would do them a minimum amount of good. With set faces, past all reasonableness, the defeated men streamed slowly towards Paris on the summer roads, officerless, without formations or discipline, abandoned to the tanks and the planes of the Americans who were following them. Occasionally a wheezing French bus, with a charcoal furnace, would drag past, loaded down with dusty soldiers, who on the hills would have to get out to push. Once in a while an officer could be seen, but he would keep his mouth shut, look as lost and deserted as any of the others.

And, meanwhile, the country, in the full bloom of summer, with the geraniums high and pink and red along the farmers' walls, was shining and lovely in the long perfect days.

By evening, Christian was exhausted. He hadn't ridden a bicycle for years, and in the first hour or two he had gone too fast. Also, twice during the day, shots had been fired at him, and he had heard the bullets snipping by, past his head, and had driven himself frantically out of danger. The bicycle was wavering almost uncontrollably all over the road as he slowly pushed into the square of quite a fair-sized town at sunset. He was pleased, dully, to see that the square was full of soldiers, sitting in the cafes, lying exhausted and asleep on the stone benches in front of the town hall, tinkering hopelessly with broken-down 1925 Citroens in an attempt to get them to move just a few more kilometres. Here, for a few moments, at least, he could be safe.

A drink, he thought, a drink will give me a breathing spell, a drink will keep me going.

He walked stiffly through the open door of a cafe, wheeling the bicycle at his side. There were some soldiers sitting at the back of the room and they looked at him briefly and without surprise, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for German sergeants to enter cafes wheeling bicycles, or leading horses, or at the controls of armoured cars. Christian carefully put the bicycle against the wall and placed a chair against the back wheel. Then he sat down slowly in the chair. He gestured to the old man behind the bar. "Cognac," he said. "A double cognac."

Christian looked around the shadowy room. There were the usual signs in French and German, with the rules for the sale of alcohol on them, and the legend that only aperitifs would be sold on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was a Thursday, Christian remembered hazily, but the special nature of this particular Thursday might be said to countermand even the regulations of a Minister of the French Government at Vichy. At any rate, the Minister who had delivered himself of the regulations was no doubt running as fast as he could at the moment and would probably be grateful for a little cognac himself. The only law anyone could be expected to observe on the evening of this summer day was the law of flight, the only authority the guns of the First and Third American Armies, not yet heard in this part of the country, but already felt, already exercising a premature and dreadful sovereignty.

The old Frenchman shuffled over with a small glass of brandy. The old man had a beard like a Jewish prophet and his teeth smelled terribly of decay, Christian noticed irritably. Was there no escaping, even in this cool dark place, the odours of ferment and mortality, the scent of dying bone and turning flesh?

"Fifty francs," said the old man, leaning horribly over Christian, his hand still cautiously on the glass.

For a moment Christian thought of arguing with the old thief about the overcharge. The French, he thought, making a good thing out of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, friend and enemy. God, he thought, let the Americans have them for a while, see how happy they'll be about it. He tossed the fifty francs, worn scraps of paper printed by the German Army, on the table. He would have little use for francs, soon, anyway, and he thought of the old man trying to collect on the printed, flimsy German promise from the new conquerors.

Hazily, Christian remembered that other bar in Rennes, long ago, and the group of soldiers with their tunics unbuttoned, loud and boisterous and rich, drinking cheap champagne. No one was drinking champagne now, and no one was loud, and if anyone talked, he spoke in a single low phrase and was answered in a monosyllable. Yes. No. Will we die tomorrow? What will the enemy do to us? Is the road to Rennes passable? Did you hear what happened to the Panzer Lehr Division? What does the BBC say? Is it over yet? Is it over? Dimly, toying with his glass, Christian wondered whatever had happened in the long years to the private in the Pioneers he had reported for improper conduct. Confined to barracks for a month, Christian thought, leaning back against his bicycle, how wonderful it would be to be confined to barracks for a month. Confine the First American Army to barracks for a month, confine the Eighth Air Force, confine all Austrians in the German Army, for improper conduct…

He sipped gently at the cognac. It was raw and probably not even cognac. Probably made three days ago and doctored with plain spirits. The French, the miserable French. He looked at the old man behind the bar, hating him. He knew that the old man had been dragged out of doddering retirement for this week's work. Probably a sturdy fat merchant and his plump, sweaty wife owned this place, and had run it until now. But when they saw how things were going, had seen the first scum of the German tide racing through the town, they had resuscitated the old man and put him behind the bar, feeling that even the Germans would not take out their venom on such a poor specimen. Probably the owner and his wife were tucked away somewhere in a safe attic, eating a veal steak and a salad, with a bottle of strong wine, or they were climbing into bed with each other. (Remember Corinne in Rennes, the heavy flesh and the milkmaid's hands, and the coarse dyed ropes of hair.) The owner and his wife, chubbily linked in a warm feather bed, were probably chuckling at this moment at the thought of the drained soldiers paying fantastic prices to Papa in their dirty estaminet, and at the dead Germans all along the road, and at the Americans rushing towards the town, eager to pay even higher prices for their wretched raw alcohol.

He stared at the old man. The old man stared back, his little pebbles of eyes black and insolent, secure and defiant in the rotting, ancient face. Old man with thousands of printed, useless francs in his pockets, old man with bad teeth, old man who felt he would out-live half the young men sitting silently in his daughter's establishment, old man roaring within him at the thought of what dire handling lay ahead for these almost-captured and almost-dead foreigners huddled around the stained tables in the dusk.

"Monsieur wishes…?" the old man said in his high wheezy voice that sounded as though he were listening to a joke no one else in the room had heard.

"Monsieur wishes nothing," Christian said. The trouble was, they had been too lenient with the French. There were enemies and there were friends, and there was nothing in between. You loved or you killed, and anything else you did was politics, corruption and weakness, and finally you paid for it. Hardenburg, faceless in Capri in the room with the Burn, had understood, but the politicians hadn't.

The old man veiled his eyes. Yellow, wrinkled lids, like old dirty paper, hooded down over the black, mocking pebbles of his pupils. He turned away and Christian felt that somehow the old man had got the better of him.

He drank his cognac. The alcohol was beginning to have an effect on him. He felt at once sleepy and powerful, like a giant in a dream, capable of slow, terrible movements, and enormous, semi-conscious blows.

"Finish your drink, Sergeant." It was a low, remembered voice, and Christian looked up, squinting through the increasing evening haze at the figure standing before his table.

"What?" he asked stupidly.

"I want to talk to you, Sergeant." Whoever it was, was smiling.

Christian shook his head and opened his eyes very wide. Then he recognized the man. It was Brandt, in an officer's uniform, standing over him, dusty, thin, capless, but Brandt, and smiling.

"Brandt…"

"Sssh." Brandt put his hand on Christian's arm. "Finish your drink and come on outside."

Brandt turned and went outside. Christian saw him there, standing against the cafe window, with his back to it, and a ragged column of labour troops trudging past him. Christian gulped down the rest of the cognac and stood up. The old man was watching him again. Christian pushed the chair away and carefully grabbed hold of the handle-bars of the bicycle and wheeled it towards the door. He could not resist turning at the door for one last encounter with the Frenchman's pebbly, mocking eyes, that remembered 1870, Verdun, the Marne and 1918. The old man was standing in front of a poster, printed in French but inspired by the Germans, of a snail horned with one American flag and one British flag, creeping slowly up the Italian peninsula. The words on the poster ironically pointed out that even a snail would have reached Rome by now… The final insolence, Christian felt. Probably the old man had put the poster up this very week, straight-faced and cackling, so that every fleeing German who came by could look and suffer.

"I hope," the old man wheezed, in that voice that sounded like laughter heard in a home for the aged, "that Monsieur enjoyed his drink."

The French, Christian thought furiously, they will beat us all yet.

He went out and joined Brandt.

"Walk with me," Brandt said softly. "Walk slowly around the square. I don't want anyone to hear what I am going to say to you."

He started along the narrow pavement, along the shuttered row of shops. Christian noticed with surprise that Brandt looked considerably older than when last they met, that there was considerable grey at the photographer's temples, and heavy lines around his eyes and mouth, and that he was very thin.

"I saw you come in," Brandt said, "and I couldn't believe my eyes, I watched you for five minutes to make sure it was you. What in God's name have they done to you?"

Christian shrugged, a little angry at Brandt, who, after all, didn't look magnificently healthy himself. "They moved me about a little," Christian said. "Here and there. What are you doing here?"

"They sent me to Normandy," Brandt said. "Pictures of the invasion, pictures of captured American troops, atrocity pictures of French women and children dead from American bombing. The usual thing. Keep walking. Don't stop. If you settle down anywhere, some damned officer is liable to come over and ask you for your papers and try to assign you to a unit. There are just enough busybodies about to make it unpleasant."

They walked methodically along the side of the square, like soldiers with a purpose and under orders. The grey stone of the buildings was purple in the sunset, and the lounging and restless men looked hazy and indefinite against the shuttered windows.

"What do you intend to do?" Brandt said.

Christian chuckled. He was surprised to hear the dry sound come out of his throat. For some reason, after the many days of running, dictated only by the threat of the onrushing enemy, the thought that it was possible for him to have any intentions of his own had struck him as amusing.

"What are you laughing at?" Brandt looked at him suspiciously, and Christian straightened his face, because he had the feeling that if he antagonized Brandt, Brandt would withhold valuable information from him.

"Nothing," Christian said. "Honestly, nothing. I'm a little tired. I have just won the cross-country nine-day all-European bicycle race, and I'm not exactly in control of myself. I'll be all right."

"Well?" Brandt asked querulously. Christian could tell from the timbre of the photographer's voice that he was very near the thin edge of breaking, himself. "Well, what do you intend to do?"

"Bicycle back to Berlin," Christian said. "I expect to equal the existing record."

"Don't joke, for the love of God," Brandt said.

"I love pedalling through the historic French countryside," Christian said light-headedly, "conversing with the historic natives in their native costumes of hand-grenades and Sten guns, but if something better came up, I might be interested"

"Look here," Brandt said, "I have a two-seater English car in a farmer's barn one mile from here…"

Christian became very cool and all tendency to laugh left him.

"Keep moving!" Brandt snapped, under his breath. "I told you not to stop. I want to get back to Paris. My idiotic driver left last night. We were strafed yesterday and he got hysterical. He went towards the American lines about midnight."

"Well…?" Christian asked, trying to seem very keen and understanding. "Why've you been hanging around here all day?"

"I can't drive," Brandt said bitterly. "Imagine that, I never learned how to drive a car!"

This time Christian couldn't keep his laughter down. "Oh, my God," he said, "the modern industrial man!"

"It isn't so funny," said Brandt. "I'm too highly strung to learn how. I tried once, in 1935, and I nearly killed myself."

What a century, Christian thought, enjoying this sudden advantage over a man who had before this done so well out of the war, what a century to pick to be highly strung! "Why didn't you get one of these fellows…" Christian gestured towards the men lounging on the town hall steps, "to drive you?"

"I don't trust them," Brandt said darkly, with a glance around him. "If I told you half the stories I've heard about officers being killed by their own troops in the last few days… I've been sitting in this damned little town for nearly twenty-four hours, trying to think what to do, trying to find a face I really could trust. But they all travel in groups, they all have comrades, and there's only two places in the car. And, who knows, by tomorrow the enemy may be here, or the road to Paris will be closed… Christian, I confess to you, when I saw your face in that cafe, I had to hold on to myself to keep from crying. Listen…" Brandt grabbed his arm anxiously. "There's nobody with you? You're alone, aren't you?"

"Don't worry," Christian said. "I'm alone."

Suddenly Brandt stopped. He wiped his face nervously. "It never occurred to me," he whispered. "Can you drive?"

The anguish plain on Brandt's face as he asked the simple, foolish question that at this moment, at the time of the crumbling of an army, had become the focal point and tragedy of his life, made Christian feel grotesquely and protectively full of pity for the thin, ageing ex-artist. "Don't worry, comrade." Christian patted Brandt's shoulder soothingly. "I can drive."

"Thank God," Brandt sighed. "Will you come with me?"

Christian felt a little weak and giddy. Safety was being offered here, speed, home, life… "Try and stop me," he said. They grinned weakly like two drowning men who somehow have contrived, by helping each other, to reach shore.

"Let's start at once," Brandt said.

"Wait," said Christian. "I want to give this bicycle to someone else. Let someone else have a chance to get away…" He peered at the shadowy figures stirring around the town hall, trying to devise some innocent way of choosing the lucky man to survive.

"No." Brandt pulled Christian back towards him. "We can use the bicycle. The Frenchman at the farm will give us all the food we can carry for that bicycle."

Christian hesitated, but only for a second. "Of course," he said evenly. "What could I have been thinking of?"

With Brandt looking back nervously over his shoulder to make certain they were not being followed, and Christian wheeling the bicycle, they walked out of the town, back over the road Christian had traversed just half an hour before. At the first turning, where a dusty road slid out into the main highway between banks of flowering hawthorn bushes, fragrant and heavy in the still evening air, they turned off. After walking for a quarter of an hour, they reached the comfortable, geranium-bordered farmhouse and the large stone barn in which, under a pile of hay, Brandt had hidden the two-seater.

Brandt had been right about the bicycle. When, under the first stars of evening, they started out along the narrow road leading from the farmhouse, they had with them a ham, a large can of milk, half a large cheese, a litre of Calvados and two of cider, half a dozen thick loaves of coarse brown bread and a whole basketful of eggs that the farmer's wife had hard-boiled for them while they were taking the hay off the car. The bicycle had proved most useful.

With full stomach, relaxed behind the wheel of the small, humming, well-conditioned car, riding past the pale glow of the hawthorns into the main road in the moonlit evening, Christian smiled gently to himself. Meeting the boy in the blue shirt on the empty road early that morning, he reflected, had proved considerably more profitable than he had expected. They drove back through the town without stopping. Someone shouted at them as they sped through the square, but whether it was a command to halt or an appeal for a ride or a curse because they were going too fast and were endangering the men on foot, they never found out, because Christian accelerated as much as he dared. A moment later, they were sliding out on the dim ribbon of road that stretched ahead of them across the moonlit countryside towards the city of Paris two hundred kilometres away.

"Germany is finished," Brandt was saying, his voice thin and weary, but loud, so as to be heard against the rush of night wind that piled across the open car. "Only a lunatic wouldn't know it. Look at what's happening. Collapse. Nobody cares. A million men left to shift for themselves. A million men, practically without officers, without food, plans, ammunition, left to be picked up by the enemy when they have time. Or massacred, if they're foolish enough to make a stand. Germany can't support an army any longer. Perhaps, somewhere, they'll collect some troops and draw a line, but it will only be a gesture. A temporary, bloodthirsty gesture. A sick, romantic Viking funeral. Clausewitz and Wagner, the General Staff and Siegfried, combined for a graveyard theatrical effect. I'm as much of a patriot as the next man, and God knows, I've served Germany in the best way I knew, in Italy, in Russia, here in France… But I'm too civilized for what they're doing to us now. I don't believe in the Vikings. I'm not interested in burning on Goebbels's pyre. The difference between a civilized human being and a wild beast is that a human being knows when he is lost, and takes steps to save himself… Listen, when it looked as though the war was about to start, I had my application in to become a citizen of the French Republic, but I gave it up. Germany needed me," Brandt went on, earnestly, convincing himself as much as the man in the seat beside him of his honesty, his rectitude, his good sense, "and I offered myself. I did what I could. God, the pictures I've taken. And what I've gone through to get them! But there are no more pictures to be taken. Nobody to print them, nobody to believe them, or be touched by them if they are printed. I exchanged my camera with that farmer back there for ten litres of petrol. The war is no longer a subject for photographers because there is no war left to photograph. Only the mopping-up process. Leave that to the enemy photographers. It is ridiculous for the people who are being mopped up to record the process on film. Nobody can expect it of them. When a soldier joins an army, any army, there is a kind of basic contract the army makes with him. The contract is that while the army may ask him to die, it will not knowingly ask him to throw his life away. Unless the government is asking for peace this minute, and there are no signs that that is happening, they are violating that contract with me, and with every other soldier in France. We don't owe them anything. Not a thing."

"What are you telling me all this for?" Christian asked, keeping his eyes on the pale road ahead of him, thinking warily: He has a plan, but I will not commit myself to him yet.

"Because when I get to Paris," Brandt said slowly, "I am going to desert."

They drove in silence for a full minute.

"It is not the correct way to put it," said Brandt. "It is not I who am deserting. It is the Army which has deserted me. I intend to make it official."

Desert. The word trembled in Christian's ear. The enemy had dropped leaflets and safe-conducts on him, urging him to desert, telling him, long before this, that the war was lost, that he would be treated well… There were stories of men who had been caught by the Army in the attempt, hung to trees in batches of six, whose families in Germany had been shot… Brandt had no family, and was a freer agent than most. Of course, in confusion like this, who would know who had deserted, who had died, who had been captured while fighting heroically? A long time later, perhaps in 1960, perhaps never, some rumour might come out, but it was impossible to worry about that now.

"Why do you have to go to Paris to desert?" Christian asked, remembering the leaflets. "Why don't you go the other way and find the first American unit and give yourself up?"

"I thought of that," Brandt said. "Don't think I didn't. But it's too dangerous. Troops in the field aren't dependable. They may be hot-headed, perhaps one of their comrades was killed twenty minutes before by a sniper, perhaps they're in a hurry, perhaps they are Jews with relatives in Buchenwald, how can you tell? And then, in the country like this, there'd be a good chance you'd never reach the Americans or the English. Every damned Frenchman between here and Cherbourg has a gun by now, and is out to kill a German before it's too late. Oh, no. I want to desert, not die, my friend."

A thoughtful man, Christian thought admiringly, a man who has thought things out reasonably in advance. It was no wonder Brandt had done well in the Army, had taken just the kind of pictures he knew would be liked by the Propaganda Ministry, had got the fat job in Paris on the magazine, had been billeted for so long in an apartment in Paris and had done himself well.

"You remember my friend, Simone?" Brandt said.

"Are you still connected with her?" Christian asked, surprised. Brandt had been living with Simone as far back as 1940. Christian had met her with Brandt on his first leave in Paris. They had gone out together and Simone had even brought along a friend – what was her name? – Francoise, but Francoise had been as cold as ice, and had made no bones about the fact that she was not fond of Germans. Brandt had been lucky in this war. Dressed in the uniform of the conquering army, but almost a citizen of France, speaking French so well, he had made the best of the two possible worlds.

"Of course I'm still connected with Simone," Brandt said.

"Why not?"

"I don't know," Christian smiled. "Don't get angry. It's just that it's been so long… four years… in a war…" Somehow, although Simone had been very pretty, Christian had always imagined Brandt, with all his opportunities, as moving on from one dazzling woman to another through the years.

"We intend to marry," Brandt said firmly, "as soon as this damned thing is over."

"Of course," said Christian, slowing down as they passed a column of men, in single file, trudging silently along the road's edge, the moonlight glinting on the metal of their weapons. "Of course. Why not?" Brandt, he thought, enviously, lucky, sensible Brandt, unwounded, with a nice war behind him, and a comfortable future ahead of him, all planned out.

"I'm going straight to her house," Brandt said, "and take off this uniform and put on civilian clothes. And I'm going to stay there until the Americans arrive. Then, after the first excitement, Simone will go to the American Military Police and tell them about me, that I am a German officer who is anxious to give himself up. The Americans are most correct. They treat prisoners like gentlemen, and the war will be over soon, and they will free me, and I will marry Simone and go back to my painting…"

Lucky Brandt, Christian thought, everything cleverly arranged, wife, career, everything…

"Listen, Christian," Brandt said earnestly, "this will work for you, too."

"What?" Christian asked, grinning. "Does Simone want to marry me, too?"

"Don't joke," Brandt said. "She's got a big apartment, two bedrooms. You can stay there, too. You're too good to sink in this swamp of a war…" Brandt waved his hand stiffly to take in the reeling men on the road, the death in the sky, the downfall of states. "You've done enough. You've done your share. More than your share. This is the time when every man who is not a fool must take care of himself." Brandt put his hand on Christian's arm softly, imploringly. "I'll tell you something, Christian," he said. "Ever since that first day, on the road to Paris, I've looked up to you, I've worried about you, I've felt that if there was one man I could pick to come out of this alive and well, you would be that man. We're going to need men like you when this is over. You owe it to your country, even if you don't feel you owe it to yourself. Christian… Will you stay with me?"

"Perhaps," said Christian slowly. "Perhaps I will." He shook his head to throw off the weariness and sleep from his eyes and manoeuvred around a stalled armoured car that lay across the road, with three men working feverishly at it in the frail light of shaded flashlights. "Perhaps I will. But we have first to try to get through to Paris. Then we can begin thinking about what we'll do after that…"

"We'll get through," Brandt said calmly. "I am sure of it. Now I am absolutely sure of it."

They arrived in Paris the next night. There was very little traffic in the streets. It was as dark as ever, but it didn't look any different from the other times that Christian had come back to it, in the days before the invasion. German staff cars still whipped about the streets; there were fitful gleams of light as cafe doors swung open, and bursts of laughter from strolling soldiers. And the girls, Christian noticed, as they swung across the Place de l'Opera, were still there, calling out to the shadowy, passing uniforms. The world of commerce, Christian thought grimly, continuing whether the enemy was a thousand kilometres away or just outside town, whether the enemy were in Algiers or Alencon…

Brandt was very tense now. He sat on the edge of the seat, breathing sharply, directing Christian through the jumbled maze of blacked-out streets. Christian remembered the other time he and Brandt had rolled down these boulevards, with Sergeant Himmler pointing out places of interest like a professional guide, and Hardenburg in the front seat. Himmler, full of jokes, and now a collection of bones on the sandy hill in the desert; Hardenburg, a suicide in Italy… But Brandt and he still alive, driving over the same streets, smelling the same ancient aroma of the old city, passing the same monuments along the everlasting river…

"Here," Brandt whispered. "Stop here."

Christian put on the brakes and turned off the motor. He felt very tired. They were in front of a garage, a garage with a big blank door, and a steep incline of cement. "Wait for me," Brandt said, climbing hurriedly out of the car. Brandt knocked on a door to one side of the incline. In a moment the door opened, and Brandt disappeared inside.

There was a grinding noise and the blank door of the garage swung open. A light shone dimly at the top of the incline, a gloomy yellow dab in the depths of the building. Brandt came out hurriedly. He looked up and down the empty street.

"Drive in," he whispered to Christian. "Fast."

Christian started the motor and swung the little car up the incline towards the light. Behind him he heard the garage door closing. He drove carefully up the narrow passage-way and stopped at the top. He looked about him. in the dim light he saw the shapes of three or four other cars, covered with tarpaulins.

"All right." It was Brandt's voice behind him. "This is where we stop."

Christian shut off the motor and got out. Brandt and another man were coming towards him. The other man was small and fat and was wearing a homburg hat, half-comic, half-sinister at this moment in this shaded place.

The man in the homburg hat walked slowly around the car, touching it tentatively from time to time. "Good enough," he said in French. He turned and disappeared into a small office to one side, from which came the meagre glow of light from a hidden lamp.

"Listen," Brandt said. "I've sold them the car. Seventy-five thousand francs." He waved the notes in front of Christian. Christian couldn't see them very well, but he heard the dry rustle of the paper. "The money will be very useful in the next few weeks. Let's get our things out. We'll walk from here."

Seventy-five thousand francs, Christian thought admiringly, as he helped Brandt unload the bread, the hams, the cheese, the Calvados. This man cannot be defeated by anything! He has friends and commercial acquaintances all over the world, ready to spring to his assistance at any moment.

The man in the hat came back with two canvas sacks. Christian and Brandt stowed their belongings into them. The Frenchman did not offer to help, but stood outside the shine of the one small light, obscure, watching, expressionless. When the packing was finished, the Frenchman led the way down a half-flight of steps and unlocked a door. "Au revoir, Monsieur Brandt," he said, his voice flat. "Enjoy yourself in Paris." There was a subtle overtone of warning and mockery in the Frenchman's voice. Christian would have liked to seize him and drag him under a light to get a good look at him. But as he hesitated, Brandt pulled nervously at his arm. He allowed himself to be guided into the street. The door closed behind them, and he heard the quiet clicking of the lock.

"This way," Brandt said, and started off, the sack of loot over his shoulder. "We haven't far to go." Christian followed him down the dark street. Later on, he decided, he would question Brandt about the Frenchman and what he would be likely to do with the little car. But he was too tired now, and Brandt was hurrying ahead of him, walking swiftly and silently towards his girl's house.

Two minutes later Brandt stopped at the doorway of a three-storey house. Brandt rang the bell. They had not passed anyone.

It was a long time before the door opened, and then only a crack. Brandt whispered into the crack and Christian heard an old woman's voice, at first querulous, then warm and welcoming as Brandt established his identity. There was the small rattling of a chain and the door opened wide. Christian followed Brandt up the steps, past the muffled figure of the concierge. Brandt, Christian thought, the man who knows precisely on which doors to knock, and what to say to get them open. Someone pushed a button and the lights on the stairway went up. Christian saw that it was quite a respectable building, with marble steps, clean, bourgeois.

The lights went out after twenty seconds. They climbed in darkness. Christian's Schmeisser, slung on his shoulder, banged against the wall with an iron sound. "Quiet!" Brandt whispered harshly. "Be careful." He pushed the button on the next landing and the lights went on for another twenty seconds, in the thrifty French style.

They climbed to the top floor and Brandt knocked gently on a door. This door opened quickly, almost as though whoever lived in the apartment had been waiting eagerly for the signal. A beam of light flooded into the hallway, and Christian saw the figure of a woman in a long robe. Then the woman threw herself into Brandt's arms. She began to sob, brokenly, saying, "You're here, oh, cheri, you're here… you're here."

Christian stood awkwardly against the wall, holding on to the butt of his gun, watching the two people embracing. It was a domestic, husband-and-wife embrace, more relief than passion, plain, unbeautiful, tearful, touching, profoundly private, and Christian felt embarrassed.

Finally, half-sobbing, half-laughing, Simone broke away, pushing back her straight, long hair with one hand, and with the other still clutching Brandt's arm, as though to reassure herself that he was real and to make certain that he would not vanish in the next minute.

"Now," she said, and Christian remembered her light, soft voice very well, "now, we have time to be polite." She turned to Christian.

"You remember Diestl, don't you?" Brandt said.

"Of course, of course." She put out her hand impulsively. Christian shook it. "I am so glad to see you. We have talked about you so often… Come in, come in… You can't stand out in the hall all night."

They stepped into the apartment and Simone locked the door behind them, the sound home-like and secure. Brandt and Christian followed her into the living-room. Standing before the drawn curtains in front of a window was a woman in a quilted robe, her face in shadow, outside the light of the single lamp on the table near the couch.

"Put your things down, oh, you'll want to wash, oh, you must be starving," Simone was saying in a babble of wifely consideration. "We have some wine, we must open a bottle of wine to celebrate… Oh, Francoise, see who's come, isn't it wonderful?"

Francoise, Christian remembered, the German-hater, that's who it is. He watched Francoise warily as she came out from her place near the window and shook hands with Brandt.

"I am so glad to see you," Francoise said.

She was even prettier than Christian remembered, a tall woman, with chestnut hair and a long, fine nose over a controlled mouth. She turned to Christian, smiling and extending her hand.

"Welcome, Sergeant Diestl," Francoise said. She pressed his hand warmly.

"Oh," said Christian carefully, "you remember me."

"Of course," said Francoise, staring directly at him. "I have thought of you again and again."

Greenish, hidden eyes, Christian thought, what is she smiling at, what does she mean by saying she thought of me again and again?

"Francoise came to live with me last month, cheri" Simone said to Brandt. "Her apartment was requisitioned. Your Army." She made a charming little face at Brandt, who laughed and kissed her. Her hands lingered for a moment on his shoulders before she pulled away. Christian noticed that she looked much older. She was still small and trim, and there were anxious wrinkles around her eyes and her skin looked dry and lifeless.

"Do you expect to stay long?" Francoise asked.

There was a moment of hesitation. Then Christian said, stolidly, "Our plans are not definite at the moment, we…"

He heard Brandt laughing and stopped. The laughter was high, near hysteria, a combination of relief and amusement.

"Christian," Brandt said, "stop being so damned correct. We plan to stay until the end of the war."

Then Simone broke down. She sat on the edge of the couch and Brandt had to comfort her. Christian caught Francoise's eye for a flicker and observed what he thought was cool amusement there, before Francoise politely turned away and strolled back to her window.

"Go," Simone was saying. "This is ridiculous. I don't know why I'm crying. Ridiculous. I am getting like my mother, cry because she's happy, cry because she's sad, cry because it's sunny, cry because it's beginning to rain. Go. Go in and tidy up, and when you come back, I shall be as sensible as you can imagine, and I'll have a beautiful supper all ready for you. Go. Don't look at me with my eyes like this. Go ahead."

Brandt was grinning, a foolish, homecoming, childish grin, incongruous on his thin, lined, intelligent face, now grimed with the dust of the long trip from Normandy.

"Come on, Christian," said Brandt, "let's get the dirt off our faces."

Together they went into the bathroom. Francoise, Christian noticed, did not look at them as they left the room.

In the bathroom, with the water running (all cold because of the lack of fuel), Brandt talked, while Christian arranged his dark hair, wet with water, with someone's comb. "There is something about that woman," Brandt was saying, "something I have never found in anyone else. I… I accept everything about her. It's funny, with other women, I was too critical. They were too thin, they were too vain, they were a little silly…

Two, three weeks, and I couldn't stand them any more. But with Simone… I know she is a little sentimental, I know she's getting older, there are wrinkles… I love it. She is not smart. I love it. She has a tendency to weep. I love it." Then he spoke very seriously. "It is the one good thing I have got out of the war." Then, as though ashamed at having talked so frankly, he turned the water on full and vigorously rinsed the soap off his face and neck. He was stripped to the waist, and Christian noticed with amused pity how his friend's bones stuck out, like a small boy's, how frail his arms were. What a lover, Christian thought, what a soldier, how had he ever managed to survive four years of war?

Brandt stood up and towelled his face. "Christian," he said seriously, through the muffling cloth, "you're going to stay with me, aren't you?"

"First," Christian began, keeping his voice low, "what about that other one?"

"Francoise?" Brandt waved his hand. "Don't worry about her. There's plenty of room. You can sleep on the couch. Or…" He grinned. "Come to an understanding with her. Then you wouldn't have to sleep on the couch."

"I'm not worried about the overcrowding," Christian said.

Brandt reached over to turn the water off. "Leave it on," Christian said sharply, holding Brandt's hand.

"What's the matter with you?" Brandt asked, puzzled.

"She doesn't like Germans, that one," Christian said. "She can make a lot of trouble."

"Nonsense." With a quick movement, Brandt snapped the water off. "I know her. She'll grow very fond of you. Now promise you'll stay…"

"All right," Christian said slowly. "I'll stay." He could see Brandt's eyes glistening. Brandt's hand, as it patted Christian's bare shoulder, was trembling a little.

"We're safe, Christian," Brandt whispered. "At last we're safe…"

He turned awkwardly and put on his shirt and went into the other room. Christian put his shirt on slowly, buttoning it carefully, looking at himself in the mirror, studying the haggard eyes, the ridged lines on his cheeks, the topography of fear and grief and exhaustion that was obscurely and invincibly marked there. He leaned close to the mirror and stared at his hair. There was a sanding of grey, heavy at the temples, glistening in little pale tips on top. God, he thought, I never saw that before. I'm getting old, old… He braced himself, hating the wave of self-pity that for a moment he had allowed to flood through him, and walked stiffly out into the living-room.

The living-room was cosy, with the one shaded lamp diffusing a dull rosy glow over the room and over the long, reclining figure of Francoise on the soft couch.

Brandt and Simone had gone to bed, holding hands domestically as they had gone down the hallway. After eating, after telling a jumbled, inaccurate account of the last few days, Brandt had almost fallen asleep in his chair and Simone had fondly pulled him up by his hands and led him away, smiling in an almost motherly way at Christian and Francoise left together in the shadowy room.

"The war is over," Brandt had mumbled in farewell, "the war is over, boys, and now I am going to sleep. Farewell, Lieutenant Brandt, of the Army of the Third Reich," he had said with sleepy oratory, "farewell, soldier. Tomorrow once more the decadent painter of non-objective pictures awakens in his civilian bed, next to his wife." He had pointed in a limp, gentle way at Francoise. "Be good to my friend. Love him well. He is the best of the best. Strong, delicate, tested in the fire, the hope of the new Europe, if there will be a new Europe and if there is any hope for it. Love him well."

Shaking her head fondly, saying, "The drink has gone to the man's tongue," Simone had pushed him gently towards the bedroom.

"Good night," they had heard Brandt's mumbled valedictory in the hallway, "good night, my dear friends…"

Then the door had closed and there had been silence in the small, feminine room, with its pale wood and its dark, nighttime mirrors, its soft-coloured cushions, and its silver-framed photograph of Brandt taken in beret and Basque shirt before the war.

"A tired soldier," Francoise murmured from the depths of the couch, "a very tired soldier, our Lieutenant Brandt."

"Yes," said Christian, watching her carefully.

"He's had a hard time, hasn't he?" Francoise moved her toes.

"It hasn't been pleasant, the last few weeks, has it?"

"No, not very."

"The Americans," said Francoise, in a flat, innocent voice, "they're very strong, very fresh, aren't they?"

"You might say that."

"The papers here," Francoise shifted her weight gently and the long lines rearranged themselves in silvery shadows under the robe, "keep saying it is all going according to plan. The enemy are being cleverly contained, there will be a surprising counter-attack." The tone of lazy amusement in Francoise's voice was very clear. "The papers are very reassuring. Mr Brandt ought to read them more often." She laughed softly. The quiet laugh would have seemed sensual and inviting, Christian realized, if they had been talking on a different subject. "Mr Brandt," Francoise said gently, "is not of the opinion that the enemy will be contained. And a counter-attack would be really surprising to him, wouldn't it?"

"I imagine so," Christian said, sparring, wondering: What is this woman up to?

"How about you?" She spoke abstractedly, not really to Christian, but into the warm, dusky air.

"Perhaps I share Brandt's opinion," Christian said.

"You're very tired, too, aren't you?" Francoise sat up and stared at him, her lips straight and quite sympathetic, but her heavy-lidded green eyes contracted in what seemed to Christian to be a hidden smile. "You probably want to go to sleep, too."

"Not just now," said Christian. Suddenly he couldn't bear the thought of this long-limbed, green-eyed, mocking woman leaving him. "I've been a lot more tired than this in my time."

"Oh," said Francoise, lying back again, "oh, what an excellent soldier. Stoical, inexhaustible. How can an army lose a war when it still has troops like that?"

Christian stared at her, hating her. She turned her head in a sleepy movement of the cushions, to look at him. The long muscles under the pale skin of her throat made a delicate new pattern of flesh and shadows in the lamplight. Finally, Christian knew, staring at her, he would have to kiss that place where the skin swept in an ivory, trembling, living sheet from the base of her throat to the half-exposed shoulder.

"I knew a boy like you long ago," Francoise said, not smiling now, looking directly at him. "A Frenchman. Strong. Uncomplaining. A resolute patriot. I liked him very much, I must say." The deep voice murmured in his ears. "He died in ' 40. In another retreat. Do you expect to die, Sergeant?"

"No," said Christian, slowly. "I do not expect to die."

"Good." Francoise's full lips moved into the semblance of a smile. "The best of the best, according to your friend. The hope of the new Europe. Do you consider yourself the hope of the new Europe, Sergeant?"

"Brandt was drunk."

"Was he? Possibly. Are you sure you don't want to go to sleep?"

"I'm sure."

"You do look very tired, you know."

"I do not wish to go to sleep."

Francoise nodded gently. "The ever-waking Sergeant. Does not wish to go to sleep. Prefers to remain awake, at great personal sacrifice, and entertain a lonely French lady who is at a loose end until the Americans enter Paris…" She put her hand, palm upward, over her eyes, the loose sleeve falling back from the slender wrist and the long, sharp-nailed fingers. "Tomorrow," she said, "we will enter your name for the Legion of Honour, second class, service to the French nation."

"Enough," Christian said, without moving from his chair.

"Stop making fun of me."

"Nothing," said Francoise flatly, "could be further from my mind. Tell me, Sergeant, as a military man, how long do you think it will be before the Americans get here?"

"Two weeks," said Christian. "A month."

"Oh," Francoise said, "we are in for an interesting time, aren't we?"

"Yes."

"Shall I tell you something, Sergeant?"

"What?"

"I have remembered our little dinner party again and again.

"'40? '41?"

"'40."

"I wore a white dress. You looked very handsome. Tall, straight, intelligent, conquering, shining in your uniform, the young god of mechanized warfare." She chuckled.

"You are making fun of me again," Christian said. "It is not pleasant."

"I was very much impressed with you." She waved her hand, as though to stop a contradiction that Christian had no idea of voicing. "Honestly, I was. I was very cold to you, wasn't I?" Again the small remembering laugh. "You have no idea how difficult it was for me to manage it. I am far from impervious, Sergeant, to the attractions of young men. And you were so splendid-looking, Sergeant…" The sleepy, hypnotic voice whispering musically in the soft-lighted, civilized room, seemed remote, unreal. "So ripe with conquest, so arrogant, so beautiful. It took all my enormous powers of self-control. You are less arrogant, now, aren't you, Sergeant?"

"Yes," said Christian, feeling himself between sleeping and waking, rhythmically adrift on a soft, perfumed, subtly dangerous tide. "Not arrogant at all any more."

"You're very tired now," the woman murmured. "A little grey. And I noticed that you limp a bit, too. In '40 it did not seem you could ever grow tired. You might die, then, I thought, in one glorious burst of fire, but never weary, never… You are very different now, Sergeant, very different. By ordinary standards, one would never say you were beautiful now, with your limp and your greying hair and your thin face… But I'm going to tell you something, Sergeant. I am a woman of peculiar tastes. Your uniform is no longer shining. Your face is grey. No one would ever believe that there is a resemblance in you to the young god of mechanized warfare…" A final hint of soft laughter echoed in her voice. "But I find you much more attractive tonight, Sergeant, infinitely more…"

She stopped speaking, her opium-like voice dying among the shadows of the cushioned couch.

Christian stood up. He went over and stared at her for a moment. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, smiling with candour.

He knelt swiftly and kissed her.

He lay beside her in the dark bed. The window-curtains were blowing gently in the summer night wind. A pale silvery wash of moonlight draped and made soft the outlines of the dressingtable, the chairs with his clothes thrown over them.

The German-hater… He smiled and turned his head. Her hair tumbled in a dark, fragrant mass on the pillow, Francoise was lying beside him, touching his skin lightly with the tips of her fingers, her eyes once more mysterious in the wavering pale light.

She smiled slowly. "See," she said, "you weren't so terribly tired, after all, were you?"

They laughed together. He moved his head and kissed the smooth, silvery skin where her throat joined her shoulder, drowsily submerged in the mingled textures of skin and hair, swimming hazily in the living double fragrance of hair and skin.

"There is something to be said," Francoise whispered, "for all retreats."

Through the open window came the sound of soldiers marching, hobnails making a remote military rhythmic clatter, pleasant and meaningless heard in this way in a hidden room through the tangled perfumed strands of his mistress's hair.

"I knew it, as soon as I saw you," Francoise said. "The first time, long ago, that it could be like this. Formidable. I could tell."

"Why did you wait so long?" Christian pulled back gently, turning, looking up at the pattern the moonlight, reflected from a mirror, made on the ceiling. "God, the time we've wasted. Why didn't you do this then?"

"I was not making love to Germans, then," Francoise said coolly. "I did not think it was admirable to surrender everything in the country to the conqueror. You may not believe this, and I don't care whether you do or not, but you are the first German I have let touch me."

"I believe you," Christian said. And he did, because whatever else her faults might be, dishonesty was certainly not one of them.

"Don't think it was easy," Francoise said. "I am not a nun."

"Oh, no," said Christian gravely. "I will swear to that."

Francoise did not laugh. "You were not the only one," she said. "So many magnificent young men, such a pleasant variety of young men… But, not one of them, not one… The conquerors did not get anything… Not until tonight…"

Christian hesitated, vaguely troubled. "Why," he asked, "why have you changed now?"

"Oh, it's all right now." Francoise laughed, a sly, sleepy, satisfied, womanly laugh. "It's perfectly all right now. You're not a conqueror any more, darling, you're a refugee…" She twisted over to him and kissed him. "Now," she said, "it is time to sleep…"

She moved over to her side of the bed. Lying flat on her back, with her arms chastely at her side, her long body sweepingly outlined under the white blur of the sheet, she soon dropped off to sleep. Her breath came in an even, healthy rhythm in the quiet room.

Christian did not sleep. He lay uncomfortably, with growing rigidity, listening to the breathing of the woman beside him, staring at the moon and mirror-flecked ceiling. Outside, there was the noise of the hobnailed patrol again, increasing and receding on the silent pavement. It did not sound remote any more, or pleasant, or meaningless.

Refugee, Christian remembered, and remembered the low, mocking laugh that accompanied it. He turned his head a little and looked at Francoise. Even as she slept, he imagined seeing a superior, victorious smile at the corner of the long, passionate mouth. Christian Diestl, the non-conquering refugee, finally given admission to the Parisienne's bed. The French, he remembered, they will beat us all yet. And, what's worse, they know it.

Suddenly it was intolerable to think of Brandt snoring softly in the next room, intolerable for himself to remain in bed next to the handsome woman who had used him so comfortably and mercilessly. He slid noiselessly on to the floor and walked barefooted and naked over to the window. He stared out over the roofs of the sleeping city, the chimneys shining under the moon, the pale streets winding away narrowly with their memories of other centuries, the river shining under its bridges in the distance. He could hear the patrol from the window, faint and brave across the still dark air, and he got a glimpse of it as it crossed an intersection. Five men walking deliberately and cautiously down the night-time streets of the enemy, vulnerable, stolid, pathetic, friends…

Swiftly and soundlessly, Christian dressed himself. Francoise stirred once, threw her arm out languidly towards the other side of the bed, but she did not awake. Her arm looked white and snake-like stretched into the warm emptiness beside her.

Christian stole through the door and closed it softly behind him.

Fifteen minutes later he was standing before the desk of a Colonel in the SS. In the sleeping city, the SS officers did not sleep. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, men came and went in an endless bustle, there was the clatter of typewriters and teletype machines, and it had the unreal, hectic air of a factory going full blast during an overtime night-shift.

The Colonel behind the desk was wide awake. He was short and he wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, but there was no air of the clerk about him. He had a thin gash for a mouth, and his magnified pale eyes were coldly probing behind their glasses. He held himself like a weapon always in readiness to strike.

"Very good, Sergeant," the Colonel was saying. "You will go with Lieutenant von Schlain and point out the house and identify the deserter and the women who are hiding him."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"You are right in supposing that your organization no longer exists as a military unit," the Colonel said dispassionately. "It was overrun and destroyed five days ago. You have displayed considerable courage and ingenuity in saving yourself…" Christian could not tell whether the Colonel was being ironic or not, and he felt a twinge of uneasiness. The Colonel, he realized, made a technique out of making other people uneasy, but there was always the chance this was something special. "I shall have orders made out for you," the Colonel went on, his eyes glinting behind the thick lenses, "to be returned to Germany for a short leave, and assigned to a new unit there. In a very short time, Sergeant," the Colonel said, without expression in his voice, "we will need men like you on the soil of the Fatherland. That is all. Heil Hitler."

Christian saluted and went out of the room with Lieutenant von Schlain, who also wore glasses.

In the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain, which preceded the open truck with the soldiers, Christian asked, "What will happen to him?"

"Oh," said von Schlain, yawning, taking off his glasses, "we'll shoot him tomorrow. We shoot a dozen deserters a day, and now, with the retreat, business will be better than ever." He put his glasses back and peered out. "Is this the street?"

"This is the street," Christian said. "Stop here."

The small car stopped in front of the well-remembered door. The truck clanged to a halt behind it and the soldiers jumped out.

"No need for you to go up with us," von Schlain said. "Might make it unpleasant. Just tell me which floor and which door and I'll handle it in no time."

"Top floor," said Christian, "the first door to the right of the stairway."

"Good," said von Schlain. He had a lordly, disdainful way of speaking, as though he felt that the Army was making poor use of his great talents, and he wished the world to understand that immediately. He gestured languidly to the four soldiers who had come in the truck, and went up the steps and rang the bell, very loudly.

Standing on the kerb, leaning against the car in which he had come from SS Headquarters, Christian could hear the bell wailing mournfully away in the concierge's quarters deep in the sleeping fastnesses of the house. Von Schlain never took his finger off the bell, and the ringing persisted in a hollow, nervous crescendo. Christian fit a cigarette and pulled at it hard. They'll hear it upstairs, he thought. That von Schlain is an idiot.

Finally there was a clanking at the door and Christian heard the irritable, sleepy voice of the concierge. Von Schlain barked at her in rapid French and the door swung open. Von Schlain and the four soldiers went in and the door closed behind them.

Christian paced slowly up and down alongside the car, puffing on the cigarette. Dawn was beginning to break and a pearly light, mingled with secret blues and silvery lavenders, was drifting across the streets and buildings of Paris. It was very beautiful and Christian hated it. Soon, that day perhaps, he would leave Paris, and probably never see it again in his whole life, and he was glad. Leave it to the French, to the supple, cheatingly, everlastingly victorious French… He was well rid of it. It looked like a fair meadow and it turned out to be slippery swamp-land. It seemed full of beauty and promise and it turned out to be a sordid trap, well-baited and fatal to a man's dignity and honour. Deceptively soft, it blunted all weapons that attacked it. Deceptively gay, it lured its conquerors into a bottomless melancholy.' Long ago, the Medical Corps had been right. The cynical men of science had supplied the Army with the only proper equipment for the conquest of Paris… three tubes of Salvarsan…

The door was flung open and Brandt, with a civilian coat thrown over pyjamas, came out between two soldiers. Just behind him came Francoise and Simone, in robes and slippers. Simone was sobbing, in a childish, strangled, tearing convulsion, but Francoise looked out at the soldiers with calm derision.

Christian stared at Brandt, who looked painfully back at him in the half-light. There was no expression on Brandt's face, snatched out of its deep, secure sleep, only dull exhaustion. Christian hated the lined, over-delicate, compromising, losing face. Why, he thought with surprise, he doesn't even look like a German!

"That's the man," Christian said to von Schlain, "and those're the two women."

The soldiers pushed Brandt up into the truck, and rather gently lifted Simone, now lost in a tangled wet marsh of tears. Helplessly, Simone, once she was in the truck, stretched out her hand towards Brandt. Christian despised Brandt for the soft, tragic way in which without shame, in front of the comrades he would have deserted, he put out his hand to take Simone's and carry it up to his cheek.

Francoise refused to allow the soldiers to help her climb into the truck. She stared for a moment with harsh intensity at Christian, then shook her head gently in a gesture of numb bewilderment, and climbed heavily up by herself.

There, Christian thought, watching her, there, you see, it is not all over yet. Even now, there are still some victories to be won…

The truck started down the street. Christian got into the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain and followed it through the streets of dawning Paris towards SS Headquarters.