The Young Lions

CHAPTER THIRTY

THERE was something wrong about the town. There were no flags hanging out of the windows, as there had been in all the towns along the way from Coutances. There were no improvised signs welcoming the deliverers, and two Frenchmen who saw the jeep ducked into houses when Michael called to them.

"Stop the jeep," Michael said to Stellevato. "There's something fishy here."

They were on the outskirts of the town, at a wide intersection of roads. The roads, stretching bleakly away in the grey morning, were cold and empty. There was no movement to be seen anywhere, only the shuttered windows of the stone houses, and the vacant roads with nothing stirring on them. After the crowded month, in which almost every road in France had seemed to be jammed with tanks and half-tracks and petrol lorries and artillery pieces and marching men, in which every town had been crowded with cheering Frenchmen and women in their brightest clothes, waving flags hidden through all the years of the Occupation, and singing the Marseillaise, there was something threatening and baleful about the dead silence around them.

"What's the matter, Bo?" Keane said from the back seat.

"Did we get on the wrong train?"

"I don't know," Michael said, annoyed at Keane. Pavone had told him to pick up Keane three days ago, and Keane had spent the three days in mournful chatter about how timidly the war was being run, and how his wife kept writing to him that the money she was getting was not enough to keep a family alive with prices going up the way they were. By now, the prices of chopped meat, butter, bread and children's shoes were indelibly engraved in Michael's brain, thanks to Keane. In 1970, if somebody asks me how much hamburger cost in the summer of 1944, Michael thought irritably, I'll answer, sixty-five cents a pound, without thinking for a second.

He got out the map and opened it on his knees. Behind him he heard Keane snapping the safety-catch off his carbine. A cowboy, Michael thought, staring at the map, a brainless, bloodthirsty cowboy…

Stellevato, slouched in the front seat beside him, smoking a cigarette, his helmet tipped far back on his head, said, "Do you know what I could use now? One bottle of wine and one French dame." Stellevato was either too young, too brave, or too stupid to be affected by the autumnal, dangerous morning, and by the unusual, unliberated aspect of the buildings in front of them.

"This is the place, all right," Michael said, "but it certainly doesn't look good to me." Four days before, Pavone had sent him back to Twelfth Army Group with a bagful of reports on a dozen towns they had inspected, reports on the public-utility situations, the food reserves, the number of denunciations of the incumbent civil officials that had been made by the local people. After that, he had ordered Michael to report back to him at the Infantry Division's Headquarters, but the G3 there had told Michael that Pavone had left the day before, leaving instructions for Michael to meet him in this town the next morning. A combined armoured and mechanized task force was to have reached the town by ten hundred hours and Pavone was to be with them.

It was eleven o'clock now, and apart from a small sign that read WATER POINT in English, with an arrow, there was no hint that anyone speaking English had been there since 1919.

"Come on, Bo," Keane said. "What're we waiting for? I want to see Paris."

"We don't have Paris," Michael said, putting the map away, and trying to make some sense out of the empty streets before him.

"I heard over the BBC this morning," Keane said, "that the Germans've asked for an armistice in Paris."

"Well, they haven't asked me," Michael said, sorry that Pavone wasn't with him at this moment to take on the burden of responsibility. The last three days had been pleasant, riding round the festive French countryside as commander of his own movements, with no one to order him about. But there was no celebrating going on here this morning, that was certain, and he had an uneasy sensation that if he guessed wrong in the next fifteen minutes, they might all be dead by noon.

"The hell with it." Michael nudged Stellevato. "Let's see what's happening at the Water Point."

Stellevato started the jeep and they went slowly down a side street towards a bridge they could see in the distance, crossing a small stream. There was another sign there, and a big canvas tank and pumping apparatus. For a moment, Michael thought that the Water Point, together with the rest of the town, was deserted, but he saw a helmet sticking cautiously up from a foxhole covered with branches.

"We heard the motor," said the soldier under the helmet. He was pale and weary-eyed, young and, as far as Michael could tell, frightened. Another soldier stood up next to him and came over to the jeep.

"What's going on here?" Michael asked.

"You tell us," said the first soldier.

"Did a task force go through here at ten o'clock this morning?"

"Nothing's been through here," the second soldier volunteered. He was a pudgy little man, nearly forty, who needed a shave badly, and he spoke with a hint of a Swedish singsong in his voice. "Fourth Armoured Headquarters went through last night and dropped us off here and turned south. Since then it's been lonely. There was some shooting near dawn from the middle of the town…"

"What was it?" Michael asked.

"Don't ask me, Brother," said the pudgy man. "They put me here to pump water out of this creek, not to conduct private investigations. These woods're full of Krauts and they shoot the Frogs and the Frogs shoot them. Me, I'm waiting for reinforcements."

"Let's go into the middle of the town and look around," Keane said eagerly.

"Will you shut up?" Michael swung round and spoke as sharply as he could to Keane. Keane, behind his thick glasses, grinned unhappily.

"Me and my buddy here," the pudgy soldier said, "have been debating whether maybe we ought to pull out altogether. We ain't doing anybody any good sitting here like ducks on a pond. A Frog came by this morning, he spoke some English, and he said there was eight hundred Krauts with three tanks on the other side of town, and they was going to come in here and take the town some time this morning."

"Happy days," Michael said. That was why there had been no flags.

"Eight hundred Krauts," Stellevato said. "Let's go home."

"Do you think it's safe here?" the pale-faced young soldier asked Michael.

"Just like your own living-room," said Michael. "How the hell would I know?"

"I was just asking a question," the young soldier said reproachfully.

"I don't like it," said the man with the Swedish accent, peering down the street. "I don't like it one bit. They got no right leaving us like this, all by ourself, sitting next to this goddamn creek."

"Nikki," Michael said to Stellevato. "Turn the jeep round and leave it on the road, so we can get away from here fast if we have to."

"What's the matter?" Keane asked, leaning towards Michael.

"Got your wind up?"

"Listen, General Patton," Michael said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice, "when we need a hero, we'll call on you. Nikki, turn that jeep around."

"I wish I was home," Stellevato said. But he got into the jeep and turned it round. He unhooked his tommy-gun from under the windshield and blew vaguely on it. It was coated with dust.

"What're we going to do, Bo?" Keane asked. His big blotched hands moved eagerly on his carbine. Michael looked at him with distaste. Is it possible, Michael thought, that his brother won the Congressional Medal of Honour out of sheer stupidity?

"We're going to sit down here for a while," Michael said, "and wait."

"For what?" Keane demanded.

"For Colonel Pavone."

"What if he doesn't show up?" Keane persisted.

"Then we'll make another decision. This is a lucky day for me," Michael said crisply. "I bet I'm good for three decisions before sunset."

"I think we ought to say the hell with Pavone," said Keane, "and move right in on Paris. The BBC says…"

"I know what the BBC says," Michael said, "and I know what you say, and I say we're going to sit here and wait." He walked away from Keane and sat down on the grass, leaning against a low stone wall that ran alongside the stream. The two Armoured Division soldiers looked at him doubtfully, then went back into their foxhole, pulling the branches cautiously over their heads. Stellevato leaned his tommy-gun against the wall and lay down and went to sleep. He lay straight out, with his hands over his eyes. He looked dead.

Keane sat on a stone and took out a pad of paper and a pencil and began writing a letter to his wife. He sent his wife a detailed account of everything he did, including the most horrible descriptions of the dead and wounded. "I want her to see what the world is going through," he had said soberly. "If she understands what we are going through, it may improve her outlook on life."

Michael stared past the helmeted head of the man who, at this distance, was attempting to improve the outlook on life of his frigid wife 3,000 miles away. On the other side of Keane, the unscarred old walls of the town, and the shuttered, unbannered windows, held their enigmatic secret.

Michael closed his eyes. Someone ought to write me a letter, he thought, to make me understand what I am going through. The last month had been so crowded with experience, of such a wildly diversified kind, that he felt he would need years to sift it, classify it, search out its meaning. Somewhere, he felt, in the confusion of strafing and capturing and bumping in dusty convoys through the hot French summer, somewhere in the waving of hands and girls' kisses and sniping and burning, there was a significant and lasting meaning. Out of this month of jubilation, upheaval and death, a man, he felt, should have been able to emerge with a key, a key to wars and oppression, a key to unlock the meaning of Europe and America.

Ever since Pavone had so savagely put him in his place that night on sentry duty in Normandy, Michael had almost given up any hope of being useful in the war. Now, he felt, in lieu of that, I should at least understand it…

But nothing fell into generalities in his brain, he could not say "Americans are thus and so and therefore they are winning," or "It is the nature of the French to behave in this fashion," or "What is wrong with the Germans is this particular misconception…"

All the violence, all the shouting, ran together in his brain, in a turbulent, confused, many-threaded drama, a drama which endlessly revolved through his mind, kept him from sleeping, even in these days of heat and exhaustion, a drama which he never would get rid of, even at a time like this, when his life perhaps was silently being jeopardized in this quiet, grey, lifeless town on the road to Paris.

The soft noise of the water going by between its banks mingled with the soft, busy scratching of Keane's pencil. With his eyes closed, leaning against the stone wall, drowsy from all the lost hours of sleep, but not surrendering to sleep, Michael sifted through the furious events of the month just passed… The names… The names of the sunlit towns, like a paragraph out of Proust: Marigny, Coutances, St Jean le Thomas, Avranches, Pontorson, stretching away into the seaside summer in the magic country where Normandy and Brittany blended in a silvery green haze of pleasure and legend. What would the ailing Frenchman in the cork-lined room have said about his beloved Maritime Provinces during the bright and deadly August of 1944? What observations would he have made, in his shimmering, tidal sentences, about the changes in architecture the 105s and the dive-bombers had brought about in the fourteenth-century churches; what would have been his reaction to the dead horses in the ditches under the hawthorn bushes and the burned-out tanks with their curious smell of metal and flesh; what elegant, subtle and despairing things would M. de Charlus and Mme de Guermantes have had to say about the new travellers on the old roads past Mont St Michel?

"I have been walking for five days now," the young Middle-Western voice had said next to the jeep, "and I ain't fired a shot yet. But don't get me wrong, I ain't complaining. Hell, I'll walk them to death, if that's what they want…"

And the sour-faced ageing Captain in Chartres, leaning against the side of a Sherman tank across the square from the cathedral, saying, "I don't see what people've been raving all these years about this country for. Jesus Christ on the mountain, there ain't nothing here we can't make better in California…"

And the chocolate-coloured dwarf with a red fez dancing among the Engineers with minesweepers, at a crossroads, entertaining the waiting tankmen, who cheered him on and got him drunk with Calvados they had taken as gifts from the people along the road that morning.

And the two drunken old men, weaving down the shuttered street, with little bouquets of pansies and geraniums in their hands, who had given the bouquets to Pavone and Michael, and had saluted and welcomed the American Army to their village, although they would like to ask one question: Why it was, on July 4th, with not a single German in the town, the American Army had seen fit to come over and bomb the place to rubble in thirty minutes?

And the German Lieutenant in the First Division prisoner-of-war cage who, in exchange for a clean pair of socks, had pointed out on the map the exact location of his battery of 88s, to the Jewish refugee from Dresden who was now a Sergeant in the MPs.

And the grave French farmer who had worked all one morning weaving an enormous "Welcome USA" in roses in his hedge along the road to cheer the soldiers on their way; and the other farmers and their women who had covered a dead American along the road with banks of flowers from their gardens, roses, phlox, peonies, iris, making death on that summer morning seem for a moment gay and charming and touching as the infantry walked past, circling gently around the bright mound of blossoms.

And the thousands of German prisoners and the terrible feeling that you got from looking at their faces that there was nothing there to indicate that these were the people who had torn Europe from its roots, murdered thirty million people, burned populations in gas-ovens, hanged and crushed and tortured through 3,000 miles of agony. There was nothing in their faces but weariness and fear, and you knew, being honest with yourself, that if they were dressed in ODs, they would all look as though they came from Cincinnati.

And the funeral of the FFI man in that little town – what was its name? – near St Malo, with the artillery going off all around it, and the procession winding behind the black-plumed horses and the rickety hearse up the hill to the cemetery, and all the people of the town in their best clothes, shuffling along in the dust, to shake the hands of the murdered man's relatives who stood at the gate in a solemn line. And the young priest, who had helped officiate at the funeral services in the church, who answered, when Michael asked him who the dead man was, "I don't know, my friend. I'm from another town."

And the fifteen-year-old boy in Cherbourg who had been furious with the Americans. "They are fools," he had said hotly.

"They take up with exactly the same girls who lived with the Germans! Democrats! Pah! I give you democrats like that! I, myself," the boy boasted, "have shaved the hair off five girls in this neighbourhood for being German whores. And I did it when it was dangerous, long before the invasion. And I'll do it again, oh, yes, I'll do it again…"

Stellevato was snoring, and the noise of Keane's pencil went on steadily. There was no sound from the grey town around them and Michael stood up and went over to the little bridge and stared down at the dark brown water eddying gently below. If the eight hundred Germans were going to put in an attack, he wished they'd do it fast. Or even better, if the task force would only show up, and Pavone with it. A war was more bearable when you were surrounded by hundreds of other men and all responsibility was out of your hands, and you knew that trained minds somewhere were busy with your problem. Here, on the old, mossy bridge over the nameless, dark stream in a forgotten, silent town, you had the feeling that you had been deserted, that no one would care if the eight hundred Germans came down and shot you, no one would care whether you fought them, surrendered to them, or ran from them… It is almost like civilian life, Michael thought, nobody gives a damn whether you live or die…

I'll give Pavone and that task force another thirty minutes, Michael decided, then I'll pull out. Go back and find an American Army to attach myself to.

He stared uneasily up at the sky. It was a pity it was so grey and threatening. There was something ominous about the swollen low clouds. All the rest of the time had been so sunny. The sun had brought you a feeling of luck, so that when you had been sniped at, you felt that it was normal that they'd missed you, when you'd been strafed on the road outside Avranches and jumped into the ditch on top of the dead Armoured Division corporal, you were sure they weren't going to hit you, and they hadn't… And when the Regimental CP outside St Malo had been shelled, and the visiting General had started yelling in the room full of tense, red-eyed men at telephones, "What the hell is that man in the Cub doing? Why doesn't he spot that gun? Call him and ask him to locate the bastard!", even then, with the house rocking from the shells and the men outside crouched in their holes, you felt that you were going to come out all right…

Today, somehow, seemed different. It was not sunny, and he didn't feel lucky today…

Michael turned to Keane. "Let's get into the middle of the town and see if anything's happening there."

"OK," Keane said, putting away the pad he was writing on.

"You know me. I'll go anywhere."

I bet he would, Michael thought. He went over to Stellevato, and bent over and tapped on Stellevato's helmet. Stellevato moaned softly, lost in some warm, immoral iceman's dream.

"Lea' me alone," Stellevato mumbled.

"Come on, come on!" Michael tapped more impatiently on the helmet. "We're going to go and win the war."

The two Armoured Division soldiers came out of their hole.

"You leaving us here alone?" the pudgy man said accusingly.

"Two of the best-trained, best-fed, best-equipped soldiers in the world," Michael said, "ought to be able to handle eight hundred Krauts any day of the week."

"You're full of jokes, ain't you?" the pudgy man said aggrievedly. "Leaving us alone like this."

Michael climbed into the jeep. "Don't worry," he said, "we're just going to take a look around the town. We'll notify you if you're missing anything."

"Full of jokes," the pudgy man was repeating, looking mournfully at his partner, as Stellevato slowly drove across the bridge.

The town square, when they rolled cautiously into it, with their fingers on the triggers of their carbines, seemed completely deserted. The windows of the shops were covered with their steel shutters, the doors of the church were closed, the hotel looked as though no one had gone in or out for weeks. Michael could feel a muscle in his cheek begin to pull nervously as he stared around him. Even Keane, in the back seat, was quiet.

"Well?" Stellevato whispered. "Now what?"

"Stop here," Michael said.

Stellevato put on the brakes and they stopped in the middle of the cobbled square.

There was a loud, swinging noise. Michael jumped around, bringing his carbine up. The doors of the hotel had opened and a crowd of people was pouring out. Many of them were armed, some of them with Sten guns, others with hand-grenades stuck in their belts, and there were some women among them, their scarves making bright bobbing bits of colour among the caps and dark heads of the men.

"Frogs," Keane said from the back seat, "with the keys of the city."

In a moment the jeep was surrounded, but there was no air of celebration about the group. They looked serious and frightened. A man in knickers, with a Red Cross band on his arm, had a bloody bandage around his head.

"What's going on here?" Michael asked in French.

"We were expecting the Germans," said one of the women, a small, chubby, shapeless, middle-aged creature in a man's sweater and men's work boots. She spoke in English, with an Irish accent, and for a moment Michael had the feeling that some elaborate, dangerous practical joke was being played on him. "How did you get through?"

"We just rode into the town," Michael said irritably, annoyed unreasonably at these people for being so timid. "What's the matter, here?"

"There are eight hundred Germans on the other side of the town," said the man with the Red Cross on his arm.

"And three tanks," Michael said. "We know all about that. Have there been any American convoys going through here this morning?"

"A German truck went through here this morning," the woman said. "They shot Andre Fouret. Seven-thirty this morning. Since then, nothing."

"Are you going to Paris?" asked the Red Cross man. He had no cap, and his hair was long over the stained bandage. He was wearing short socks, his legs bare, sticking out of the baggy knickers. Michael looked at him, thinking: This man is made up for something, these can't be real clothes. "Tell me," the man said eagerly, leaning into the jeep, "are you going to Paris?"

"Eventually," Michael said.

"Follow me," the Red Cross man said. "I have a motor-cycle. I have just come from there. It will only take an hour."

"What about the eight hundred Germans and the three tanks?" Michael asked, certain this man was somehow trying to trap him.

"I go by back roads," said the Red Cross man. "I was only fired on twice. I know where all the mines are. You have three guns. We need every gun we can find in Paris. We have been fighting for three days and we need help…"

The other people standing around the jeep nodded soberly and talked to one another in French too rapid for Michael to follow.

"Wait a minute." Michael took the arm of the woman who spoke English. "Let's get this straight. Now, Madame…"

"My name is Dumoulin. I am an Irish citizen," the woman said loudly and aggressively, "but I have lived in this town for thirty years. Now, tell me, young man, do you propose to protect us?"

Michael shook his head numbly. "I shall do everything in my power, Madame," he said, feeling: This war has got completely out of hand.

"You have ammunition, too," said the man with the Red Cross armband, peering hungrily into the back of the jeep where there was a jumble of boxes and bedrolls. "Excellent, excellent. You will have no trouble if you follow me. Just put on an armband like this, and I will be very surprised if they shoot at you."

"Let Paris take care of itself," Mrs Dumoulin snapped. "We have our own problem of the eight hundred Germans."

"One at a time, please," Michael said, spreading his hands out dazedly, thinking: This is one situation they never told me about at Fort Benning. "First, I'd like to hear if anyone actually saw the Germans."

"Jacqueline!" said Mrs Dumoulin loudly. "Tell the young man."

"Speak slowly, please," Michael said. "My French leaves a great deal to be desired."

"I live one kilometre outside town," said Jacqueline, a squat girl with several of her front teeth missing, "and last night a Boche tank stopped and a Lieutenant got out and demanded butter and cheese and bread. He said he would give us some advice, not to welcome the Americans, because the Americans were just going to pass through the town and leave us alone. Then the Germans were coming back. And anybody who had welcomed the Americans would be shot and he had eight hundred men waiting with him. And he was right," Jacqueline said excitedly. "The Americans came and one hour later they were gone and we'll all be lucky if the Germans don't burn the whole town down by evening…"

"Disgraceful," said Mrs Dumoulin firmly. "The American Army ought to be ashamed of itself. Either they should come and stay or they should not come at all. I demand protection."

"It is criminal," said the man with the Red Cross armband, "leaving the workers of Paris to be shot down like dogs without ammunition, while they sit here with three guns and hundreds of cartridges."

"Ladies and gentlemen," Michael stood up and spoke in a loud, oratorical voice, "I wish to state that…"

"Attention! Attention!" It was a woman's shrill cry from the edge of the crowd.

Michael swung round. Coming at a fair rate of speed into the square, was an open car. In it two men were standing with their hands above their heads. They were dressed in field grey.

The people around the jeep stood for a moment in surprised silence.

"Boches!" someone shouted. "They wish to surrender."

Then, suddenly, when the car was almost abreast of the jeep, the two men with their hands in the air dived down into the body of the car and the car spurted ahead. Out of the back of it a figure loomed up and there was the ugly high sound of a machine-pistol and screams from people who were hit. Michael stared stupidly at the careering car. Then he fumbled at his feet for his carbine. The safety-catch was on, and it seemed to take hours to get it off.

From behind him there was the sharp, beating rhythm of a carbine. The driver of the car suddenly threw up his hands and the car hit the kerb, wobbled, turned and crashed into the epicerie on the corner. There was a cymbal-like sound as the tin shutter came down, and the splintering of the window behind it. The car slowly fell on its side and two figures sprawled out.

Michael got the safety-catch off his carbine. Stellevato was still sitting, his hands on the wheel, frozen in surprise. "What happened?" Stellevato whispered angrily. "What the hell's going on here?"

Michael turned. Keane was standing up behind him, his carbine in his hand, grinning bleakly at the broken Germans. There was the acrid smell of burned powder. "That'll teach them," Keane said, his yellowish teeth bared with pleasure.

Michael sighed, then looked around him. The Frenchmen were getting slowly and warily to their feet, their eyes on the wreck. Two figures lay in contorted heaps on the cobblestones. One of them, Michael noticed, was Jacqueline. Her dress was up high over her knees. Her thighs were thick and yellowish. Mrs Dumoulin was bending over her. A woman was weeping somewhere.

Michael got out of the jeep, and Keane followed him. They walked carefully across the square, their guns ready, to the overturned car.

Keane, Michael thought bitterly, his eyes on the two grey figures sprawled head down on the pavement, it had to be Keane. Faster than I, more dependable, while I was still fiddling with the catch. The Germans could've been in Paris by the time I got ready to shoot at them…

There had been four men in the car, Michael saw, three of them officers. The driver, a private, was still alive, with blood bubbling unevenly between his lips. He was trying to crawl away, on his hands and knees, with stubborn persistence, when Michael got to him. He saw Michael's shoes and stopped trying to crawl.

Keane looked at the three officers. "Dead," he reported, smiling his sick, humourless smile. "All three of them. We ought to get a Bronze Star, at least. Get Pavone to write it up for us. How about that one?" Keane indicated, with his toe, the wounded driver.

"He's not very healthy," Michael said. He bent down and touched the man's shoulder gently. "Do you speak French?" he asked.

The man looked up. He was very young, eighteen or nineteen, and the froth of blood on his caked lips, and the long lines of pain cutting down from his eyes, made him look animal-like and pathetic. He nodded. The effort of moving his head brought a spasm of pain to his lips. A gob of blood dripped down to Michael's shoes.

"Do not move," Michael said slowly, bent over, speaking softly into the boy's ear. "We'll try to help you."

The boy gently let himself down to the pavement. Then he slowly rolled over. He lay there, staring up through pain-torn eyes at Michael.

By now the Frenchmen were grouped around the wrecked car. The man with the Red Cross armband had two machine-pistols. "Wonderful," he was saying happily, "wonderful. These will be most welcome in Paris." He came over to the wounded boy and briskly yanked the pistol out of the boy's holster.

"Good," he said, "we have some.38-calibre ammunition for this."

The wounded boy stared dumbly up at the Red Cross on the Frenchman's arm. "Doctor," he said slowly, "Doctor. Help me."

"Oh," said the Frenchman gaily, touching the Red Cross, "it is just a disguise. Just for getting past your friends on the road. I am not a doctor. You will have to find someone else to help you…" He took his treasures off to one side and began to inspect them minutely for damage.

"Don't waste any time on the pig." It was the voice of Mrs Dumoulin, stony and cold. "Put him out of his misery."

Michael stared disbelievingly at her. She was standing at the wounded boy's head, her arms crossed on her bosom, speaking, Michael could tell from their harsh faces, for the men and women grouped behind her.

"No," Michael said. "This man is our prisoner and we don't shoot prisoners in our Army."

"Doctor," said the boy on the cobbles.

"Kill him," said someone from behind Mrs Dumoulin.

"If the American doesn't want to waste ammunition," another voice said, "I'll do it with a stone."

"What's the matter with you people?" Michael shouted.

"What are you, animals?" He spoke in French so that they could all understand, and it was very difficult to translate his anger and disgust in his high-school accent. He stared at Mrs Dumoulin. Inconceivable, he thought, a plump little housewife, an Irishwoman improbably in the middle of the Frenchmen's war, violent for blood, outside the claims of pity. "He's wounded, he can't do you any harm," Michael went on, furious at his slow searching for words. "What's the sense in it?"

"Go," Mrs Dumoulin said coldly, "go look at Jacqueline over there. Go see Monsieur Alexandre, that's the other one, lying there, with a bullet in his lung… Then you'll understand a little better."

"Three of them are dead," Michael pleaded with Mrs Dumoulin. "Isn't that enough?"

"It is not enough!" The woman's face was pale and furious, her dark, almost purple eyes set maniacally in her head. "Perhaps enough for you, young man. You haven't lived here under them for four years! You haven't seen your sons taken away and killed! Jacqueline was not your neighbour. You're an American. It's easy for you to be humane. It is not so easy for us!" She was screaming wildly by now, shaking her fists under Michael's nose. "We are not Americans and we do not wish to be humane. We wish to kill him. Turn your back if you're so soft. We'll do it. You'll keep your pretty little American conscience clean…"

"Doctor," the boy on the pavement moaned.

"Please…" Michael said, appealing to the locked faces of the townspeople behind Mrs Dumoulin, feeling guilty that he, a stranger, a stranger who loved them, loved their country, their courage, their suffering, dared to oppose them on a profound matter like this in the streets of their town… "Please," he said, feeling confusedly that perhaps she was right, perhaps it was his usual softness, his wavering, unheroic indecision that was making him argue like this. "It is impossible to take a wounded man's life like this, no matter what…"

There was a shot behind him. Michael wheeled. Keane was standing above the German's head, his finger on the trigger of his carbine, that sick, crooked smile on his face. The German was still now. All the townspeople stared quietly and with almost demure good manners at the two Americans.

"What the hell," Keane said, grinning, "he was croaking anyway. Might as well please the lady." Keane slung the carbine over his shoulder.

"Good," said Mrs Dumoulin flatly. "Good. Thank you very much." She turned, and the little group behind her parted so that she could walk through it. Michael watched her, a small, plump, almost comic figure, marked by childbearing and laundering and endless hours in the kitchen, rolling solidly from side to side, as she crossed the grey square to the place where the ugly farm girl lay, her skirts up, now once and for all relieved of her ugliness and her labours.

One by one, the Frenchmen wandered off, leaving the two American soldiers alone over the body of the dead boy. Michael watched them carry the man with the bullet in his lungs into the hotel. Then he turned back to Keane. Keane was bent over the dead boy, going through his pockets. Keane came up with a wallet. He opened the wallet and took out a folded card.

"His paybook," Keane said. "His name is Joachim Ritter. He's nineteen years old. He hasn't been paid for three months." Keane grinned at Michael. "Just like the American Army." He groped inside the wallet and brought out a photograph. "Joachim and his girl." Keane extended the photograph. "Take a look. Juicy little piece."

Dumbly, Michael looked at the photograph. A thin, living boy in an amusement park peered out at him, and next to him a plump blonde girl with her young man's military cap perched saucily on her short blonde hair. There was something scrawled in ink across the face of the photograph. It was in German.

"For ever in your arms, Elsa," Keane said. "That's what it says. In German. I'm going to send it back to my wife to hold for me. It will make an interesting souvenir."

Michael's hands trembled on the glossy bit of amusement-park paper. He nearly tore it up. He hated Keane, hated the thought of the long-faced, yellow-toothed man fingering happily over the picture later in the century, back in the United States, remembering this morning with pleasure. But he knew he had no right to tear up the photograph. Much as he hated the man, Keane had earned his souvenir. When Michael had faltered and fumbled, Keane had behaved like a soldier. Without hesitation or fear, he had mastered the emergency, brought the enemy down when everyone else around him had been frozen and surprised. As for the killing of the wounded boy, Michael thought wearily, Keane had probably done the correct thing. There was nothing much they could have done with the German, and they'd have had to leave him, and the townspeople would have brained him as soon as Michael left. Keane, in his sour, sadistic way, had acted out the will of the people whom they had, after all, come to Europe to serve. By the single shot, Keane had given the bereaved and threatened inhabitants of the town a sense that justice had been done, a sense that, on this morning at least, the injuries they had suffered for so long had been paid for in a fitting coin. I should be pleased, Michael thought bitterly, that Keane was with us. I could never have done it, and it probably had to be done…

Michael started back towards where Stellevato was standing by the jeep. He felt sick and weary. This is what we're here for, he thought heavily, this is what it's all been for, to kill Germans. I should be light-hearted, triumphant…

He did not feel triumphant. Inadequate, he thought bruisedly, Michael Whitacre, the inadequate man, the doubtful civilian, the non-killing soldier. The girls' kisses on the road, the roses in the hedge, the free brandy had not been for him, because he could not earn it… Keane, who could grin as he put a bullet through a dying boy's head at his feet, carefully folding away a foreign photograph in his wallet for a souvenir, was the man these Europeans had feted on the sunny march from the coast.

… Keane was the victorious, adequate, liberating American, fit for this month of vengeance…

The man with the Red Cross armband came roaring past on his motor-cycle. He waved gaily, because he had two new guns and a hundred rounds of ammunition to take to his friends behind the improvised barricades of Paris. Michael did not turn to watch him as the bare legs, the absurd shorts, the stained bandage, bumped swiftly past the overturned car and disappeared in the direction of the eight hundred Germans, the mined crossroads, the capital of France.

"Holy man," Stellevato said, his soft Italian voice still husky, "what a morning. You all right?"

"Fine," Michael said flatly. "Fine."

"Nikki," Keane said, "don't you want to go over and take a look at the Krauts?"

"No," Stellevato said. "Leave them to the undertakers."

"You might pick up a nice souvenir," Keane said, "to send home to your folks from France."

"My folks don't want any souvenirs," Stellevato said. "The only souvenir they want from France is me."

"Look at this." Keane took out the photograph again and shoved it in front of Stellevato's nose. "His name was Joachim Ritter."

Stellevato slowly took the photograph and stared at it. "Poor girl," Stellevato said softly. "Poor little blonde girl."

Michael wanted to take Stellevato in his arms and embrace him.

Stellevato gave the photograph back to Keane. "I think we ought to go back to the Water Point," Stellevato said, "and tell the boys there what happened. They must've heard the shooting and they're probably scared out of their boots."

Michael started to climb into the jeep. He stopped. There was a jeep coming slowly down the main street. He heard Keane throw a cartridge into the chamber of his carbine.

"Cut it out," Michael said sharply. "It's one of ours."

The jeep drew slowly up beside them and Michael saw that it was Kramer and Morrison, who had been with Pavone three days before. The townspeople who were grouped on the steps of the hotel stared down at the new arrivals stonily.

"Hiya, Boys," Morrison said. "Enjoying yourself?"

"It's been great, Bo," Keane said heartily.

"What happened there?" Kramer gestured incredulously towards the dead Germans and the overturned car. "A traffic accident?"

"I shot them," Keane said loudly, grinning. "Perfect score for the day."

"Is he kidding?" Kramer asked Michael.

"He's not kidding," Michael said. "They're all his."

"Jee-sus!" Kramer said, looking with new respect at Keane, who had been the butt of the unit ever since its arrival in Normandy. "Old big-mouth Keane… What do you know?"

"Civil Affairs," Morrison said. "This is a hell of a thing for a Civil Affairs outfit to get mixed up in."

"Where's Pavone?" Michael asked. "Is he coming here this morning?"

Morrison and Kramer kept staring at the dead Germans. Like most of the outfit, they had seen no fighting in all the time they had been in France, and they were frankly impressed. "The plans've been changed," Kramer said. "The task force ain't coming through here. Pavone sent us to get you. He's at a town called Rambouillet. It's only an hour from here. Everybody's waiting for a Frog Division to lead the parade into Paris. We know the roads. Nikki, you follow us."

Stellevato looked inquiringly at Michael. Michael felt numb, relieved a little that the necessity for making decisions was now out of his hands. "OK, Nikki," Michael said, "let's get started."

"This looks like a pretty hot little town," Kramer said. "You think those Frogs'd knock up a meal for us?"

"I'm dying for a steak," Morrison said. "With French fried potatoes."

Suddenly the thought of remaining any longer in the town, under the cold measuring eyes of the townspeople, with the German dead sprawled in front of the epicerie, was intolerable to Michael. "Let's get back to Pavone," he said. "He may need us."

"If there's one thing that gets on my nerves it's PFCs," Morrison said. "Whitacre, your rank is too big for you." But he turned the jeep round.

Stellevato turned their jeep and started to follow Morrison. Michael sat stiffly in the front seat. He avoided looking at the hotel steps, where Mrs Dumoulin was standing in front of her neighbours.

"Monsieur!" It was Mrs Dumoulin's voice, loud and commanding. "Monsieur!" Michael sighed. "Hold it," he told Stellevato.

Stellevato stopped the jeep and honked the horn at Morrison. Morrison stopped, too.

Mrs Dumoulin, followed by the others, came across from the hotel steps. She stood near Michael, surrounded by the weary, work-worn farmers and merchants in their clumsy, frayed clothing.

"Monsieur," Mrs Dumoulin said, with her arms crossed again on her full shapeless breast, her tattered sweater flapping a little in the wind around her broad hips, "do you intend to leave?"

"Yes, Madame," Michael said quietly. "We have orders."

"What about the eight hundred Germans?" Mrs Dumoulin asked, her voice savagely controlled.

"I doubt that they will come back," Michael said.

"You doubt that they will come back," Mrs Dumoulin mimicked him. "What if they don't know about your doubts, Monsieur? What if they do come back?"

"I'm sorry, Madame," Michael said wearily. "We have to go. And if they did come back, what good would five Americans be to you?"

"You are deserting us," Mrs Dumoulin said loudly. "They will come back and see the four dead ones over there and they will kill every man, woman and child in town. You can't do that! You must stay here and protect us!"

Michael looked wearily at the two jeep-loads of soldiers – Stellevato, Keane, Morrison, Kramer, himself – stalled in the ugly little square. Keane was the only one who had ever fired a shot in anger, and he might be considered to have done his share for the day. Lord, Michael thought, turning regretfully back to Mrs Dumoulin, who stood there like the fierce, prodding, squat incarnation of complex duty, Lord, what protection you would get against that phantom German battalion from these five warriors! "Madame," Michael said, "it's no good. There's nothing we can do about it. We are not the American Army. We go where we are told and we do what we are ordered to do." He stared past Mrs Dumoulin at the anxious, accusing faces of the townspeople, trying to reach them with his good intentions, his pity, his helplessness. But there was no answering glow in the frightened faces of the men and women who were certain they were being left to die that day in the ruins of their homes.

"Forgive me, Madame," Michael said, almost sobbing, "I can't help…"

"You had no right to come," Mrs Dumoulin said, suddenly quiet, "unless you were prepared to stay. The tanks last night, you this morning. War or no war, you have no right to treat human beings like this…"

"Nikki," Michael said thickly, "let's get out of here! Fast!"

"It is dirty," Mrs Dumoulin was saying, speaking for the racked men and women behind her as Stellevato drove the jeep away, "it is too dirty, it is not civilized…"

Michael could not hear the end of her sentence, and he did not look back as they drove swiftly out of town, following Kramer and Morrison, in the direction of Colonel Pavone.

There were champagne bottles all over the table, catching the light of the hundreds of candles which were the only illumination in the night club. The room was very crowded. Uniforms of a dozen nations mingled with gay print dresses, bare arms, high-piled gleaming hair. Everybody seemed to be talking at once. The liberation of Paris the day before and the parade that afternoon, with the attendant interesting sniping from the rooftops, had liberated an enormous flood of conversation, most of which had to be shouted loudly to be heard over the three musicians in the corner, who were playing, very loudly, "Shuffle off to Buffalo".

Pavone was sitting opposite Michael, smiling widely, a cigar in his mouth, his arm lightly around a bleached lady with long false eyelashes. Occasionally he waved his cigar in pleasant salute to Michael, who was flanked by the correspondent, Ahearn, the man who was making a study of fear for Collier's, and a middleaged, beautifully dressed pilot in the French Air Force.

"Whitacre," Pavone said, across the table, "you're a fool if you ever leave this city."

"I agree with you, Colonel," Michael said. "When the war is over, I'm going to ask them to discharge me on the Champs Elysees." And, for the moment, he meant it. From the minute when, from among the rolling troop-filled trucks, he had seen the spire of the Eiffel Tower rising above the roofs of Paris, he had felt that he had finally arrived at his true home. Caught in the riotous confusion of kissing and handshaking and gratitude, hungrily reading the names of the streets which had haunted his brain ever since he was a boy. "Rue de Rivoli", "Place de l'Opera", "Boulevard des Capucines", he had felt washed of all guilt and all despair. Even the occasional outbursts of fighting, among the gardens and the monuments, when the remaining Germans had fired away their ammunition before surrendering, had seemed like a pleasant and fitting introduction to the great city. And the spilled blood on the streets, and the wounded and dying men being hurried away on stained stretchers by the FFI Red Cross women, had added the dramatically necessary note of poignancy and suffering to the great act of liberation.

He would never be able to remember what it had been like, exactly. He would only remember the cloud of kisses, the rouge on his shirt, the tears, the embraces, the feeling that he was enormous, invulnerable, and loved.

"I remember," Ahearn was saying next to him, "that the last time I saw you I questioned you on the subject of fear."

"Yes," Michael said, looking agreeably at the sunburned red face, and the serious grey eyes. "I believe you did. How's the market on fear these days among the editors?"

"I decided to put off writing it," Ahearn said earnestly. "It's been overdone. It's the result of the writers after the last war, plus the psychoanalysts. Fear has been made respectable and it's been done to death. It's a civilian concept. Soldiers really don't worry as much about it as the novelists would have you believe. In fact, the whole picture of war as an unbearable experience is a false one. I've watched carefully, keeping my mind open. War is enjoyable, and it is enjoyed by and large by almost every man in it. It is a normal and satisfactory experience. What is the thing that has struck you most strongly in the last month in France?"

"Well," Michael began, "it's…"

"Hilarity," Ahearn said. "A wild sensation of holiday. Laughter. We have moved three hundred miles through an enemy army on a tide of laughter. I plan to write it for Collier's."

"Good," Michael said gravely. "I shall look forward to reading it."

"The only man who has ever written accurately about a battle," said Ahearn, leaning over so that his face was just six inches from Michael's, "was Stendhal, In fact, the only three writers who have ever been worth reading twice in the whole history of literature were Stendhal, Villon and Flaubert."

"Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good," one of the musicians was singing in accented English, "oh, lady be good to me…"

"Stendhal caught the unexpected and insane and humorous aspect of war," Ahearn said. "Do you remember, in his journal, his description of the Colonel who rallied his men during the Russian campaign?"

"I'm afraid not," Michael said.

"You look like a nice, lonely soldier." It was a tall, dark-haired girl in a flowered dress whom Michael had smiled at across the room fifteen minutes before. She was standing, bent over the table, her hand on Michael's. Her dress was cut low, and Michael noticed the pleasant, firm, olive sweep of her bosom so close to his eyes. "Wouldn't you like to dance with a grateful lady?"

Michael smiled at her. "In five minutes," he said, "when my head is cleared."

"Good." The girl nodded, smiling invitingly. "You know where I'm sitting…"

"Yes, I certainly do," Michael said. He watched the girl slip through the dancers in a sinuous flowery movement. Nice, he thought, very nice for later. I should really make love to a Parisienne to make official our entry into Paris.

"There are volumes to be written," Ahearn said, "about the question of men and women in wartime."

"I'm sure there are," Michael said. The girl sat down at her table and smiled across at him.

There were shouts from the other end of the room, and four young men with FFI armbands and rifles pushed their way through the dancers, dragging another young man whose face was bleeding from a long gash over his eyes. "Liars!" the bloody young man was shouting. "You're all liars! I am no more of a collaborationist than anybody in this room!"

One of the FFI men hit the prisoner on the back of the neck. The young man's head sagged forward and he was quiet. The four FFI men dragged him up the steps past the candles in their glass holders on the maroon walls. The orchestra played louder than before.

"Barbarians!" It was a woman's voice, speaking in English. A lady of forty was sitting in the seat that the French pilot had vacated next to Michael. She had long, dark red fingernails and an elegant simple black dress, and she was still very handsome.

"They all ought to be arrested. Just looking for an excuse to stir up mischief. I am going to suggest to the American Army that they disarm them all." Her accent was plainly American and both Ahearn and Michael stared at her puzzledly. She nodded briskly to Ahearn, and more coolly to Michael, after swiftly noting that he was not an officer. "My name is Mabel Kasper," she said, "and don't look so surprised. I'm from Schenectady."

"We are delighted, Mabel," Ahearn said gallantly, bowing without rising.

"I know what I'm talking about," the lady from Schenectady said feverishly, obviously three or four drinks past cold sobriety.

"I've lived in Paris for twelve years. Oh, the things I've suffered. You're a correspondent – the stories I could tell you about what it was like under the Germans…"

"I would be delighted to hear," Ahearn began.

"The food, the rationing," Mabel Kasper said, pouring a large glass full of champagne and drinking half of it in one gulp.

"The Germans requisitioned my apartment, and they only gave me fifteen days to move my furniture. Luckily, I found another apartment, a Jewish couple's; the man is dead now, but this afternoon, imagine that, the second day of liberation, the woman was around asking me to give it back to her. And there wasn't a stick of furniture in it when I moved in, I was damn careful to have affidavits made, I knew this would happen. I have already spoken to Colonel Harvey, of our Army, he's been most reassuring. Do you know Colonel Harvey?"

"I'm afraid not," Ahearn said.

"These are going to be hard days ahead of us in France." Mabel Kasper finished the glass of champagne. "The scum are in the saddle. Hoodlums, parading around with their guns."

"Do you mean the FFI?" Michael asked.

"I mean the FFI," said Mabel Kasper.

"But they've done all the fighting in the underground," said Michael, trying through all the noise to puzzle out what this woman was driving at.

"The underground!" Mabel Kasper snorted in a genteel, annoyed way. "I'm so tired of the underground. All the loafers, all the agitators, all the ne'er-do-wells, who had no families to worry about, no property, no jobs… The respectable people were too busy, and now we'll all pay for it unless you help us. You've liberated us from the Germans, now you must liberate us from the French and the Russians." She drained her glass and stood up. "A word to the wise," she said, nodding gravely.

Michael watched her walk along the jumbled line of tables, in her simple, handsome black dress. "Lord," he said softly, "and out of Schenectady, too."

"A war," Ahearn said soberly, "as I was saying, is full of confusing elements."

"If there is any hope in the future," Michael heard Pavone lecturing two young American infantry officers who were AWOL from their Division for the night, "it is in France. It is not enough for Americans to fight for France, they must understand it, stabilize it, be patient with it. That is not easy, because the French are the most annoying people in the whole world. They are annoying because they are chauvinistic, scornful, reasonable, independent and great. If I were the President of the United States, I would send every young American to France for two years instead of to college. The boys would learn about food and art, and the girls learn about sex, and in fifty years you would have Utopia on the banks of the Mississippi…"

Across the room, the girl in the flowered dress, who had been watching Michael intently, smiled broadly and nodded when she caught Michael's eye.

"The irrational element in war," Ahearn said, "is the one that has been missing from all our literature. Let me remind you once more of the Colonel in Stendhal…"

"What did the Colonel in Stendhal say?" Michael asked dreamily, happily floating in a haze of champagne, smoke, perfume, candlelight, lust…

"His men were demoralized," Ahearn said sternly, his tone now martial and commanding, "and they were on the verge of running under a Russian attack. The Colonel swore at them, waved his sword, and shouted, 'My arse-hole is as round as an apple, follow me!' And they followed him and routed the Russians. Irrational," Ahearn said professorially, "a perfect nonsequitur, but it touched some obscure spring of patriotism and resistance in the hearts of the soldiers, and they won the day."

"Ah," said Michael regretfully, "there are no Colonels like that today."

A drunken British Captain was singing, very loudly, "We're going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line," his voice bellowing strongly, drowning the music of the orchestra. Immediately, other voices took up the song. The orchestra gave in and stopped the dance tune they were playing and began to accompany the singers. The drunken Captain, a big, red-faced man, grabbed a girl and began to dance around the room among the tables. Other couples jumped up and attached themselves to the line, weaving slowly and loudly between the paper tablecloths and the wine buckets. In a minute, the line was twenty couples long, chanting, their heads thrown back, each person's hands on the waist of the dancer ahead of him, like a triumphant snake dance in college after a football game, except that it was all enclosed in a low-ceilinged, candlelit room, and the singing was deafening.

"Agreeable," Ahearn said, "but too normal to be interesting, from a literary point of view. After all, after a victory like this, it is only to be expected that the liberators and the liberated sing and dance. But what a thing it would have been to be in the Czar's palace in Sevastopol when the young cadets filled the swimming pool with champagne from the Czar's cellar and tossed naked ballet girls by the dozen into the foam, while waiting for the arrival of the Red Army which would execute them all! Excuse me," Ahearn said gravely, standing up, "I must join this."

He wriggled out on to the floor and put his hands on the waist of the Schenectady-born Mabel Kasper, who was swaying her simple taffeta hips and singing loudly at the end of the line.

The girl in the flowered dress was standing in front of the table, looking at Michael, smiling through the clamour. "Now?" she asked softly, putting out her hand.

"Now," Michael said. He stood up and took her hand. They hitched on to the line, the girl in front of Michael, her hips living and slender under the frail silk of her gown.

By now everybody in the room was in the line, spiralling in a roaring silk and uniformed line, over the dance floor, in front of the blaring band, among the tables. "We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line," they sang. "Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?"

Michael sang with the loudest of them, his voice hoarse and happy in his ears, holding tight to the desirable slim waist of the girl who had sought him out of all the victorious young men in the celebrating city. Lost on a clangorous tide of music, shouting the crude, triumphant words, remembering with what savage irony the Germans had thrown those words back in the teeth of the British who had first sung them in 1939, Michael felt that on this night all men were his friends, all women his lovers, all cities his own, all victories deserved, all life imperishable…

"We'll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line," the blended voices sang among the candles, "if the Siegfried Line's still there," and Michael knew that he had lived for this moment, had crossed the ocean for it, carried a rifle for it, escaped death for it.

The song ended. The girl in the flowered dress turned and kissed him, melting into him, clutching him, making him dizzy with the smell of wine and heliotrope perfume, as the other people around him sang, like all the gay, jubilating ghosts at every New Year's party that had ever been held, the sentimental and haunting words of "Auld Lang Syne".

The middle-aged French pilot from Park Avenue, who had given the ingenious parties in 1928, and who had gone to Harlem late at night, and who had flown three complete tours in the Lorraine Squadron, and whose friends had all died through the years, and who now was finally back in Paris, was weeping as he sang, the tears unashamedly and openly streaming down his handsome, worn face… "Should old acquaintance be forgot," he sang, his arm around Pavone's shoulders, already hungry and nostalgic for this great and fleeting night of hope and joy, "and never brought to mind…?"

The girl kissed Michael ever more fiercely. He closed his eyes and rocked gently with her, the nameless gift of the free city, locked in his arms…

Fifteen minutes later, as Michael, carrying his carbine, and the girl in the flowered dress and Pavone and his bleached lady were walking along the dark Champs Elysees, in the direction of the Arch, near where Michael's girl lived, the Germans came over, bombing the city. There was a truck parked under a tree, and Michael and Pavone decided to wait there, sitting on the bumper, under the moral protection of the summer foliage above their heads.

Two minutes later, Pavone was dead, and Michael was lying on the tarry-smelling pavement, very conscious, but curiously unable to move his legs below the hips.

Voices came from far away and Michael wondered what had happened to the girl in the silk dress, and tried to puzzle out how it had happened, because all the firing had seemed to be on the other side of the river, and he hadn't heard any bombs dropping…

Then he remembered the sudden dark shape roaring across the intersection… A traffic accident… He smiled remotely to himself. Beware French drivers, all his travelling friends had always said.

He couldn't move his legs and the light of the torch on Pavone's face made it seem very pale, as though he had been dead for ever, and there was an American voice saying, "Hey, look at this, an American, and he's dead. Hey, look, it's a Colonel. What do you know…? He looks just like a GI."

Michael started to say something clear and definitive about his friend, Colonel Pavone, but it never quite formed on his tongue. When they picked Michael up, although they did it very gently, considering the darkness and the confusion and the weeping women, he dropped steeply into unconsciousness…