The Young Lions (37 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It happened the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"THEY assure me," the voice behind the bandages was saying, "that in two years they can give me a face. I am not under any illusions. I will not look like a motion-picture actor, but I am confident it will be a serviceable face."

Christian had seen some of the serviceable faces that the surgeons patched on to the wrecked skulls delivered to their tables, and he was not as confident as Hardenburg, but he merely said, "Of course, Lieutenant."

"It is already almost definite," the voice went on, "that I will see out of my right eye within a month. By itself that is a victory, even if it was as far as they could go."

"Certainly, Lieutenant," Christian said in the darkened room of the villa on the pretty island of Capri, standing in the winter sunlight of the bay of Naples. He was sitting between the beds, with his right leg, bandaged and stiff in front of him, just touching the marble floor and his crutches leaning against the wall.

The case in the other bed was a Burn, an armoured-division Burn, very bad, and the Burn merely lay still under his ten metres of bandage, filling the high-ceilinged cool room with the usual smell, which was worse than the aroma of the dead, but which Hardenburg could not smell, because he had nothing left to smell with. An economically minded nurse had realized this fortunate fact and had placed them side by side, since the hospital, once the vacation spot of a prosperous Lyons silk manufacturer, was being crowded more and more every day with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa.

Christian was in a larger hospital down the hill, devoted to the common soldiers, but they had given him his crutches a week ago, and he now felt like a free man.

"It is very good of you, Diestl," said Hardenburg, "to come and visit me. As soon as you get hurt people have a tendency to treat you as though you were eight years old, and your brain goes to rot along with everything else."

"I was very anxious to see you," Christian said, "and tell you in person how grateful I am for what you did for me. So when I heard you were on the Island, too, I…"

"Nonsense!" It was amazing how much the same, clipped, precise, snarling, Hardenburg's voice was, although the whole facade that had shielded the voice was now gone. "Gratitude is out of order. I did not save you out of affection, I assure you."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"There were two places on that motor-cycle. Two lives could be saved that might be useful somewhere later on. If there was someone else there who I thought would be more valuable later, I would have left you behind."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, staring at the smooth, white, unfeatured bandages wrapped so neatly about the head that he had last seen red and dripping on the hill outside Solium, with the noise of the British planes dying away in the distance.

The nurse came in. She was a motherly-looking woman of about forty, with a kindly, fat face. "Enough," she said. Her voice was not motherly, but bored and business-like. "The visit is over for the day."

She stood at the door, waiting to make sure that Christian left. Christian stood slowly, taking hold of his crutches. They made a sodden, wooden noise on the marble floor.

"At least," said Hardenburg, "I will be able to walk on my own two feet."

"Yes, Sir," Christian said. "I'll visit you again, if you are agreeable, Lieutenant."

"If you wish," said the voice behind the bandages.

"This way, Sergeant," said the nurse.

Christian tapped his way out clumsily, because he had only recently learned how to handle the crutches. It was very good to be out in the corridor, where you could not smell the Burn.

"She will not be too disturbed," Hardenburg was saying through the white muffling wall of bandage, "by the change in my appearance." He was talking about his wife. "I have written to her and told her I was hit in the face and she said she was proud of me and that it would alter nothing."

No face, Christian thought, that is quite a change in appearance. But he said nothing. He sat between the two beds, with his leg out, and his crutches in their accustomed place against the wall.

Now he came to visit the Lieutenant almost every day. The Lieutenant talked, hour after hour, through the white darkness of the bandages, and Christian said, "Yes, Sir," and "No, Sir," and listened. The Burn still smelled just as badly, but after the first few gagging moments each time, Christian found himself able to bear it and even, after a while, to forget it. Locked in his blindness, Hardenburg talked calmly and reflectively for hours on end, slowly unwinding the tissue of his life for his own and Christian's benefit, as though now, in this enforced holiday, he was taking an inventory of himself, weighing himself, judging his past triumphs and errors and mapping out the possibilities of his future. It grew more and more fascinating for Christian, and he found himself spending half-days in the evil-smelling room, following the spiral, oblique uncovering of a life that he felt to be more and more significantly locked with his own. The sick-room became a combination of lecture room and confessional, a place in which Christian could find his own mistakes clarified, his own vague hopes and aspirations crystallized, understood, categorized. The war was a dream on other continents, an unreal grappling of shadows, muffled trumpets in a distant storm, and only the room with the two swathed and stinking figures overlooking the sunny, blue harbour was real, important.

"Gretchen will be very valuable to me," Hardenburg was saying, "after the war. Gretchen, that's the name of my wife."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, "I know."

"How do you know? Oh, yes, I sent you to deliver a package."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"She is quite handsome, Gretchen, isn't she?"

"Yes, Sir. Quite handsome."

"Very important," said Hardenburg. "You would be amazed at the number of careers that have been ruined in the Army by dowdy wives. She is also very capable. She has the knack of handling people…"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"Did you have an opportunity to talk to her?"

"For about ten minutes. She questioned me about you."

"She is very devoted," said Hardenburg.

"Yes, Sir."

"I plan to see her in eighteen months. My face will be well enough by then. I do not wish to shock her unnecessarily. Very valuable. She has a knack of being at home wherever she finds herself, of being at ease, saying the correct thing…"

"Yes, Sir."

"To tell you the truth, I was not in love with her when I married her. I was very much attached to an older woman. Divorced. With two children. Very attached. I nearly married her. It would have ruined me. Her father was a workman in a metal factory and she herself had a tendency to fat. In ten years she will be monstrous. I had to keep reminding myself that in ten years I expected to have Ministers and Generals as guests in my home and that my wife would have to serve as hostess. She had a vulgar streak, too, and the children were impossible. Still, even now, thinking of her, I feel a sinking, weak sensation. Have you ever been like that about a woman?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"It would have been ruinous," said the voice behind the bandages. "A woman is the most common trap. A man must be sensible in that department as in anything else. I despise a man who will sacrifice himself for a woman. It is the most sickly form of self-indulgence. If it were up to me, I would have all the novels burned, too, all of them, along with Das Kapital and the poems of Heine."

The doctor was a grey-haired man. He looked seventy years old. He had pouches under his eyes of wrinkled purple skin, like the flesh of swamp flowers, and his hands shook as he poked at Christian's knee. He was a Colonel and he looked too old even for a Colonel. There was brandy on his breath and the small, watery spurts of his eyes suspiciously searched Christian's scarred leg and Christian's face for the malingering and deception the doctor had found so often in thirty years of examining ailing soldiers of the Army of the Kaiser, the Army of the Social Democrats, and the Army of the Third Reich. Only the doctor's breath, Christian thought, has remained the same over the thirty years. The generals have changed, the sergeants have died, the philosophers have veered from north to south, but the Colonel's breath bears the same rich freight by a dark bottle out of Bordeaux that it did when Emperor Franz Josef stood beside his brother monarch in Vienna to review the first Saxony Guards on their way into Serbia.