The Young Lions (79 page)

It started to rain. Curtains of water poured down over the ancient earthworks and the rotting wooden posts that had supported the wire in 1917. The Chaplain slowed down, peering through the clouded windshield. Noah, who was sitting in the front seat, worked the manual wiper to clear the glass. They passed a little fenced-off plot next to the road where ten Frenchmen had been buried on the retreat in 1940. There were faded artificial flowers on some of the graves, and a little statue of a saint in a glass case on a grey wood pedestal. Michael looked away from the Chaplain, thinking vaguely of the overlapping quality of wars.

The Chaplain stopped the jeep abruptly, and backed it down the road towards the little French cemetery.

"That will make a very interesting photograph for my album," the Chaplain said. "Would you boys mind posing in front of it?"

Michael and Noah climbed out and stood in front of the neat little plot. "Pierre Sorel," Michael read on one of the crosses, "Soldat, premiere class, ne 1921, mort 1940." The artificial leaves of laurel and the dark memorial ribbon around them had run together in streaks of green and black in the long rains and the warm sun of the years between 1940 and 1944.

"I have more than a thousand photographs I've taken since the war began," said the Chaplain, busily working on a shiny Leica camera. "It will make a valuable record. A little to the left, please, Boys. There, that's it." There was a click from the camera. "This is a wonderful little camera," the Chaplain said proudly. "Takes pictures in any light. I bought it for two cartons of cigarettes from a Kraut prisoner. Only the Krauts know how to make good cameras, really. They have the patience we lack. Now, you boys give me the address of your families back in the States, and I'll make up two extra prints, and send them back to show the folks how healthy you are."

Noah gave the Chaplain Hope's address, care of her father in Vermont. The Chaplain carefully wrote it down in a pocket notebook with a black leather cover and a cross on it.

"Never mind about me," Michael said, feeling that he didn't want his mother and father to see a photograph of him, thin and worn, in his ill-fitting uniform, standing in the rain before the ten-grave roadside cemetery of the lost young Frenchmen.

"I don't like to bother you, Sir."

"Nonsense, Boy," said the Chaplain. "There must be somebody who'd be right happy with your picture. You'd be surprised, all the nice letters I get from folks whose boys' pictures I send them. You're a smart, handsome young feller, there must be a girl who would like to put your picture on her bed table."

Michael thought for a moment. "Miss Margaret Freemantle," he said, "26 West 10th Street, New York City. It's just what she needs for her bed table."

While the Chaplain scratched away in his notebook, Michael thought of Margaret receiving the photograph and the note from the Chaplain in the quiet, pleasant street in New York. Maybe now, he thought, she'll write… Although what she'll have to say to me, and what I might possibly answer, I certainly don't know. Love, from France, a million years later. Signed, Your interchangeable lover, Michael Whitacre, Army Speciality Number 745, from the grave of Pierre Sorel, ne 1921, mort 1940, in the rain. Having a wonderful time, wish you were…

They got into the jeep again and the Chaplain drove carefully along the narrow, high-backed, slippery road with the marks of tank treads and a million heavy army wheels on it.

"Vermont," the Chaplain said pleasantly to Noah, "that's a pretty quiet section of the country for a young feller, isn't it?"

"I'm not going to live there," Noah said, "after the war. I'm going to move to Iowa."

"Why don't you come to Texas?" the Chaplain said hospitably. "Room for a man to breathe there. You got folks in Iowa?"

"You might say that," Noah nodded. "A buddy of mine. Boy by the name of Johnny Burnecker. His mother's found a house we can have for forty dollars a month, and his uncle owns a newspaper and he's going to take me on when I get back. It's all arranged."

"Newspaperman, eh?" the Chaplain nodded sagely. "That's the lively life. Rolling in money, too."

"Not this newspaper, " Noah said. "It comes out once a week. It has a circulation of 8, 200."

"Well, it's a start," said the Chaplain agreeably. "A springboard to bigger things in the city."

"I don't want a springboard," said Noah quietly. "I don't want to live in a city. I haven't any ambition. I just want to sit in a small town in Iowa for the rest of my life, with my wife and my son, and my friend, Johnny Burnecker. When I get the itch to travel, I'll walk down to the post office."

"Oh, you'll get tired of it," the Chaplain said. "Now that you've seen the world, a small town will seem pretty dull."

"No, I won't," said Noah, very firmly, working the manual wiper with a decisive flick of his arm. "I won't ever get tired of it."

"Well, you're different from me, then." The Chaplain laughed. "I come from a small town and I'm tired in advance. Though, to tell you the truth, I don't think I'll have anybody much waiting for me at home." He chuckled sympathetically to himself. "I have no children, and my wife said, when the war began, and I felt I had the call to join up, 'Ashton,' she said, 'you have got to make your choice, it is either the Corps of Chaplains or your wife. I am not going to sit home by myself for five years, thinking of you travelling around the world, loose as a humming-bird, picking up with God knows what kind of women. Ashton,' she said, 'you don't fool me not for a minute.' I told her she was unreasonable, but she's a stubborn woman. The day I come home I bet she starts proceedings for a divorce. I had quite a decision to make, I can tell you that. Oh, well," he sighed philosophically, "it hasn't been so bad. There's a very nice little nurse in the 12th General, and I have managed to assuage my sorrows." He grinned. "Between my nurse and my photography, I find I hardly think of my wife at all. As long as I have a woman to soothe me in my hours of despair, and enough film to take my pictures, I can face whatever comes…"

"Where do you get all that film?" Michael asked, thinking of the thousand pictures for the album, and knowing how difficult it was to get even one roll a month out of any PX.

The Chaplain made a sly face and put his finger along his nose. "I had some trouble for a while, but I have it taped now, as our English friends say. Oh, yes, it's taped now. It's the best film in the world. When the boys come in from their missions, I get the Engineering Officer of the Group to let me clip off the unexposed ends in the gun cameras. You'd be surprised how much film you can accumulate that way. The last Engineering Officer was beginning to get very stuffy about it, and he was on the verge of complaining to the Colonel that I was stealing government property, and I couldn't make him see the light…" The Chaplain smiled reflectively. "But I have no trouble any more," he said.

"How did it work out?" Michael asked.

"The Engineering Officer went on a mission. He was a good flier, oh, he was a crackerjack flier," the Chaplain said enthusiastically, "and he shot down a Messerschmitt, and when he came back to the field he buzzed the radio tower to celebrate. Well, the poor boy miscalculated by two feet, and we had to sweep him together from all four quarters of the field. I tell you, I gave that boy one of the best funerals anybody has ever had from the Corps of Chaplains in the Army of the United States. A real, full-sized, eloquent funeral…" The Chaplain grinned slyly. "Now I get all the film I want," he said.

Michael blinked, wondering if the Chaplain had been drinking, but he drove the jeep with easy competence, as sober as a judge. The Army, Michael thought dazedly, everybody makes his own arrangements with it…

A figure stepped out from under the protection of a tree and waved to them, and the Chaplain slowed to a halt. An Air Force Lieutenant was standing there, wet, dressed in a Navy jacket, carrying one of those machine-pistols with a collapsible stock.

"Going to Rheims?" the Lieutenant asked.

"Hop in, Boy," said the Chaplain heartily, "get right on in there at the back. The Chaplain's jeep stops for everybody on all roads."

The Lieutenant climbed in beside Michael and the jeep rolled on through the thick rain. Michael looked sidelong at the Lieutenant. He was very young, and he moved slowly and wearily, and his clothes didn't fit him. The Lieutenant noticed that Michael was staring at him.

"I bet you wonder what I'm doing here," the Lieutenant said.

"Oh, no," said Michael hastily, not wishing to get into that conversational department. "Not at all."

"I'm having a hell of a time," the Lieutenant said, "trying to locate my glider group."

Michael wondered how you could lose a whole group of gliders, especially on the ground, but he didn't inquire further.

"I was on the Arnhem thing," the Lieutenant said, "and I was shot down inside the German lines in Holland."

"What happened?" Michael asked. Somehow it was hard to imagine this pale, gentle-faced boy being shot down out of a glider behind the enemy lines.

"It's the third mission I've been on," the Lieutenant said.

"The Sicily drop, the Normandy drop and this one. They promised us it would be our last one." He grinned weakly. "As far as I'm concerned, they were damn near right." He shrugged.

"Though I don't believe them. They'll have us dropping into Japan before it's over." He shivered in his wet, outsize clothes.

"I'm not eager," he said, "I'm far from eager. I used to think I was one hell of a brave, hundred-mission pilot, but I'm not. The first time I saw flak off my wing, I couldn't bear to watch. I turned my head away and flew by touch, and I told myself, "Francis O'Brien, you are not a fighting man."

They drove in silence for a long time between the vineyards and the signs of old wars in the grey rain.

"Lieutenant O'Brien," Michael said, fascinated by the pale, gentle boy, "you don't have to tell me if you don't want, but how did you get out of Holland?"

"I don't mind telling," said O'Brien. "The right wing was tearing away and I signalled the tow plane I was breaking off. I came down in a field, pretty hard, and by the time I got out of the glider all the men I was carrying had scattered, because there was machine-gun fire coming in at us from a bunch of farmhouses about a thousand yards away. I ran as far as I could and I took off my wings and threw them away, because people're liable to get very mad at the Air Force when they catch them. You know, all the bombing, all the mistakes, all the civilians that get killed by accident, it doesn't do any good to be caught with wings. I laid in a ditch for three days, and then a farmer came up and gave me something to eat. That night he led me through the lines to a British reconnaissance outfit. They sent me back and I got a ride on an American destroyer. That's where I got this jacket. The destroyer mooched around all over the Channel for two weeks. Lord, I've never been so sick in my life. Finally they landed me at Southampton, and I hitched a ride to where I'd left my Group. But they'd pulled out a week before, they'd come to France. They'd reported me missing, and God knows what my mother was going through, and all my things'd been sent back to the States. Nobody was much interested in giving me orders. A glider pilot seems to be a big nuisance to everybody when there's no drop scheduled, and nobody seemed to have the authority to pay me or issue me orders or anything, and nobody gave a damn." O'Brien chuckled softly, without malice. "I heard the Group was over here, near Rheims, so I hitched a ride back to Cherbourg in a Liberty ship that was carrying ammunition and ten-in-one rations. I took two days off in Paris, on my own, except that a Second Lieutenant who hasn't been paid for a couple of months might as well be dead as be in Paris, and here I am…"

"A war," the Chaplain said officially, "is a very complex problem."

"I'm not complaining, Sir," O'Brien said hastily, "honest I'm not. As long as I don't have to make any more drops, I'm as happy as can be. As long as I know I'm finally going back to my diaper service in Green Bay, they can push me around all they want."

"Your what?" Michael asked dully.

"My diaper service," O'Brien said shyly, smiling a little. "My brother and I have a dandy little business, two trucks. My brother's taking care of it, only he writes that it's getting impossible to get hold of cotton materials of any kind. The last five letters I wrote before the drop, I was writing to cotton mills in the States to see if they had any material they could spare…" The heroes, Michael thought humbly, as they entered the outskirts of Rheims, come in all sizes.

There were MPs on the corners and a whole batch of official cars near the Cathedral. Michael could see Noah tensing in the front seat at the prospect of being dumped out in the middle of this rear-echelon bustle. Still, Michael couldn't help staring with interest at the sandbagged Cathedral, with its stained glass removed for safe-keeping. Dimly he remembered, when he was a little boy in grade school in Ohio, he had donated ten cents to rebuilding this Cathedral, so piteously damaged in the last war. Staring at the soaring pile now from the Chaplain's jeep, he was pleased to find that his investment hadn't been wasted. The jeep stopped in front of Communications Zone Headquarters. "Now you get out here, Lieutenant," the Chaplain said, "and go in there and demand transportation back to your Group, no matter where they are. Raise your voice nice and loud. And if they won't give you any satisfaction, you wait for me here. I'll be back in fifteen minutes and I'll go in and threaten to write to Washington if they don't treat you well."

O'Brien got out. He stood, looking, puzzled and frightened, at the shabby row of buildings, obviously lost and doubtful of Army channels.

"I have an even better idea," the Chaplain said. "We passed a cafe two blocks back. You're wet and cold. Go in and get yourself a double cognac and fortify your nerves. I'll meet you there. I remember the name… Aux Boris Amis."