"Yes, Sir," Christian said.

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

SMOKE from crashed and burned gliders stained the wet dawn sky to the east. There was small-arms fire all around the compa.s.s and more planes kept coming over, and more gliders, and everyone fired at them with all types of weapons, anti-aircraft cannon, machine guns, rifles, and Christian thought he remembered seeing Captain Penschwitz standing on a fence firing with a pistol at a glider that crashed right in front of the Company in a poplar tree and broke into flames, with men screaming in it, and leaping in veils of flame through the canvas sides to the ground.

It was very confusing, with everyone shooting at everyone else. It had been going on now for four hours, and Penschwitz had panicked and had marched the Company down a road toward the coast for three kilometers, where they had been fired upon, and had lost eight men, then marched the Company back, with men being picked off in the dark and straggling away into farmhouses. Then, at around seven in the morning, Penschwitz had been shot by a nervous sentry at an anti-aircraft battery, and the Company had melted away, until, in a momentary lull, behind the wall of a huge old Norman stone barn, among a herd of fat black and white cows who stared suspiciously at them, Christian counted the men around him and saw that there were only twelve left, and that there were no officers at all.

Wonderful, Christian thought grimly, staring back at the cows, five hours of war and no Company left. The war will be over by dinnertime if the rest of the Army is like this.

But, from the sound of it, the rest of the Army was in better shape. There was steady firing now, and it sounded organized, and the deep rumble of artillery in s.p.a.ced series of shots.

Christian stared thoughtfully at the remnants of the Company. They were almost useless, he realized. One man had begun digging a hole for himself, and all the others were following suit. They were digging feverishly, at the base of the wall, in the soft barnyard earth, and already five or six of them were down to their hips, with the rich, dark-brown loam in loose piles around them.

Useless, Christian thought, useless. He had seen too many men in panic by now to have any illusions about this bunch. Compared to them, Heims and Richter and Dehn, back in Italy, had all been heroes of the first magnitude. For a moment he thought of slipping away on his own, finding a company that was doing some fighting, and joining them, leaving these cattle to their own devices. Then he thought better of it. They will fight today, he thought sourly, if I have to march them out across a field at the muzzle of a machine gun.

He went to the man nearest him. The man was bending over, wrestling with a root he had uncovered two feet down. Christian kicked him, hard, and the man fell face forward into the muck.

"Get out of your G.o.dd.a.m.n holes," Christian shouted. "You're not going to lie here waiting for the Americans to come and get you whenever they feel like it. Get out, get out!" He kicked the next man in line in the ribs. The man had never stopped digging, had not even seemed to hear Christian, and had dug the deepest hole in the barnyard. The man sighed and got out of the hole. He did not look at Christian.

"You," Christian said, "come with me. The rest of you stay here. Eat something. You're not going to have another chance to eat for a long time. I'll be right back."

He shoved the shoulder of the man he had kicked, and started toward the house, past the silent, white-faced men and the suspicious cows.

The back door was locked. Christian banged loudly on it with his gun. The man with him, whose name, Christian finally remembered, was Buschfelder, shuddered at the noise. No good, Christian thought, looking at him, no good at all.

Christian banged on the door again, and there was the sound of a bolt being drawn. A moment later the door opened, and a small, fat old woman, in a faded green ap.r.o.n, was standing there. She had no teeth and her wrinkled lips were pulling dryly at each other.

"We are not responsible," the woman began.

Christian pushed past her and Buschfelder followed. He was an enormous, powerful-looking man, and he seemed to fill the kitchen, as he stood against the stove, with his rifle ready in his hand.

Christian looked around the room. It was blackened by smoke and age. Two large roaches were making their way across the cold stove. There was some b.u.t.ter, wrapped in cabbage leaves, on the windowsill, and a large loaf of bread on the table.

"Take the b.u.t.ter, and the bread," Christian told Buschfelder. Then he spoke in French to the woman. "I want all the alcohol you have in the house, Mother," he said. "Wine, Calvados, marc, whatever you have. And if you try to hold out one drop, we will burn the house down and slaughter all your cows."

The old woman was watching Buschfelder collect the b.u.t.ter, her lips trembling in protest. But she turned to Christian when he spoke to her. "This is barbarism," she said. "I shall report you to the Commandant. Our family is well known to him and my daughter works in his house ..."

"All the liquor, Mother," Christian said harshly. "Fast!"

He waved his gun threateningly.

The woman went to a corner of the kitchen and lifted a trap door. "Alois," she called down, her voice echoing hollowly in the cellar below their feet, "it is the soldiers. They demand our Calvados. Bring it up. Bring it all up. They will kill the cows."

Christian grinned inwardly. He looked out the window. All the men were still there. There were two new ones with them, without guns, talking swiftly with large gestures, and the men grouped around them.

There was a clumping on the cellar steps and Alois climbed into the kitchen, carrying a two-liter jar. He was over sixty, and knotted and worn with years of Norman farming. At the moment, his large, misshapen brown hands were trembling on the jug.

"Here," he said. "My best apple. I deny you nothing."

"Good," Christian said, taking the Calvados. "I thank you."

"He thanks us," the old woman said bitterly. "But no talk of payment, none at all."

"Submit your bill," Christian said, grinning, enjoying the scene suddenly, "to your friend, the Commandant. Come on, you," he touched Buschfelder.

Buschfelder went out the door. There was a new burst of small-arms fire, much closer, and the trembling roar of low-flying planes.

"What is it?" Alois peered out the door nervously. "Is it the invasion?"

"No," said Christian carrying the liquor out of the door. "Maneuvers."

"What will happen to our cows?" Alois called after him. "Where should we put our cows?"

Christian didn't answer the old man. He strode down to the barnyard wall and put the jug on the ground.

"Here," he said, "come and get some of this. Drink as much as you can now, and every other man fill his canteen with it. In ten minutes you will be ready to take on a regiment." He grinned at them, but they did not smile back. But one by one, they came up and drank and filled their canteens.

"Don't be bashful," Christian said. "This is on the Fatherland."

The two newcomers came up last. They drank eagerly. Their eyes were bloodshot and jumpy, and they spilled the liquor over their chins.

"What happened to you two?" Christian asked when they had put down the jug.

The two men looked at each other. They did not speak.

"They were two kilometers from here," said one of the other men, Stauch, who was standing next to Christian, biting greedily at a large chunk of b.u.t.ter he held in one hand, and sucking at his canteen full of Calvados to wash the b.u.t.ter down, "two kilometers, a whole battalion, and the battalion was surprised and they are the only ones left. American paratroopers. They don't take prisoners. They killed everyone. They are all drunk, too. They have tanks and heavy artillery ..." Stauch's voice ran on, high and uneven, through the b.u.t.ter and the apple brandy. "Thousands of them. They are solid from here to the coast, and there is no organized resistance ..."

The two survivors were nodding eagerly through all this, their eyes flickering back and forth from Christian's face to Stauch's.

"We are cut off here, too, they say," Stauch continued. "A runner broke through from Division Headquarters, and he said there was no one left there. They shot the General and knifed two Colonels ..."

"Shut up," Christian said to Stauch. He turned to the two fugitives. "Get out of here," he said.

"But where ..." asked one of the survivors. "The paratroopers are all over ..."

"Get out of here," said Christian loudly, cursing the bad luck that had given these men five minutes with his squad. "If I can still see you in one minute I am going to have my men fire at you. And if I ever see you again, I am going to have you court-martialed and shot for deserters."

"Please, Sergeant."

"One minute," Christian said.

The two men looked around them wildly, then turned and started to trot away. Then they grew panicky and began to run. They were running frenziedly when they disappeared through the hedge of a neighboring field.

Christian took a long drink of the Calvados. It was raw and hot and burned ferociously as it went down his throat. But a moment later he was feeling confident and powerful, and as he peered through half-closed measuring eyes at the men of his squad, he thought, I will get you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to fight like a full company of Elite Guards.

"One more drink," he shouted. "One more before the party."

They all drank together. Then, in single file, walking in the ditch, alongside the thick hedge that bounded each field, they started, with Christian at the head, toward the sound of the firing to the east.

They went quickly for ten minutes, stopping only for a moment each time they came to the limit of a field or to the edge of one of the narrow, hedge-lined roads. Then Christian or one of the others would slide through the hedge, make sure the way was clear, and wave to the others. The men were behaving very well. The Calvados, Christian noticed with grim satisfaction, was working so far. The men were alert, tense but not panicky, and their fatigue had lifted. They responded quickly to orders, took risks promptly, and did not fire wildly, even when a machine gun from another field sent a burst into the trees over their heads.

If he could get them back to Regimental Headquarters inside an hour, Christian thought, if there still was a Regimental Headquarters, where they could be put into an organized group under the command of officers, with a definite plan of fighting, they might earn their keep today, after all.

Then they ran into bad luck. A machine gun, concealed in the ditch beneath the thick hedges in a corner of a field, opened fire. Before they could gain cover, two men were hit. One of the men, a small, middle-aged, sorrowful-looking fellow, had got it in the jaw, and the lower part of his face was a sickening mess, and he was making a lot of noise, trying not to drown in his own blood. Christian helped put a bandage on him, but the man was bleeding so badly there wasn't going to be much anyone could do for him.

"Just stay here," Christian told the two wounded men. "You're in good cover. We'll come back for you with help after we get to Regiment." He made himself sound bluff and confident, although he was certain he was not going to see either of these two men alive again.

The man with the wounded jaw made a wet, imploring noise, behind his soaking bandage, but Christian ignored it. He motioned to the others to get started, but they didn't move.

"Come on," Christian said. "The faster you move the better chance you have of getting through this. If you stand still, you'll catch it ..."

"Listen, Sergeant," Stauch said, from his crouched position in the gra.s.sgrown ditch, "what's the sense in fooling ourselves? We're cut off, we haven't got a chance in the world, there's a whole d.a.m.ned American division here and we're in the middle of it. Besides, these men will die if they don't get help soon. I'll volunteer to go through this hedge with a white flag on my rifle and arrange the surrender ..." He stopped lamely, refusing to face Christian.

Christian looked at the others. Their pale faces, peering wanly over the brink of the ditch, made it plain that the temporary fort.i.tude they had gained from the jug had evaporated once and for all.

"The first man that goes through that hedge," he said quietly, "I guarantee to shoot myself. Any other suggestions?"

n.o.body said anything.

"We are going to find Regiment," Christian said. "Stauch, you will lead the procession. I will be in the rear and I will be watching every single one of you. Keep in the ditches, on this side of the hedge. Keep low, and move fast. All right, start now."

Christian watched, his Schmeisser ready at his hip, as the ten men, one by one, began to crawl down the ditch. The man with the wounded jaw was still making the drowning, sorrowful noise as Christian pa.s.sed him, but the sound was growing weaker and more irregular.

Twice they stopped and watched German tanks rumbling blindly down the road toward the beach, and that was rea.s.suring. Once they saw a jeep with three Americans in it, skidding around the corner of a farmhouse. Christian could feel the trembling desire to run, to lie down, to weep, to die and get it over with, sweep through the men in front of him. They pa.s.sed two dead cows, torn open by sh.e.l.ls, lying feet up in the corner of a field, and a wild-eyed horse that galloped madly down the road, only to stop and gallop equally madly, its hooves making a m.u.f.fled, urgent clatter on the damp clay. There were dead Germans and dead Americans strewn at random in the careless exposure of death, and it was impossible to tell from the manner in which they lay or the direction of their weapons what the lines had been or how the battle had gone. From time to time sh.e.l.ls made their crushing, swift noise in the sky above their heads. In one field, in an almost mathematically s.p.a.ced line, there were the bodies of five Americans whose parachutes had never opened. They had hit so hard they had driven into the ground, and their straps had burst and their equipment lay scattered around them as though ready for a kind of drunken inspection in a foreign army.

Then Christian saw Stauch, at the end of the ditch, thirty meters in front of him, waving cautiously. Christian ran, crouching over, past the other men. When he got to the end of the ditch, Stauch pointed through a small opening in the hedge. Twenty meters on the other side of the hedge there were two paratroopers out in the open, working to free another American who had been caught in a tree, and was hanging there, helplessly, swaying six feet from the ground. Christian fired two short bursts and the two men on the ground fell immediately. One of them moved and started to get up on one elbow. Christian fired again and the man fell over on his back and lay still.

The man in the tree yanked furiously at his cords, but he could not break free.

Christian could hear Stauch, crouched beside him, licking his lips noisily. Christian signaled to the first three men to follow him and the four of them went cautiously up to the man hanging from the tree, dangling over his two dead comrades.

Christian grinned up at the American. "How do you like France, Sammy?" Christian asked.

"s.h.i.t on you, Bud," said the paratrooper. He had a tough, athlete's face, with a broken nose and cold, tough eyes. But he stopped struggling with the traces and just hung there, staring at Christian. "I'll tell you, what, Kraut-face," the American said, "you cut me down and I'll accept your surrender."

Christian smiled at him. If only I had a few like him with me, today, Christian thought, instead of these worms ...

He shot the paratrooper.

Christian patted the dead man's leg, with a gesture which he himself did not understand, part pity, part admiration, part mockery. Then he led the way back to the rest of the squad. Ah, Christian thought, if they are all like that, we are not going to do very well against them.

By ten o'clock in the morning they met up with a Colonel who was moving eastward with what was left of Regimental Headquarters. They had to fight twice before noon, but the Colonel knew his business, and they kept together and kept moving. The men of Christian's squad fought no better and no worse than the other men under the Colonel's command. Four of them were dead by nightfall, and Stauch had shot himself through the head when his leg was broken by a machine-gun bullet and he was told he was going to be left behind. But they fought decently, and none of them ever made a move to surrender, although the opportunities that first day were numerous.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

"BACK IN TULSA, when I was in high school," Fahnstock was saying, between slow strokes of the hammer, "they called me Stud. From the time I was thirteen years old my prevailing interest in life was girls. If I could find me an English broad in town here, I wouldn't even mind this place." Reflectively he hammered out a nail from a weathered piece of lumber he was working on and threw the nail into the can next to him. Then he spat, a long, dark spurt of tobacco juice, from the cud that seemed to be permanently attached to the inside of his jaw.

Michael took out the pint bottle of gin from the back pocket of his fatigues and took a long gulp. He put the bottle away without offering Fahnstock a drink. Fahnstock, who got drunk every Sat.u.r.day night, did not drink on weekdays before Retreat, and it was only ten o'clock in the morning now. Besides, Michael was tired of Fahnstock. They had been together for over two months now in the Replacement Center Casual Company. One day they worked on the lumber pile, taking nails out and straightening them, and the next day they worked on KP. The Mess Sergeant didn't like either of them, and for the last fifteen times he had put them on the dirtiest job in the kitchen, scrubbing the big greasy pots and cleaning the stoves after the day's cooking was over.

As far as Michael could tell, both he and Fahnstock, who was too stupid to do anything else, were going to spend the rest of the war and perhaps the rest of their lives alternating between the lumber pile and the kitchen. When this realization had sunk in, Michael had thought of desertion, but had compromised with gin. It was very dangerous, because the camp was run like a penal colony and men were constantly being sentenced to years in jail for smaller offenses than drunkenness on duty, but the dull, ameliorating effects of the steady flow of alcohol through his brain made it possible for Michael to continue to live, and he took the risk gladly.

He had written Colonel Pavone soon after he was put on the lumber pile, asking to be transferred, but there had been no answer from the Colonel, and Michael was too tired all the time now to bother to write again or to try any other avenues of escape.

"The best time I had in the Army," Fahnstock drawled, "was in Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. I found three sisters in a bar. They worked in a brewery in St. Louis on different shifts. One was sixteen, one was fifteen, and one was fourteen. Hillbillies fresh out of the Ozark Mountains. They never owned a pair of stockings till they worked in the brewery for three months. I sure did regret it the day my orders came through for overseas."

"Listen," Michael said, pounding slowly on a nail, "will you please talk about something else?"

"I'm just trying to pa.s.s the time," Fahnstock said, aggrieved.

"Pa.s.s the time some other way," Michael said, feeling the gin, sour and strong, gripping the lining of his stomach.

They hammered at the splintery boards in silence.

A guard with a shotgun came by behind two prisoners who were rolling wheelbarrows full of lumber ends. The prisoners dumped the lumber onto the pile. They all moved with a dragging, deliberate slowness, as though there was nothing ahead of them in their whole lives that was important to do.

"Shake your a.s.s," the guard said languidly, leaning on the shotgun. The prisoners paid no attention to him.

"Whitacre," said the guard, "whip out the bottle."

Michael looked glumly at him. The police, he thought, everywhere the same, collecting their blackmail for overlooking the breaking of the law. He took out the bottle and wiped the neck of it before handing it to the guard. He watched jealously as the guard took a deep swig.

"I only drink on holidays." The guard grinned as he handed back the bottle.

Michael put the bottle away. "What's this?" he asked. "Christmas?"

"Haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"We hit the beach this morning. This is D Day, Brother, ain't you glad you're here?"

"How do you know?" Michael asked suspiciously.

"Eisenhower made a speech on the radio. I heard it," the guard said. "We're liberating the frigging frogs, he said."