Michael closed his eyes, hoping that Papuga would stop. But there was an acc.u.mulated ma.s.s of agony in Papuga that had been simmering in silence all this time. Now that he had started, he didn't seem to be able to stop.

"I was not in good shape," Papuga said, "and a buddy of mine gave me half a bottle of marc, that's a French drink that the farmers make, it's like plain alcohol, it bites the back of your throat like a trap. I drank all of it by myself, and when some planes started to come in low, and somebody began to yell, I must of got a little confused. It was almost dark, understand, and the Germans had a habit of ..." He stopped and sighed and pa.s.sed his hand across his eyes slowly. "I turned the gun on them, I'm a good gunner, and then the other guns started in on them, too. I'll tell you something, the third one, I saw the stripes on the underside of the wings, I saw the star and the bar, but somehow I couldn't stop. He flew right over me, real slow, with his flaps down, trying to land, I couldn't explain it, I couldn't stop ..." Papuga took his hand away from his eyes. "Two of them burned," he said flatly, "and the other one crashed and turned over. Ten minutes later, the Colonel in command of the Group came over to me, he was just a young feller, you know those Air Force Colonels, he got the Congressional Medal for something while we were still in England. He came up to me and he smelled my breath and I thought he was going to shoot me right there and then, and to tell the truth, I don't blame that Colonel, I don't hold nothing against him."

Krenek slipped the bolt of the Ml into place with a sharp snapping noise.

"But he didn't shoot me," Papuga said dully. "He took me out to the field where the planes were, and he made me look at what was left of the two guys that burned, and he made me help carry the other one, the one that turned over, back to the doctor's tent, only he was dead anyway."

Speer was making a nervous, sucking sound with his tongue, and Michael was sorry the boy had had to hear this. It would do him no good, in the approaching time when they would put him, not gradually, into the line in front of the Siegfried fortifications.

"They held me for court-martial, and the Colonel said he was going to have them hang me," Papuga said, "and, like I said, I didn't blame that Colonel for a minute, he was just a young feller, anyway. But after awhile, they came to me and they said, 'Papuga, we will give you a chance, we will dispense with the court-martial, we will put you in the infantry,' and I said, 'Anything you say.' They took off my stripes and the day before I came up-here the Colonel came to me and he said, 'I hope they shoot your b.a.l.l.s off in the infantry the first day.'"

Papuga stopped talking. He stared flatly and expressionlessly up at the canvas above his head.

"I hope," said Krenek, "they don't put you in the First."

"They can put me anywhere they like," Papuga said. "It don't make no difference to me."

A whistle blew outside. They all got up and put on their raincoats and helmet liners and went out to stand the Retreat formation.

There was a big new batch of replacements that had just come over from the States. The swollen, oversize, casual company stood in the drizzle, the mud thick on their boots, answering to their names, and the Sergeant said, "Sir, L Company all present and accounted for," and the Captain took the salute and walked away to supper.

The Sergeant did not dismiss the Company. He strolled back and forth in front of the first line, peering out at the dripping men standing in the mud. The rumor was that the Sergeant had been a chorus boy before the war. He was a slender, athletic-looking man, with a pale, sharp face. He wore the good-conduct ribbon and the American defense ribbon and the European Theatre ribbon, with no campaign stars.

"I have a couple of things to say to you guys," the Sergeant began, "before you go slop up your supper."

A slight, almost inaudible sigh rustled through the ranks. By this stage of the war everyone knew that there was nothing a Sergeant could say that could be listened to with pleasure.

"We had a little trouble here the last few days," the Sergeant said, nastily. "We are close to Paris and some of the boys got the notion it would be nice to slip off for a couple of nights and get laid. In case any of you boys're entertaining the same idea, let me tell you they never got to Paris, they never got laid, and they are already way up front in Germany and I will give any man here odds of five to one they never come back." The Sergeant walked meditatively, looking down at the ground, his hands in his pockets. He walks like a dancer, quite graceful, Michael thought, and he looks like a very good soldier, the neat, dashing way he wears his clothes ..."For your information," the Sergeant began again in a low, mild voice, "Paris is out of bounds to all GI's from this camp, and there are MP's on every road and every entrance leading into it, and they are looking at everybody's papers, very careful. Very, very careful."

Michael remembered the two men with full packs pacing slowly back and forth in front of the orderly room at Dix, in payment for going to Trenton for a couple of beers. The long continuing struggle of the Army, the sullen attempts by the caged animals to get free for an hour, a day, for a beer, a girl, and the sullen punishments in return.

"The Army is very lenient over here," the Sergeant said. "There are no courts-martial for being AWOL like in the States. Nothing is put on your record. Nothing to stop you from getting an honorable discharge, if you live that long. All we do is, we catch you and we look up the requests for replacements, and we see, 'Ah, the Twenty-ninth Division is having the heaviest casualties this month' and I personally make out your orders and send you there."

"That son of a b.i.t.c.h is a Peruvian," a voice whispered behind Michael. "I heard about him. Would you believe it, not even a citizen, a Peruvian, and he's talking to us like that!"

Michael looked with new interest at the Sergeant. It was true that he was dark and foreign-looking. Michael had never seen a Peruvian before, and for a moment he was mildly amused at the thought of standing here in the French rain being lectured to by a Peruvian Master Sergeant who had been a chorus boy before the war. Democracy, he thought appreciatively, how inscrutable are your works ...

"I have been handling replacements for a long time," the Sergeant was saying. "I've seen fifty, maybe seventy thousand GI's go through this depot, and I know what's going on in your minds. You been reading the newspapers and listening to the speeches, and everybody keeps saying, 'Our brave fighting boys, the heroes in khaki,' and you feel, as long as you are heroes you can do whatever you d.a.m.n well please, go AWOL into Paris, get drunk, pick up the clap from a French wh.o.r.e for 500 francs outside the Red Cross club. I'm going to tell you something, boys. Forget what you read in the newspapers. That's for civilians. Not for you. That's for guys making four dollars an hour in the airplane factories, that's for the air-raid wardens in Minneapolis with a bottle of Budweiser in one hand, and some dogface's loving wife in the other. You ain't heroes, Boys. You're culls. Culls. That's why you're here. You're the people n.o.body else wanted. You're the guys who can't type or fix a radio or add up a column of figures. You're the guys n.o.body would have in an office, you're the guys n.o.body could find any use for back in the States. You're the frig-ups of the Army, and I'm the boy who knows it. I don't read the papers. They heaved a sigh of relief back in Washington and it was on the boat for you, and n.o.body cares do you come home or don't you come home. You're replacements. And there's nothing lower in this Army than a replacement, unless it's another replacement. Every day they bury a thousand like you, and the guys like me, who never frigged up, go over the lists and send up a thousand more. That's how it is in this camp, Boys, and I'm telling it to you for your own good, so you know where you stand. There's a lot of new boys in camp tonight, with the beer from the Kilmer PX still wet on their lips, and I want to put things straight for them. So don't get any fancy ideas in your head about Paris, Boys, it won't work. Go back to your tents and clean your rifles nice and neat and write your final instructions home to the folks. So forget about Paris, Boys. Come back in 1950. Maybe it will not be out of bounds for GI's then."

The men stood rigidly, in silence. The Sergeant stopped his pacing. He smiled grimly at the ranks, his jaws creasing in razored lines under his soft garrison cap with the cellophane rain-covering over it, like an officer's.

"Thanks for listening, Boys," the Sergeant said. "Now we all know where we stand. Dis-miss!"

The Sergeant walked springily down the Company street as the lines dissolved into confusion.

"I'm going to write to my mother," Speer said, angrily, next to Michael, as they walked toward their tent to pick up their mess kits. "She knows the Senator from Ma.s.sachusetts."

"By all means," Michael said politely. "Do that."

"Whitacre ..."

Michael turned around. A small, half-familiar figure, almost lost in a raincoat, was standing there. Michael moved closer. Through the dusk, he could make out a battered face, a split eyebrow, a full, wide mouth, now curved in a small smile.

"Ackerman!" Michael said. They shook hands.

"I didn't know whether you'd remember me or not," Noah said. His voice was low and even and sounded much older than Michael remembered. The face, in the half-light, was very thin and had a new, mature sense of repose.

"Lord," Michael said, delighted, in this strange ma.s.s of men, to come across a face that he knew, a man with whom once he had been friendly, feeling as though somehow, by great luck, in a sea of enemies, he had found an ally. "Lord, I'm glad to see you."

"Going to chow?" Ackerman asked. He was carrying his mess kit.

"Yes." Michael took Ackerman's arm. It seemed surprisingly wasted and fragile under the slippery material of the raincoat. "I just have to get my mess kit. Hang onto me."

"Sure," Noah said. He smiled gravely, and they walked side by side toward Michael's tent. "That was a real little dandy of a speech," Noah said, "wasn't it?"

"Great for the morale," said Michael. "I feel like wiping out a German machine-gun nest before chow."

Noah smiled softly. "The Army," he said. "They sure love to make speeches to you in the Army."

"It's an irresistible temptation," Michael said. "Five hundred men lined up, not allowed to leave or talk back ... Under the circ.u.mstances, I think I'd be tempted myself."

"What would you say?" Noah asked.

Michael thought for a moment. "G.o.d help us," he said soberly. "I'd say, 'G.o.d help every man, woman and child alive today.'"

He ducked into his tent and came out with his mess kit Then they walked slowly over to the long line outside the mess hall.

When Noah took off his raincoat in the mess hall, Michael saw the Silver Star over his breastpocket, and for a moment he felt the old twinge of guilt. He didn't get that by being hit by a taxicab, Michael thought. Little Noah Ackerman, who started out with me, who had so much reason to quit, but who obviously hadn't quit ...

"General Montgomery pinned it on," Noah said, noticing Michael staring at the decoration. "On me and my friend Johnny Burnecker. In Normandy. They sent us to the supply dump to get brand-new uniforms. Patton was there and Eisenhower. There was a very nice G2 in Division Headquarters, and he pushed it through for us. It was on the Fourth of July. Some kind of British-American good will demonstration." Noah grinned. "General Montgomery demonstrated his good will to me, with the Silver Star. Five points toward discharge."

They sat at the crowded table, in the big hall, eating warmed-up C rations, vegetable hash, and thin coffee.

"Isn't it a shame," asked Krenek, lower down at the table, "how the civilians are deprived of all their porterhouse steaks for the Armed Forces?"

n.o.body laughed at the ancient joke, which had served Krenek as table conversation in Louisiana, Feriana, Palermo ...

Michael ate with pleasure, going back over the years with Noah, filling the gaps between Florida and the Replacement Depot. He looked gravely at the photograph of Noah's son ("Twelve points," Noah said, "he has seven teeth.") and heard about the deaths of Cowley, Donnelly, Rickett, and the breakup of Captain Colclough. He felt a surprising family-like wave of nostalgia for the old Company which he had been so happy to leave in Florida.

Noah was very different. He didn't seem nervous. Although he was terribly frail now, and coughed considerably, he seemed to have found some inner balance, a thoughtful, quiet maturity which made Michael feel that Noah somehow was much older than he. Noah talked gently, without bitterness, with none of his old intense, scarcely controlled violence, and Michael felt that if Noah survived the war he would be immensely better equipped for the years that came after than he, Michael, would be.

They cleaned their mess kits and, luxuriously smoking nickel cigars from their rations, they strolled through the sharp, dark evening, toward Noah's tent, their mess kits jangling musically at their sides.

There was a movie in camp, a 16 mm version of Rita Hay-worth in Cover Girl, and all the men who were billeted in the same tent with Noah were surrendering themselves to its technicolor delights. Michael and Noah sat on Noah's cot in the empty tent, puffing at their cigars, watching the blue smoke spiral softly up through the chilled air.

"I'm pulling out of here tomorrow," Noah said.

"Oh," Michael said, feeling suddenly bereaved, feeling that it was unjust for the Army to throw friends together like this, only to tear them apart twelve hours later. "Your name on the roster?"

"No," said Noah quietly. "I'm just pulling out."

Michael puffed carefully at his cigar. "AWOL?" he asked.

"Yes."

G.o.d, Michael thought, remembering the time Noah had spent in prison, hasn't he had enough of that? "Paris?" he asked.

"No. I'm not interested in Paris." Noah bent over and took two packs of letters, carefully done up in string, from his barracks bag. He put one pack, the envelopes scrawled unmistakably in a woman's handwriting, on the bed. "Those are from my wife," Noah said flatly. "She writes me every day. This pack ..." He waved the other bunch of letters gently. "From Johnny Burnecker. He writes me every time he has a minute off. And every letter ends, 'You have to come back here.'"

"Oh," Michael said, trying to recall Johnny Burnecker, remembering an impression of a tall, raw-boned boy with a girlish complexion and blond hair.

"He's got a fixation, Johnny," Noah said. "He thinks if I come back and stay with him, we'll both come through the war all right. He's a wonderful man. He's the best man I ever met in my whole life. I've got to get back to him."

"Why do you have to go AWOL?" Michael asked. "Why don't you go into the orderly room and ask them to send you back to your old Company?"

"I did," Noah said. "That Peruvian. He told me to get my a.s.s the h.e.l.l out of there, he was too busy, he wasn't any G.o.dd.a.m.n placement bureau, I'd go where they sent me." Noah played slowly with the pack of Burnecker's letters. They made a dry, rustling sound in his hands. "I shaved and pressed my uniform, and I made sure I was wearing my Silver Star. It didn't impress him. So I'm taking off after breakfast tomorrow."

"You'll get into a mess of trouble," Michael said.

"Nah." Noah shook his head. "People do it every day. Just yesterday a Captain in the Fourth did it He couldn't bear hanging around any more. He just took a musette bag. The guys picked up all the other gear he left and sold it to the French. As long as you don't try to make Paris, the MP's don't bother you, if you're heading toward the front. And Lieutenant Green, I hear he's Captain now, is in command of C Company, and he's a wonderful fellow. He'll straighten it out for me. He'll be glad to see me."

"Do you know where they are?" Michael asked.

"I'll find out," Noah said. "That won't be hard."

"Aren't you afraid of getting into any more trouble?" Michael asked. "After all that stuff in the States?"

Noah grinned softly. "Brother," he said, "after Normandy, anything the United States Army might do to me couldn't look like trouble."

"You're sticking your neck out," Michael said.

Noah shrugged. "As soon as I found out in the hospital that I wasn't going to die," he said, "I wrote Johnny Burnecker I'd be back. He expects me." There was a note of quiet finality in Noah's voice that admitted no further questioning.

"Happy landing," Michael said. "Give my regards to the boys."

"Why don't you come with me?"

"What?"

"Come along with me," Noah repeated. "You'll have a lot better chance of coming out of the war alive if you go into a company where you have friends. You have no objections to coming out of the war alive, have you?"

"No," Michael smiled weakly. "Not really." He did not tell Noah of the times when it hadn't seemed to make much difference to him whether he survived or not, some of the rainy, weary nights in Normandy when he had felt so useless, when the war had seemed to be only a growing cemetery, whose only purpose seemed the creation of new dead; or the bleak days in the hospital in England, surrounded by the mangled product of the French battlefields, at the mercy of the efficient, callous doctors and nurses, who would not even give him a twenty-four-hour pa.s.s to visit London, to whom he had never been a human being in need of comfort and relief, but merely a poorly mending leg that had to be whipped back into a facsimile of health so that its owner could be sent back as soon as possible to the front. "No," Michael said, "I don't really mind the idea of being alive at the end of the war. Although to tell you the truth, I have a feeling, five years after the war is over, we're all liable to look back with regret to every bullet that missed us."

"Not me," said Noah fiercely. "Not me. I'm never going to feel that."

"Sure," Michael said, feeling guilty. "I'm sorry I said it."

"You go up as a replacement," said Noah, "and your chances are awful. The men who are there are all friends, they feel responsible for each other, they'll do anything to save each other. That means every dirty, dangerous job they hand right over to the replacements. The Sergeants don't even bother to learn your name. They don't want to know anything about you. They just trade you in for their friends and wait for the next batch of replacements. You go into a new Company, all by yourself, and you'll be on every patrol, you'll be the point of every attack. If you ever get stuck out some place, and it's a question of saving you or saving one of the old boys, what do you think they'll do?"

Noah was speaking pa.s.sionately, his dark eyes steady and intense on Michael's face, and Michael was touched by the boy's solicitude. After all, Michael remembered, I did d.a.m.n little for him in his trouble in Florida, and I was no great comfort to his wife back in New York. He wondered if that frail dark girl had any notion of what her husband was saying now on the wet plain outside Paris, any notion of what subterranean, desperate reasoning a man went through in this cold foreign autumn so that he could one day come back and touch her hand, pick up his son in his arms ... What did they know about the war back in America, what did the correspondents have to say about the replacement depots in their signed pieces on the front pages of the newspapers?

"You've got to have friends," Noah was saying fiercely. "You can't let them send you any place where you don't have friends to protect you ..."

"Yes," Michael said gently, putting out his hand and touching the boy's wasted arm, "I'll go with you."

But he didn't say it because he felt that he was the one who needed friends.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

A CHAPLAIN in a jeep picked them up on the other side of Chateau-Thierry. It was a gray day and the old monuments among the cemeteries and the rusting wire of another war looked bleak and ill-tended.

The Chaplain was quite a young man, with a Southern accent, and very talkative. He was attached to a P-51 fighter group and he was going up to Reims to testify as a character witness for a pilot who was being court-martialed there.

"Poor young feller," the Chaplain said, "nicest boy you could hope to meet. Has a darn nice record too, twenty-two missions already, one certain and two probables, and even though the Colonel personally asked me not to testify, I believe it's my Christian duty to go up there and say my piece in court."

"What is he up for?" Michael said.

"He committed a nuisance at a Red Cross dance," the Chaplain said. "He p.i.s.sed on the floor in the middle of a number."

Michael grinned.

"Conduct unbecoming an officer, the Colonel says," said the Chaplain, looking around dangerously from the wheel. "The boy was a little drunk and I don't know what-all was pa.s.sing through his mind. I am taking a real personal interest in the case. I have had a long correspondence with the officer who is conducting the defense, a very smart Episcopalian boy who was a lawyer in Portland before the war. Yes, Sir. And the Colonel is not going to stop me from saying what I have to say, and he knows it. Why," the Chaplain said indignantly, "Colonel b.u.t.ton is the last man in the world to persecute a man on a charge like that. I'm going to tell the Court about the Colonel's activity at a dance in Dallas, right at home, in the heart of the United States of America, surrounded by American women. You may not believe it, but Colonel b.u.t.ton, in full uniform, p.i.s.sed into a potted rubber plant in the ballroom of a downtown hotel, and I saw it with my own eyes. Only he was a high-ranking officer, and we all hushed it up. But it's going to come out now, it really is."

It started to rain. Curtains of water sifted 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 gla.s.s. They pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s case on a gray 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 toward the little French cemetery.

"That will make a very interesting photograph for my alb.u.m," 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 cla.s.s, 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 in 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 bedtable."

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 bedtable."

While the Chaplain scratched away in his notebook, Michael thought of Margaret receiving the photograph and the note from the Chaplain on 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 Specialty Number 745, from the grave of Pierre Sorel, ne 1921, mort 1940, in the rain. Having a wonderful time, wish you were ...