"Yes?"

"Is he hurt bad?"

"Very bad, Noah," Green said wearily. "Very, very bad."

Noah arranged his face neatly and coldly, and went out, with the pa.s.s in his hand. A moment later, Michael heard the jeep starting up, and moving through the mud, making a chugging, motor-boat kind of noise into the distance.

"Whitacre," Green said, "you can hang around here until he gets back."

"Thank you, Sir," Michael said.

Green peered sharply at him. "What kind of soldier have you turned out to be, Whitacre?" he asked.

Michael thought for a moment. "Miserable, Sir," he said.

Green smiled palely, looking, more than ever, like a clerk after a long day at the counter in the Christmas rush. "I'll keep that in mind," he said. He lit a cigarette and went over to the door and opened it. He stood there, framed against the gray, washed-out colors of the autumnal countryside. From afar, now that the door was open, could be heard the faint chugging of a jeep. "Ah," Green said, "I shouldn't've let him go. What's the sense in a soldier going to watch his friends die when he doesn't have to?"

He closed the door and went back and sat down. The phone rang and he picked it up languidly. Michael heard the sharp voice of Battalion. "No, Sir," Green said, speaking as though on the brink of sleep. "There has been no small-arms fire since 700 hours. I will keep you informed." He hung up the handset and sat silently, staring at the patterns his cigarette smoke was making before the terrain map on the wall.

It was long after dark when Noah got back. It had been a quiet day, with no patrols out Overhead, the artillery came and went, but it seemed to have very little relation to the men of C Company who occasionally drifted into the CP to report to Captain Green. Michael had dozed all afternoon in a corner, considering this new, languid, relaxed aspect of the war, so different from the constant fighting in Normandy, and the wild rush after the break through. This was the slow movement, he thought sleepily, with the melody, such as it was, being carried by other instruments. The main problems, he saw, were keeping warm, keeping clean and keeping fed, and Captain Green's big concern all day had seemed to be the growing incidence of trenchfoot in his command.

Michael remembered with wonder all the huge bustle and movement of men and vehicles he had seen on his way up to the front, all those thousands of men, all those busy officers, all those jeeps and trucks and railroad cars busily rattling around just to keep these few, forlorn, sleepy-eyed, slow-moving soldiers rooted and secure on this forgotten strip of line. Everywhere else in the Army, Michael realized, thinking of Green demanding forty replacements, there had always been two or three men for every job; in the supply rooms, in the offices, in the Special Services departments, in the hospitals, on the convoys. Only here, in the face of the enemy, were the numbers spa.r.s.e. Only here, in the dreary autumn weather, among the damp and slit-trenches, did it seem as though the Army were representing a decimated, impoverished nation of beggars. One-third of the nation, he dimly remembered the President saying long ago, ill-housed, ill-nourished. The Army here, by some curious trick of distribution, seemed to be representing only that third of America ...

Michael heard the jeep coming up through the darkness out-side. The windows were covered with blankets to show no light, and a blanket hung over the doorway. The door swung open and Noah came in slowly, followed by Berenson. The blanket flickered in the light of the electric lantern, blowing in the raw gust of night air.

Noah closed the door behind him. He leaned wearily against the wall. Green looked up at him.

"Well?" Green asked gently. "Did you see him, Noah?"

"I saw him." Noah's voice was exhausted and hoa.r.s.e.

"Where was he?"

"At the field hospital."

"Are they going to move him back?" Green asked.

"No, Sir," Noah said. "They're not going to move him back."

Berenson clattered over to one corner of the room and got out a K ration from his pack. He ripped open the cardboard loudly, and tore the paper around the biscuits. He ate noisily, his teeth making a crackling sound on the hard biscuit.

"Is he still alive?" Green spoke softly and hesitantly.

"Yes, Sir," said Noah, "he's still alive."

Green sighed, seeing that Noah did not wish to speak further. "O. K." he said. "Take it easy. I'll send you and Whitacre over to the second platoon tomorrow morning. Get a good night's rest."

"Thank you, Sir," said Noah. "Thanks for the use of the jeep."

"Yeah," said Green. He bent over a report he was working on.

Noah looked dazedly around the room. Suddenly he went to the door and walked out. Michael stood up. Noah hadn't even looked at him since his return. Michael followed Noah out into the raw, black night He sensed rather than saw Noah, leaning against the farmhouse wall, his clothes rustling a little in the gusts of wind.

"Noah ..."

"Yes?" The voice told nothing. Even, exhausted, emotionless. "Michael ..."

They stood in silence, staring at the bright distant flicker on the horizon, where the guns were busy, like the nightshift in a factory.

"He looked all right," Noah said finally, in a whisper. "At least his face was all right. And somebody had shaved him this morning, he'd asked for a shave. He got hit in the back. The doctor warned me he was liable to act queer, but when he saw me, he recognized me. He smiled. He cried ... He cried once before, you know, when I got hurt ..."

"I know," Michael said. "You told me."

"He asked me all sorts of questions. How they treated me in the hospital, if they give you any convalescent leave, whether I'd been to Paris, if I had any new pictures of my kid. I showed him the picture of the kid that I got from Hope a month ago, the one on the lawn, and he said it was a finelooking kid, it didn't look like me at all. He said he'd heard from his mother. It was all arranged for that house back in his town, forty dollars a month. And his mother knew where she could get a Kelvinator second-hand ... He could only move his head. He was paralyzed completely from the shoulders down."

They stood in silence, watching the flicker of the guns, listening to the uneven rumble carried fitfully by the gusty November wind.

"They were crowded in the hospital," Noah said. "There was a Second Lieutenant in the next cot. From Kentucky. He'd had his heel blown off by a mine. He was very pleased, the Lieutenant said. He was getting tired of being the first man to poke his head over every hill in France and Germany to be shot at."

Silence again.

"I've had two friends in my whole life," Noah said. "Two real friends. A man called Roger Cannon, he used to sing a song, 'You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell mola.s.ses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money, That's all I want to know ...'" Noah moved slowly in the cold mud, rubbing against the wall with a small, sc.r.a.ping sound. "He got killed in the Philippines. My other friend was Johnny Burnecker. A lot of people have dozens of friends. They make them easy and they hold onto them. Not me. It's my fault and I realize it I don't have a h.e.l.l of a lot to offer ..."

There was a bright flash in the distance and a fire sprang up, surprising and troubling in the blacked-out countryside, where people on your own side would fire at you if you struck a match after dark because it exposed your position to the enemy.

"I sat there, holding Johnny Burnecker's hand," Noah's voice went on evenly. "Then, after about fifteen minutes he began to look at me very queerly. 'Get out of here,' he said, 'I'm not going to let you murder me.' I tried to quiet him, but he kept yelling that I'd been sent to murder him, that I'd stayed away while he was healthy and could take care of himself, but now that he was paralyzed, I was going to choke him when n.o.body was looking. He said he knew all about me, he'd kept his eye on me from the beginning, and I'd deserted him when he needed me, and now I was going to kill him. He yelled that I had a knife on me. And the other wounded began to yell too, and I couldn't get him quiet. Finally, a doctor came and made me leave. As I went out of the tent, I could hear Johnny Burnecker yelling for them not to let me come near him with my knife." For a moment, Noah's voice stopped. Michael kept his eyes on the distant flare of the German farm going up in flames. Vaguely he thought of the featherbeds, the table linen, the crockery, the photograph alb.u.ms, the copy of Mein Kampf, the kitchen tables, the beer steins, being brightly eaten away there in the darkness.

"The doctor was very nice," Noah's voice took up in the darkness. "He was a pretty old man from Tucson. He'd been a specialist in tuberculosis before the war, he told me. He told me what was the matter with Johnny, and for me not to take what Johnny said to heart. Johnny's spine had been broken by the sh.e.l.l, and his nervous system had degenerated, the doctor said, and there was nothing to be done for him. The nervous system had degenerated," Noah said, horribly fascinated by the word, "and it would get worse and worse until he died. Paranoia, the doctor said, from a normal boy to an advanced case of paranoia in one day. Delusions of grandeur, the doctor said, and manias of persecution. It might take him another three days to die, the doctor said, and he would finally be completely crazy.... That's why they weren't even bothering to send him back to a general hospital. Before I left, I looked in the tent again. I thought maybe he would be having a quiet period. The doctor said that was still possible. But when he saw me, he began to yell I was trying to kill him again ..."

Michael and Noah stood side by side, leaning against the flaking, damp, cold stone wall of the CP, behind which Captain Green was worrying about trenchfoot. In the distance, the fire was growing brighter, as it took hold more strongly on the timbers and heirlooms of the German farmer's home.

"I told you about the feeling Johnny Burnecker had about us," said Noah. "How if we stayed together nothing would happen to us ..."

"Yes," said Michael.

"We went through so much together," said Noah. "We were cut off, you know, and we got through, and we weren't hurt when the LCI we were on was. .h.i.t on D Day ..."

"Yes," said Michael.

"If I hadn't been so slow," Noah said, "if I'd got up here one day earlier, Johnny Burnecker would have come out of this war alive."

"Don't be silly," Michael said sharply, feeling: Now this is finally too much of a burden for this boy to carry.

"I'm not silly," Noah said calmly. "I didn't act quickly enough. I took my time. I hung around that replacement depot five days. I went and talked to that Peruvian. I knew he wouldn't do what I wanted, but I was lazy, I just hung around."

"Noah, don't talk like that!"

"And we took too long on the trip up," Noah continued, disregarding Michael. "We stopped at night, and we wasted a whole afternoon on that chicken dinner that General arranged for us. I let Johnny Burnecker die for a chicken dinner."

"Shut up!" Michael shouted thickly. He grabbed Noah and shook him hard. "Shut up! You're talking like a maniac! Don't ever let me hear you say anything like that again!"

"Let me go," Noah said calmly. "Keep your hands off me. Excuse me. There's no reason why you should have to listen to my troubles. I realize that."

Slowly Michael relinquished his grip. Once again, he felt, I have failed this battered boy ...

Noah hunched into his clothes. "It's cold out here," he said pleasantly. "Let's go inside."

Michael followed him into the CP.

The next morning Green a.s.signed them to their old platoon, the one they had been in together in Florida. There were still three men left out of the forty who had been in the original platoon, and they welcomed Michael and Noah with heartwarming cordiality. They were very delicate when they spoke of Johnny Burnecker in front of Noah.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.

"SO THEY ASKED this GI, what would you do if they sent you home," Pfeiffer was saying. He and Noah and Michael were squatting on a half-submerged log against a low stone wall, their meat b.a.l.l.s, spaghetti and canned peaches in rich combination on their mess kits. It was the first warm food they'd had in three days, and everyone was very pleased with the cooks who had got the field kitchen so close up. The line of men, s.p.a.ced ten yards apart so that if a sh.e.l.l came it would only hit a few of them at one time, wound through a copse of bare, artillery-marked beeches. The line moved swiftly as the cooks hurriedly dished out the food. "What would you do if they sent you home?" Pfeiffer repeated, through the thick mash in his mouth. "The GI thought for a minute ... Have you heard this one?" Pfeiffer asked.

"No," Michael said politely to Pfeiffer.

Pfeiffer nodded, pleased. "First, the GI said, I'd take off my shoes. Second, I'd lay my wife. Third, I'd take off my pack." Pfeiffer roared at his joke. He stopped suddenly. "You sure you haven't heard it before?"

"Honest," said Michael. Witty table conversation, he thought, in the heart of European civilization. The guests included a smattering of representatives of the arts and military men on a brief holiday (one hour and a half) from their pressing duties at the front. PFC Pfeiffer, well known in Kansas bookmaking circles, and with a local celebrity among the general courts-martial of the region, entertained with reflections on post-war problems. One of the luncheon guests, representing our national theatre in Western Europe, dabbled at his canned peach, a delicacy of the country, and remarked to himself that Private Anacreon of Macedonia, during Philip's campaign in Persia, undoubtedly heard a similar story outside Bagdad, that Caius Publius, centurion in Caesar's Army, told somewhat the same enlightening tale two days after landing in Britain, that Julian Saint-Crique, Adjutant in the corps of Murat, drew extensive laughter from his comrades with a literal translation of the epigram the day before Austerlitz. It was not unknown, the thoughtful student of history reflected, looking doubtfully at his mud-encased shoe packs, and wondering if his toes had begun to rot yet, to Warrant Officer Robinson of the Welsh Rifles at Ypres, or to Feldwebel Fugelheimer at Tannenberg, or to Sergeant Vincent O'Flaherty of the First Marines, pausing for a moment of refreshment on the road into the Argonne Forest.

"That's a h.e.l.l of a funny story," Michael said.

"I thought you'd like it," Pfeiffer said with satisfaction, wiping up the last thick juice of the meat b.a.l.l.s, spaghetti and peach syrup. "What the h.e.l.l, you have to laugh every once in a while."

Pfeiffer industriously scrubbed his mess kit with a stone and a piece of the toilet paper he always carried in his pocket. He got up and wandered over to the c.r.a.p game that was going on behind a blackened chimney that was all that was left of a farmhouse that had survived three wars before this. There were three soldiers, a Lieutenant and two Sergeants, from a Communications Zone Signal Corps message center, who had somehow arrived here in a jeep on a tourist visit. They were shooting c.r.a.ps, and they seemed to have a lot of money which would do more good in the pockets of the infantry.

Michael lit a cigarette, relaxing. He wiggled his toes automatically, to make certain he could still feel them, and enjoyed the sense of having eaten well, and being out of danger for an hour. "When we get back to the States," Michael said to Noah, "I will take you and your wife out for a steak dinner. I know a place on Third Avenue, on the second floor. You eat your meal and watch the L pa.s.s by at dish level. The steaks are as thick as your fist, we'll have it very rare ..."

"Hope doesn't like it very rare," Noah said, seriously.

"She will have it any way she wants it," Michael said. "Antipasto first, then these steaks, charred on the outside and they sigh when you touch a b.u.t.ter knife to them, and you get spaghetti and green salad and red California wine, and after that, cake soaked in rum and cafe espresso, that's very black, with lemon peel. The first night we get home. On me. You can bring your son, too if you want, we'll put him in a high chair."

Noah smiled, "We'll leave him home that night," he said.

Michael was gratified at the smile. Noah had smiled very seldom in the three months since they had returned to the Company. He had spoken little, smiled little. In his taciturn way, he had attached himself to Michael, watched out for him with critical, veteran eyes, protected him by word and example, even when it had been a full-time job trying to keep himself alive, even in December, when it had been so bad, when the Company had been loaded on trucks and had been thrown in hurriedly against the German tanks that had suddenly materialized out of the supposedly exhausted Army in front of them. The Battle of the Bulge, it was now called, and it was in the past, and the one thing Michael really would remember from it for the rest of his life was crouching in a hole, which Noah had made him dig two feet deeper, although Michael had been weary and annoyed at what he considered Noah's finickiness ... The German tank looming up on the bare field, coming at them, and all the bazooka ammunition gone, and the anti-tank gun on the half-track behind them burning, and nothing to do but duck down deep ... The driver of the tank had seen Michael ducking in and had driven up and tried to run him over, because they couldn't reach him with their guns. The interminable minute, with the roaring seventy-ton machine over his head, and the tread spinning, sending a heavy shower of dirt and stones down on his helmet and his back, and his own voice screaming soundlessly in the thundering darkness ... As you looked back on it, it seemed like the sort of thing men bucking for Section Eights reported as nightmares to the psychoa.n.a.lysts in the Medical Corps. It did not seem possible that it ever could really happen to you, a man over thirty who had had his own well-ordered apartment in New York City, who had eaten in so many good restaurants, who had five good soft tweed suits hanging in the closet, who had driven slowly up Fifth Avenue in a convertible car, with the top down, and the sun shining on his face ... And, having happened, it did not seem possible that you could live through it, that the churning, spiked steel tread one foot above your head could let you survive, that the man to whom this final, h.e.l.lish thing had happened, could ever come back to a moment in which he could even think about such things as steaks and wine and Fifth Avenue. The tank, impersonally seeking his life in the hole that he had been forced by his friend to dig deep enough to protect him, had seemed to cut the bridge back to civilian existence. There was a gap there now, a dark ravine spanned only by hallucinations. Looking back on it now, remembering the lumbering withdrawal of the machine across the field, with sh.e.l.lbursts tossing up spouts of dirt around it, he realized that that was the moment he had finally become a soldier. Until then, he had merely been a man in uniform, on temporary duty from another life ...

The Battle of the Bulge, they now called it in Stars and Stripes, and many men had been killed in it, and Liege and Antwerp had been threatened, and there were accounts of how magnificently the Army had reacted, and some unpleasantness about Montgomery, who was not now as full of British-American good will as he had been on July Fourth, when he had pinned the Silver Star on Noah ... The Battle of the Bulge, another bronze campaign star, five points toward discharge. All he remembered was Noah standing over him, saying crisply and unpleasantly, "I don't care how tired you are, dig two feet deeper," and the whirling, roaring tread over his muddy helmet.

Michael looked over at Noah. Noah was sleeping now, sitting up, leaning against the stone wall. Only when he slept did his face look young. He had a very light beard, blondish and spa.r.s.e, as compared with Michael's thick black mat, which made Michael look like a hobo who had been riding the rods from Vancouver to Miami. Noah's eyes, which, when he was awake, stared out with a dark, elderly tenacity, were closed now. Michael noticed for the first time that his friend had soft, upcurling eyelashes, full and blond at the tips, giving the upper part of his face a gentle appearance. Michael felt a wave of grat.i.tude and pity for the sleeping boy, m.u.f.fled now in his heavy, stained overcoat, his wool-gloved fingertips just touching the barrel of his rifle.... Looking at him now, this way, Michael realized at what cost this frail boy maintained his att.i.tude of grave competence, made his intelligent, dangerous, soldierly decisions, fought tenaciously and cautiously, with a manual-like correctness, to remain alive in this country and this time when death came so casually to so many of the men around him. The blond lash-tips fluttered softly on the fist-broken face, and Michael thought of the times Noah's wife must have stared, with sorrowful tenderness and amus.e.m.e.nt, at the incongruous, girlish ornament. How old was he? Twenty-two, twenty-four? Husband, father, military man ... Two friends, and both lost ... Needing friends as other men needed air and, out of that need, worrying desperately, in the middle of his own agony, how to keep the clumsy, aging soldier called Whitacre alive, who, left to his own blundering, ill-trained devices would most certainly have walked over a mine by now, or silhouetted himself against a ridge to a sniper, or out of laziness and inexperience, been mangled by a tank in a too-shallow hole ... Steaks and red California wine across the gap spanned only by hallucinations, the first night home, on me ... It was impossible, and it must happen. Michael closed his eyes, feeling an immense, sorrowing responsibility.

From the c.r.a.p game the voices floated over. "I'll fade a thousand francs. The point is nine ..."

Michael opened his eyes and stood up quietly and, carrying his rifle, went over to watch.

Pfeiffer was shooting and he was doing well. He had a pile of paper crushed in his hand. The Services of Supply Lieutenant wasn't playing, but the two Sergeants were. The Lieutenant was wearing a beautiful officer's coat, brindle-colored and full. The last time he had been in New York, Michael had seen such a coat in the window of Abercrombie and Fitch. All three men were wearing parachute boots, although it was plain that they had never jumped from anything higher than a barstool. They were all large, tall men, clean shaven, well dressed, and fresh looking, and the bearded infantrymen with whom they were playing looked like neglected and rickety specimens of an inferior race.

The visitors talked loudly and confidently, and moved with energy, in contrast to the weary, mumbling, laconic behavior of the men who had dropped out of the line to have their first warm meal in three days. If you were going to pick soldiers for a crack regiment, a regiment to seize towns and hold bridgeheads and engage armor, you certainly would not hesitate to choose these three handsome, lively fellows, Michael thought. The Army, of course, had worked things out somewhat differently. These bluff-voiced, well-muscled men worked in a snug office fifty miles back, typing out forms, and shoveling coal into the rosy iron stove in the middle of the room to keep out the wintry chill. Michael remembered the little speech Sergeant Houlihan, of the second platoon, always made when he greeted the replacements ..."Ah," Houlihan would say, "why is it the infantry always gets the 4F's? Why is it the Quartermasters always get the weight-lifters, the shot-putters, and the All-American fullbacks? Tell me, Boys, is there anybody here who weighs more than a hundred and thirty pounds?" It was a fantasy of course, and Houlihan made the speech shrewdly, because he knew it made the replacements laugh and like him, but there was a foolish element of fact in it, too.

As he was watching, Michael saw the Lieutenant take a bottle out of his pocket and drink from it. Pfeiffer watched the Lieutenant narrowly, rolling the dice slowly in his mud-caked hand. "Lieutenant," he said, "what do I see in your pocket?"

The Lieutenant laughed. "Cognac," he said. "That's brandy."

"I know it's brandy," Pfeiffer said. "How much do you want for it?"

The Lieutenant looked at the notes in Pfeiffer's hand. "How much you got there?"

Pfeiffer counted. "2000 francs," he said. "Forty bucks. I sure would like a nice bottle of cognac to warm up my old bones."

"4000 francs," the Lieutenant said calmly. "You can have the bottle for 4000."

Pfeiffer looked narrowly at the Services of Supply Lieutenant. He spat slowly. Then he talked to the dice. "Dice," he said, "Papa needs a drink. Papa needs a drink very bad."

He put his 2000 francs down. The two Sergeants with the bright stars in the circles on their shoulders faded him.

"Dice," Pfeiffer said, "it's a cold day and Papa's thirsty." He rolled the dice gently, relinquishing them like flower petals. "Read them," he said, without smiling. "Seven." He spat again. "Pick up the money, Lieutenant, I'll take the bottle." He put out his hand.

"Delighted," the Lieutenant said. He gave Pfeiffer the bottle and scooped up the money. "I'm glad we came."

Pfeiffer took a long drink out of the bottle. All the men watched him silently, half-pleased, half-annoyed at his extravagance. Pfeiffer corked the bottle carefully and put it in his overcoat pocket. "There's going to be an attack tonight," he said pugnaciously. "What the h.e.l.l good would it do me to cross that G.o.dd.a.m.n river with 4000 francs in my pocket? If the Krauts knock me off tonight, they are going to knock off a GI with his belly full of good liquor." Self-righteously, slinging his rifle, he walked away.

"Service of Supply," said one of the infantrymen who had been watching the game. "Now I know why they call it that."

The Lieutenant laughed easily. He was a man beyond the reach of criticism. Michael had forgotten that people laughed like that any more, good-humoredly, without much cause, from a full reservoir of good spirits. He guessed that you could only find people who laughed like that fifty miles back of the lines. None of the men joined in the Lieutenant's laughter.

"I'll tell you why we're here, Boys," the Lieutenant said.

"Let me guess," said Crane, who was in Michael's platoon. "You're from Information and Education and you brought up a questionnaire. Are we happy in the Service? Do we like our work? Have we had clap more than three times in the last year?"

The Lieutenant laughed again. He is a great little laugher, that Lieutenant, Michael thought, staring at him somberly.

"No," said the Lieutenant, "we're here on business. We heard we could pick up some pretty good souvenirs in this neck of the woods. I get into Paris twice a month, and there's a good market for Luegers and cameras and binoculars, stuff like that. We're prepared to pay a fair price. How about it? You fellows got anything you want to sell?"

The men around the Lieutenant looked at one another silently. "I got a nice Garand rifle," Crane said, "I'd be willing to part with for 5000 francs. Or, how about a nice combat jacket," Crane went on innocently, "a little worn, but with sentimental value?"

The Lieutenant chuckled. He was obviously having a good time on his day off up at the front. He would write about it to his girl back in Wisconsin, Michael was sure, the comedians of the infantry, rough boys, but comic. "O.K.," he said, "I'll look around for myself. I hear there was some action here last week, there should be plenty of stuff lying around."

The infantrymen stared coldly at one another. "Plenty," said Crane gently. "Jeep loads. You'll be the richest man in Paris."

"Which way is the front?" the Lieutenant asked briskly. "We'll take a peek."

There was the cold, slightly bubbling silence again. "The front," Crane said innocently, "you want to peek at the front?"