"Houlihan!" He sprang up beside the Sergeant, who was peering, with a steady, fierce expression, across the river to the other ridge. "Houlihan, you can't do that! You can't let them go out there like that! Houlihan!"
"Shut up!" Houlihan whispered ferociously. "Don't tell me what to do. I'm running this platoon."
"They'll be killed," Michael said urgently, staring down at the three men sliding on the dirty snow.
"Well, now," Houlihan said, and Michael was frightened by the look of loathing and hatred on his fine, thin-mouthed, scholarly face, "which would you prefer, man? Why shouldn't some of those bastards get killed once in a while? They're in the Army, aren't they? Souvenirs!"
"You've got to stop them!" Michael said hoarsely. "If you don't stop them, I'll put in a report, I swear to God I will…"
"Shut up, Whitacre," Noah said.
"Put in a report, eh?" Houlihan never took his eyes off the opposite ridge. "You want to go yourself, is that it? You want to get killed this afternoon yourself out there, you want Ackerman to get killed, Crane, Pfeiffer, you'd rather have your friends get it than three fat pigs from the Services of Supply. They're too good to be killed, is that it?" His voice which had been trembling with malice suddenly became smooth and professional as he addressed the other men. "Don't watch them down on the field," he said. "Keep your eyes on the ridge. There'll only be two, three short bursts, you'll have to look sharp. And keep your eyes on the spot and call it out… Still want me to call them back, Whitacre?"
"I…" Michael began. Then he heard the firing and he knew it was too late.
Down on the field along the river, the brindle coat was slowly going down, deflating on to the ground. Louis and the other man started to run, but they did not get far.
"Sergeant," it was Noah's voice, very calm and level, "I see where it's coming from. To the right of that big tree, twenty yards, just in front of those two bushes that stick up just a little higher than the others… See it?"
"I see it," Houlihan said.
"Right there. Two or three yards from the first bush."
"You sure?" Houlihan said. "I missed it."
"I'm sure," Noah said.
God, Michael thought wearily, admiring and hating Noah, how much that boy had learned since Florida.
"Well," Houlihan finally turned to Michael, "do you want to send in your report now?"
"No," Michael said. "I'm not going to report anything."
"Of course not." Houlihan patted his elbow warmly. "I knew you wouldn't." He went over to the field telephone and called the Company CP. Michael listened to him, giving the exact location of the German gun for the mortars.
Now, again, the afternoon was totally silent. It was hard to remember that, just one minute ago, the machine-gun had torn the quiet, and that three men had died.
Michael turned and looked at Noah. Noah was kneeling on one knee, holding his rifle with its butt in the mud, the barrel resting against his cheek, looking like old pictures of frontiersmen in the Indian wars far away in Kentucky and New Mexico. Noah was staring at Michael, his eyes wild and burning and without shame.
Michael slowly sat down, averting his eyes from Noah's, realizing finally the full implications of what Noah had tried to tell him in the replacement depot about going, in the Army, only to places where you had friends.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
IT didn't look bad, it looked almost like an ordinary Army camp, quite pleasant, in the middle of wide, green fields, with the sloping, forested hills behind it. The barracks-like buildings were a little close together, and the doubled, barbed-wire fences, spaced with watch towers, tipped you off, of course – and the smell. Two hundred metres away, the smell suffused the air, like a gas that, by a trick of chemistry, is just about to be transformed into a solid.
Still Christian didn't stop. He limped hurriedly along the road towards the main gate, through the shining spring morning. He had to get something to eat, and he needed information. Perhaps somebody inside the camp was in telephone communication with a functioning headquarters, or had been listening to the radio… Maybe, he thought hopefully, remembering the retreat in France, maybe I can even pick up a bicycle…
He grimaced as he neared the camp. I have become a specialist, he thought, in the technique of personal retreat. It was a good skill to have in the spring of 1945. I am the leading Nordic expert, he thought, on disengaging tactics from dissolving military organizations. I can sniff surrender in a Colonel two days before the Colonel realizes himself what is passing through his mind.
Christian did not want to surrender, although it had suddenly become very common, and millions of men seemed to be spending their entire time thinking up the most satisfactory means of accomplishing it. For the last month, most of the conversation in the Army had been an examination of that subject… In the ruined cities, in the sketchy and hopeless little islands of resistance set Up across main roads and town-entrances, the discussion had always followed the same course. No hatred for the Air Forces which had destroyed cities that had stood unmolested for a thousand years, no feeling of revenge for the thousands of women and children stinking and buried in the rubble, only, "The best ones to hand yourself over to are, of course, the Americans. After that, the British. Then, the French, although that is a last emergency. And if the Russians take you, we'll see you in Siberia…" Men with the Iron Cross, first class, men with the Hitler Medal, men who had fought in Africa and in front of Leningrad, and all the way back from St. Mere Eglise… It was disgusting.
It did not fit in with Christian's plans to die. He had learned too much in the last five years. He would be too useful after the war to throw it all away now. He would have to lie low, of course, for three or four years, and be agreeable and pleasant to the conquerors. Probably at home the tourists would come again for the skiing, probably the Americans would set up huge rest camps there, and he could get a job teaching American Lieutenants how to make snow-plough turns… And after that… Well, after that he would see. A man who had learned how to kill so expertly, and handle violent men so well, was bound to be a useful commodity five years after the war, if he preserved himself carefully…
He didn't know what the situation was in his home town, but if he could manage to get back there before troops got in, he could put on civilian clothes, and his father could invent a story for him… It wasn't so far away, here he was deep in Bavaria, and the mountains were just over the horizon. The war had finally turned convenient, he thought with grim humour. A man could fight his final action in his own front garden.
There was only one guard on the gate, a pudgy little man in his middle fifties, looking out of place and unhappy with his Volkssturm armband and his rifle. The Volkssturm, Christian thought contemptuously – that had been a marvellous idea. Hitler's home for the aged, the bitter joke had run. There had been a great deal of resounding talk in the newspapers and over the radio, to the effect that every man, of whatever age, fifteen or seventy, would, now that their very homes were threatened, fight like raging lions against the invader. The sedentary, hardened-arteried gentlemen of the Volkssturm had obviously not heard about their fighting like lions. One shot over their heads and you could pick up a whole battalion, with their eyes running, and their hands up in the air. Another myth – that you could take middle-aged Germans away from their desks and children out of school and make soldiers out of them in two weeks. Rhetoric, Christian thought, looking at the worried fat man in his ill-fitting uniform at the gate, rhetoric has deranged us all. Rhetoric and myth against whole divisions of tanks, armies of aeroplanes, all the petrol, all the guns, all the ammunition in the world. Hardenburg had understood, long ago, but Hardenburg had killed himself. Yes, there would be a use, after the war, for men who had been cleansed of rhetoric and who had been once and for all inoculated against myth.
"Heil Hitler," said the Volkssturm guard, saluting uncomfortably.
Heil Hitler. Another joke. Christian didn't bother to answer the salute.
"What's going on here?" Christian asked.
"We wait" The guard shrugged.
"For what?"
The guard shrugged again. He grinned uneasily.
"What's the news?" the guard asked.
"The Americans have just surrendered," Christian said. "Tomorrow the Russians."
For a moment, the guard almost believed it. A credulous flicker of joy crossed his face. Then he knew better. "You are in good spirits," he said sadly.
"I am in great spirits," said Christian. "I have just come back from my spring holiday."
"Do you think the Americans will come here today?" the guard asked anxiously.
"They are liable to come in ten minutes, or ten days," said Christian, "or ten weeks. Who can tell what the Americans will do?"
"I hope they come soon," said the guard. "They are preferable to the…"
This one, too, Christian thought. "I know," he said shortly.
"They are preferable to the Russians and preferable to the French."
"That's what everybody says," the guard said unhappily.
"God," Christian sniffed. "How can you stand the stink?"
The guard nodded. "It is bad, isn't it?" he said. "But I've been here a week and I don't notice it any more."
"A week?" Christian asked. "Is that all?"
"There was a whole SS battalion here, but a week ago they took them away and put us here. Just one company," the guard said aggrievedly. "We are lucky to be alive."
"What have you got in there?" Christian nodded his head in the direction of the smell.
"The usual. Jews, Russians, some politicals, some people from Yugoslavia and Greece, places like that. We locked them all in two days ago. They know something is up and they are getting dangerous. And we have only one company, they could wipe us out in fifteen minutes if they wanted, there are thousands of them. They were making a lot of noise an hour ago." He turned and peered uneasily at the locked barracks. "Now, not a sound. God knows what they are cooking up for us."
"Why do you stay here?" Christian asked curiously.
The guard shrugged, smiling that sick, foolish smile again. "I don't know. We wait."
"Open the gate," Christian said. "I want to go in."
"You want to go in?" the guard said incredulously. "What for?"
"I am making a list of summer resorts for the Strength Through Joy Headquarters in Berlin," Christian said, "and this camp has been suggested to me. Open up. I need something to eat, and I want to see if I can borrow a bicycle."
The guard signalled to another guard in the tower, who had been watching Christian carefully. The gate slowly began to swing open.
"You won't find a bicycle," the Volkssturm man said. "The SS took everything with wheels away with them when they went last week."
"I'll see," Christian said. He went through the double gates, deep into the smell, towards the Administration Building, a pleasant-looking Tyrolean-style chalet, with a green lawn and whitewashed stones, and a tall flagpole with a flag fluttering from it in the brisk morning wind. There was a low, hushed, non-human-sounding murmur, coming from the barracks. It seemed to come from some new kind of musical instrument, designed to project notes too formless and unpleasant for an organ to manage. All the windows were boarded up, and there were no human beings to be seen within the compound.
Christian mounted the scrubbed stone steps of the chalet and went inside.
He found the kitchen and got some sausage and ersatz coffee from a gloomy, sixty-year-old, uniformed cook, who said, encouragingly, "Eat well, Boy, who knows when we'll ever eat again?"
There were quite a few of the misfits of the Volkssturm huddled uneasily in their second-hand uniforms along the halls of the Administration Building. They held weapons, but did so gingerly, and with clear expressions of distaste. They, too, like the guard at the gate, were waiting. They stared unhappily at Christian as he passed among them, and Christian could sense a whisper of disapproval, disapproval for his youth, the losing war he had fought… The young men, Hitler had always boasted, were his great strength, and now these makeshift soldiers, torn from their homes at the heel end of a war, showed, by the slight grimaces on their worn faces, what they thought of the retreating generation which had brought them to this hour.
Christian walked very erect, holding his Schmeisser lightly, his face cold and set, among the aimless men in the halls. He reached the Commandant's office, knocked and went in. A prisoner in his striped suit was mopping the floor, and a corporal was sitting at a desk in the outer office. The door to the private office was open, and the man sitting at the desk there motioned for Christian to come in when he heard Christian say, "I wish to speak to the Commandant."
The Commandant was the oldest Lieutenant Christian had ever seen. He looked well over sixty, with a face that seemed to have been put together out of flaky cheese.
"No, I have no bicycles," the Lieutenant said in his cracked voice in answer to Christian's request. "I have nothing. Not even food. They left us with nothing, the SS. Just orders to remain in control. I got through to Berlin yesterday and some idiot on the phone told me to kill everybody here immediately." The Lieutenant laughed grimly. "Eleven thousand men. Very practical. I haven't been able to reach anybody since then." He stared at Christian. "You have come from the front?" Christian smiled. "Front is not exactly the word I would use."
The Lieutenant sighed, his face pale and creased. "In the last war," he said, "it was very different. We retreated in the most orderly manner. My entire company marched into Munich, still in possession of their weapons. It was much more orderly," he said, the accusation against the new generation of Germans, who did not know how to lose a war in an orderly manner, like their fathers, quite clear in his tone.