Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  She fled out of the small, dark room with the little bar near the window and the old-fashioned maps of the wine sections of France hung around the smoky walls. Michael left some money on the table for the bill, and a big tip to try to make up to the Italian waiter for being ugly to him, and walked slowly out into the street.

  He stood in front of the restaurant, thoughtfully smoking a cigarette. No, he thought finally, no. She’s wrong. I’m not going to carry that burden, too, or let her carry it, either. If she was going to forget him, that was merely another price you paid for the war, another form of casualty. It was not entered on the profit-and-loss balances of men killed and wounded and treasure destroyed, but it was just as surely a casualty. It was hopeless and crippling to try to fight it.

  Peggy came out. Her hair shone in the sun as though she had combed it violently upstairs, and her face was composed and smiling.

  “Forgive me,” she said, touching his arm. “I’m just as surprised by it as you are.”

  “That’s all right,” Michael said. “I’m no prize today myself.”

  “I didn’t mean a word of what I said. You believe that, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Michael.

  “Some other time,” Peggy said, “I’ll tell you about the man in Vienna. It’s an interesting story. Especially for a soldier.”

  “Sure,” said Michael politely. “I’d love to hear it.”

  “And now,” Peggy looked up the street and waved to a taxi-cab that was slowly coming down from Lexington Avenue, “I think I’d better go back to work for the rest of the afternoon. Don’t you?”

  “There’s no need …”

  Peggy smiled at him. “I think it’s a good idea,” she said. “Then tonight, we’ll meet as though we never had lunch today at all. I’d prefer it that way. You can find plenty of things to do this afternoon, can’t you?”

  “Of course,” Michael said.

  “Have a good time, darling.” She kissed him lightly. “And wear your gray suit tonight.” She got into the cab without looking back and the car drove loudly off toward Third Avenue. Michael watched it turn the corner under the splintered bright shadows of the L. Then he walked slowly west on the shady side of the street.

  He had put off thinking about Peggy, half consciously, half unconsciously. There were so many other things to think about. The war made a miser out of a man, he saved all his emotions for it. But that was no excuse, either. He still wanted to postpone thinking about her. He knew himself too well to imagine that for two, three, four years he could remain faithful to a photograph, a letter a month a memory … And he didn’t want to make any claims on her. They were two sensible, forthright, candid people, and here was a problem that millions of people all around them were facing one way or another, and they couldn’t handle it any better than the youngest, the most naive, the most illiterate backwoodsman come down from his hills to pick up a rifle, leaving his Cora Sue behind him … He knew that they wouldn’t talk about it any more, either that night or any night before the end of the war, but he knew that in the nights of memory and recapitulation ahead of him on continents he had never traveled before, he would suffer as he thought of this early summer afternoon and a bitter voice would cry within him, “Why didn’t you do it? Why not? Why not?”

  He shook his head to clear it, and walked with defiant briskness between the brown buildings, gracious and friendly in the spacious light. He passed an old man, walking painfully with a cane. The old man had a wool muffler on and a long, dark coat, although it was a warm day. There were livermarks on the old man’s skin, and his hands were yellow on his cane, and his eyes, as he looked at Michael, were watery and bitter, as though any young man briskly walking the streets was an affront to him, mufflered and limping on the edge of the grave.

  The look was surprising, and Michael almost stopped to peer again, to see if perhaps the old man was known to him and was nursing a more personal injury. But the old man was a stranger, and Michael walked on, more slowly. Fool, Michael thought. You’ve had the whole banquet, all the courses, the soup, the fish, the white wine, the red, the Burgundy and the Bordeaux, the game, the roast, the salad, the cheese, and now you’ve come to the dessert and brandy, and because you’ve found the sweet bitter and the drink harsh, you hate the men who have come more lately than you to the table. I’d change with you, Old Man, Michael thought. The days you’ve lived through. The best days of America. The optimistic days, the short wars, the little killing, the bracing, invigorating, early-century weather … You married and sat down to dinner with many children in the same house for twenty uninterrupted years, and only foreigners fought in the wars then. Don’t envy me, Old Man, don’t envy me. What good fortune, what a gift to be seventy and nearly dead in 1942! I pity you now because of your heavy coat on the old bones, the warm wool around the frozen throat, the shaking hand on the necessary cane … but perhaps I should pity myself more. Warm as I am, with my steady hands, and my certain step … I will never freeze on a summer’s day, and my hand will never shake from age. I come to Intermission and I do not return to the Theatre for the Second Act.

  There was the crisp sound of high heels beside him and Michael looked at the woman who was passing him. She had on a wide straw hat with a deep green band and the light, thrown on her face through the brim, was softened and rosy. Her dress was of a light, cool green and clung in nude, delightful wrinkles to her hips. She was barelegged and brown. She made a point of not paying any attention to Michael’s polite but admiring glance. She passed him quickly and walked in front of him. Michael’s eyes lingered pleasantly on the trim, pretty figure and he smiled as her hand went inevitably up to her hair and patted it and arranged it in helpless, agreeable response to the fact that a young man was looking at her and finding her beautiful.

  Then Michael grinned. No, he thought, Old Man. I’ve been making it all up. Go die, Old Man, with my blessing. I’ll sit the meal out with pleasure.

  He was whistling later in the afternoon as he approached the bar where he was to meet Cahoon and say good-bye to him before he left for the wars.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THIS IS WHAT they said along the bar where they sold three-point-two beer in the PX at Fort Dix in the State of New Jersey on a night in the fateful, warm summer of 1942.

  “I got one eye. Actually one eye. I told the bastidds and they said One A and here I am.”

  And they said, “I am the father of a ten-year-old girl. You’re separated from your wife, they said, One A. The State is jumping with young single men without children and they persecuted me.”

  And they said, “In the old country, they wanted to draft you, you went to an expert and he ruptured you. One little pull of the finger and you had a hernia would keep you out of fifty wars. But in America they take one look and they say, ‘Son, we’ll fix your balls just as good as new in two days. One A.’”

  And they said, “You call this beer? As soon as the government steps in, everything stinks, even the beer.”

  And they said, “It’s a question of pull. You could beat Joe Louis in two rounds, and they’d defer you for delicate health, you know somebody on the draft board.”

  And they said, “I got ulcers so bad, every time I hear the telephone ring, my gut bleeds. It don’t show on the x-rays, they said, One A. They won’t be satisfied till they have my life. I wonder will they bury me at Arlington Cemetery. They’ll send me a purple heart for hyperacidity and give me a military funeral and they can stuff it up their ass. I ain’t et any of their food yet, but I can’t hold out forever. One of those meals, bologna and cheese and peanut butter they pass out, and they got a dead soldier on their hands. I warned them, but they said, One A.”

  And they said, “I don’t mind servin’ my country, but what I don’t like is they deduct twenty-two dollars a month and send it to my wife. I been separated from my wife eleven years, and she slept with every man and boy between here and Salt Lake, and they deduct twenty-two dollars.”

&n
bsp; And they said, “When I get out I’m goin’ to kill the chairman of my draft board. I told him I want to join the Coast Guards, my application is in, I like the sea, but he said, ‘One A, you better learn to like the land.’”

  And they said, “Listen to me, Bud, when you stand formation, stand in the middle. Not in the front, not in the back, not on the sides. In the middle, see. Then they don’t pick you for details, see. And stay away from your tent except at night, because they go around snoopin’, and anybody they see on his back, they grab him and put him to work, unloadin’ trucks in the warehouses.”

  And they said, “I could have had a commission, only it would of taken a little time, and the draft board was hungry for me, red, raving hungry.”

  And they said, “Did you see those two guys marchin’ back and forth with full packs in front of the orderly room? They been there for five days like that, back and forth, back and forth, they must of walked two hundred miles by now. They went into Trenton for a couple of beers, and the Sergeant caught them, and they have to walk until they’re shipped. For a couple of glasses of beer. And they call this a free country.”

  And they said, “When they take you in front of the interviewer, you tell him you can type. Makes no difference can you type, can’t you type. You tell him you can type. This Army is crazy for typists. One thing you can be sure, they don’t put typewriters any place where they can be shot at. You tell them you can’t type, they put you in the Infantry and you can write home and tell your Ma to start shoppin’ for a nice gold star for the window.”

  And they said, “This Army pays more attention to a man’s instrument than a Spanish bride on a hot night on the Equator. I been in the Army twelve hours now and they’ve looked at it three times already. Who do they expect us to fight—the Japs or the field hockey team at Vassar?”

  And they said, “They got all the ratings in the Air Force.”

  And they said, “You don’t get killed in the Artillery.”

  And they said, “This is the worst company at Fort Dix. They found the cook buggering a KP and they court-martialed him and reduced him to the rank of Staff Sergeant.”

  And they said, “This is the first night I’ll be sleeping away from my wife since 1931. I don’t think I can manage it.”

  And they said, “Hey, look, they give you condoms for nothing in this joint.”

  And they said, “What do you know, you can buy the Bible for a quarter. Paper covered.”

  And they said, “Oh, Christ, they’re closin’ up.”

  Michael walked down the spit-covered steps of the PX onto the worn soil of New Jersey, under the calm, starlit summer-sky. Heavy with beer, in the stiff green fatigue suit that smelled like the back room of a haberdashery store, with his feet feeling clumsy and anchored in the new square shoes that already were blistering his heel, he moved down the company street between the tents, past the two sullen figures marching slowly back and forth under heavy packs in payment for the Trenton beers, past the crap game that had started yesterday and would go on until the men died or the Japanese surrendered, past the lonely, rumpled figures that stood next to the guy ropes looking soberly up at the dark sky, past the men packing their civilian clothes into bundles to give to the Red Cross, past the privates, first class, who did the actual work of running the company and who seemed like rare and lofty persons, endowed with incredible privileges, who were now calling hoarsely, “Lights out in ten minutes, Soldiers! Lights out in ten minutes!”

  He went into his tent, bare and lonely under the single forty-watt bulb, and slowly undressed and got under the rough blanket in his underwear because he had been ashamed to go to war carrying pajamas.

  The man from Elmira, who slept next to the tent opening, put out the light. He had been there three weeks already because he was a veterinarian and the Army was trying to place him at a post where he could be useful with mules, and it was hard to find that many mules in this up-to-date war. The man from Elmira put out the light because he was the veteran of the establishment and naturally took command of matters like that.

  The man to the right of Michael was already snoring. He was a Sicilian who pretended he could read and write and he was going to wait here for ninety days to be made a citizen before the Army decided what it was going to do with him.

  The men in the other beds had communicated nothing to Michael. They lay in the darkness, listening to the Sicilian snore, listening to Taps weep out over the public-address system, enormous and sorrowful over the herded shabby acres of men who were no longer civilians and not yet soldiers, and who now, finally, in a generally loose and approximate way, were to be prepared to die.

  I’m here, Michael thought, smelling the Army blanket under his chin, it’s happened. I should have rushed into it and I didn’t and I could have dodged it and I didn’t. Here I am, in this tent, under the stiff blanket, as I always knew I would be. This tent, this blanket, these snoring men have been waiting for me for thirty-three years, and now they have caught up with me and I have caught up with them. The expiration has begun. I have begun to pay up. Pay for my opinions, pay for my easy life, for the good meals and the soft beds, pay for the easy girls and all the easy money. Pay for the thirty-three year holiday that ended this morning when the Sergeant said, “You. Pick up that butt.”

  He found it easy to drift off to sleep, although there were shouts and whistles and drunken weeping all about him. And he slept without dreams all that night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE GENERAL had come down to inspect the line, exuding confidence, so they all knew something was up. Even the Italian General in the party of ten bulky, binoculared, goggled, scarved, glittering officers had exuded confidence, so they knew it was something big. The General had been particularly hearty, laughing uproariously when he talked to the soldiers, patting them heavily on the shoulder, even pinching the cheek of an eighteen-year-old boy who had just come up as a replacement in Himmler’s squad. This was a certain sign that a great many men were going to be killed, one way or another, very soon.

  There were other signs, too. Himmler, who had been at Divisional Headquarters two days ago, had heard on the radio that the British had been burning papers again at their headquarters in Cairo. The British seemed to have an unlimited number of papers to burn. They had burned them in July, and then again in August, and here it was October, and they were still burning them.

  Himmler had also heard the man on the radio say that the overall strategy was for them to break through to Alexandria and Jerusalem and finally to join up with the Japanese in India. It was true that this seemed a little grandoise and ambitious to men who had been sitting in the same place in the bitter sun for months, but there was a reassuring sound to the plan. At least it gave evidence that the General had a plan.

  The night was very quiet. Occasionally there was a random small rattle of fire, or a flare, but that was all. There was a moon and the pale sky, crusted with the mild glitter of the stars, blended gently with the shadowy expanse of the desert.

  Christian stood alone, loosely holding the machine pistol in the crook of his arm, looking out toward the anonymous shadows behind which lay the enemy. There was no sound from them in the sleeping night, and no sound from the thousands of men all about him.

  Night had its advantages. You could move around quite freely without worrying that some Englishman had you in his glasses and was debating with himself whether or not you were worth a shell or two. Also, the smell died down. The smell was the salient fact about war in the desert. There was not enough water for anything but drinking, and not enough for that, and nobody bathed. You sweated all day, in the same clothes, week in and week out, and your clothes rotted with it, and became stiff on your back, and you had a steady rash of prickly heat that itched and burned, but your nose suffered worst of all The human race was only bearable when the obscene juices of living were being constantly washed away. You became dulled to your own smell, of course, otherwise you would kill yourself, but when yo
u joined any group, the smell hit you, in a solid, jolting attack.

  So the night was solace. There had been little enough solace since he had arrived in Africa. They had been winning, it was true, and he had marched from Bardia to this spot, some seventy miles from Alexandria. But somehow, while agreeable, victory did not have a personal quality to a soldier in the line. No doubt victory meant a great deal to the well-uniformed officers at the various headquarters and they probably celebrated over large dinners with wines and beer when towns were taken, but victories for you still meant that there was a good chance that you would die in the morning, and that you would still live in a shallow, gritty hole, and that the other men who lived by your side would stink just as unbearably in the hot wind of triumph as in defeat.

  The only good time had been the two weeks in Cyrene, when he had been sent back with malaria. It had been cooler there, and green, and there was swimming in the Mediterranean.

  When Himmler had reported that he had heard the expert on the radio announce that the plan of the German General Staff was to go through Alexandria and Cairo to join up in India with the Japanese, Knuhlen, who had come out with a recent draft of replacements, and who had taken over some of Himmler’s old position of comedian to the company, had said, “Anybody who wants can go join up with the Japs. Myself, if nobody minds, I’ll stop in Alexandria and join up with some of that Italian ass I hear they have running all over the streets there.”

  Christian grinned in the darkness as he remembered Knuhlen’s rough witticism. There are probably few jokes, he thought, being told tonight on the other side of the minefield.

  Then there was a flash for a hundred miles, and a second later, the sound. He fell to the sand, just as the shells exploded all around him.