Irwin Shaw - The Young Lions

"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 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 night shift 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 fine-looking 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 refrigerator second-hand… He could only move his head. He was paralysed 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.

"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 molasses 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 scraping 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 on to them. Not me. It's my fault and I realize it. I don't have a hell 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 paralysed I was going to choke him when nobody 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 feather beds, the table linen, the crockery, the photograph albums, 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 shell, 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 trench-foot. In the distance, the fire was growing brighter, as it took hold more strongly on the timbers and contents 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 hit 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 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 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 assigned 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 careful when they spoke of Johnny Burnecker in front of Noah.

"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 balls, spaghetti and canned peaches in rich combination on their mess kits. It was the first warm food they'd had for three days, and everyone was very pleased with the cooks who had got the field kitchen so close up. The line of men, spaced ten yards apart so that if a shell came in 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.