Читать книгу The High White Forest - Ralph Allen - Страница 4

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Perhaps, David Kyle reminded himself again, it might have turned out differently if his home town had had another name. But how could you say in one breath that you were a conchie and in the next that you came from a place called Battle Creek? Some had, of course, and endured whatever extra torment it involved, but few of them could have been already reeling, as he had been doing, under a prior burden of other incongruities, other contradictions, and other doubts and convictions so finely balanced that they sometimes changed places overnight.

“Camel?” The man slumped beside him in the steamy, twilit but oddly cheerful cellar was a three-day-old reinforcement. “Oh, I forgot,” he said. “One of the guys told me you never even tasted one. That can’t be right, can it?” The man beside him—David remembered now that his name was Jones—drew back the bayonet attached to his M-1 rifle to inspect the damp sacks he’d been drying over the damp, rebellious remnants of the fire in the middle of the floor.

“No, thanks,” Dave said. That tiny indiscretion, mumbled in a moment of bored gabbiness away back on the other side of the Seine, came home to rest at the most unexpected times; not precisely to haunt him or embarrass him but rather to remind him, in a dull, stale, repetitious way of a whole complex of matters he’d rather have forgotten for now at least. Murchison, to whom he’d first made the disclosure, had left the company long ago, on his way to the hospital. Almost two hundred others had gone after him and another two hundred had come to take their places. Of his own platoon only he, Henry Whelan, Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz, and Sergeant Kennebec were still there now. Pretty soon, Henry Whelan had once prophesied, the two of them would be like his great-grandfather’s old ax that had had nine new handles and four new blades but was still the oldest store-bought ax in the United States of America, the selfsame original ax that his great-grandfather had bought in Boston about the time of John Quincy Adams. Yet though David Kyle had never voluntarily discussed the subject of his never-smoking with anyone again, this one muttered, utterly trivial boast or confession or whatever he had intended it to be at the time had been kept alive in the platoon and handed down from each of its generations to the next, like some priestly secret or family heirloom. Perhaps before this was over he would blunder into a Congressional Medal of Honor or be sentenced to life imprisonment for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or simply disappear into the limbo of an ambulance jeep, but the thing he’d still be best and solely and surely remembered for in the annals of Number Three Platoon of Able Company of the First Battalion of the 957th Infantry Regiment was that he was the one who’d never, not only even as a kid or even for curiosity, tasted tobacco. Not a single drag, no sir, not even one single drag. “I offered him one more than once myself. He didn’t like to talk about it much. In most other ways he was pretty much the same as the rest of us. No, I don’t know what happened to him. I saw him last in some kind of a stone cellar in Belgium or Luxembourg or one of those countries; the winter of 1944, I guess.”

He moved away from the fire and felt in a corner for his blanket. He squatted down and unlaced his high combat boots but did not take them off. His feet were almost dry and warm, the blanket above him was almost dry and warm, and with his scarf folded on top of his pack it was soft and easy beneath his head. They’d eaten abundantly and well, and hot, from the field kitchen. The air of the cellar, thick and gently rustling with the yawns, belches, sighs, scratchings, and reassuring smells of a dozen companions, offered a further invitation to repose. There was no reason to expect a short or interrupted night, but even though he was certain he’d heard it somewhere else, he had learned to respect and, whenever possible, to follow Sergeant Kennebec’s First Law of the Infantry: Never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or go to the can.

But he couldn’t sleep after all. The business about the cigarette had got him going a little again. Not in an unduly remorseful or self-pitying way, just going a little, mainly for the rare pleasure of employing his mind from the surface down in some wholly nonutilitarian, optional, and harmless pursuit, like plucking daisies or counting watch ticks in the dark.

Now, if they’d called the place Utopia, or Kingdom Come—but Battle Creek! No, this line of speculation was too retroactive. He’d have to watch it. These post-facto rationalizations could drive a man loony as surely as the shelling, the cold, the wet, the clock and the calendar, and the absence of any visible boundary to any of them. It had never occurred to him before he joined the shooting army that names had anything to do with it. Whether his decision had been good or bad, it had been already taken for altogether different reasons; this grabbing and grubbing around for extra reasons after it was over and done with might easily become habit-forming. Soon he’d be telling himself that he’d enlisted because of the look on young Harvey’s face when the floodlights caught him between two shell craters in the advance toward St. Lô and Harvey knew and David Kyle, miraculously safe in one of the craters, knew, too, that the Spandau had young Harvey in its sights and young Harvey had a tenth of a second left to live.

The fact he mustn’t lose sight of was that he was already in long long before he’d known young Harvey. The only thing he hoped to win any longer, aside from his survival, which he cherished and believed in, was some sort of clarity; if he got out even fuller of confusion and self-deceit than when he’d got in, he’d have lost on all counts.

“Aw right! Off those merry asses! Out!” The high voice of Sergeant Kennebec, sharpened to a tone of perpetual defensiveness by months of ridiculous demands, unappreciated apologies, and almost unheeded—almost but never quite—threats, came down to them from the kitchen like a voice from the top of a well.

Kennebec’s long legs now appeared on the wooden ladder leading downward from the wooden trap door. He had to bend anyway to keep his head below the six-foot beam-and-plaster ceiling, so he bent all the way and warmed his hands above the damply floundering fire.

“Is it an alert, Sergeant?” Henry Whelan knew the answer as well as any of them. He put the question with innocent venom. But Whelan was already on his feet, moving briskly toward the ladder. The company hadn’t had a casualty in a week and all the contact they’d been able to get from his patrols indicated that the enemy was, for the moment, as thin on the ground, unbloody-minded, and even companionable as they were. Six nights ago, Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz had found themselves staring down across a row of snow-covered sandbags into the barrel of one big machine gun and at least three Schmeissers. They hadn’t even had a chance to lift their M-1’s, but had done the next best thing and turned and run for the trees. The Krauts hadn’t fired a single shot, just shouted gleefully and mockingly, and when Whelan and Ruiz were two hundred yards out of sight one of the Krauts was still hollering after them, half-choked with laughter, “Raus! Raus! Yankee jerk! Jerk Yankee!” Two nights later, in an almost exactly reversed situation out beyond the BAR emplacement that they called the Northwest Haystack, two men from Seven Platoon lined up a solitary German who’d lost his patrol along with his way, gave him a yell of warning, and peppered him with frozen cow turds they’d gathered to take back to the fireplace at company headquarters. Perhaps the Germans had caught the same scuttlebutt about an already-arranged ending before Christmas, and Christmas was less than two weeks off. Certainly nobody seemed to be trying to make any kind of a major move, or getting ready to make one, not in this sector at least. But they all knew you couldn’t count on anything at all, and no matter how gratifying it might be to know that another alert at this time and place represented a brand-new pinnacle in stupidity and useless mortification of the flesh, you couldn’t do much but go on complying with and secretly reveling in the continued mindlessness of the Great God They. Henry Whelan, blaspheming only mildly, was halfway up the ladder, closing up his field jacket and hauling on his gloves. David was right behind him. Suddenly remembering that you never knew how long you might be out there, he darted back and scooped up his blanket before he went up and through the kitchen and out in the yard, where it was now thick night.

He had only two or three hundred yards to go. Other dark figures flitted ahead along the line of the wire fence before the barnyard and groped, disappearing one by one, toward their forward foxholes in the trees. No one kept particularly low or made any particular attempt to use the shadows. A cold wind was swinging down the frozen roadway and it felt all the colder because of the abrupt transition from the fetid, stagnant, lovely air of the cellar. Everybody was hurrying to get back beneath the hostile crust of the essentially friendly earth.

David Kyle slowed a little when he came to the edge of the small clearing covered by their platoon’s main sentry hole. This hole was far more than just another man-sized excavation. Compared to other sentry posts that they’d dug, maintained, and swiftly left behind in their comparative dash across Northwestern Europe, this one had grown, during the last ten days, into a veritable Fort Knox. As much as anything to relieve the boredom and thaw their stiffened limbs, its rotating tenants had fallen into the habit of making gradual improvements during each of their four-hour terms of occupancy. On one particularly bright and shiny and peaceful day half a dozen men from the platoon had come out voluntarily and all had begun digging together, driven by some sudden obsessive impulse to create the deepest, longest, widest, most spacious and splendid foxhole in the annals of the U. S. First Army. It was almost six feet deep and twice that long and half that wide before Sergeant Kennebec, drifting up in the late afternoon to see what was going on, commanded them to desist. “Yah, you smart bastards!” he shouted over their angry protests. “She looks great in broad daylight while you got a convention going and a jug of schnapps to pass around. Wait till you’re all alone in her, rattling around in her all alone in the middle of the night.” They had an uneasy premonition that Sergeant Kennebec, as frequently turned out to be the case, knew what he was talking about. “Wait till the screaming meemies start floating in,” he demanded as a clincher. “What do you do then—start diggin’ foxholes in the foxhole?” Muttering, they’d filled it partly in with the earth they’d already taken out. They found some old timbers around the farm and made a kind of catwalk along the front and tore a big piece of rusty corrugated sheeting off a storage bin and made a roof to protect the rear half from air bursts.

Unwilling to give up the notion that they were creating something special and even moderately historic, the instigator of the project, a squad leader named Williamson, had found a coil of fencing wire, strung it out along the bases of the trees on the far side of the clearing, and at considerable personal risk fastened three half-unpinned hand grenades to the wire with loops of finer wire borrowed from the signalers. It was very delicate work, but, as Williamson kept shouting back over his shoulder to the fascinated spectators gathered in the shelter of the foxhole, it was a very delicate war. It was Williamson’s perfectly sound theory that any Kraut who came in contact with the wire would shake the pin loose from at least one of the grenades and complete the mechanism’s intended cycle, thus killing or at the least wounding himself and any nearby companions. When the sergeant objected that Williamson had created a hazard almost as dangerous to their own night patrols as to the enemy’s and demanded that the apparatus be dismantled forthwith, Williamson flatly refused. The sergeant backed away a little, knowing full well that Williamson had already used up all his luck in getting the grenades planted. It would have been easy enough to explode the grenades with a rifle from the giant foxhole. The grenades were all quite visible, hanging from the wire, but the sounds of war had grown so rare during the last few days that the sergeant was unwilling to take the responsibility of starting them up again.

They compromised by laying out a white tape halfway across the clearing and posting an old German sign someone had thrown into the rations truck for a souvenir away back in Normandy. Every time a sentry mounted the catwalk in the big foxhole to peer across the clearing, the stenciled black-on-white death’s-head hit him in the eye: beside it the two familiar cried-out words “Achtung! Minen!”

David Kyle paused a moment in the trees, trying to calculate who would be standing sentry in the big trench now. Somebody, somewhere on the forward positions, must have got the wind up; otherwise in the absence of an enemy barrage there’d have been no reason for the general alert. If the panic had happened to begin in this particular place, then it could be important to know who was there.

It wasn’t necessarily the new and inexperienced men who were the trigger-happy ones. The new ones might start playing Glorious Fourth or, on the other hand, they might still be so full of their drill and lectures that they’d never think of shooting until they were absolutely sure what they were shooting at. The older men, particularly the Normandy men like Henry Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz—or, if it came right down to it, Sergeant Kennebec—could not be counted on to be quite so finicky. Out there alone and with an unrecognized and unexpected form moving toward them—it didn’t matter much from what direction—they were apt to shoot first and ask the questions later.

It was an admitted fact—admitted even by Ruiz—that when Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz shot Charley Bernstein through the leg last September there had been at least some doubt in his mind even before he pulled the trigger. “Of course I didn’t know it wasn’t one of our guys,” Ruiz explained logically and with a certain resentment at his conduct’s being questioned. “If I’d a known I’d a shot the son-of-a-bitch through the head. Now on when you send anybody to relieve me an hour ahead of time, tell him either to come up a hell of a lot louder or a hell of a lot quieter or I might make another mistake.” The matter was dropped and Charley Bernstein was evacuated as a normal battle casualty and awarded a Purple Heart. There were half a dozen others in the platoon—Dave Kyle wasn’t sure what he’d have done himself—who’d said they’d have done the same thing as Carmen Ruiz.

There was always another possibility, of course; the possibility that the man he was about to join in the darkness ahead might be asleep. This was by no means out of the question, but Dave excluded it from his calculations because, although there were at least three known sleeping sentries in their company and he knew their names, he’d never thought to ascertain whether they were light sleepers or heavy sleepers and without this detail the basic information would be meaningless. (Everybody who knew about them, and this included practically all the privates and corporals, kept nagging at the sleepers to stay awake out there, and threatening to turn them in, but nobody ever did; some people might have attributed this to misguided chivalry, but the fact was that the Krauts had never tried anything serious without dropping in at least a few mortars or eighty-eights ahead of the infantry, and it was largely felt that the only lives the sleepers were risking were their own. It was, besides, no minor thing to take any man’s sleep away from him.)

Dave Kyle’s own foxhole was about twenty yards to the right of and a little behind the giant foxhole. He stood in the shadow of the trees for a moment, wondering whether he should just slip into his own hole unnoticed. But he had no way of telling whether the sentry in the big trench had been told about the alert or not; probably he hadn’t. In that case he’d better announce himself somehow. The clouds were low and there was no moon or stars; all he could see was the little rise of the big foxhole’s half-roof and beyond that the dark edge of the clearing. There was no sound anywhere. He stood still for a moment and then whistled a few bars of “Are You from Dixie?” into the flat, cold night air. Almost at once a low, hand-cupped half-call came from the edge of the sentry post. He did not recognize the voice. It must be one of the new men, he thought. “FDR,” the half-voice half-called.

“This is Dave Kyle.” He bent down, hissing across the few feet of ground between them.

“FDR,” the half-voice repeated, now a trifle anxiously.

“All right for me to come in for a minute?” Dave hissed. “I’m setting up over on your right.”

“FDR,” the half-voice repeated, rising and close to fright. “FDR?” He heard a rifle barrel scrape against the upper part of the roof. Then in a swift flash of memory it came to him. “Eleanor! Eleanor, for Christ’s sake!” He seldom swore except in moments of extreme stress.

“Advance,” the half-voice commanded in a tone of relief.

Dave crouched lower, ran the few steps to the edge of the big trench and vaulted down inside.

“Hey, what about that FDR-Eleanor crap?” he whispered, angry at his own instant of fear. “That’s two weeks old.”

“Well, it’s the last password anybody gave me,” the sentry whispered self-righteously. Dave finally recognized him; a new man, as he’d suspected, recently arrived all the way from England.

“Well, listen,” Dave whispered. “Most of the time the people back there forget to give us the new one and when they do most of the people up here forget it. And even then another half-forget the countersign. You’ve got to use your head up here, boy. This is no place for playing games.”

“Who was playing games?”

“I heard you aiming at me, even after I whistled and told you who I was,” Dave answered accusingly. Then as an afterthought, “Hey! You got your safety back on?”

The other man groped at the stock of his rifle.

“God damn it, you still got it off,” Dave said. The momentary excitement had warmed him a little and he sought to keep the warmth alive with a glow of wrath.

“All right, all right.” The sentry sounded aggrieved and still far from complete understanding. Dave dropped it. “What’s been going on?” he whispered.

“All I saw was one flare, about a quarter of a mile ahead and to the left. I figured one of their patrols might have hit one of our trip wires.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not a thing that I saw.”

“Oh, Christ. It was probably only Bed-Check Charlie. Did you hear anything that sounded like a small plane?”

“Who’s Bed-Check Charlie?”

“Guy that does a low-flying recon most nights when there’s any weather at all for him. He drops a flare or two and disappears.”

“I didn’t hear a plane.” The other man, who had been whispering, now spoke aloud too, but less querulously; it was always good to have company up here. “Hey, you say your name’s Kyle. Mine’s Colhurst.”

“That’s all right.” Dave spoke grudgingly, as though making a concession. He was still pretty indignant, but more so now at the ubiquitous, unfailing thickheadedness of Them than at the casual and just possibly amendable thickheadedness of his companion.

“Say, why don’t you stay in here?” Colhurst suggested.

“No. I’m supposed to go over to my own foxhole and cover you from there.” He was aware of sounding very soldierly, very stiff and pretentious, and unduly respectful of authority. With Whelan or Ruiz he’d simply have told the truth: “This place gives me the creeps.” The sentry Colhurst sensed it anyway.

“Why the hell didn’t we fill this thing in and be done with it?” Colhurst asked. “It seemed like such a hot-shot idea when that bastard corporal had us up here digging. But holy God, it gives you as much privacy and shelter as Piccadilly Circus. You been there lots of times, I guess?”

“Lots.”

“Once I laid a broad in the blackout right beneath that round little platform where they say the statue of love used to be. Another broad stumbled across us and started counting.”

Dave said nothing. “Of course,” the other man added hastily, “they were both hookers and I was drunk.”

“Lots of funny things have happened,” Dave responded vaguely, trying not to sound priggish.

“Well, anyways,” the sentry said, “this is one son-of-a-bitch of a lousy foxhole. Look out in front and you see that sign with the skull on it. Look out either end and you hear noises in the other end. A whole platoon of the bastards could crawl into one side of it and cook their breakfast while you were watching the other side.”

Dave thawed a little more. He laughed faintly. “What we should do is declare it an open city. Well, see you later.”

“Sure you don’t want to stay here? You could cover one end and me the other.”

“No. I’ll be over there. You watch to the left of the mine field and I’ll watch the right. It’s a false alarm anyway.”

“O.K., then. Want to split a cigarette before you go? God knows we can get down far enough so nobody will see. We could take turns.”

“No, thanks.”

“Hey, you’re the guy that doesn’t smoke at all, aren’t you? That never even tried it.”

“That’s right.”

“How come?” the sentry asked, genuinely puzzled.

“No particular reason,” Dave said. “I just never got around to it.”

“I bet you took one of those pledges when you were a school kid,” Colhurst speculated sympathetically. “They bullied me into signing one. I was never going to taste tobacco or liquor or shack up with anybody I wasn’t married to. But what the hell! they caught me when I was eleven years old, away under the age of consent and I figured it wasn’t legal.”

“Go ahead and grab a couple of drags,” Dave said. “But don’t be long.” The other man disappeared beneath the roofing and was back within a minute.

“Thanks.”

“O.K. I’ll be over there.”

Alone in his own well-fitting little box of earth, he squatted on the empty ammunition box he had brought up earlier, checked his rifle, and prepared to sit there until some authority or some event should permit or require him to stop sitting and do something else. His resentment of the unnecessary alert and the unnecessary discomfort it had caused had not been forgotten, but he pushed it aside for the time being. Back there in the cellar before the rude advent of the sergeant he had been on the verge of one of those mellow little inner dialogues that, once broken up—as they almost always were before they got anywhere—could take days or weeks to get going again. Conversation in the Army, even conversation with yourself, was hedged with its own special rules and handicaps. It was something like a Berlitz school, where the French class spoke only French, the Russian class spoke only Russian, the Spanish class spoke only Spanish, and the newcomer to the class was never allowed to speak or hear a single word in any other language that he might already know. Throw them in and they’ll swim. In the Army you spoke Army. Maybe if you got off into a corner with some other expatriate from your part of the universe of words, you could risk a few sentences in something besides Army. In these circumstances books, theater, and music were permissible, but if there was any danger of being widely overheard, it was dangerous to go past Gone with the Wind or Raymond Chandler or, at the most extreme, Hemingway or the relative sleepability-with of the pinup girls. Philosophy was absolutely out, except as a semiunderground affair preferably pursued in a dark corner of a dark pub while on leave. Religion O.K. so long as you stuck to exalting God’s name whenever ordered, instructed and led by a chaplain and profaning it whenever not; arguing about religion forbidden at any time. Politics permitted but only under the headings Democraticwayoflife, Fascistoppressors, Toughrussianallies with Formercommunistmenace in strict abeyance and Republicans vs. Democrats clearly labeled Dangerous, especially in the presence of officers. If you were particularly discreet and unshowy, the Army Berlitz system permitted partial, though not total, abstinence from the standard obscenities. But these set the normal form of conversation just as the subject matter was set by baseball, boxing, movies, radio, sex, food, leaves, the digestive system, and the professional shop talk of life and death. One of the advantages of talking to yourself was that you could choose your own topics and your own vocabulary.

At the time of the original charter, Elder Morgan had once told him, their ancestors had decided momentarily to call the new city Wopikisko. But hotter heads prevailed—the elder smiled indulgently—and Battle Creek it was. Even the strife-bearing name was born in strife, the elder’s words reminded him; the essential challenge of strife, the smile added, was the need to rise above it.

One of the minor disappointments—well, not so minor, either, because in a sense it crowned all the others—was the mounting evidence that the elder meant more or less what he seemed to mean. It had been hard in those first few months in the Army to forgive Elder Morgan for having forgiven him. The elder’s refusal to treat him like a betrayer had left David feeling betrayed himself.

Elder Morgan’s Christmas card, postmarked November 14, had reached him early in December, a week before either his father’s or Mary Egan’s. There wasn’t the slightest hint of churchliness about it; indeed the lopsided red and green type conveyed a note of jocularity. The hand-written note below was conventional and gossipy and it would have taken a great deal of touchiness and imagination to read any special ecclesiastical significance, much less an implied rebuke, into the elder’s closing “God bless you, David.”

But Mary and his father had both been more dependable. Their cards were identical, a photograph of the new temple on Washington Street. His father’s message had been a few anguished sentences. “All our love is with you, as always, David. I will not burden you with all my thoughts. But remember always that, even though it may be too late to change your mind in the sight of the world, it is never too late to change your heart. Whatever you do or do not do, I have always known that the truth has always been there, there in your heart, and has never left and never will.”

It was not possible to be bitter in the face of such passionate, single-minded sincerity, but at least it gave you something to come to grips with, as Elder Morgan had not done. So, in a way, did the longer letter that accompanied Mary’s card. This was some new, shy Mary he was hearing from. He’d mentioned in one of his letters to her that his letters had to be read and censored by an officer; she must have thought the rule applied to those he received as well as those he sent, for she was altogether too splendid, sturdy, and aloof. Perhaps, on the other hand, it was his own response she was nervous of; maybe they had gone a little far on that last night.

I manage to keep fairly busy. We’re still far understaffed at the office and I’m now rolling bandages four nights a week instead of two. We bring sandwiches to choir practice and hold it now at suppertime and I’m still helping teach the brass section in the band at the academy. It did not come naturally to Mary to be so mousy and undramatic and resigned. No memory of her could ever eclipse his first one: a nine-year-old and sweaty redhead, shouting and squalling and punching at big Hortense McGraw in a corner of the open-air playground one summer afternoon, so consumed by her anger that it took two boys to haul her off and a third boy to help the first two boys escape when she turned her rage on them. David had been the third boy. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been on this corner of the ground at all, for he was much bigger than any of the other parties involved, bigger even than big Hortense McGraw; he had been making a detour from the big boys’ baseball diamond on a short cut home for lunch. When this panting red-haired captive saw who he was, her ingrained respect for age and for their mutual commitments caused her to stop trying to bite him and he felt safe enough to release his hammer lock.

She appeared to take his sympathy for granted. “She called me a Holy Roller!” she panted, not caring whether the other kids had dispersed beyond hearing range or not. “You’d have hit her yourself, wouldn’t you? And I’ll hit her again, the next time I catch her.”

“No, you won’t,” David had said. He remembered now that he’d seen her, or someone like her, waiting at Sabbath School last week for the new boy in his class, Gustav Egan.

He saw then that she was better brought up than you’d have thought at first, for she did not contradict him, even though she was still shaking with indignation.

“What would you have done?” she asked.

“I’d have paid no attention,” he said, very likely truthfully. There was, of course, no way of being certain, for Hortense McGraw would never have said anything like that to him to begin with. It was one thing for Hortense to try out her insolence on a newcomer of her own age and sex and a good deal less than her own size, but the Kyles had been here for three generations, almost as long as the Kelloggs and far, far longer than Mr. Post. There had been at least one Kyle up at the Health Center ever since the Health Center began, on terms of mutual esteem with two generations of movie stars, maharajahs and millionaires. Great-Uncle Richard Kyle had been head of cardiology for eighteen years, and David’s father had recently been appointed to the almost equally prestigious position of supervising attendant of the men’s bath department. Mrs. Tillie Woolaston, née Kyle, had been assistant dietitian until she retired to raise a family. Even the family’s one black sheep, a cousin named Hubert Sorensen, had gone to his downfall with a certain raffish élan—caught red-handed smuggling in a pound of smoked ham, a carton of Luckies, and a bottle of Old Grand-Dad to a famous producer from Broadway. The Kyles were as solid as the Sanitarium itself, as solid as Corn Flakes, as solid as Battle Creek.

“How did this fight start?” David asked her. They had begun to walk away from the playground together, the disheveled, pugnacious girl of nine and the tall, serious boy of eleven.

“She started it.”

“But how?”

“Well, she asked me to come and play scrub on Saturday.”

“That sounds friendly. She meant well.”

“No, she didn’t. She was looking at me the way they do. She already knew.”

“But that wasn’t enough to start a fight.”

“Of course not,” she said impatiently. “I told you she started it.”

“Well, then what happened next?”

“I said I wouldn’t.”

“Not couldn’t?”

“No, wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to let her sneak anything in and start pretending she was sorry for me, the way they do.”

“And then what did she say?”

“She asked me why.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said I wouldn’t porfane the Lord’s day and—”

“Profane.”

“And I saw her getting her big mouth ready to say something smart and so I said if she wanted to be destroyed in the lake of fire it was none of my business and one of those two boys started giggling and egging her on and she came right out and called me a Holy Roller and then I gave her a good big shove and she shoved me back. I told you she started it.”

“Well, let me tell you something,” he said severely. “I don’t know where you came from but—where do you come from?”

“Busby.” She looked up at him in a tentative, guarded way, challenging him to pretend that he’d never heard of Busby.

“That’s in the Upper Peninsula, isn’t it? My father and I went camping near there once.”

“The schools there aren’t much good. There’s no Adventist school at all. So when my father got this chance of a job at Post’s he thought we’d better move now. My brother and I will be going to the academy in the fall. I guess you go there, don’t you? I’ve seen you at church.”

“That’s the thing I was going to tell you,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know what it was like in the Upper Peninsula, but here you don’t need to carry a chip on your shoulder. It’s not needed and it’s not—not dignified.”

“You mean you should let them call you a Holy Roller and just not do anything about it?”

“They know better,” he said. “They don’t mean it at all. And maybe they’re a little bit jealous, too.”

“Jealous?” Her still-smoldering gray-green eyes widened. “Nobody in Busby was jealous,” she said candidly. “In Busby they didn’t just pretend to look down on us. They really did.”

“Well, here they don’t.” He’d been instructed a hundred times not to be vain or boastful about spiritual matters, but this was more in the line of dispensing Christian comfort.

“Oh.” The momentary eagerness had disappeared. Her voice had grown wary, as though getting ready for the disappointment to come. “You mean they’re jealous about us going to heaven and them not.”

He’d been warned, too, about not falling back on the worldly arguments, but she was too good an audience to waste. “Well, partly that, but just as much for other reasons. Except for us would Battle Creek be famous all over the world? Would famous people come to Battle Creek from everywhere, from New York and India and Detroit and Chicago? Except for us would there be a San at all? All that marble and the fountains and movie actresses? Henry Ford and Eddie Cantor coming right here and as friendly with Dr. John as he’ll let them be? Would there be Corn Flakes, or Bran Flakes, or Postum or Post Toasties or Grape Nuts? Would there be Nuttose or Protose or Savita? Would there be a Kellogg’s or a Post’s?”

In the strict theological sense he was conscious of having strayed far off course, but in this summer noontime, they both found the words voluptuous and exciting, like the Songs of Solomon stumbled upon during a search for the Book of Obadiah. How beautiful, my beloved, upon thy—

“Have you ever been in the San?” she asked him. And in the next breath, “Is it true it doesn’t belong to the church any more?”

“It doesn’t belong in the dollars-and-cents and bricks-and-mortar sense.” He was quoting his father exactly now. “Sometime when you’re older you’ll be able to understand everything that led Dr. John away from the church and Mrs. White. But don’t forget a mistaken man can still be a good man. Dr. John hasn’t allowed the San itself to drift away. There’s still no meat allowed. No tobacco. No strong drink. No tea. No coffee. Christian prayers every day. Christian thanks at every meal. No steam baths or gym classes on Saturday. Full observance of the true Sabbath, the Seventh Day.”

“In Busby”—it was plain that she was asking him only for further reassurance—“they used to say it was Sister White who burned down the old San. Of course, nobody believed them for a minute.”

“Well I hope not.”

“And they used to say whoever burned down the old Tabernacle did it because Sister White told them to.”

They had turned the corner off Van Buren. They might have been actors in a pageant; straight ahead was the clean-columned bulk of the new Temple, rising above its tall, wide stair like a vision of ancient Greece, and then, almost directly behind, the majestic, block-long San itself, with its block-high tower soaring up above the winding driveway. At that very instant a chauffeur-driven Packard disgorged a plump and elegant lady who might as well have been a duchess as not. The busy, opulent breakfast-food factories across the river were not in sight, but they were no less a part of the general presence and emanations of this summer day. There was no need to reply to Mary in words.

“You’ll like Battle Creek,” David said nevertheless. He was grateful to her for helping him to summarize his blessings. “Don’t ever worry about what anybody says.” As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. Isaiah something.

When school started that fall, Mary’s older brother Gus was in David’s class. Soon the two boys became best friends and soon after that, since the Egan children had no mother and David Kyle’s mother had no daughter, Gus and Mary became ex-officio members of the Kyle household.

When Hannah Kyle discovered they were getting their own mid-day meal, she persuaded their father to allow them to come home with David; there was of course an unobtrusive arrangement about payment and the arrangement continued until David went to Ann Arbor to study pharmacy, Gus joined the design staff at Kellogg’s and, two years later, Mary began her nurse’s training at the San.

David’s father liked but never fully trusted the father of the Egan children. His name was Martin Egan. The Martin was for Martin Luther and Egan made no attempt to keep it a secret that except for the prompting of his late wife he’d never even have given a second thought to the real truth and prophecies about the Advent, much less found the sense to follow them. Even now, Samuel Kyle sometimes suspected, Egan only discharged his religious duties as an example; anybody with eyes could see that Adventist children were almost automatically healthier, happier, better-mannered, better-schooled, better-nourished, and in better company than other children.

One day at lunch—Samuel Kyle took all his meals at home as part of his duty to his family—young Gustav Egan let it slip that he knew the taste of bacon.

A little clean meat now and then, especially living on that lonely little farm and with the woman gone to her rest and waiting—a little clean meat was probably no worse than eggs or milk, if you came right down to it; but bacon! pork! specifically forbidden in the Bible. Samuel’s frown was so eloquent that young Gus dropped his eyes and went scarlet with shame and Gus’s sister Mary burst out with a loyal explanation. “It was only once. A neighbor lady brought it over when Father was out haying. As soon as he found out he made us throw the rest away.” Samuel would have felt more certain, nevertheless, except that, on three successive foot-washing Sabbaths, Martin Egan had had impeccable excuses for being absent: twice a sick sister in Flint, once a cold that kept him in bed all day Saturday but did not prevent him from going back to work as usual on Sunday. There was never enough for a direct confrontation, but Samuel discovered all too quickly that the two fine new children at his table were all too urgently in need of instruction. He seized on every possible pretext and, if no pretext came forward, invented one, to introduce some essential article of Scripture or one of the interpretations or canons of Sister White.

“I spy with my little eye.” Mary soon was starting the game herself. Everybody taught children, but nobody sat on them. In the Temple—even in the middle of the most portentous messages from the pulpit or the mightiest anthems from the choir—three-, four-, and five-year-olds as scrubbed and dainty as wedding china romped, tottered, shrieked, cried, and floundered down the aisles without noticeable let or visible hindrance. The noisiest cases were sometimes gently exiled to and allowed to run down in a cubicle called the cry room, but this was very rare. In general it was held that children were better off to have the law sink in on them by degrees rather than have it smother them all at once. So Mary could speak without being spoken to.

“I spy with my little eye, something—”

“Something what?” David’s mother asked.

“Something red.”

It was Gustav’s turn. “Your hair.”

“No.”

“Be more systematic,” Mr. Kyle suggested, balancing a morsel of vegetarian steak.

“Is it on the table?”

“No.”

“Is it on one of us?” David asked.

“No.”

“Is it on one of the walls?”

“Yes.”

“Red and on a wall,” Gus summarized. “Is it the red flower in the picture?”

“Oh, you got it!”

“Your turn, Gus,” David might say.

“Ah, red,” Mr. Kyle might break in. He’d more than likely say, so sure of the need and value of saying it that there was no trace of self-consciousness, lifting his proud and gently certain head and smiling, “Red is for redemption.”

And then, by whatever contrived route he’d led them in by, Mr. Kyle would be giving them a quiet lesson in their faith. David didn’t need it; for him it was solved and settled and timeless, but his kinship with his father was so perfect that he pretended he was hearing for the first time, so that Gus and Mary wouldn’t know they were learning things they should have learned long long ago. Samuel kept a much-annotated and book-marked Bible on an oaken side table beside his oaken chair, and there were always several volumes of the Testimonies as well as the other works of Mrs. White.

“Here, now, let me read it to you,” he’d say. “Go on with your Protose, Mary. Now I’m reading this from Mrs. White’s own writing.” In spite of his injunction, Mary put down her fork. “Now, then,” Samuel read. “No one has yet received the Mark of the Beast. The testing time has not yet come. There are true Christians in every church, not excepting the Roman Catholic Communion.” At this there might be a faint stirring of unrest from David’s mother. “None are condemned,” Samuel would read on quietly, “until they have had the light and have seen the obligation of the Fourth Commandment. But when the decree shall go forth exploring the counterfeit Sabbath, and the loud cry of the Third Angel shall warn men against the worship of the Beast and his image, the line shall be clearly drawn between the false and the true. Then those who still continue in transgression will receive the Mark of the Beast.”

Samuel spent countless lunchtimes over the prophecies, explaining and quoting exact authorities for the 2300 Days of Daniel 8 and the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9. Gustav was a placid boy and David was long accustomed, but Mary often squirmed and there was never any positive way of knowing whether it was through boredom or excitement. One Friday she let it drop that some of the kids from down the street were thinking of going fishing tomorrow in the Kalamazoo River, let it drop in such a way that it didn’t appear whether she’d been asked to go with them or not and Samuel had one of the Books open again: “ ‘If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.’ ”

“You can’t go fishing tomorrow, Mary,” David translated.

One time when they were talking about the flawless way in which Charlie Gehringer played second base for the Detroit Tigers, young Gus was suddenly and unexpectedly full of fire and conversation and started telling them about an article he’d read in The Saturday Evening Post about another, greater Tiger, Ty Cobb; a minotaur, a swift and killing bull moose, all hoofs and thudding shoulders and bone-hard thighs. Samuel quickly calmed him down. He did not have to consult the Books, for it was ready to his mind.

“With all power to Mr. Cobb,” Samuel said, “let’s not lose sight of Matthew Seven.”

“Yes, sir,” Gus said, meek and horrified at his departure from meekness.

“All things whatsoever that men shall do to you, do ye even so to them. And then of course thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

Gus was speechless with shame, but Mary, characteristically, came to his defense.

“We had this awful teacher up in Busby, Mr. Kyle. A real mean teacher, always hitting kids and giving them bad marks. One day this teacher forgot to bring his lunch and do you know what Gus did, he gave the teacher half his lunch.”

Gus blushed even worse.

Samuel sighed approvingly, “Ah, Gustav.”

“You see, Gustav,” Samuel smiled, “when it is your heart you follow, it is not this unfortunate Mr. Cobb you follow. It is the Book you follow. You know the Book before you’ve heard it.” He had the Bible open on the table. He leafed it and caressed it with his tender hands and gentle eyes.

“See now in John,” Samuel said. “ ‘These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.’ ”

“Mr. Cobb was only trying to steal third base,” David interrupted daringly. If Mary and poor Gus were being lectured, he did not want them to go through it alone.

His father emitted a half-chuckle, as David had hoped he might. But then he was stern again. “That will do, David. We are just recovering from one terrible war and perhaps getting ready for another one. Now I’ll read to you. You may put down your fork, Mary.

“ ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said,’ ” Samuel read, “ ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh this sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.’

“That’s, of course, Matthew.” No one ever interrupted when the Bible was being read. It was permissible to go on eating, though quietly, when it was Mrs. White, but they were all quite still while Samuel turned a few chapters ahead.

“This is Romans,” Samuel said. “See how durable are the things that must endure. ‘Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.’ ”

None of this was lost on David, but he had other things to think of too. It became his intention, at the age of fourteen, to make Mary his bride and live with her in unceasing vast felicity, as his father Samuel lived with his mother Hannah. He did not mention this personally to her. He was never shy with Mary. She was his firmest and far least inhibited friend, not at all like Gus, who was often too careful and pious to be wholly companionable with. But for all her confidence, Mary had a streak of scariness too. The reason he didn’t mention their ordained nuptials to her was that he’d read somewhere, in one of the forbidden books he was always reading, that the Wedding Bed was painful to Young Brides and he feared that if he gave her too much warning she might try to sneak out of it.

Then a sterner truth appeared. He’d gone to the monthly band concert at the academy. Mary went ahead, of course, because she had to be there for tuning up, and there was no specific understanding that he’d wait for her afterward. He was in the twelfth row of the audience and Mary was in the fourth row of the band. Her wild red hair was partly plastered down—he’d lent her his own Sultan’s Pride liquid brilliantine—but an untamed swatch of it careened down over her left eye and David could see her other eye concentrated, as sparkling and proud as John Philip Sousa’s or Evangeline Booth’s, on the collapsible tin music stand in front of her. They never let Mary play solo cornet or even first or second cornet. An outrage, and no use pretending that it had nothing to do with being a newcomer from the Upper Peninsula. Mary was allowed to play only third cornet—a community instrument with rusty valves and two gobs of beeswax sealing its ancient wounds. Pause pah pah; pause pah pah. If they gave Mary a chance, she’d play Over the Waves as high and sweet as it was ever heard. But there she was with the cluster of red hair over her eye, there in the fourth row going pause pah pah on the old and ruined third cornet, pause pah pah. His heart went out like the swelling of an ocean.

Being sorry for her was, however, a mistake. David waited for her outside the auditorium. She must have seen him sighing with his unwelcome compassion, because she had consented to be walked home by a trombone player and she walked on past with her hand on the trombone player’s arm and pretended not even to see David standing there.

He had his own pride too and it was nearly a week—even though they continued to have lunch at the same table with Gus and David’s father and mother—before they exchanged an unnecessary word. Suddenly one noontime, with a burst of womanhood and wisdom, she asked him, “David, would you please help me with my arithmetic?” He said he would and they were friends again.

There were three definable shades of cold—cold, vrai cold, and formidable cold. He’d borrowed it from the grades of calvados. “Oui, monsieur, j’ai du calvados.” If they said it just like that, without an adjective, the calvados was a pale, weak vinegar. A vrai calvados had a bite to it, but it was raw and harsh, the mashed apples of last spring. But when they promised you a formidable calvados, they dug it out of haystacks or manure piles or fished it up from the bottoms of their wells; a formidable calvados was a pre-German calvados, ten years old, twenty years old, thirty years old perhaps, as ripe and mellow as the Norman fields.

So it was with cold. There was just plain ordinary cold, the kind that began in October, the organic cold, the nine-tenths of cold that never showed above the surface, the cold that was with you night and day, not quite freezing you, not quite numbing you, not quite stinging you awake, not quite clubbing you to sleep, not quite turning your blood to jelly, not quite turning it to fire, not a Nirvana, euphoria cold, not a gangrene, cut-his-green-foot-off-and-send-him-home cold; just cold, steady, unspectacular, and always there.

The vrai cold, the true cold hit you very hard. You didn’t want to do anything but get through it and find a fire or another blanket somewhere. The one good thing about a vrai cold was that the Krauts didn’t like it either; in a vrai cold there was very little unwarranted shooting anywhere.

The formidable cold was another matter again. On the big guns, away back of the infantry lines, the ammunition numbers slapped their flanks and pounded their fists into their open palms. Ammunition numbers were notoriously peaceable and unenterprising. They had none of the satisfaction of laying a gun or commanding it to fire or causing it to fire, and every time they fed another round into the breech it increased their chances of betraying their position to the equally miserable and congealing enemy and goading him to search them out and blow them all to hell. In a formidable cold, when a man caught, say, a piece of shrapnel in his leg and started losing blood, or got pinned down all night in a ditch or maybe even left his damp socks on—in a formidable cold and in these special circumstances, more than one man had been turned to a rock-hard statue. Nevertheless the shooting seemed to step up when it was desperately cold rather than just abjectly cold. Perhaps in a formidable cold some death wish communicated back to the commanders far and snugly away in Brussels or Berlin and bounced back to the frigid occupants of the gun pits.

This was merely a vrai cold tonight. Perhaps twelve above, perhaps even fifteen. David looked across to the big foxhole, saw a sign of movement there, checked the dimly visible death’s-head on the “Achtung! Minen!” sign out in front and resumed his vigil over the frozen strip of ground and the frozen line of trees, the whole of his frozen universe.

He’d arrived here on his own; there was no way of going back. Ann Arbor had been a crucial error. Right into his sophomore year he’d been full of unassailable truth; as a junior he was a shipwreck of doubt. His roommate was not so crude as to laugh at him, but he did smile. They were too fast for him at Ann Arbor, altogether too swift and knowing. He wrote home to Samuel in anguish and supplication. “I know the Bible says we’re right, but this friend of mine and this girl of his keep asking how I’m sure the Bible’s right.”

“My son,” Samuel wrote back to him, “it’s the Bible.”

And then he was left and lonely. He explored the roots of his being time and time again. He was only nineteen; Samuel had never encouraged reading except the Bible and Mrs. White, and David could only grope.

Suddenly all the articles of his faith, all that he had grown up with, all that gave him meaning and a place to go were in total jeopardy. He wrote Samuel again. “It’s all there in the Bible,” Samuel answered.

He’d stopped talking religion at all, stopped going to chapel, cut out philosophy, changed roommates, stared blankly past his former roommate’s girl when they passed on the campus. But the more he’d tried to reinforce himself the more difficult it became. There was no one but Samuel to reassure him.

Christ did live, Christ did die, Christ would return, at his Advent the righteous would be borne to eternal bliss and the unrighteous would be devoured in flames. This was the soul of all his belief, and Samuel, as staggered as the boy himself before his son’s dawning apostasy, had no true help to give him.

He went home at Easter and here he found a disappointment far worse.

“Mary, I’m in a God-awful mess,” he said. Now Mary was eighteen and David was twenty. They no longer held hands naturally, as a brother and sister would, but David touched her just the same and felt the touch returned. Physical attraction was not supposed to count with decent people. Mrs. White had given at least tacit approval to the bloomer girls in an earlier day, but then she had relented. The doctrine was mixed. “The dress question is not to be our present truth. To create an issue on this point now would please the enemy. He would be delighted to have minds diverted to any subject which might create division of sentiment—I beg of our people to walk carefully and circumspectly before God. Let our sisters dress plainly, having the dress of good, durable material, appropriate to this age. Our sisters should clothe themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety.”

Walking down the street with Mary, under the tall elm trees and with their hands together, shyer than they had been before, David could not for the life of him find the slightest sign of shamefacedness or sobriety in whatever it was she wore. He couldn’t think of the color of it or the texture or the length or breadth. All he was sure of was that Mary’s radiant red head was above the dress and the rest of Mary was curving and rippling and creating fantastic arcs and emanations beneath it and he needed her love and help as he’d never needed anything in all his life.

“Mary,” David said, “my draft number’s come up.”

“Oh, David!”

“I wasn’t going to tell you until I got back to school and started packing. I wasn’t going to tell my father and mother, either.”

“I’m glad you told me now.”

“But Mary, I’ve just started to tell you. This is where the real mess comes in.”

“Are you afraid, David?” Her touch was closer. “I guess everybody’s afraid. I’m afraid and I don’t even have to go.”

“No, I’m not afraid. At least I don’t think so. That will come later, I suppose.”

“David.” Mary stopped and turned him to face her, squaring him with her hands on his shoulders. She had guessed without his telling her. “David, you mustn’t. You mustn’t even think of it.”

“I’ve thought of it.”

“How long?”

“Oh, years. Maybe since that day I saw you first and hauled you out of the Holy Roller fight.”

“David, I’m not like that any more. You mustn’t get like that.”

“I haven’t got guts enough to be a coward.”

“David,” she implored him. “David.”

“They’ve put my number up. That means I’m eligible for getting shot at. All right. I claim the right to shoot back.”

“Oh, David, join the medical corps, join the ambulance corps. You can’t go killing people. It’s your right to stay out of the killing. It’s the law. You’ll be in as much danger as anyone. It’s—”

“I’m not taking my exemption, Mary.”

“Your father—”

“Yes, my father. How I’d like to have his infallibility, but I haven’t and that’s more or less that. That’s the mess I was talking about.”

“So you’ll go and fight this war. It will be a sin against your father, it will be a sin against yourself, it will be a sin against God and the church, but nobody will ever be able to say you were afraid. All you’ve believed in, all you’ve been taught, it’s all gone, but you’re still most highly brave.” She drew away from him in the springtime night.

He was a traitor, but what else could he be? “You cannot possibly change the heart,” Mrs. White had written. “There are many things that will come to try and test these poor deluded spiritually dwarfed, world-loving souls.”

Mary Egan, please don’t be so sanctimonious. Mary Egan, I love you, deluded, spiritually dwarfed, world-loving, and trial-haunted as I am. If you won’t love me in return, who will? He didn’t say it aloud. They walked on down the street and crossed the bridge across the Kalamazoo, Mary still in her good durable dress appropriate to this age, but her hand no longer in his.

“Mary Egan. Mary Egan.”

Now the cold was truly formidable. The sentry in the big foxhole was pounding his hands on the frozen earth, kicking at the timbers. “Hey,” he sobbed across at David, “when’s our relief coming?” David did not reply, and for perhaps ten minutes everything was still. He guessed the new man was sitting on the timber in the big foxhole with his boots off and his rifle put aside, trying to rub some life into his feet. He was about to start doing the same thing himself, when there was an unbelievable interruption in the black and bitter night. Two new shapes half-lurched, half-crouched across the clearing, big bucket helmets halfway down to their hunched-up shoulders. Somehow they’d missed the mine field, not even seen it. Each of them carried a rifle, or rather dangled it. There was no caution in their movements, they just plodded ahead, waiting for what the next step might bring, half comatose, not caring much one way or the other. The sentry in the big foxhole hadn’t seen or apparently even heard them. David hoped they might somehow stumble past or turn around or do anything but keep coming on toward him as numb and beaten as he was himself, trailing their useless guns. But they kept coming. Now the death’s-head sign “Achtung! Minen!” was right behind them. David lost a second praying that the man in the big foxhole would miraculously come to life and do it for him. Then he put the M-1 on the first German, but by a miracle almost equal to the one he’d desired the two of them suddenly turned and stumbled away in the direction from which they’d come.

At last Sergeant Kennebec came up with another new man to relieve both him and Colhurst. “Panic’s off,” he said. David told him about the two Germans. “For God’s sake,” Kennebec said. “Maybe it’s true after all.”

“What’s true?” David said. “Look, get me out of here. You’d better get him out, too.” He waved his rifle in the direction of the giant foxhole and the invisible sentry Colhurst.

“I came to get you out,” Kennebec said. “But I may have to bring you back.”

Suddenly Colhurst pulled himself from the other foxhole. It was a slow, painful performance; his stiff legs buckled underneath him and he fell headlong on the snow-covered ground. But he got up again.

The relief sentry slid into the big foxhole.

“I heard you, Sergeant,” Colhurst said. “Maybe you’ll get him back here.” He turned painfully toward David’s faint shadow for some sign of joint rebellion. “You won’t get me back. Nothing, nobody will get me back.” He was almost shouting.

“Shut up,” Kennebec said. “It may be true. It came down from regiment.”

“What came down?”

“They’re attacking.”

“They’ll have to find somebody else to attack. They’re not attacking me. I’m going to get warm.”

“They got a talking PW. He said it’s a very big attack and it’s coming at first light.”

David walked her home that night and they parted silently. There were three more days of total silence, but on the fourth day he had to go away and he knew he had to see her, whatever the cost.

His favorite song ran through his head, a note of it in time with every step toward her house.

Where is the one

Who will mourn me when I’m gone,

When the dogwood is in bloom who will sigh?

If the robin won’t sing

At the first sign of spring

I’ll know that my darling don’t cry,

I’ll know that my darling don’t cry.

He rapped timidly on the door. “Come in, David,” Mr. Egan said. “Gus is at work. Mary’s upstairs. I’m home looking after her.”

“Can I talk to her a minute, Mr. Egan?”

“No, you can’t. You’re a good young man but you’ve upset her far too much.”

“Can I sit down, Mr. Egan?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I know Mary doesn’t read a lot.”

“No,” Mr. Egan said dryly. “None of us read much, do we? I used to read more before I joined the church.”

“She knows Götterdämmerung.”

“The twilight of the gods.”

“Yes,” David said. “And my gods are all in twilight. Can’t I tell her that?”

“No, David. You just go on away. You and your father got Mary built up on this business. Your father got me built up on it again just about when I was ready to go away. Now you’ve gone away, leaving Mary stuck with it. All right, David. Stay away from your church if you must. But stay away from Mary, too.”

Until the last night that whole last week as a civilian was full of torment. Martin Egan’s scorn and Mary’s sad rejection swung the pendulum again and called back into doubt the honesty of his doubts. Was he yielding to impulses that even he, somewhere beneath some protective sheath of hypocrisy, knew to be cruel, false, selfish, and craven? Was it an admissible argument—and if so, on which side?—that in most places his impulses would be taken to be straightforward and manly?

It was only now that David began to realize how little he understood his father. He had dreaded the ordeal of telling him, but only because he always dreaded the ordeal of telling his father that he had broken a rule. He had expected Samuel to feel shamed, and perhaps even—though he’d never seen him that way—angry. He had been ready for thunderous reproaches and even fearful prophecies. But he had grown so accustomed to thinking of Samuel Kyle as a man securely rooted in and insulated by his religion that the idea of his being strongly affected by any purely earthly disappointment had not entered his calculations at all. A man who believed in his religion as firmly and held to it as unwaveringly as Samuel Kyle could be offended, but he could not be damaged. He was beyond the reach of tragedy. The only tragedy that could ever touch him lay beyond the grave; and if silence dwelt there in spite of all the promises, he would never know.

It came as a totally unexpected, totally shattering discovery that his decision to enlist for combat duty was not a mere defeat for his father, but a cause of aching sorrow. For the first time he perceived that his father neither saw nor leaned upon his gospel of salvation as a gospel mainly of self-preservation; it was a gospel of pity and concern, and Samuel’s concern now was not for forms and observances and rules and his own unflawed performance of his duty, but for the immortal soul of his only son.

Samuel sat for ten minutes without speaking. David had expected him to bring out the marked Bible and attempt to overwhelm him with the literal Word, as he had done so often and so easily before. “I can see I’ve gotten away behind you, Son,” Samuel said heavily when he was ready to speak. “I’ve failed you. I’ve asked you to take too much on faith and go on taking it on faith too long.”

He crossed the room and opened the lower drawer of the long chest in which the silverware and table linen were kept. David’s mother sat, white-faced, in the other corner of the room. After one smothered gasp of disbelief at David’s first announcement she had not spoken either.

“I’d almost forgotten,” Samuel said. “I’d almost forgotten these. I’d almost forgotten I needed them once myself.” He began sorting out a stack of pamphlets. “Here you’ll find all the important reasons all the important rationalists have given for not believing in the Bible. You’ll also find the reasons why their reasons don’t stand up, why they all ultimately refute themselves. You’ll find—” The old man looked into David’s miserable, set eyes and stopped himself in midsentence. “Oh, I guess it’s old stuff to you anyway,” he said sorrowfully.

“I’ve thought about it so much, Father,” David said. “It’s just that there’s no time left to think any more. I’ve had to make up my mind, that’s all—and, well, I have and I’m sorry.”

“David,” his father said, “I’m sorry too and I’m not going to pester you about this. But you do know that no one’s asking you to put your church ahead of your country?”

“I haven’t been thinking of it that way, Father. All I’ve thought is that if I’m going to be in the war at all, I’m going to be all the way in. The excuse I could use doesn’t fit my case any longer, that’s all.”

“We declared ourselves at the time of the Civil War, David.” Samuel was determined to make his point. “The Adventist declaration was accepted by the Government and it was accepted again in 1917 and it’s still accepted.”

“I know, Father.”

Samuel read from one of the pamphlets. “Our declaration was this: ‘That we recognize civil government as ordained by God, that order, justice, and quiet may be maintained in the land, and that the people of God may lead quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and honesty. In accordance with this fact, we acknowledge the justice of rendering tribute, custom, honor and reverence to the civil power, as enjoined in the New Testament. While we thus cheerfully render unto Caesar the things which the Scriptures show to be his, we are compelled to decline all participation in acts of war and bloodshed, as being inconsistent with the duties enjoined upon us by our divine Master toward our enemies and toward all mankind.’ ”

There was no reply that David could think of.

“Son, if it’s a question of not wanting to evade danger, your mother and I would both be proud to think of you driving an ambulance.”

“Maybe that is the question, Father. I can’t be sure. But I’m going to enlist in the infantry.”

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” Samuel said. “You stay here and talk to your mother for a while. Oh, and there’s one thing. Will you come to church with us on Saturday?”

“I’d like that,” David had said. That was their last discussion on the subject. Samuel and Hannah Kyle entered quietly and obediently on the most difficult test of their mortal life: accepting the fearful ordinance that when heaven opened to receive them they would look in vain for their only son.

The night before David left, Mary came to say good-by to him. She gave no indication whether it was with her father’s knowledge or not. She asked him to go for a walk with her. Instead he borrowed his father’s car and they drove a few miles into the country. At first they were both self-conscious and uncommunicative.

The black Plymouth coach ambled past a neon-lit roadhouse and a few bars of jukebox music ushered them on down the moonlit roadway. “Turn around,” Mary said abruptly. “I want to go back there and dance.”

He put on the brakes. “Dance?” he asked incredulously. “You can’t dance, Mary.” He paused and added anxiously, “Can you?”

“Can you?”

“Well,” he admitted, “I tried it two or three times at Ann Arbor. I’m no good at it. There was nothing wrong in my doing it; or anyway, nothing any more wrong than the whole business.”

“I don’t think it would be wrong for me either.”

“Yes, it would, Mary, and you know it.” He was talking to her again in the severe, uncomplicated, unsophisticated, almost technologically precise language of the tracts and the Sabbath School. This was exactly the tone in which he’d first met her and begun filling in the more urgent gaps in her instruction. Perhaps it was only imagination that the pugnacious set of her red head had come back again and she once more seemed to be squirming free to resume her assault on some new oppressor, some new mocker, some larger and more troublesome Hortense McGraw. He had not seen her in this fully redheaded mood since the night she’d walked home, treasonably, with the trombone player.

“I don’t know anything of the kind.”

He listened in alarm and bafflement. Mary was not always as easy a girl to figure as she seemed. There did not seem to be any bitterness in her voice or any taunting, either. He’d have felt easier if he could be sure that she merely was taking some oblique way of paying him back or offering him some reckless dare. All right, Gus, she’d said to her brother one late-May morning, if you and David are going swimming in your birthday suits, so am I, and she’d made them back down and resume their search for mushrooms. All right, David, if you’re going to hell I’m going too. In her first mood of shock and reproof and pious incredulity she had left him full of guilt and haunting second thoughts, but in this abrupt claim to a share in his folly and his sin it was almost impossible to define her, much less to cope with her.

“Mary”—having forfeited the right to fall back upon the church, her church still, no longer his, he floundered for the unassailable argument—“I can’t go dancing with you. Your father would never forgive me.”

“He’ll never know,” she said coolly. “Look, David, I’ve made a new dress.” She opened her fawn trench coat and slipped her bare arms through the sleeves and reached forward and turned on the dash light. It was a green dress with a startling intermediate neckline and—if David had heard right from his former roommate’s girl at Ann Arbor—a high waist and a full, fringed bust. It was not a fast dress, per se, but it was a fast dress to see on Mary. “At first,” she said before he had a chance to comment, “I just went up to my room and started bawling and Father thought I was going to stay there bawling forever and for a while I thought so too. But then I heard you at the door the other night—yes, I heard you all right, David—and I decided there were more constructive things I might be doing, so I made this dress. Father hasn’t seen it of course and there’s no need for him to see it. I didn’t make it for him. I made it for you and I want you to take me dancing in it.”

“I can’t do that, Mary,” he said. “I’ve got enough to answer for as it is.”

She stirred impatiently. Could it be—no it must be some flowering bush along the roadside—she couldn’t be wearing perfume.

“It’s perfectly all right, David,” she said. “If it’s the dress you’re thinking of anyway. I just knew you’d be like this,” she said reproachfully. “So I borrowed one of Father’s Mrs. White books. Do you know what she said?”

“Sure.” David’s reply was light, almost bantering. He wanted to hit a note mixed of tolerance, wry humor, and the very gentlest confession of the very gentlest feeling of surprise. “Mrs. White said our sisters should clothe themselves in modest apparel with shamefacedness and sobriety. I don’t think she’d object,” he said, forcing himself into a lie that did not deceive her for an instant.

Mary’s response again was beyond the range of prediction. She giggled. “She also said,” Mary added, “and don’t bother contradicting me because I memorized it for you: she said to enter into no controversy in regard to outward apparel, but be sure you have the inward adorning of a meek and quiet spirit. Now tell me, David, have you ever been able to deny that I have a meek and quiet spirit?”

“Only sometimes, only about ninety-five per cent of the time.” David reached across the seat and took her hand.

“Mrs. White also said,” Mary informed him, “ ‘We are a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men.’ ”

He grinned and looked at her squarely and wholly for the first time since she’d removed her coat. “I don’t know about Mrs. White. I thought she wore bloomers. But you qualify all right.”

“False prudence,” Mary continued, “mock modesty may be shown in the outward apparel, while the heart is in great need of inward adorning. Take me dancing in my new dress, David.”

“All right,” he said, and reached for the starter.

“No,” she said in alarm. “Good heavens, David, I’d just fall all over your feet. I’d be scared anyway. I only wanted to see if you would.”

He had never been so close, since the unfortunate night of the trombone player, to bringing up the matter of their marriage. But David was a creature of convention and, having strayed from the conventions of the church, he had all the greater need of abiding by the conventions of the outer world. Fighting for His Country had become the chief of these; Not Asking a Girl to Wait was an almost equally compelling one. But he did kiss her, long and sweetly, before the long, sweet night was over. When at last she turned to go in, his pulse was pounding hard and he knew that hers was pounding too. “Put the dress away until you see me next,” he commanded.

“I will,” she whispered, and left him easily and confidently, with nothing so mean as tears.

When they got back to the cellar, Henry Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz were already there. Whelan had a big can of coffee going on the smoking bonfire in the middle of the stone floor and Carmen (the Hood) had a mixture of K-ration cheese, K-ration meat, biscuits, and bouillon cubes mixed into an iron pot along with a half-pound can of lobster he had been bragging about for several days as the very early Christmas present of a very early lady friend. Out there during the last four hours, Ruiz said, he’d made up his mind that he’d never feel anything hot again, see anything hot again, or eat anything hot again. From now on any time he discovered a fire, anything within reach of it was going on it.

Colhurst, the new man, acquired the prestige of six months’ battle service by producing a full bottle of cognac. It was just a little past midnight and nobody was ready to try the sack again for a while. Kennebec came back in and sat down. After a while he asked David to tell him some more about the two Germans he’d seen. Did they look as if they were on an organized patrol or did they just look lost? David had decided to say nothing about them because he knew it would revive an old and pointless argument with Henry Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz, and after the bad beginning it had turned into too comfortable a night for arguing.

“Hey!” Ruiz had been working over the last of the lobster and picked up the conversation only at the tail end. “You mean you had two of the bastards lined up and let them go? What the hell is this?”

“Isn’t that what they did for you and Henry the other night?” David asked.

“That’s been evened up once already,” Ruiz’s dark head swung around and he scowled across the fire, getting ready to get worked up. “From now on I don’t want nobody paying back no favors for me. To nobody. Never. Christ!”

“What do you say, Sarge?” Whelan invited the sergeant to join the discussion as an equal. “Is it time to start the war again or not?”

“You God-damn’ right it is,” Carmen (the Hood) said. When they were discussing ethical matters, large matters, affairs in general, the affairs of politics, human behavior, and the world as distinct from military and local matters, Ruiz had something of the status of an elder statesman. It was clear from the tone and context and the whole atmosphere that Henry Whelan had meant his question in the larger sense. Therefore, Ruiz was perfectly free to break in ahead of the sergeant, and he did so.

Three or four other men gathered around to listen. Back in Jersey and indeed up to a week before they had gone aboard their convoy ship, nobody had done much listening to Carmen Ruiz. A gulf of nearly fifteen years separated him from most of the GI’s in their battalion, and to men in their early twenties that meant a whole generation. Ruiz made it worse by being at first too polite and deferential, too obviously eager for friendship and respect. And then he’d made matters worse by letting it drop—too clumsily for it to be taken as an accident—that his draft number had been nowhere near in sight. When one or two skeptics began harassing him, he’d got off some highly embarrassing claptrap about democracy and wanting to fight for the country that had been so good to him; and when somebody demanded, “How do you mean, good?” he’d started throwing in pompous hints about leaving a 1940 Cadillac and a 1941 blonde behind him. “To hear him tell it, you’d think the son-of-a-bitch was a cross between the chaplain and John D. Rockefeller,” Henry Whelan announced in disgust, and pretty soon nobody at all was listening to Carmen Ruiz and scarcely anybody was talking to him.

Then a man from Buffalo showed up in the last draft before they sailed. “Good God!” he announced in awe. “That’s one of the biggest gangsters in Western New York.” At first nobody would believe him and quite a few of the more contemptuous anti-Ruizists were trapped into making sucker bets. The man from Buffalo sent back home for some newspaper clippings and photographs. Carmen’s darkly amiable scowl was always identified, with full civic honors, as that of Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz. The enterprises mentioned in connection with his name were always carefully described as alleged; they included lotteries, slot machines, labor organization, and prostitution. Confronted with the evidence by a small and respectful committee of losing bettors, Ruiz was more than happy to confirm his eminence. The boldest of the interviewers, Henry Whelan, came right out and asked him how a man with a record like his could be accepted by the Army. “What record?” Ruiz asked, making use of his newly established right to be a little haughty. “Outside of one hot-car rap when I was a punk, I never done a day.” Even Henry Whelan wasn’t so presumptuous as to delve more deeply into Carmen’s real reason for beating the draft board by so sensational a margin. The theories were divided: maybe income-tax trouble; maybe some crazy desire for kicks; maybe some rival hood had a light burning in the window for him; maybe he even meant all that about democracy; certainly nobody could deny that his country had been good to him.

“You God-damn’ right it’s time to start the war again,” Carmen repeated. He looked across the fire at David. It was a severe look, but a fond one, too, a look of avuncular, reluctant disapproval. “We got too God-damn’ many pacifists around here.”

David wasn’t being led into it again. He and Ruiz and Whelan had covered all the essential ground that long night outside St. Lô, and although they’d touched on it again two or three times since, they’d always ended up where they’d started. Their division came in through Omaha Beach on D Plus Five. The men they met from Omaha assured them that nobody anywhere would ever run into anything quite as rough as Omaha even if the war lasted forever. But St. Lô was rough enough. The hedgerows were like walls of barbed wire three feet thick, the Germans had their armor in behind, the U.S. division on their right kept falling apart, the Limeys on their left weren’t moving an inch, the artillery behind them and the planes above them proved infallibly unable, by widespread agreement among the infantry, of hitting a cow in the ass with a handful of buckshot, and they fought for eight straight days and nights just to stay alive. A surprising number of them did and an appalling number didn’t. Casualties in the battalion were 33 per cent and in their company 39.

When the German armor pulled out, David Kyle and Carmen Ruiz were lying close together in a shell hole they had discovered and deepened under the one corner still left standing of what not long ago had been a crossroads church. They’d had no orders from either their platoon or company since the night before, and as the queer silence of the morning gathered volume they’d had no idea what they should be doing next. Then, halfway through the morning, before the reaction had had a chance to set in, Henry Whelan limped into view, dirty, groggy, splattered with the dried blood of other men, and full of a bitter, new-earned hate.

He sat down in the open, too weary to think of taking cover. “They sent me out from company to see who I could round up,” he said. “Come on. We’re moving back.”

“My Christ, boy, where you been?” Carmen Ruiz asked him.

“The dirty bastards,” Whelan said. “The dirty bastards.”

“What’s new about that?” Ruiz asked with a mixture of curiosity and concern. “Where you been, Henry? All that blood can’t be yours or you’d be dead.” If Ruiz felt any relief at the news that they didn’t have to go on fighting, it was too early to show. His voice, too, was groggy, though not so groggy as Whelan’s. Dave Kyle closed his eyes and tried to imagine that the strange silence around them was not another of the many tricks of his drugged and spongy mind and that Henry Whelan had really said they were moving back. But all he could imagine was that Henry Whelan wasn’t even there and that what he mistook for silence was only the lull before another salvo from the Nebelwerfer or another counterattack by the Panthers.

“The dirty bastards,” Henry Whelan said again. He looked around the cluster of gravestones in what had been the churchyard. Three dead GI’s and four dead Germans, their red-white-purple-black-and-belly-white grab bag of gaps, incisions, and absent members still gleaming wetly in the morning sun, lay within twenty feet of the shell hole. “I see they got in here too,” Henry said.

“Yeah, they were in here all right.” Ruiz looked out among the broken gravestones. “One shell got them all,” he said with a note of proprietary interest in the seven visible corpses. “One of our guys is Herbie Witherspoon. Dave was going along right beside him, we were trying to get across the road when the Krauts jumped out of their foxholes and the shell hit all at once. Dave stayed out there a good five minutes trying to patch Herbie up. He told me to get down and cover him and I don’t God-damn’ care who knows that’s exactly what I did. I got down. One of the other GI’s is that fellow Casey or Ryan from company headquarters; I don’t know how he got over here anyway.” Ruiz made it sound as though he was objecting to an act of trespass. “We can’t figure out who the other one is. Dave thought it was you at first. The crazy bugger wanted to go and look but I wouldn’t let him.”

“The dirty bastards,” Henry Whelan said once more. “They got in on us over there too. They killed every God-damn’ medic in the company. So finally the captain put me and that little Johnny Meyers fellow on medic and we were on it all night. We brought in eleven and all but four of them are gone already. Finally just after daylight they got Johnny Meyers. He was wearing an armband, the dirty bastards.”

“Well, let’s go, then,” Carmen said. “Come on, Dave.”

“Sure.” David realized that it wasn’t an illusion after all and they were really supposed to leave. He pushed himself to his feet, using his M-1 as a cane, but careful to keep the barrel uppermost and free of dirt.

A rifle bullet thwacked against the stone corner of the church behind them and sang off like the twang of a breaking wire. Then another thwacked into the ground. Henry Whelan threw himself over the edge of the crater. In the first movement they all punched themselves absolutely flat, driving their bellies into the earth, but without breaking the continuity they rolled back up in a half-crouch, like gymnasts bouncing down and up again under the same momentum. Whelan and Ruiz shoved their eyes above the edge of the crater to the front. David scrambled in behind them and looked the other way, expecting to see another cluster of gray-green figures fanning in against the wiry hedgerow.

“Nothing here,” he said over his shoulder.

“Two at ten o’clock. On their bellies at the base of those trees.” Henry Whelan’s voice was shaking. “The dirty bastards!” he said once more, talking himself out of the shakes. He raised up a little more and took two quick pot shots. “Bastards!” His composure had returned. Now there was a quick, rippling burst from the other side of the ground that Whelan and Ruiz were watching. “Light machine gun at one o’clock,” Ruiz said.

It was quite a while before they were satisfied that there were just the three enemy weapons. Nobody, neither they themselves nor the Germans, was getting up high enough or staying long enough to take a real aim or offer a real target. There’d be a round or two from the Germans, a quick wild shot by Ruiz or Whelan, a very short burst from the machine gun, then nothing at all for five or six minutes from anywhere. The Germans were as wary of moving in or moving back as they were themselves.

Another hour went. “The dirty bastards aren’t keeping me here forever,” Henry Whelan announced. “I’m going out there.”

“No,” Carmen said.

“You God-damn’ right I am,” Henry Whelan corrected him.

“Wait a minute,” David said. There was no bravery involved in this, just bad luck. For the last while he’d been studying a tiny fold in the ground directly in his line of vision and on the opposite side of the shell crater to Whelan and Ruiz. He’d decided not to say anything about it, but since Henry Whelan was forcing the issue he had no choice. “I’ve got a nice little draw on this side,” David called softly over his shoulder. “Keep them down and I think I can get around them. When I say go, give them a couple of rounds and I’ll go too.”

Since they were all of equal rank, there was no one in command. But since they were also used to each other, any idea put forth with special emphasis and conviction by any one of them had always attained the force of a command unless someone else challenged it with still greater emphasis. Henry Whelan had been emphatic enough and his idea would have had to be accepted if no one had offered a better one. But even he had known it was a foolish idea.

“Go!” David shouted, and in the quick flurry of shots he made a dive for the grassy slope outside, crawled ahead four or five body lengths, and then rested. “It looks good,” he called back softly. “I’m going around to the right for the machine gun.”

He had been reasonably sure that if he could get the machine gun first the two riflemen would chicken out, and, after an hour’s slow and painful stalking, that was precisely how it happened. His cover ran out when he was still fifty or sixty yards from the machine gunner, and he had to hurry his shot because there was a chance one of the riflemen might see him if he took too long, but he got the machine gunner on the side of the thigh, spinning him away from the gun in a sidewise sprawl. Fast though it happened, this was one Kraut who knew what hit him, because he was on his feet at once with his arms held high, bawling, “Kamerad! Kamerad!” at the top of his lungs and looking wildly around him to see whom he was surrendering to. In the next second the two riflemen heaved their Mausers out into the clearing and jumped up with their hands held even higher. David lay still for a moment or two, taking in their bewilderment and making certain there were no others left. Then he got to one knee with his rifle across the other knee and waved the three Germans in toward him. He signaled them into a triangle and started off behind them to the shell crater where Henry Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz were on their feet and waiting. The machine gunner’s leg had not been broken and he was able to hobble along with help from one of the riflemen.

When they were thirty feet or so away, Henry Whelan shouted, “Stand aside, Dave.” David saw at once what was in Henry’s mind and he shouted to the three prisoners to halt. “Put it down, Henry,” David said. “Like hell I will!” Whelan shouted. “Get out of the way, Dave!”

Carmen Ruiz had his rifle up too. “Get out of the way, Dave!” Carmen shouted.

One of the Krauts sank to the ground and for a moment the only sound was the curiously embarrassing noise of his slackening bowels. “Bitte! Bitte!” another of the Krauts whimpered. “Kamerad!” the machine gunner cried more strongly, reminding them that everything was already solved.

“Come on, Henry, put it down,” David urged. “Come on, Carmen.”

“All right, Dave,” Henry said with the measured venom of a man who is determined to show that he is patient and then to let his patience go. “I’ll saw off with you. Let’s go over and look at their guns.”

“Yeah,” Carmen Ruiz said, emerging from the shell hole. “Let’s do that.”

They marched the three captives back. Ruiz picked up the two rifles on the way and then the six soldiers went to the upturned machine gun. The three Germans held their hands very high while Carmen Ruiz inspected their bullet pouches. “Empty,” he said when he’d finished with the first. He picked up one of the rifles, broke it open at the breech, and took off the magazine and looked into it. “Empty,” he said. “This yours?” He thrust the empty rifle under the nearest German’s nose. “Bitte!” the German wept. “Is it yours, God damn it?” Carmen shouted.

“Ja,” the German wept. “Bitte.”

Carmen went through the same procedure with the second rifleman. His bullet pouches and his rifle were empty too. “No bullets left?” Carmen asked pleasantly. The German understood. “Nein,” he sobbed with sudden, radiant hopefulness. “No bullets.” Ruiz stepped over in front of David so that he was between David and their captives. “All right, Henry,” Ruiz said. Whelan brought his rifle up. He shot the first German through the heart from a foot away and shot the second through the head as the German turned to run.

The machine gunner sank to his knees shouting, “Kamerad!” again. The sound was muffled and hopeless. He had already buried his head in his arms.

David threw himself to the ground before the machine gunner. Henry Whelan had lost a few seconds reloading his rifle. David stood up and grabbed the rifle by its muzzle. His eyes wavered on the new-dead riflemen, stopped at the machine gunner, now a crouching bundle of terror, and then brought Henry Whelan back into focus. Henry was panting. His mouth was wide open and his eyes gleamed with a wild, perfervid joy. “Out of the way, you bastard!” Henry commanded, and struggled to wrench his rifle free.

“No!” David started to say, but at first he could bring out no sound. He wet his lips, while he and Henry wrestled for the rifle. “No!”

Carmen Ruiz threw himself in between them. “Henry!” he shouted. “Cut it out, Henry!” Whelan was cursing wildly now. He tried to drive David off with a knee to the groin. Carmen Ruiz aimed a chopping, side-handed blow at Whelan’s neck and Henry let go the rifle and floundered to the ground. He got up shaking his head, dazed and suddenly much calmer.

“It’s O.K., Henry,” Carmen Ruiz said. “This one’s O.K. He’s got a whole magazine left.”

“Sure,” Henry said, feeling the side of his neck. He was quite easy now and mildly rueful, as though he’d lost his wind in a football scrimmage and was glad to take a breather. “Sure, that’s O.K., I guess.”

“Dave did a good job with these bastards,” Carmen said.

“I know he did,” Henry Whelan agreed, his excitement worn away, anxious to be fair. “You did a good job, Dave. I’m sorry I got sore at you.” He looked at the two dead riflemen. “I did a good job too.”

Carmen Ruiz kicked the half-paralyzed machine gunner to his feet. “Raus!” he commanded, “Raus! you lucky Heinie pisspot. Consider yourself a prisoner of the Boy Scouts of America.”

They were driven back in trucks to a schoolhouse just outside Bayeux. With short interruptions for food, a visit to a mobile bath and delousing unit, and an extremely unpopular but compulsory service of prayer for the dead and missing, they did nothing for the next forty-eight hours but sleep. David, Ruiz, and Whelan were the last ones in and they drew a small storage cupboard to themselves. They did very little talking until just after dusk on the second night, when, as though by some radar signal, they all came fully and luxuriously awake again.

Dave had hoped there’d be no more said about the way their part of St. Lô had ended. Nothing was going to be clarified or amended by conversation. Ruiz didn’t seem to want to discuss that subject either, and while they were reasserting their quiet satisfaction in each other’s presence he told them easy, not unduly interesting stories about his mother’s Spanish cooking, his beautiful sister’s thwarted romance with a young man who went into the priesthood, and his own brief, much-regretted career as a semi-professional shortstop. But Henry Whelan kept skirting around the edges of the other topic, obviously needing to talk it out and establish the justness of his position. When he got no encouragement he went into it head on.

“Dave,” Henry Whelan said. “I want to get something straightened out. Why didn’t you want me to shoot those Krauts?”

“Let’s not go into it, Henry,” David said. “The less talking there is the better.”

“That’s right,” Carmen Ruiz said. “We better just forget it. A thing like that gets around and the first thing you know some pressed-pants prick of an officer has you up for a court of inquiry and God knows what else. Well, I wasn’t ready for the Bisons or anywhere near, but they were always looking out for local talent and they offered me this tryout. I shouldn’t have taken it. I wasn’t even eighteen. The batting practice pitcher they started me out on was a sour old crock of a southpaw on the way down from Cincinnati. The miserable s.o.b. would never think of giving a break to a kid on the way up. He threw me nothing but the same fat-looking slider and I spent a whole morning breaking my back on it and—”

“It doesn’t have to go past us three,” Henry Whelan interrupted. “I just want to know why Dave was against it.”

Carmen tried again, anxious to forestall an argument. “It’s these pricks in pressed pants, Henry,” he said. “There was a guy on the ship whose buddy was in Italy. This guy’s buddy helped shoot up a tank crew after the bastards lost their tank and tried to pretend the war was over just because they didn’t have anything left to shoot with. And do you know what the U. S. Army tried to do to this guy’s buddy? They tried to send him to Leavenworth, for Christ’s sake. To Leavenworth.”

“I know, I know,” Whelan said with mounting disgust. “I heard about a captain in North Africa that got knocked down all the way to private. Not even PFC. I just want to know what’s wrong with Dave.”

“There’s nothing wrong,” David said. “No two people look at everything exactly the same.”

“If I thought it was just a nervous gut I wouldn’t care,” Henry Whelan persisted. “But it’s not that. I’ll admit I was pretty excited but I noticed what was going on. You looked at me damn’ funny, Dave. As if there was something horrible about me, a hell of a lot more horrible than anything about those bastard Krauts. As if I was a criminal.”

“Come on, Henry,” Carmen broke in. “Let’s just drop it, kid.”

“Do you go for that crap about the articles of war and the Geneva Convention and all that other crap, Dave?” Henry Whelan put it as a direct accusation. “Do you?”

David had no idea how to answer. So far as he was able to analyze the sickness he had felt when Henry Whelan shot the two Germans, laws and regulations had had nothing to do with it. He’d only had a short time to work it over. Most of the time since then he’d been either dreamlessly asleep or asleep and dreaming of pleasant waterfalls and snow in the woods and handsome women and almost everything else but fresh-dead men of any nationality, fresh-dead of whatever cause.

“Now listen, Dave.” Henry Whelan was a year younger than David and a dozen years younger than Carmen Ruiz but he had taken charge. He stood up in the center of the floor, blinking down at them, dominating them both by the stronger force of his feelings. “Everybody around here isn’t stupid. You don’t smoke. That’s your business but how come you never smoked, never even tasted it? You hardly ever swear. But you’ve got guts, more guts than most of us, more guts than I’ve got. Then why, for Christ’s sake—”

“I don’t know, Henry,” David said.

“You a philosopher or something? You belong to one of those funny churches, like those guys in the medical corps?”

“Drop it, Henry,” Carmen Ruiz broke in.

“I think it is something like the Geneva Convention that was eating your ass back there,” Whelan announced. “Well, to avoid any more misunderstanding in the future, let me now proclaim the Henry Whelan Convention. Under the Henry Whelan Convention anybody who discharges dangerous weapons in the direction of Henry Whelan will find Henry Whelan, God willing, discharging dangerous weapons right back in his direction. And when and if this other party decides to stop discharging dangerous weapons he better not count on Henry Whelan stopping too.”

“Now you’re getting around to the Ruiz Convention.” Carmen’s awakened interest overrode his desire to head off a dispute. “Under the Ruiz Convention any Kraut who puts down his gun and puts his hands up in the air is Carmen’s friend. Carmen will treat him like those other conventions say he should. Carmen will treat him like a brother. With one exception.”

He looked at David, waiting for a question. “Henry knows what the exception is, and why,” he said to David. “I don’t think you understood it. Two of those bastards were out of ammo; the two I told Henry to give it to. How about that? They throw everything at you that they’ve got, then when they got nothing more to throw they want to be friends, they want to call the war off. I say no. If they surrender to old Carmen they better surrender while they still got some bullets. That’s the Ruiz Convention.”

“Now tell me what’s wrong about that, Dave?” Henry Whelan demanded. “What the hell is wrong about that?”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong about it, did I?” All David wanted to do now was to get back to his private thoughts and see if there was anything to be extracted from what had been done and said. He could not get much meaning here and his weary mind kept leading him back to the simpler, surer universe he thought he had renounced forever. His mother hadn’t spoken much when his father left them alone that evening. “I know you’re confused, David,” Hannah Kyle had said gently. “I can understand a boy like you wavering on a lot of things. You always did do so much thinking. But leaving the Bible out of it, if you must, how can you waver on a thing as true as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

For all he knew, David brought himself to admit, it might be even more elementary—to use the Ann Arbor word, more fundamental—than that. For all he knew he’d failed, after all, to discard the deep and bottomless terror of the lake of fire. As Henry Whelan had conceded, he had already established his temporal possession of a full temporal share of temporal courage. His life was filled with desperate, uncluttered temporal fear, but he hadn’t run from it. Moreover he had proved that he could kill men when he had to. The machine gunner was the first German he knew, to his certain knowledge, that he’d ever hit with his rifle, but at the start of the battle for St. Lô he personally, he David Kyle and he David Kyle alone, had put a bazooka through a Tiger tank and seen the tank burn slowly with its turret sealed as tightly as a tomb. He could kill men, in their uncapitalized, lower-case, collective state. But could he kill a Man—a Man close up and identifiable and individual, a Man he could see and sense and pity and, if the temptation overcame him, even shelter and protect?

Carmen Ruiz, having dispatched the last of the lobster, signaled PFC Colhurst to pass the cognac. “Too God-damned many pacifists,” he repeated, looking indulgently at David across the fire. “Time to start the war again.”

It was Sergeant Kennebec’s judgment, not Ruiz’s, that had been sought in the first place, and he felt obliged to make his own pronouncement. “Don’t worry,” he counseled. “It will start again all right. It always does, doesn’t it?”