Hardenburg waved his hand. "Cease firing," he said. The guns stopped. The gunner nearest Christian was sweating. He sighed loudly and wiped his face and leaned wearily on the barrel in the quiet.
"Diestl," said Hardenburg.
"Yes, Sir."
"I want five men. And you." Hardenburg started down, sliding a little in the heavy sand, towards the still field below.
Christian motioned to the five men nearest him and they followed the Lieutenant.
Hardenburg walked deliberately, as though he were going to address a parade, towards the trucks. His pistol was in its holster and his hands swung in stiff little arcs at his side. Christian and the others followed just behind him. They came to the Englishman who had foolishly run towards them, holding on to his belt. The Englishman had been hit several times in the chest. His ribs were shattered and sticking in white and red splinters among the blood-soaked rags of his jacket, but he was still alive. He looked up quietly from the sand. Hardenburg took out his pistol, pulled the bolt to load it, and casually shot twice, without taking careful aim, at the Englishman's head. The Englishman's face disappeared. He grunted once. Hardenburg put the pistol back in his holster and strolled on.
Next there was a group of six men. They all seemed to be dead, but Hardenburg said, "Make sure," and Christian fired some shots into them mechanically. He felt nothing.
They reached the line of breakfast fires. Christian observed the careful way in which the tins had been punched with holes to get the best possible results out of the makeshift stoves. God knows how many gallons of tea had been brewed there. There was a heavy smell of tea, and the smell of burned wool and burning rubber, and the smell of roasted flesh from the trucks, where several men had been caught in the fire. One man had jumped out of a truck, all ablaze. He was lying on one elbow, with his blackened and burnt head up in an alert searching pose. The mortars had hit around here, too, and there was a pair of naked legs torn off at the hips.
Here and there an arm moved, or a groan could be heard. The detail spread out, and the shots came from all over the area. Hardenburg went to the leading car, which had obviously been used by the officer in command of the convoy, and rummaged around inside for papers. He took some maps and some typewritten orders and a photograph of a blonde woman with two children that was tucked in the map-case. Then he set fire to the car.
He and Christian stood watching the car burn.
"We were lucky," Hardenburg said. "They stopped in just the right place." He grinned. Christian grinned too. This wasn't like the half-farcical approach to Paris. This wasn't the black-marketing and police-work of Rennes. This was what they were here for, this was what the war was like, these dead around him were measurable, substantial, valuable.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE train rattled slowly along between the drifts and the white hills of Vermont. Noah sat at the frosted window, with his overcoat on, shivering because the heating system of the car had broken down. He stared out at the slowly changing, forbidding scenery, grey in the cloudy wastes of Christmas dawn. He had not been able to get a berth because the train was crowded, and he felt grimy and stiff. The water had frozen in the men's room and he hadn't been able to shave. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek and knew that it was black and ugly and that his eyes were rimmed with bloodshot red and that there were smoke smudges on his collar. This is a hell of a way, he thought, to present myself to her family.
With each mile he felt more and more uncertain. At one station, where they had stopped for fifteen minutes, there had been another train en route back to New York, and he had had a wild impulse to jump out and climb aboard and rush back to the city. With the discomfort of the journey, the cold and the snoring passengers and the sight of the grim hills breaking out of the cloudy night, more and more of his confidence had left him. Never, he was saying to himself, this will never work.
Hope had gone on ahead to prepare the way. She had been up here for two days now, and by this time she must have told her father that she was going to get married, and that she was going to marry a Jew. It must have gone off all right, Noah thought, forcing himself to be optimistic in the dusty car, otherwise she would have sent me a telegram. She's let me come up here, so it must be all right, it must be…
After the Army had rejected him, Noah had, as reasonably as he could, decided to rearrange his life in as rational and useful a way as possible. He had begun to spend three or four evenings a week in the library, reading blueprints for marine-construction work. Ships, they cried in the newspapers and on the radio, ships and more ships. Well, if he couldn't fight, he could at least build. He had never studied a blueprint in his life, and he had only the vaguest notion of what the processes of welding and riveting were, and, according to all authorities, it took months of intensive training for a man to become proficient at any of those things, but he studied with cold fury, memorizing, reciting to himself, making himself draw plans from memory again and again. He was at home with books and he learned quickly. In another month, he felt, he could go into a shipyard and bluff his way on to the scaffolding and earn his keep.
And in the meantime, there was Hope. He felt a little guilty about planning his private happiness at a time when all his friends were going down into the horrors of war, but his abstinence would not bring Hitler to defeat any sooner, nor would the Emperor of Japan surrender any earlier if he, Noah, remained single – and Hope had been insistent. But she was very fond of her father. He was a devout churchgoer, a hard-bitten Presbyterian elder, rooted stubbornly all his life in this harsh section of the world, and she would not marry without his consent. Oh, God, Noah thought, staring across the aisle at a Marine corporal who was sleeping, sprawled there, with his mouth open and his feet up in the air, Oh, God, why is the world so complicated?
There was a brickyard along the tracks, and a glimpse of one of those tightly-put-together, unpromising white streets with steeples rising at both ends. Then there was Hope, standing on the platform, searching the sliding, frosted windows for his face.
He jumped down from the train before it stopped. He skidded a little on a patch of frozen snow, and nearly dropped the battered imitation-leather bag he was carrying as he fought to hold his balance. An old man who was pushing a trunk said to him testily, "That's ice, young man. Ice. You can't toe-dance on it."
Then Hope hurried up to him. Her face was wan and disturbed. She didn't kiss him. She stopped three feet away from him. "Oh, my, Noah," she said, "you need a shave."
"The water," he said, feeling irritated, "was frozen."
They stood there uncertainly facing each other. Noah looked hastily around to see if she was alone. Two or three other people had got off at the station, but it was early and no one had come to greet them and they were already hurrying off. Apart from the old man with the trunk, Noah and Hope had the station to themselves as the train started to pull out.
It's no good, Noah thought, they've sent her down by herself to break the news.
"Did you have a good trip?" Hope said artificially.
"Very nice," Noah answered. She seemed strange and cold, bundled up in an old mackinaw and a scarf drawn tight over her hair. The northern wind cut across the frozen hills, slicing through his overcoat as though it were the thinnest cotton.
"Well," Noah said, "do we spend Christmas here?"
"Noah…" Hope said softly, her voice trembling with the effort to keep it steady. "Noah, I didn't tell them."