Christian went by it slowly, on foot, still carrying his Schmeisser, in a straggling group of perhaps twenty men, none of whom was known to him. He had picked them up early in the morning, after he had become separated from the hastily organized platoon with which he had been posted three days before. The platoon, he was sure, had deserted to the Americans during the night. Christian felt a somber sense of relief that he was no longer responsible for them or their actions.
Looking at the dead convoy, sadly marked with the red crosses that had done no good at all, he was overwhelmed with a sense of anger and despair. Anger at the swooping, 400-mile-an-hour young Americans who had come upon the slow-moving wagons toiling up the hill with their load of broken and dying men and had, in the wanton fury of destruction, roweled it with their machine guns and rockets.
The men around him, he could tell from glancing at them, did not share his anger. All that was left was their despair. They were past anger, as they trudged, gravel-eyed and exhausted, under heavy packs, some of them with no weapons, past the ruins of the convoy, past the growing smell of the horses. They dragged slowly eastward, keeping their eyes with dull wariness on the dangerous clear sky above them, moving like a dying beast, without reason or hope, toward the final cool, sheltered place where they might lie down and die. Some of them, with crazy miserliness, through all the welter of retreat and death, still carried loot with them. One man held a violin in his hand, stolen from what music-lover"s living room no one would ever know. A pair of silver candlesticks jutted out of another man"s pack, mute and stubborn evidence that this soldier, even in this agony, had faith in a future of dinners, table-linen, food, soft lights. A huge, red-eyed man without a helmet, whose long shock of blond hair was crusted with dust, carried in his pack a dozen wooden containers of Camembert cheese. When he pa.s.sed Christian, because he was a powerful man and walked with dogged swiftness, the ripe, fermenting aroma of the melting cheese made a sick marriage with the smell of the convoy.
At the head of the convoy was a wagon on which was mounted an 88 millimeter anti-aircraft cannon. The horses were dead in the traces, in wild att.i.tudes of gallop and fear, and there was blood all over the gun and its mounting. The German Army, Christian thought dully, as he went past, horses against airplanes. At least, in Africa, when he retreated, he had retreated with the aid of engines. He remembered the motorcycle and Hardenburg, the Italian staff car, the hospital plane that had crossed the Mediterranean with him, carrying him to Italy. It seemed to be the fate of the German Army, as a war went on, to go back to more and more primitive methods of fighting. Ersatz. Ersatz gasoline, ersatz coffee, ersatz blood, ersatz soldiers ...
He seemed to have been retreating all his life. He had no memory any more of ever advancing any place. Retreat was the condition, the general weather of existence. Going back, going back, always hurt, always exhausted, always with the smell of German dead in his nostrils, always with enemy planes flickering behind his back, their guns dancing brightly in their wings, their pilots grinning because they were safe and they were killing hundreds of men a minute.
There was a loud blowing of a horn behind him, and Christian scrambled to one side. A small, closed car sped past, its wheels sending a fine cloud of dust over him. Christian got a glimpse of clean-shaven faces, a man smoking a cigar ...
Then somebody was shouting, and there was the howl of engines above him. Christian lumbered away from the road and dove into one of the carefully s.p.a.ced holes that had thoughtfully been provided by the German Army along many of the roads of France for the use of its troops at moments like this. He crouched deep in the damp earth, covering his head, not daring to look up, listening to the returning whine of the engines, and the savage tearing sound of the guns. After two pa.s.ses, the planes moved off. Christian stood up. He climbed out of the hole. None of the men he had been walking with had been touched, but the little sedan was overturned, against a tree, and it was burning. Two of the men who had been in it had been thrown clear, and were lying very still in the center of the road. The other two men were burning in a welter of spilled gasoline, torn rubber and whipcord upholstery.
Christian walked slowly up to where the two men were lying face down on the road. He did not have to touch them to see that they were dead.
"Officers," said a voice behind him. "They wanted to ride." The man behind him spat.
The other men walked past the two dead forms and the burning car. For a moment Christian thought of ordering some of the men to help him move the bodies, but it would have meant an argument, and at the moment, it did not seem very important whether two bodies, more or less, were put to one side or not.
Christian slowly started eastward once more, feeling his bad leg shiver beneath him. He blew his nose and spat again and again to try to get the smell and the taste of the dead horses and the spilled medicine out of his mouth and throat.
The next morning he had a stroke of luck. He had pulled away from the other men during the night and had marched slowly on to the outskirts of a village, which lay across his path in the moonlight, dark, empty, seemingly lifeless. He had decided not to try to get through it by himself, at night, since it was all too possible that the inhabitants, seeing a lone soldier wandering past in the dark, might pick him off, rob him of his gun, boots and uniform, and throw him behind a hedge to rot. So he had camped under a tree, eaten sparingly of his emergency ration, and slept until dawn.
Then he had hurried through the town, almost trotting down the cobbled road, past the gray church, the inevitable statue of victory with palms and bayonets in front of the town hall, the shuttered shops. No one was stirring. The French seemed to have vanished from the face of the land as the Germans retreated through it. Even the dogs and the cats seemed to understand that it was safer for them to hide until the bitter tide of defeated soldiers pa.s.sed over them.
It was on the other side of town that his luck changed. He was hurrying, because he was still in sight of the walls of the last row of houses, and his breath was coming hoa.r.s.ely into his lungs, when he saw, coming around a bend in the road ahead of him, a figure on a bicycle.
Christian stopped. Whoever it was on the bicycle was in a hurry. He kept his head down and pedaled swiftly toward where Christian was standing.
Christian moved to the middle of the road and waited. He saw that it was a young boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, capless, dressed in a blue shirt and old French Army pants, racing b.u.mpily through the cool, misty dawn light between the still rows of poplars on each side of the road, casting a soft, elongated shadow of legs and wheels on the road in front of him.
The boy saw Christian when he was only thirty yards away. He stopped suddenly.
"Come here," Christian shouted hoa.r.s.ely, in German, forgetting his French. "Walk over here."
He started toward the boy. For a moment the two of them stared at each other. The boy was very pale, with curly black hair and dark, frightened eyes. With a swift, animal-like movement, the boy picked up the front wheel of the bicycle and whirled it around. He was running with the bicycle before Christian could unsling his gun. The boy jumped onto the bicycle. Bent over, with his blue shirt filling with wind behind him, he pedaled furiously back along the road, away from Christian.
Without thinking, Christian opened fire. He caught the boy with the second burst. The bicycle careened off into the ditch alongside the road. The boy went sliding across the road to the other side, and lay there without moving.
Christian lumbered quickly along the uneven road, his boots making a thick thudding sound in the silent morning. He bent over the bicycle and picked it up. He rolled it back and forth. It was unharmed. Then he looked at the boy. The boy"s head was twisted toward him, very pale and unmarked under the curly hair. There was a light blond fuzz of moustache under the slender nose. A red stain slowly spread across the back of the faded blue shirt. Christian made a movement toward the boy, but thought better of it. They"d have been bound to hear the shooting in the village, and if they found him there, fiddling over a dying child, they"d make short work of him.
Christian swung himself up on the bicycle and started east. After the weary days of walking, the ground seemed to spin past beneath him with charming swiftness and ease. His legs felt light; the dawning breeze against his cheeks was soft and cool; the light dewy green of the foliage on both sides of the road was pleasing to the eye. Now, he thought, it needn"t only be officers who ride.
The roads of France seemed to have been made for bicyclists, not too rough, with the paving in fair condition, and no high hills to slow a man down. Why, it was easily possible for a man to do two hundred kilometers a day, easily ...
He felt youthful, strong, and for the first time since he had seen the first glider coming down out of the coastal sky that bad morning so long ago, he began to feel as though there was some hope for him. After a half hour, as he was gliding down a gentle slope between two fields of half-grown wheat, pale yellow in the morning sun, he found himself whistling, a vacation-like, holiday-like, tuneless, heart-free merry sound, rising gay and uninstructed in his throat.
All that day, he fled east along the road to Paris. He pa.s.sed groups of men, walking, moving slowly in overloaded farm wagons stubbornly loaded with pictures and furniture and barrels of cider. He had pa.s.sed refugees before in France, a long time ago, but it had been more natural then, because they were mostly women, children and old men, and you knew they had some reason to hold onto mattresses and kitchen pots and odds and ends of furniture because they hoped to set up domestic lives somewhere else. But it was strange to see a German Army trudging along this way, young men with guns and uniforms, who could only hope either finally to be reformed on some line by some miracle and turned around to fight-or to fall into the hands of the Americans who, it was rumored, were closing in on them from all directions. In either case, framed paintings from Norman chateaux and cloisonne lamps would do them a minimum amount of good. With set faces, past all reasonableness, the defeated men streamed slowly toward Paris on the summer roads, officerless, without formations or discipline, abandoned to the tanks and the planes of the Americans who were following them. Occasionally a wheezing French bus, with a charcoal furnace, would drag past, loaded down with dusty soldiers, who would have to get out on the hills to push. Once in a while an officer could be seen, but he would keep his mouth shut, look as lost and deserted as any of the others.
And, meanwhile, the country, in the full bloom of summer, with the geraniums high and pink and red along the farmers" walls, was shining and lovely in the long perfect days.
By evening, Christian was exhausted. He hadn"t ridden a bicycle for years, and in the first hour or two he had gone too fast. Also, twice during the day, shots had been fired at him, and he had heard the bullets snipping by, past his head, and had driven himself frantically out of danger. The bicycle was wavering almost uncontrollably all over the road as he slowly pushed into the square of quite a fair-sized town at sunset. He was pleased, dully, to see that the square was full of soldiers, sitting in the cafes, lying exhausted and asleep on the stone benches in front of the town hall, tinkering hopelessly with broken-down 1925 Citrons in an attempt to get them to move just a few more kilometers. Here, for a few moments, at least, he could be safe.
He dismounted from the bicycle, which by now was a kind of slippery enemy, raw-boned and malicious, a French machine with a sly intelligence of its own, which seemed to drag on his last strength with tenacious and murderous purpose, and which had almost thrown him four or five times on mild curves and hidden b.u.mps in the road.
He walked stiffly beside the bicycle, his legs rigid and weak. The other men sitting and lying in the square glanced stonily at him for a moment, without interest or connection, then dropped their eyes with bleak indifference. He clutched the bicycle tightly, feeling that any one of these weary, foreign-looking, cold-eyed men would gladly murder him for the two wheels and the worn saddle if they could.
He would have liked to lie down and sleep for a few hours, but he didn"t dare. Since the two shots on the road, he refused to take the risk of stopping any place, even in the most remote and quiet spot, by himself. The only safety from the lurking French now was either in speed or numbers. And he could not lie down here, in town, among the other men, because he knew that when he awoke, the bicycle would be gone. He knew that he, himself, would have leaped at the chance to steal the machine from any sleeping comrade, even from General Rommel, himself, and there was no reason to suppose the other footsore and b.l.o.o.d.y-minded gentlemen in the town square would be more fastidious.
A drink, he thought, a drink will give me a breathing spell, a drink will keep me going.
He walked stiffly through the open door of a cafe, wheeling the bicycle at his side. There were some soldiers sitting in the back of the room and they looked at him briefly and without surprise, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for German Sergeants to enter cafes wheeling bicycles, or leading horses, or at the controls of armored cars. Christian carefully put the bicycle against the wall and placed a chair against the back wheel. Then he sat down slowly in the chair. He gestured to the old man behind the bar. "Cognac," he said. "A double cognac."
Christian looked around the shadowy room. There were the usual signs in French and German, with the rules for the sale of alcohol on them, and the legend that only aperitifs would be sold on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was a Thursday, Christian remembered hazily, but the special nature of this particular Thursday might be said to countermand even the regulations of a Minister of the French Government at Vichy. At any rate, the Minister who had delivered himself of the regulation was no doubt running as fast as he could at the moment and would probably be grateful for a little cognac himself. The only law anyone could be expected to observe on the evening of this summer day was the law of flight, the only authority the guns of the First and Third American Armies, not yet heard in this part of the country, but already felt, already exercising a premature and dreadful sovereignty.
The old Frenchman shuffled over with a small gla.s.s of brandy. The old man had a beard like a Jewish prophet and his teeth smelled terribly of decay, Christian noticed irritably. Was there no escaping, even in this cool dark place, the odors of ferment and mortality, the scent of dying bone and turning flesh?
"Fifty francs," said the old man, leaning horribly over Christian, his hand still cautiously on the gla.s.s.
For a moment Christian thought of arguing with the old thief about the overcharge. The French, he thought, making a good thing out of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, friend and enemy. G.o.d, he thought sourly, let the Americans have them for awhile, see how happy they"ll be about it. He tossed the fifty francs, worn sc.r.a.ps of paper printed by the German Army, on the table. He would have little use for francs, soon, anyway, and he grinned within himself at the thought of the old man trying to collect on the printed, flimsy German promise from the new conquerors.
Methodically, the old man put the paper away, and dragged himself back, past the outstretched legs of the other soldiers, to his position behind the bar. Christian toyed with his gla.s.s, not drinking yet, content for the moment merely to sit, with his aching legs resting, his shoulders heavily comfortable against the wooden back of the chair. He glanced idly at the other men in the bar. It was too dark to see their faces clearly, and they were not talking or making a sound, merely sitting in att.i.tudes of exhaustion and contemplation, sipping slowly at their drinks, as though they did not expect to be able to drink much longer, and wished to hold the memory of the alcohol, the sense of its sharpness against their tongues, as long as possible now.
Hazily, Christian remembered that other bar in Rennes, long ago, and the group of soldiers with their tunics unb.u.t.toned, loud and boisterous and rich, drinking cheap champagne. No one was drinking champagne now, and no one was loud, and if anyone talked, he spoke in a single low phrase and was answered in a monosyllable. Yes. No. Will we die tomorrow? What will the Americans do to us? Is the road to Rennes pa.s.sable? Did you hear what happened to the Panzer Lehr Division? What does the BBC say? Is it over yet? Is it over? Dimly, toying with his gla.s.s, Christian wondered whatever had happened in the long years to the Private in the Pioneers he had turned in for insubordination and improper conduct. Confined to barracks for a month. Christian smiled weakly, leaning back against his bicycle. How wonderful it would be to be confined to barracks for a month. Confine the First American Army to barracks for a month, confine the Eighth Air Force, confine all Austrians in the German Army, for improper conduct ...
He sipped gently at the cognac. It was raw and probably not even cognac. Probably made three days ago and doctored with plain spirits. The French, the miserable French. He looked at the old man behind the bar, hating him. He knew that the old man had been dragged out of doddering retirement for this week"s work. Probably, a st.u.r.dy fat merchant and his plump, sweaty wife owned this place, and had run it until now. But when they saw how things were going, had seen the first sc.u.m of the German tide racing through the town, they had resuscitated the old man and put him behind the bar, feeling that even the Germans would not take out their venom on such a poor, outdated specimen. Probably the owner and his wife were tucked away somewhere in a safe attic, eating a veal steak and a salad, with a strong bottle of wine, or they were climbing into bed with each other in a sweaty, garlicky embrace. (Remember Corinne in Rennes, the cowy flesh and the milkmaid"s hands, and the coa.r.s.e dyed ropes of hair.) The owner and his wife, chubbily linked in a warm featherbed, were probably chuckling at this moment at the thought of the drained soldiers paying fantastic prices to Papa in their dirty estaminet, and at the dead Germans all along the road, and at the Americans rushing toward the town, eager to pay even higher prices for their wretched raw alcohol.
He stared at the old man. The old man stared back, his little pebbles of eyes black and insolent, secure and defiant in the rotting, ancient face. Old man with thousands of printed, useless francs in his pockets, old man with bad teeth, old man who felt he would outlive half the young men sitting silently in his daughter"s establishment, old man roaring within him at the thought of what dire handling lay ahead for these almost-captured and almost-dead foreigners huddled around the stained tables in the dusk.
"Monsieur wishes ...?" the old man said in his high wheezy voice that sounded as though he were listening to a joke no one else in the room had heard.
"Monsieur wishes nothing," Christian said. The trouble was, they had been too lenient with the French. There were enemies and there were friends, and there was nothing in between. You loved or you killed, and anything else you did was politics, corruption and weakness, and finally you paid for it. Hardenburg, faceless on Capri, in the room with the armored Burn, had understood, but the politicians hadn"t.
The old man veiled his eyes. Yellow, wrinkled lids, like dirty old paper, hooded down over the black, mocking pebbles of his pupils. He turned away and Christian felt that somehow the old man had won a b.l.o.o.d.y victory over him.
He drank his cognac. The alcohol was beginning to have an effect on him. He felt at once sleepy and powerful, like a giant in a dream, capable of slow, terrible movements, and enormous, semi-conscious blows.
"Finish your drink, Sergeant." It was a low, remembered voice, and Christian looked up, squinting through the increasing evening haze at the figure standing before his table.
"What?" he asked stupidly.
"I want to talk to you, Sergeant." Whoever it was, was smiling.
Christian shook his head and opened his eyes very wide. Then he recognized the man. It was Brandt, in an officer"s uniform, standing over him, dusty, thin, capless, but Brandt, and smiling.
"Brandt ..."
"Sssh." Brandt put his hand on Christian"s arm. "Finish your drink and come on outside."
Brandt turned and went outside. Christian saw him there, standing against the cafe window, with his back to it, and a ragged column of labor troops trudging past him. Christian gulped down the rest of the cognac and stood up. The old man was watching him again. Christian pushed the chair away and carefully grabbed hold of, the handlebars of the bicycle and wheeled it toward the door. He could not resist turning at the door for one last encounter with the pebbly, French, 1870, mocking, Verdun and Marne-like eyes of the antique bartender. The old man was standing in front of a poster, printed in French but inspired by the Germans, of a snail horned with one American flag and one British flag, creeping slowly up the Italian peninsula. The words on the poster ironically pointed out that even a snail would have reached Rome by now ... The final insolence, Christian felt. Probably the old man had put the poster up this very week, straight-faced and cackling, so that every fleeing German who came by could look and suffer.
"I hope," the old man wheezed, in that voice that sounded like laughter heard among rocking chairs in a home for the aged, "that Monsieur enjoyed his drink."
The French, Christian thought furiously, they will beat us all yet.
He went out and joined Brandt.
"Walk with me," Brandt said softly. "Walk slowly around the square. I don"t want anyone to hear what I am going to say to you."
He started along the narrow sidewalk, along the shuttered row of shops. Christian noticed with surprise that Brandt looked considerably older than when last they met, that there was considerable gray at the photographer"s temples, and heavy lines around his eyes and mouth, and that he was very thin.
"I saw you come in," Brandt said, "and I couldn"t believe my eyes. I watched you for five minutes to make sure it was you. What in G.o.d"s name have they done to you?"
Christian shrugged, a little angry at Brandt, who, after all, didn"t look magnificently healthy himself. "They moved me around a little," Christian said. "Here and there. What are you doing here?"
"They a.s.signed me to Normandy," Brandt said. "Pictures of the invasion, pictures of captured American troops, atrocity pictures of French women and children dead from American bombing. The usual thing. Keep walking. Don"t stop. If you settle down any place, some d.a.m.ned officer is liable to come over and ask for your papers and try to a.s.sign you to a unit. There are just enough busybodies around to make it unpleasant."
They walked methodically along the side of the square, like soldiers with orders and destinations. The gray stone of the buildings was purple now in the sunset, and the lounging and restless men looked hazy and evening-colored against the cobblestones and the shuttered windows.
"Listen," Brandt said, "what do you intend to do?"
Christian chuckled. He was surprised to hear the dry sound come out of his throat. For some reason, after the many days of running, dictated only by the threat of the onrushing Americans, the thought that it was possible for him to have any intentions of his own had struck him as amusing.
"What"re you laughing at?" Brandt looked at him suspicously, and Christian arranged his face, because he had the feeling that if he antagonized Brandt, Brandt would withhold valuable information from him.
"Nothing," Christian said. "Honestly, nothing. I"m just a little tired. I have just won the cross-country nine-day all-European bicycle race, and I"m not exactly in control of myself. I"ll be all right."
"Well?" Brandt asked querulously. Christian could tell from the timbre of the photographer"s voice that he was very near the thin edge of breaking, himself. "Well, what do you intend to do?"
"Bicycle back to Berlin," Christian said. "I expect to equal the existing record."
"Don"t joke, for the love of Christ," Brandt said.
"I love pedaling through the historic French countryside," Christian said light-headedly, "conversing with the historic natives in their native costumes of hand-grenades and Sten guns, but if something better came up, I might be interested ..."
"Listen," Brandt said, "I have a two-seater English car in a farmer"s barn one mile from here ..."
Christian became very cool and all tendency to chuckle left him.
"Keep moving!" Brandt snapped, under his breath. "I told you not to stop. I want to get back to Paris. My idiotic driver quit last night. We were strafed yesterday and he got hysterical. He started toward the American lines around midnight."
"Well ...?" Christian asked, trying to seem very keen and understanding. "Why"ve you been hanging around here all day?"
"I can"t drive," Brandt said bitterly. "Imagine that, I never learned how to drive a car!"
This time Christian couldn"t keep his laughter down. "Oh, my G.o.d," he said, "the modern industrial man!"
"It isn"t so funny," said Brandt. "I"m too highly strung to learn how. I tried once, in 1935, and I nearly killed myself."
What a century, Christian thought deliciously, enjoying this sudden advantage over a man who had before this done so well out of the war, what a century to pick to be too highly strung! "Why didn"t you get one of these fellows ..." Christian gestured toward the men lounging on the town hall steps, "to drive you?"
"I don"t trust them," Brandt said darkly, with a paranoiac glance around him. "If I told you half the stories I"ve heard about officers being killed by their own troops in the last few days ... I"ve been sitting in this d.a.m.ned little town for nearly twenty-four hours, trying to figure out what to do, trying to find a face I really could trust. But they all travel in groups, they all have comrades, and there"re only two places in the car. And, who knows, by tomorrow the Americans might be here, or the road to Paris will be closed ... Christian, I confess to you, when I saw your face in that cafe, I had to hold onto myself to keep from crying. Listen ..." Brandt grabbed his arm anxiously. "There"s n.o.body with you? You"re alone, aren"t you?"
"Don"t worry," Christian said. "I"m alone."
Suddenly Brandt stopped. He wiped his face nervously, "It never occurred to me," he whispered. "Can you drive?"
The bare anguish plain on Brandt"s face as he asked the simple, foolish question that at this moment, at the time of the crumbling of an army, had become the focal point and tragedy of his life, made Christian feel grotesquely and protectively full of pity for the thin, aging ex-artist. "Don"t worry, comrade." Christian patted Brandt"s shoulder soothingly. "I can drive."
"Thank G.o.d," Brandt sighed. "Will you come with me?"
Christian felt a little weak and giddy. Safety was being offered here, speed, home, life ..."Try and stop me," he said. They grinned weakly like two drowning men, who somehow have contrived, by helping each other, to reach sh.o.r.e.
"Let"s start right away," Brandt said.
"Wait," said Christian. "I want to give this bicycle to someone else. Let someone else have a chance to get away ..." He peered at the shadowy figures stirring around the town hall, trying to devise some innocent way of choosing the lucky man to survive.
"No." Brandt pulled Christian back toward him. "We can use the bicycle. The Frenchman at the farm will give us all the food we can carry for that bicycle."
Christian hesitated, but only for a second. "Of course," he said evenly. "What could I have been thinking of?"
With Brandt looking back nervously over his shoulder to make certain they were not being followed, and Christian wheeling the bicycle, they walked out of town, back over the road Christian had traversed just a half hour before. At the first intersection, where a dusty dirt road slid out into the main highway between banks of flowering hawthorn bushes, fragrant and heavy in the still evening air, they turned off. After walking for fifteen minutes, they reached the comfortable, geranium-bordered farmhouse and the large stone barn in which, under a pile of hay, Brandt had hidden the two-seater.
Brandt had been right about the bicycle. When, under the first stars of evening, they started out along the narrow dirt road leading from the farmhouse, they had with them two hams, a large can of milk, half a huge cheese, a liter of Calvados and two of cider, a half dozen thick loaves of coa.r.s.e brown bread and a whole basketful of eggs that the farmer"s wife had hard-boiled for them while they were taking the hay off the small car. The bicycle had proved most useful.
With his stomach full, relaxed behind the wheel of the small, humming, beautifully conditioned car, riding past the pale glow of the hawthorns into the main road in the moonlit evening, Christian smiled gently to himself. Meeting the boy in the blue shirt on the empty road early that morning, he reflected, had proved considerably more profitable than he had expected.
They drove back through the town without stopping. Someone shouted at them as they sped through the square, but whether it was a command to halt or an appeal for a ride or a curse because they were going too fast and were endangering the men on foot, they never found out, because Christian accelerated as much as he dared. A moment later, they were sliding out on the dim ribbon of road that stretched ahead of them across the moonlit countryside toward the city of Paris two hundred kilometers away.
"Germany is finished," Brandt was saying, his voice thin and weary, but loud, to be heard against the rush of night wind that piled across the open car as they went at the same steady pace across the sleeping countryside. "Only a lunatic wouldn"t know it. Look at what"s happening. Collapse. n.o.body gives a d.a.m.n. A million men left to wander around the best way they know how. A million men, almost without officers, without food, plans, ammunition, left to be picked up by the Americans when they have time. Or ma.s.sacred, if they"re foolish enough to make a stand any place. Germany can"t support an army any more. Maybe, somewhere, they"ll collect some troops and draw a line, but it will only be a gesture. A temporary, blood-thirsty gesture. A sick, romantic Viking funeral. Clausewitz and Wagner, the General Staff and Siegfried, combined for a graveyard theatrical effect. I"m as much of a patriot as the next man, and G.o.d knows, I"ve served Germany the best way I knew how, in Italy, in Russia, here in France ... But I"m too civilized for what they"re doing to us now. I don"t believe in the Vikings. I"m not interested in burning on Goebbels" pyre. The difference between a civilized human being and a wild beast is that a human being knows when he is lost, and takes steps to save himself ... Listen, when it looked as though the war was about to start, I had my application in to become a citizen of the French Republic, but I gave it up. Germany needed me," Brandt went on, earnestly, convincing himself as much as the man in the seat beside him, of his honesty, his rect.i.tude, his good sense, "and I delivered myself. I did what I could. G.o.d, the pictures I"ve taken. And what I"ve gone through to get them! But there are no more pictures left to be taken. n.o.body to print them, n.o.body to believe them or be touched by them if they are printed. I traded my camera to that farmer back there for ten liters of gasoline. The war is no longer a subject for photographers because there is no war left to photograph. Only the mopping-up process. Leave that to the American photographers. It is ridiculous for the people who are being mopped up to record the process on film. n.o.body can expect it of them. Listen, when a soldier joins an army, any army, there is a kind of basic contract the army makes with him. The contract is that while the army may ask him to die, it will not knowingly ask him to throw his life away. Unless the government is asking for peace this minute, and there are no signs that this is happening, they are violating that contract with me, and with every other soldier in France. We don"t owe them anything. Not a thing."
"What are you telling me all this for?" Christian asked, keeping his eyes on the pale road ahead of him, thinking, warily: He has a plan, but I will not commit myself to him yet.
"Because when I get to Paris," Brandt said slowly, "I am going to desert."
They drove in silence for a full minute.
"It is not the correct way to put it," said Brandt. "It is not I who am deserting. It is the Army which has deserted me. I intend to make it official."
Desert. The word trembled in Christian"s ear. The Americans had dropped leaflets and safe-conducts on him, urging him to desert, telling him, long before this, that the war was lost, that he would be treated well ... There were stories of men who had been caught by the Army in the attempt, hung to trees in batches of six, whose families back in Germany had been shot ... Brandt had no family, and was a freer agent than most. Of course, in confusion like this, who would know who had deserted, who had died, who had been captured while fighting heroically? A long time later, perhaps in 1960, perhaps never, some rumor might come out, but it was impossible to worry about that now.
"Why do you have to go to Paris to desert?" Christian asked, remembering the leaflets. "Why don"t you go to the other way and find the first American unit and give yourself up?"
"I thought of that," Brandt said. "Don"t think I didn"t. But it"s too dangerous. Troops in the field aren"t dependable. They may be hot-headed, maybe one of their comrades was killed twenty minutes before by a sniper, maybe they"re in a hurry, maybe they are Jews with relatives in Bchenwald, how can you tell? And then, in the country like this, there"d be a good chance you"d never reach the Americans. Every d.a.m.ned Frenchman between here and Cherbourg has a gun by now, and is dying to kill one German for the record before it"s too late. Oh, no. I want to desert, not die, my friend."
A thoughtful man, Christian thought admiringly, a man who figured things out reasonably in advance. It was no wonder Brandt had done so well in the Army, had taken just the kind of pictures he knew would be liked by the Propaganda Ministry, had got the fat job in Paris on the magazine, had been billeted for so long in the fancy apartment in Paris, had eaten well, dressed well, wh.o.r.ed well.
"Listen," Brandt said, "You know my friend, Simone ..."