Hanging on

He looked quickly away, ashamed of himself for staring even as long as he had.

She sipped her wine. He sensed that she was staring at him, but he could not look up. He was a mess of confused emotions inside; his previous serenity had strangely vanished. “Say something else in French, will you?” he asked.

She looked around at the trees, at the half-seen needled branches overhead. She stared at the fire and listened solemnly to the singing frogs. “Je pense que cela doit etre la plus belle place du monde.”

“That's lovely. What does it mean?”

She smiled. “I believe that this must be the most beautiful place in the world.” She saw Beame's perplexity. “Don't you think it is?”

“It's nice,” he said, unconvinced.

“But you can't think of it without thinking of the war,” she said.

“Yeah. I guess, otherwise, I might agree.” His eyes traveled to her breasts, then rose guiltily again. He realized, suddenly, that she had seen him look at her so covetously. Their eyes met, they both blushed, and they looked away from each other.

“Tell me about America,” Nathalie said, a while later.

“Hasn't your father told you about it?” Beame asked, his voice thick and barely recognizable.

Before Nathalie could reply, her father replied for her. “I most certainly have told her about America,” he said, stalking like a brontosaurus out of the trees and into the small clearing. He threw an exaggerated shadow in the campfire light. “And I have also told her to avoid all soldiers no matter if they are German, American, or French.”

Nathalie came quickly to her feet. “Father, you must not think—”

“I will think what I wish,” Maurice said, scowling at them.

He no longer looked like a fat, greasy old man. The strength born of years of hard labor was evident in the powerful shoulders and in the hard lines of his face. He looked capable of tearing Beame into tiny, bloody pieces.

“We were only talking,” the lieutenant said, also rising.

“Why did you not ask my permission?”

“To talk?” Beame asked. He glanced at Nathalie. She was staring at the ground, biting her lip. “Look, Mr. Jobert, it was just a nice little dinner—”

Maurice advanced another step, cutting the lieutenant short with one wave of his right hand. The campfire illuminated the lower half of his face but left his eyes and forehead mostly in shadows, giving him a demonic appearance. “Just a nice little dinner? What of the wine?”

Beame looked guiltily at the bottle which rested against a tree trunk. “The wine—”

“I provided the wine, father,” Nathalie said.

“That makes it much worse,” Maurice said. “Alone at night, drinking with a soldier—at your own instigation!”

“He's not like other soldiers,” she said, a bit of fire in her now. “He is a very nice—”

“All soldiers are alike,” Maurice insisted. “American, British, French, German, whatever. They have one thing in mind. One thing only. Now, girl, you come with me. We're returning to the village.”

Beame was helpless. He watched as Maurice led the girl out of the woods, out of sight, out of the lieutenant's life. “I didn't even touch her,” he told the darkness where Maurice had been.

The darkness did not respond.

“I wish I had touched her,” Beame said.

The roof had been taken off the main bunker at the south end of the clearing, and preparations made for erecting one of the fake buildings over this ready-made basement. As a result, the men who had been sleeping there were dispossessed. And for the first time since the unit had been dropped at the bridge, the tents had been broken out and set up. They were lined in a haphazard way, the rows wandering, intersecting randomly — more the work of a troop of inept first-year boy scouts than that of a trained Army group.

Major Kelly walked briskly along one of the tent aisles, followed by twenty men. He had personally chosen each of his escorts, and he had made certain that they all had four things in common: each was big and muscular; each was mean; each was rowdy; and each one had signed his credit contract.

They stopped before a tent which looked like all the others that stretched away in the darkness, and Kelly used a flashlight to consult the chart he had prepared before sundown. “This is Armento's tent,” he told the men with him. Armento had been one of the nineteen bastards who had not signed their credit contracts. Smiling grimly, Kelly leaned down, pulled back the flap, and shouted, “Up and out of there, Private Armento!”

Armento had worked hard all day on the preparations for the construction of the village, and he was sleeping sound as a stone when Kelly called him. Shocked by this intrusion into his deserved rest, he nearly knocked the tent down when he scrambled out of it. “What? What? What?” he asked Kelly and the men behind Kelly. He rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“Sorry,” Kelly said. “Emergency. Got to requisition your tent.”

And he was sorry to have to use pressure tactics on Armento and the other holdouts who had not signed their confessions. He felt like a monster, an insensitive creep, another General Blade. But he had no choice. The Panzers were coming. Death was coming. There was nothing else to do.

Five of the men behind the major, all bigger than Armento, knocked down the tent and rolled it up. Before Armento could ask any questions, Kelly led his husky escorts down the aisle to the next victim.

By now, everyone was out of his tent. Most of the men were grinning, because they knew what was up. Only nineteen of them were bewildered…

Kelly was directing the tearing down of the eighth tent, embarrassedly parrying all questions, when Lieutenant Slade arrived. Slade was furious. “You are harassing the men who stood with me, the men who wouldn't sign those insane credit contacts.” Slade shook a finger in Kelly's face.

“Not at all,” Kelly said, feeling like a heel. “The hospital staff says we're short of bandage materials. If we suffer another Stuka attack, the shortage could be a matter of life and death. So we're confiscating a few of the tents to cut them into strip bandages.” He felt ill, and he hated himself.

“Canvas bandages? Ridiculous! If you're not harassing these men who stood with me,” Slade said, “why are you demolishing only their tents?”

“Are we?” Kelly feigned surprise. He consulted his chart. “Why, we just picked the names out of a hat.” Into which, of course, they had only put the names of the men who had not signed their contracts.

Lieutenant Slade followed them, ranting impotently as the tents came down. As they were folding up the eighteenth square of canvas, he planted himself in front of Kelly. “You aren't going to rip down my tent. You won't bully me into signing away my good name!”

“I'm not bullying anyone,” Kelly said, wishing it were true. “Besides, your name wasn't drawn from the hat. We aren't confiscating your tent. You will be snug and warm and dry tonight.” Kelly looked at the sky, pointed at the thick gray thunderhead clouds rushing westward. “Sure does look like rain before morning.” He was conscious of all the other men looking skyward with him. “These other fellows whose names were drawn at random from a hat will have to put up with a soaking, I'm afraid. But we couldn't make it any fairer… ” Any unfairer. Kelly sighed. “We have to remember there's a war going on, and that some of us must make sacrifices. At least we don't have to put everyone out in the rain, eh? You needn't worry, Lieutenant.”

Slade saw the full implications of what the major had said. He grimaced. “Very cunning, sir. But you are not going to divide and conquer us. We aren't going to put our lives and futures in the hands of a man like Maurice, no matter what you do to us.”

“I admire your strong character,” Kelly said.

Ten minutes later, the eighteen tents had been stacked in a corner of the hospital bunker. They made quite a mound.

Lily Kain put her arm around Kelly's waist and detained him at the bunker door as he was leaving. “You really think it will work?”