Hanging on

Dew's virility symbol, and he won't take kindly to my giving it away. You know, I need Danny. I can't finish the village without him.”

“But the dozer and radio are all that will satisfy my father, Major.” She let go of his hands and returned to the last track, which was waiting for her. She jumped onto the bed, sat with her long legs dangling over the lowered tailgate.

“Anything but the dozer,” Kelly said.

She shook her head. Her black hair spread out like a silk fan, folded up. “I wish I could help. But that is all my father would take.”

The truck started away. It entered the bridge. Crossed the bridge. Went around the bend on the other side. Out of sight.

6

“We should send a commando squad into Eisenhower tonight and kill that crazy frog bastard,” Sergeant Coombs said.

Major Kelly ignored the sergeant's suggestion.

Instead, he gave the men a pep talk. And he tried to flog them into accomplishing their own work and that of the Frenchmen now on strike. He doubled job assignments. Mind racing feverishly, he looked for and found and implemented all tolerable shortcuts in their construction procedures. He cut the supper break down to fifteen minutes. He stalked from one end of the clearing to the other, doing his Patton imitation: badgering, cajoling, screaming, shaking his fist in the faces of the goldbrickers, joshing, berating, threatening…

“If we don't get our little religious community built before the Germans get here, we're finished,” Kelly told them. “They have rifles, pistols, automatic pistols, cannons, ack-ack guns, grenades, submachine guns, mortar, flamethrowers, tanks… They'll grind us into fish meal. Any of you want to be made into fish meal? Huh? Any of you?”

None of the men wanted to be ground into fish meal. They worked hard, then harder, and finally hardest.

A three-man search party went looking for Lieutenant Beame when Kelly learned that the junior officer had not shown up at his work assignment after lunch. Beame was supposed to be guiding the blueprinting and initial construction of the church tower, a job only he or Kelly was qualified to do. But he was missing, and his men were idle… Half an hour after they set out, the searchers came back with the lieutenant. They had located him on a grassy knoll in the woods where he had been lying on his back, looking at the sky and daydreaming.

“What's the matter with you?” Kelly demanded of Beame. “You're the only man here besides me who can do this sort of planning. You're the only other full engineer. I need you, Beame. You can't go wandering off into the woods—”

“I can't stop thinking about her,” Beame said. “Nothing else matters except her. And he won't let me see her… ” He looked like a sad clown.

“Who?” Kelly asked. “Who's he and who's she?”

“Maurice is he. Nathalie is she. I love her, but he won't let me near her.”

“Love can get you killed,” Kelly told him. “I order you to stop loving her. Get on the ball, Beame! Don't desert me now.”

Kelly also had to keep an eye on Angelli, who kept trying to sneak away to see Nurse Pullit. Vito was one of the few men quick and limber enough to slip around on high beam frames, troubleshooting connections and looking for flaws in supports and braces. He was vital, even when there were no Frenchmen for him to oversee. And now when their chances were evaporating like water in a teakettle, he was playing the love-sick schoolboy. Even when he was working, Vito was, like Beame, in such a state of longing that he could accomplish only a third of the work he should have done.

When night came, they worked on, though they ordinarily would have stopped and called it quits until dawn. There was not much that could be done in complete darkness. If they used enough lanterns to throw sufficient light on their work, they risked becoming targets for Allied and German planes. Tonight, they compromised. Kelly allowed the use of half the lanterns they needed — which provided just enough light to attract the dreaded bombers but not enough to permit efficient labor.

Finally, at 10:30, Tooley came to see the major. The pacifist was pale, sweaty, filthy, exhausted. His ropy muscles did not look so formidable as they always had before. His thick neck seemed to be made of rubber and was supporting his head with difficulty. “Let them stop, Major! For God's sake, be merciful!”

“The Germans are coming. We can't stop. We're dead if we do!”

Tooley shook his head. It was almost more effort than he could endure. “They're so tired and terrified of attracting night planes that they aren't getting anything done, anyway. And if you expect them to achieve anything tomorrow, you have to let them rest tonight.”

Kelly knew the pacifist was right. “Dammit!” He sighed. “Okay. It's all useless anyway. It's a fairy tale. It can't be real. Tell them to knock off. We couldn't finish it in time even if they worked twenty-four hours a day.”

By eleven o'clock, the camp was dark and still. Rushing silently westward, marshmallow mountains of cumulus clouds obscured the moon and stars. The shadows had all run together in one inky pool. A few tent flaps rustled in the variable wind which had sprung up halfheartedly from the east, and the crickets chirruped softly and intermittently in the nearby woods.

Neither the wind nor the crickets was sufficient to rouse the men. Those not yet asleep soon would be, when weariness became greater than fear.

The roof was off the main bunker, and none of the men could see much sense in sleeping in a roofless bunker. It would be like wearing a bulletproof vest made of cardboard, or like wearing cotton galoshes in a rainstorm, or like dating your own sister. Therefore, they had put up the tents, most of them precisely large enough to accommodate two men in complete discomfort, though a few — like Major Kelly's — were spacious. Because they were temporary and did not deserve much planning time, the tent rows were haphazardly drawn, an intriguing maze that confused and confounded everyone. The pegs were makeshift and poorly wedged, while the taut guide ropes made a treacherous tangle in the darkness. Still, the tents were better than the roofless bunker. As Kelly had said, “As long as you can't see the sky, you can pretend that you're shielded by sheets of steel. You can pretend the tent is made of heavy armor. You can trick yourself into sleeping better.”

But Major Kelly was one of the few men who was unable to trick himself into sleeping better. Or at all. He lay in his tent, in the diffused orange light of a single, oily candle, and he worried about everything: the Germans, Hagendorf, the Germans, Lieutenant Beame, the Germans, the romance between Angelli and Pullit, the strike and the possibility that he would have to give away Dew's bulldozer, the Germans….

Suddenly, Private Tooley, breathing like a spent horse, poked his head through the unsecured tent flaps and cried, “Major!”

Kelly sat straight up, smacking his head into a tent pole.

“It's awful!” Tooley gasped.

“What? What?” Kelly rubbed his head and stumbled to his feet.

“Kowalski just made another prediction. It's horrible!”

“You broke in here to tell me about that bag of shit?” Kelly asked, incredulous.

“He's been right before,” Tooley said. “In fact, he's never been wrong.”

Major Kelly was worried in spite of himself. “What's he saying now?”

“Come quick and see!” Tooley said, dropping the flaps and disappearing.

“Tooley!” Kelly pushed out of the tent, looked around. The pacifist was twenty yards away, running towards the hospital bunker. “Damn!” Kelly said.

Two minutes later, he stumbled down the hospital's uneven, earthen steps, breathing like a horse that had been in the same race as Tooley. He struck his shoulder on the door frame, staggered inside. The lights were dimmer and the stench twice as bad as he remembered them. A veritable flock of centipedes scattered in front of him. He shivered, went down the aisle to the end of the bunker where Pullit, Lily, Liverwright, and Tooley stood by