will wave my coat,' said Christian. 'You will have to watch carefully. You will then set the fuse and make sure it is going. You will have plenty of time. Then get out on the road and run until the next turn. Then wait until you hear the explosion here. Then follow along the road until you reach us.'
Dehn nodded dully. 'I am to be all alone down here?' he asked.
'No,' said Christian, 'we will supply you with two ballet dancers and a guitar player.'
Dehn did not smile.
'Is it clear now?' Christian asked.
'Yes, Sergeant,' said Dehn.
'Good,' Christian said. 'If you set off the fuse before you see my coat, don't bother coming back.'
Dehn did not answer. He was a large, slow-moving young man who had been a stevedore before the war, and Christian suspected that he had once belonged to the Communist Party.
Christian took a last look at his arrangements under the bridge, and at Dehn standing stolidly, leaning against the curved, damp stone of the arch. Then he climbed up to the road again. Next time, Christian thought grimly, that soldier will be less free with criticism.
It took fifteen minutes, walking swiftly, to reach the clump of boulders overlooking the road. Christian was panting hoarsely by the time he got there. The men behind him marched doggedly, as though resigned to the fact that they were doomed to march, bent under their weight of iron, for the rest of their lives. There was no trouble about straggling, because it was plain to even the stupidest man in the platoon that if the Americans got to the bridge before the platoon turned away out of sight behind the boulders, the platoon would present a fair target, even at a great distance, to the pursuers.
Christian stopped, listening to his own harsh breathing, and peered down into the valley. The bridge was small, peaceful, insignificant in the winding dust of the road. There was no movement to be seen anywhere, and the long miles of broken valley seemed deserted, forgotten, lost to human use.
Christian smiled as he saw that his guess had been right about the vantage point of the boulders. Through a cut in the hills it was possible to see a section of the road some distance from the bridge. The Americans would have to cross that before they disappeared momentarily from sight behind a spur of rock, around which they would then have to turn and appear again on the way to the bridge. Even if they were going slowly and cautiously, it would not take them more than ten or twelve minutes to cover the distance, from the spot at which they would first come into sight, to the bridge itself.
'Heims,' Christian said, 'Richter. You stay with me. The rest of you go back with the Corporal.' He turned to the Corporal. The Corporal now looked like a man who expects to be killed but feels that there is a ten per cent chance he may postpone the moment of execution till tomorrow. 'Tell the Captain,' Christian said, 'we will get back as soon as we can.'
'Yes, Sergeant,' the Corporal said, nervous and happy. He started walking, almost trotting, to the blessed safety of the turn in the road. Christian watched the platoon file by him, following the Corporal. The road was high on the side of the hill now. When they walked, the men were outlined heroically and sadly against the shreds of cloud and wintry blue sky, and when they made their turns, one by one in towards the hill, they seemed to step off into windy blue space. Heims and Richter were a machine-gun team. They were standing heavily, leaning against the roadside boulders, Heims holding the barrel and a box of ammunition, and Richter sweating under the base and more ammunition. They were dependable men, but, looking at them standing there, sweating in the cold, their faces cautious but non-committal, Christian felt suddenly that he would have preferred, at this moment, to have with him now the men of his old platoon, dead these long months in the African desert.
Somehow, looking at Heims and Richter, he felt that these men could not be depended upon to do their jobs as well. They belonged, by some slight, subtle deterioration in quality, to another army, an army whose youth had left it, an army that seemed, with all its experience, to have become more civilian, less willing to die. If he left the two men now, Christian thought, they would not stay at their posts for long. Christian shook his head. Ah, he thought, I am getting silly. They're probably fine. God knows what they think of me.
The two men leaned, thickly relaxed against the stones, their eyes warily on Christian, as though they were measuring him and trying to discover whether he was going to ask them to die this morning.
'Set it up here,' Christian said, pointing to a level spot between two of the boulders which made a rough V at their joining. Slowly but expertly the men set up the machine-gun.
When the gun was set up, Christian crouched down behind it and traversed it. He shifted it a little to the right and peered down the barrel. He adjusted the sight for the distance, allowing for the fact that they would be shooting downhill. Far below, caught on the fine iron line of the sight, the bridge lay in sunlight that changed momentarily to shadow as rags of clouds ghosted across the sky.
'Give them plenty of chance to bunch up near the bridge,' Christian said. 'They won't cross it fast, because they'll think it's mined. When I give you the signal to fire, aim at the men in the rear, not at the ones near the bridge. Do you understand?'
'The ones in the rear,' Heims repeated. 'Not the ones near the bridge.' He moved the machine-gun slowly up and down on its rocker. He sucked reflectively at his teeth. 'You want them to run forward, not back in the direction they are coming from…'
Christian nodded.
'They won't run across the bridge, because they are in the open there,' said Heims thoughtfully. 'They will run for the ravine, under the bridge, because they are out of the field of fire there.'
Christian smiled. Perhaps he had been wrong about Heims, he thought, he certainly knew what he was doing here.
'Then they will run into the mines down there,' said Heims flatly. 'I see.'
He and Richter nodded at each other. There was neither approval nor disapproval in their gesture.
Christian took off his coat, so that he would be able to wave it in signal to Dehn, under the bridge, as soon as he saw the enemy. Then he sat on a stone behind Heims, who was sprawled out behind the gun. Richter knelt on one knee, waiting with a second belt of cartridges. Christian lifted the binoculars he had taken from the dead lieutenant the evening before. He fixed them on the break between the hills. He focused them carefully, noticing that they were good glasses.
There were two poplar trees, dark green and funereal, at the break in the road. They swayed glossily with the wind.
It was cold on the exposed side of the hill, and Christian was sorry he had told Dehn he would wave his coat at him. He could have done with his coat now. A handkerchief would probably have been good enough. He could feel his skin contracting in the cold and he hunched inside his stiff clothes uncomfortably.
'Can we smoke, Sergeant?' Richter asked.
'No,' said Christian, without lowering the glasses. Neither of the men said anything. Cigarettes, thought Christian, remembering, I'll bet he has a whole packet, two packets. If he gets killed or badly wounded in this, Christian thought, I must remember to look through his pockets.
They waited. The wind, sweeping up from the valley, circled weightily within Christian's ears and up his nostrils and inside his sinuses. His head began to ache, especially around the eyes. He was very sleepy. He felt that he had been sleepy for three years.
Heims stirred as he lay outstretched, belly down, on the rockbed in front of Christian. Christian put down the glasses for a moment. The seat of Heims's trousers, blackened by mud, crudely patched, wide and shapeless, stared up at him. It is a sight, Christian thought foolishly, repressing a tendency to giggle, a sight completely lacking in beauty. The human form divine.
Then he saw the small mud-coloured figures slowly plodding in front of the poplars. 'Quiet,' he said warningly, as though the Americans could hear Heims and the other man if they happened to speak.
The mud-coloured figures, looking like a platoon in any army, the fatigue of their movement visible even at this distance, passed in two lines, one each side of the road, across the binoculars' field of vision. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, forty-two, forty-three, Christian counted. Then they were gone. The poplars waved as they had waved before, the road in front of them looked exactly the same as it had before. Christian put down the glasses. He felt wide awake now, unexcited.
He stood up and waved his coat in large, delicate circles. He could imagine the Americans moving in their cautious, slow way along the edge of the ridge, their eyes always nervously down on the ground, looking for
