speed as it headed for the beach. Noah crouched against the damp steel side, ready to jump when the ramp went down. Maybe, he thought, as the waves slapped with increasing force against the speeding hull, maybe there will be a cable from Hope when I get back to camp, saying it is all over. Then, later, he thought, I will sit back and tell my son, 'The day you were born, I was landing on the coast of England with twenty pounds of dynamite.' Noah grinned. It would have been better, of course, to have been with Hope while it was happening, but this really had its advantages. You were too occupied to worry very much. There was no anxious pacing of corridors, no smoking of too many cigarettes, no listening to the screams. It was selfish, of course, but it had its points.
The barge grated against the smooth beach and a second later the ramp went down. Noah leaped out, feeling his equipment banging heavily against his back and sides, feeling the cold water pouring in over his leggings. He raced for a small dune and flung himself down behind it. The other men lumbered out, spreading rapidly, ducking into holes and behind clumps of scrub grass. The riflemen opened up on the pillbox eighty yards away, on a small bluff overlooking the beach. The bangalore-torpedo men crept carefully up to the barbed wire and set their fuses, then ran back. The bangalores exploded, adding the sharp smell of their explosion to the soft, thick smell of the smoke that the plane had laid down.
Noah picked himself up, with Burnecker protecting him, and ran forward to a hole that lay near the wire. Burnecker fell in on top of him.
Burnecker was panting heavily. 'Goodness,' Burnecker said, 'isn't dry land wonderful?'
They laughed at each other, then slowly poked their heads out of the hole. The men were working precisely, like a football team running through signals, advancing, as they had been taught, on the pale grey sides of the pillbox.
The bazooka went off again and again, in its rushing, noisy explosion, and large chunks of concrete flew up in the air from the pillbox.
'At times like this,' Burnecker said, 'I ask myself only one question. 'What are the Germans supposed to be doing while we go through all this?''
Noah leaped out of the hole and dashed, crouching, holding his charges, through the opening in the wire. The bazooka spoke again and Noah threw himself to the sand, in case any of the concrete flew out towards him. Burnecker was lying beside him, panting heavily.
'And I used to think ploughing was hard,' Burnecker said.
'Come on, Farmboy,' said Noah, 'we're on our way.' He stood up. Burnecker got off the ground, groaning.
They ran to the right and threw themselves behind a six-foot-high dune. The grass on top of the dune was snapping in the wet wind.
They watched the man with the flame-thrower carefully crawl towards the pillbox. The fire from the riflemen supporting them still whistled over their heads and ricocheted off the concrete.
If Hope could only see me now, thought Noah.
The man with the flame-thrower was in position now, and the other man with him turned the cock on the cylinders on his back. It was Donnelly who carried the enormous heavy cylinders. He had been picked because he was the strongest man in the platoon. Donnelly started the flame-thrower. The fire spurted out, whipping unevenly in the strong wind, smelling oily and heavy. Donnelly sprayed the slits of the pillbox in savage, arching bursts.
'All right, Noah,' said Burnecker. 'Do your act.'
Noah leaped up and ran lightly and swiftly to windward of Donnelly, towards the pillbox. By now the men in the box were theoretically either dead, wounded, burned or stunned. Noah ran strongly, even in the deep sand. Everything seemed very clear to him, the chipped and blackened concrete, the dangerous narrow slits, the cliff rising dark green and steep behind the beach, against the streaked, grey sky. He felt strong, able to carry the heavy charges for miles. He breathed evenly and deeply as he ran, knowing exactly where to go, exactly what he was going to do. He was smiling as he reached the pillbox. Quickly and deftly he threw the satchel charge against the base of the wall. Then he poked the other charge, on its long stick, into the ventilating hole. He was conscious as he worked that the eyes of all the men in the platoon were on him, performing expertly and well the final act in the ceremony. The fuses were spitting now, well-lit, and Noah turned and raced towards a foxhole thirty feet away. He threw himself in a long, bunched dive into the hole, and ducked his head. For a moment there was silence on the beach, except for the hiss of the wind through the spikes of sea grass. Then the explosions came, one on top of another. Chunks of concrete hurtled into the air and landed dully near him in the sand. He looked up. The pillbox was split open, smoking and black. Noah stood up. He smiled, rather proudly.
The Lieutenant who had been in charge of their training at the camp, and who had come along as an observer, was walking towards him.
'Roger,' said the Lieutenant. 'Good job.'
Noah waved at Burnecker and Burnecker, standing now, leaning on his rifle, waved back.
There was a letter from Hope at Mail Call. Noah opened it solemnly, with slow hands.
'Darling,' the letter read: 'Nothing yet. I am ENORMOUS. There is a feeling here that the child will weigh a hundred and fifty pounds at birth. I eat all the time. I love you.'
Noah read the letter three times, feeling adult and paternal. Then he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket, and went back to his tent to get ready for his three-day pass.
As he dug down in his barracks bag for a clean shirt, he felt secretly for the box he had hidden there. It was still there, wrapped in long Johns. It was a box of twenty-five cigars. He had bought it in the United States and carried it across the ocean with him, for the day that was now almost upon him. He had lived so much of his life without ritual or ceremony that the simple, rather foolish notion of signalizing the birth of an heir by handing out cigars had assumed solemn proportions in his mind. He had paid a great deal for the cigars in Newport News, Virginia, eight dollars and seventy-five cents, and the box had taken up precious room in his kit, but he had never begrudged either the cost or the space. Somehow, more felt than thought, Noah dimly realized that the act of giving, the plain, clumsy symbol of celebration, would make him feel the real living presence of the child, three thousand miles away, would place the child and himself, in his own mind and the minds of the men around him, in the proper normal relationship of father and son or father and daughter. Otherwise, in the ever-flowing stream of khaki, it would be so easy to make that day like every other day, that soldier like every other soldier… While the smoke still rose from the propitiatory offering, he would be more than a soldier, more than one of ten millions, more than an exile, more than a rifle and a salute, more than a helmet… he would be a father, love's creative particularized link among the generations of men.
'Oh,' said Burnecker, who was lying on his cot with his shoes off, but his overcoat still on, 'look at that Ackerman! Sharp as Saturday night in a Mexican dance hall. Those girls in London will just fall over and lay down in the gutter when they see that haircomb.'
Noah grinned, grateful to Burnecker for the familiar joke. How different this was from Florida. The closer they came to battle, the closer they got to the day when each man's life would depend upon every other man in the Company, the more all differences fell away, the more connected and friendly they all were. 'I'm not going to London,' he said, carefully knotting his tie.
'He has a duchess in Sussex,' Burnecker said to Corporal Unger, who was cutting his toenails near the stove. 'Very private.'
'No duchess in Sussex, either,' said Noah. He put on his tunic and buttoned it.
'Where are you going then?'
'Dover,' said Noah.
'Dover!' Burnecker sat up in surprise. 'On a three-day pass?'
'Uhuh.'
'The Germans keep lobbing shells into Dover,' Burnecker said. 'Are you sure you're going there?'
'Uhuh.' Noah waved at them and went out of the tent. 'See you Monday…'
Burnecker, puzzled, looked after him. 'That man's troubles,' he said, 'have unseated his reason.' He lay down and in a minute and a half he was sleeping.
Noah slipped out of the clean, old, wood and brick hotel just as the sun was rising out of France.
He walked down the stone street towards the Channel. It had been a quiet night, with a thin fog. He had gone to the restaurant in the centre of the town where a three-piece band had played and British soldiers and their girls had danced on the large floor. Noah had not danced. He had sat by himself, sipping unsweetened tea, smiling shyly when he caught a girl looking at him invitingly, and ducking his head. He liked to dance, but he had decided
