Noah looked at his name in print, but the other writing was too small for his eyes at the moment. He put the magazine inside the dead man's shirt again and lay back under the warm blankets.
Just before he closed his eyes he saw Rickett. Rickett was standing over him and Rickett was shaved clean and had on a fresh uniform. "Oh, Christ," Rickett said, off in the distance high above Noah, "oh, Christ, we still got the Jew."
Noah closed his eyes. He knew that later on what Rickett had said would make a great difference in his life, but at the moment all he wanted to do was sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THERE was a sign on the side of the road that said YOU ARE UNDER OBSERVED SHELLFIRE FOR THE NEXT ONE THOUSAND YARDS. KEEP AN INTERVAL OF SEVENTY-FIVE YARDS.
Michael glanced sideways at Colonel Pavone. But Pavone, in the front seat of the jeep, was reading a paper-covered mystery story he had picked up in the staging area in England while they were waiting to cross the Channel. Pavone was the only man Michael had ever seen who could read in a moving jeep.
Michael stepped on the accelerator and the jeep spurted swiftly down the empty road. On the right there was a bombed-out aerodrome, with the skeletons of German planes lying about. There was a strip of smoke further off in front, lying in neat folds over the wheatfields in the bright summer afternoon air. The jeep bounced rapidly over the macadam road to the shelter of a clump of trees, and over a little rise, and the thousand observed yards were crossed.
Michael sighed a little to himself, and drove more slowly. There was a loud, erratic growling of big guns ahead of them, from the city of Caen, that the British had taken the day before. Just what Colonel Pavone wanted to do in Caen, Michael didn't know. In his job as a roving Civil Affairs officer, Pavone had orders which permitted him to wander from one end of the front to another, and with Michael driving him, he cruised all over Normandy, like a rather sleepy, good-humoured tourist, looking at everything, when he wasn't reading, nodding brightly to the men who were fighting at each particular spot, talking in rapid, Parisian French to the natives, occasionally jotting down notes on scraps of paper. At night Pavone would retire to the deep dugout in the field near Carentan, and type out reports by himself, and send them on somewhere, but Michael never saw them, and never knew exactly where they were going.
"This book stinks," Pavone said. He tossed it into the back of the jeep. "A man has to be an idiot to read mystery stories." He looked around him, with his perky, clown's grimace. "Are we close?" he asked.
A battery concealed behind a row of farmhouses opened fire. The noise, so near, seemed to vibrate the windshield, and Michael had, once again, the expanding, tickling, concussion feeling low down in his stomach, that he never seemed to get over when a gun went off near-by.
"Close enough," Michael said grimly.
Pavone chuckled. "The first hundred wounds are the hardest," he said.
The son of a bitch, Michael thought, one day he is going to get me killed.
A British ambulance passed them, fast, going back, loaded, bumping cruelly on the rough road. Michael thought for a moment of the wounded, gasping as they rolled on the stretchers.
On one side of the road was a burned-out British tank, blackened and gaping, and there was a smell of the dead from it. Every new place you approached, every newly taken town which represented a victory on the maps and over the BBC, had the same smell, sweet, rotting, unvictorious. Michael wished vaguely, as he drove, feeling his nose burn in the strong sun, squinting through his dusty goggles, that he was back on the lumber pile in England.
They came over the brow of a hill. Ahead of them stretched the city of Caen. The British had been trying to take it for a month, and after looking at it for a moment, you wondered why they had been so anxious. Walls were standing, but few houses. Block after block of closely packed stone buildings had been battered and knocked down, and it was the same as far as the eye could reach. Tripe a la mode de Caen, Michael remembered from the menus of French restaurants in New York, and the University of Caen, from a course in Medieval History. British heavy mortars were firing from the jumbled books of the University library at the moment, and Canadian soldiers were crouched over machine-guns in the kitchens where the tripe had at other times been so deftly prepared.
They were in the outskirts of the town by now, winding in and out of stone rubble. Pavone signalled Michael to stop, and Michael drew the jeep up along a heavy stone convent wall that ran beside the roadside ditch. There were some Canadians in the ditch and they looked at the Americans curiously.
We ought to wear British helmets, Michael thought nervously. These damn things must look just like German helmets to the British. They'll shoot first and examine our papers later.
"How're things?" Pavone was out of the jeep and standing over the ditch, talking to the soldiers there.
"Bloody awful," said one of the Canadians, a small, dark, Italian-looking man. He stood up in the ditch and grinned.
"You going into the town, Colonel?"
"Maybe."
"There are snipers all over the place," said the Canadian. There was the whistle of an incoming shell and the Canadians dived into the ditch again. Michael ducked, but he could not get out of the jeep fast enough, anyway, so he merely covered his face jerkily with his hands. There was no explosion. Dud, Michael's mind registered dully, the brave workers of Warsaw and Prague, filling the casings with sand and putting heroic notes among the steel scraps, "Salute from the anti-fascist munitions workers of Skoda." Or was that a romantic story from the newspapers and the OWI, too, and would the shell explode six hours later when everyone had forgotten about it?
"Every three minutes," the Canadian said bitterly, standing up in the ditch. "We're back here on rest and every three bleeding minutes we got to hit the ground. That's the British Army's notion of a rest area!" He spat.
"Are there mines?" Pavone asked.
"Sure there're mines," the Canadian said aggressively. "Why shouldn't there be mines? Where do you think you are, Yankee Stadium?"
He had an accent that would have sounded natural in Brooklyn. "Where you from, soldier?" Pavone asked.
"Toronto," said the soldier. "The next man tries to get me out of Toronto is going to get a Ford axle across his ears."
There was the whistle again, and again Michael was too slow to get out of the jeep. The Canadian disappeared magically. Pavone merely leaned negligently against the jeep. This time the shell exploded, but it must have been a hundred yards away, because nothing came their way at all. Two guns on the other side of the convent wall fired rapidly again and again, answering.
The Canadian raised himself out of the ditch again. "Rest area," he said venomously. "I should have joined the bloody American Army. You don't see any Englishmen around here, do you?" He glared at the broken street and the smashed buildings with hatred flaring from his clouded eyes. "Only Canadians. When it's tough, hand it to Canada."
"Now…" Pavone began, grinning at this wild inaccuracy.
"Don't argue with me, Colonel, don't argue with me," the man from Toronto said loudly. "I'm too nervous to argue."
"All right," Pavone said, smiling, pushing his helmet back, so that it looked like an unmilitary chamber-pot over his bushy, burlesque eyebrows. "I won't argue with you. I'll see you later."
"If you don't get shot," said the Canadian, "and if I don't desert in the meantime."
Pavone waved to him. "Mike," he said, "I'll drive now. You sit at the back, and keep your eyes open."
Michael climbed in and sat high up on the folded-down jeep top, so that he could fire more easily in all directions. Pavone took the wheel. Pavone always took the most responsible and dangerous position at moments like this.