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 mines'.
A moment later he saw Dehn scramble swiftly out from beneath the bridge and run heavily up to the road. Dehn ran along the road, slowing down perceptibly as he tired, his boots kicking up minute puffs of dust. Then he reached a turn and he was out of sight.
Now the fuse was set. It only remained for the enemy to behave in a normal, soldierly manner.
Christian put on his coat, grateful for the warmth. He plunged his hands in his pockets, feeling cosy and calm. The two men at the machine-gun lay absolutely still.
Far off there was the drone of plane engines. High, to the south-west, Christian saw a formation of bombers moving slowly, small specks in the sky, moving north on a bombing mission. A pair of sparrows swept, chirping, across the face of the cliff, darting in a flicker of swift brown feathers across the sights of the gun.
Heims belched twice. "Excuse me," he said politely. They waited. Too long, Christian thought anxiously, they're taking too long. What are they doing back there? The bridge will go up before they get to the bend. Then the whole thing will be useless.
Heims belched again. "My stomach," he said aggrievedly to Richter. Richter nodded, staring down at the magazine on the gun, as though he had heard about Heims's stomach for years.
Hardenburg, Christian thought, would have done this better. He wouldn't have gambled like this. He would have made more certain, one way or another. If the dynamite didn't go off, and the bridge wasn't blown, and they heard about it back at Division, and they questioned that miserable Sergeant in the Pioneers and he told them about Christian… Please, Christian prayed under his breath, come on, come on, come on…
Christian kept his glasses trained on the approach to the bridge. There was a rushing, tiny noise, near him, and, involuntarily, he put the glasses down. A squirrel scurried up to the top of a rock ten feet away, then sat up and stared with beady, forest eyes at the three men. Another time, another place, Christian remembered, the bird strutting on the road through the woods outside Paris, before the French road-block, the overturned farm cart and the mattresses. The animal kingdom, curious for a moment about the war, then returning to its more important business.
Christian blinked and put the glasses to his eyes again. The enemy were out on the road now, walking slowly, crouched over, their rifles ready, every tense line shouting that their flesh inside their vulnerable clothing understood that they were targets. The Americans were unbearably slow. They were taking infinitely small steps, stopping every five paces. The dashing, reckless young men of the New World. Christian had seen captured newsreels of them in training, leaping boldly through rolling surf from landing barges, flooding on to a beach like so many sprinters. They were not sprinting now. "Faster, faster," he found himself whispering, "faster…" What lies the American people must believe about their soldiers!
Christian licked his lips. The last man was out from behind the bend now, and the officer in command, the inevitable childish lieutenant, was waving to a man with the mine detector, who was moving regretfully up towards the head of the column. Slowly, foolishly, they were bunching, feeling a little safer closer together now, feeling that if they hadn't been shot yet they were going to get through this all right.
The man with the mine detector began to sweep the road twenty metres in front of the bridge. He worked slowly and very carefully, and as he worked, Christian could see the Lieutenant, standing in the middle of the road, put his binoculars to his eyes and begin to sweep the country all round him. Zeiss binoculars, no doubt, Christian's mind registered automatically, made in Germany. He could see the binoculars come up and almost fix on their boulders, as though some nervous, latent military sense in the young Lieutenant recognized instinctively that if there were any danger ahead of him, this would be the focus of it. Christian crouched a little lower, although he was certain that they were securely hidden. The binoculars passed over them, then wavered back.
"Fire," Christian whispered. "Behind them. Behind them."
The machine-gun opened up. It made an insane, shocking noise as it broke the mountain stillness, and Christian couldn't help blinking again and again. Down on the road two of the men had fallen. The others were still standing there stupidly, looking down in surprise at the men on the ground. Three more men fell on the road. Then the others began to run down the slope towards the ravine and the protection of the bridge. They are sprinting now, Christian thought, where is the camera-man? Some were carrying and dragging the men who had been hit. They stumbled and rolled down the slope, their rifles thrown away, their arms and legs waving grotesquely. It was remote and disconnected, and Christian watched almost disinterestedly, as though he were watching the struggle of a beetle dragged down into a hole by ants.
Then the first mine went off. A helmet hurtled end over end, twenty metres straight up in the air, glinting dully in the sunlight, its straps whipping in its flight.
Heims stopped firing. Then the explosions came one on top of another, echoing and re-echoing along the walls of the hills. A large dirty cloud of dust and smoke bloomed from the bridge.
The noise of the explosions died slowly, as though the sound was moving heavily through the draws and along the ridges to collect in other places. The silence, when it came, seemed unnatural, dangerous. The two sparrows wheeled erratically, disturbed and scolding, across the gun. Down below, from beneath the arch of the bridge, a single figure came walking out, very slowly and gravely, like a doctor from a deathbed. The figure walked five or six metres, then just as slowly sat down on a rock. Christian looked at the man through his glasses. The man's shirt had been blown off him, and his skin was pale and milky. He still had his rifle. While Christian watched, the man lifted his rifle, still with that lunatic deliberation and gravity. Why, thought Christian with surprise, he's aiming at us!
The sound of the rifle was empty and flat and the whistle of the bullets was surprisingly close over their heads. Christian grinned. "Finish him," he said.
Heims pressed the trigger of the machine-gun. Through his glasses, Christian could see the darting spurts of dust, flickering along a savage, swift line in an arc around the man. He did not move. Slowly, with the unhurried care of a carpenter at his workbench, he was putting a new clip in his rifle. Heims swung the machine-gun, and the arc of dust-splashes moved closer to the man, who still refused to notice them. He got the clip in his rifle and lifted it once more to his naked shoulder. There was something insane, disturbing, about the shirtless, white-skinned man, an ivory blob against the green and brown of the ravine, sitting comfortably on the stone with all his comrades dead around him, firing in the leisurely and deliberate way at the machine-gun he could not quite make out with his naked eye, paying no attention to the continuous, snapping bursts of bullets that would, in a moment or two, finally kill him.
"Hit him," Christian murmured irritably. "Come on, hit him."
Heims stopped firing for a moment. He squinted carefully and jiggled the gun. It made a sharp, piercing squeak. The sound of the rifle came from the valley below, meaningless and undangerous, although again and again there was the whine of a bullet over Christian's head, or the plunk as it hit the hard-packed dirt below him.