Then the handle-bars jerked to one side. The front wheel skidded round and the Lieutenant's hands bounced away from the grips. Christian felt himself falling and lunged forward, grasping the Lieutenant. The impact knocked the Lieutenant over the bucking front wheel and the machine skidded crazily off the track, the engine roaring loudly. Suddenly it dipped to one side and crashed. Christian felt himself flying through the air, screaming, but somewhere inside him a voice was saying quietly, This is too much, too much. Then he hit something and he felt a numbness in his shoulder, but he got up on one knee.
The Lieutenant was lying under the motor-cycle, whose front wheel was still spinning. The back wheel was a mass of twisted metal. The Lieutenant was lying quietly, blood spurting from a gash in his forehead, with his legs at a very queer angle under the machine. Christian walked slowly over to him, and started pulling at him. But that didn't work. So he laboriously lifted the motor-cycle and toppled it over to the other side, away from Hardenburg. Then he sat down and rested. After a minute or so, he took out his first-aid kit and put a bandage clumsily over the blood on the Lieutenant's forehead. It looked very neat and professional for a moment. But then the blood came through and it looked like all the other bandages he had ever seen.
Suddenly the Lieutenant sat up. He looked once at the machine, and said, crisply, "Now we walk." But when he tried to get up he couldn't. He looked at his legs reflectively. "Nothing serious," he said, as though to convince himself. "I assure you, it is nothing serious. Are you all right?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
"I think," said the Lieutenant, "I had better rest for ten minutes. Then we shall see." He lay back with his hands clutching the sodden bandage over his forehead.
Christian sat near him. He watched the front wheel of the motor-cycle slowly stop spinning. It had been making a small, whining noise that grew lower and lower in tone. When the wheel stopped, there was no more sound. No sound from the motor-cycle, no sound from the Lieutenant, no sound from the desert, no sound from the armies intertwined with each other somewhere else on the continent.
The face of the desert looked fresh and cool in the new sun. Even the wrecks looked simple and harmless in the fresh light. Christian slowly uncorked his canteen. He drank one mouthful of water carefully, rolling it around on his tongue and teeth before swallowing it. The sound of his swallowing was loud and wooden. Hardenburg opened one eye to see what he was doing.
"Save your water," he said, automatically.
"Yes, Sir," said Christian, thinking with admiration: That man would give an order to the devil who was shovelling him through the door of the furnace of hell. Hardenburg, he thought, what a triumph of German military education. Orders spurted from him like blood from an artery. At his last gasp he would be laying his plans for the next three actions.
Finally Hardenburg sighed and sat up. He patted the wet bandage on his head. "Did you put this on?" he asked.
"Yes, Sir."
"It will fall off the first time I move," Hardenburg said coldly, objectively criticizing, without anger. "Where did you learn to put on bandages?"
"Sorry, Sir," said Christian. "I must have been a bit shaken myself."
"I suppose so," Hardenburg said. "Still, it's silly to waste a bandage." He opened his tunic and took out an oilskin case. From the case he took a sharply folded terrain map. He spread the map on the desert floor. "Now," he said, "we'll see where we are."
Wonderful, Christian thought, fully equipped for all eventualities.
Hardenburg blinked from time to time as he studied the map. He grimaced with pain as he held the bandage on. But he figured rapidly, mumbling to himself. He folded the map and put it back briskly into the case and carefully tucked it away inside his tunic.
"Very well," he said. "This track joins with another one, leading west, perhaps eight kilometres away. Do you think you can make it?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian. "How about you?"
Hardenburg looked at him disdainfully. "Don't worry about me. On your feet," he barked, again to the phantom company he was continually addressing.
Christian rose slowly. His shoulder and arm pained considerably, and he could move the arm only with difficulty. But he knew he could walk several of the eight kilometres, if not all of them. He watched Hardenburg push himself up from the sand with a furious effort. The sweat broke out on his face and the blood began to come through the bandage on his forehead again. But when Christian leaned over to try to help him, Hardenburg glared at him, and said, "Get away from me, Sergeant!"
Christian stepped back and watched Hardenburg struggle to raise himself. He dug his heels into the sand as though getting ready to take the shock of being hit by an onrushing giant. Then, with his right elbow held rigid, he pushed ferociously, with cold purpose, at the ground. Slowly, inch by inch, with the pain shouting mutely from his livid face, he raised himself till he was half-bent over, but off the ground. With a wrench, he pulled himself upright and stood there, wavering, but erect, the sweat and blood mixed with the grime on his face in a thick, alarming compost. He was weeping, Christian noticed with surprise, the tears making harsh lines down the nameless paste on his cheeks. His breath came hard, in dry, tortured sobs, but he set his teeth. In a grotesque, clumsy movement, he faced north.
"All right," he said. "Forward march."
He started out along the thick sand of the track, ahead of Christian. He limped, and his head bobbed crazily to one side as he walked, but he continued steadily, without looking back.
Christian followed him. He was feverishly thirsty. The gun slung over his shoulder seemed maliciously heavy, but he resolved not to drink or ask for a rest until Hardenburg did so first.
They shuffled slowly, in a broken, deliberate tandem, across the sand, among the occasional rusting wrecks, towards the road to the north where other Germans might be beating their way back from the battle. Or where the British might be waiting for them.
Christian thought impersonally and calmly about the British. They did not seem real or menacing. Only two or three things were real at the moment: the coppery taste in his throat, like sour brewery mash, the crippled, animal-like gait of Hardenburg before him, the sun rising higher and higher and with increasing, malevolent heat, behind their backs. If the British were waiting on the track, that was a problem that would have to be solved in its own time. He was too occupied to grapple with it now.
They were sitting down for the second rest, stunned, sun-lacerated, their eyes dull with agony and fatigue, when they saw the car on the horizon. It was coming fast, with a swirl of dust like a plume behind it. In two minutes they saw that it was a smart open staff car, and a moment later they realized it was Italian.
Hardenburg pushed himself up with a bone-cracking effort. He limped slowly out into the middle of the track and stood there, breathing heavily, but staring calmly at the onrushing machine. He looked wild and threatening with the bloody bandage angled across his forehead, and his purple, sunken eyes. His bloodstained hands hooked ready at his sides.
Christian stood up, but did not go into the centre of the track beside Hardenburg.
The car raced towards them, its horn blowing loudly, losing itself somehow in the emptiness and sounding like the echo of a warning. Hardenburg didn't move. There were five figures in the open car. Hardenburg stood cold and motionless, watching them. Christian was sure the car was going to run the Lieutenant down and he opened his mouth to call, when there was a squeal of brakes and the long, smart-looking machine skidded to a stop an arm's length in front of Hardenburg.
There were two Italian soldiers in front, one driving and the other crouched beside him. In the rear there were three officers. They all stood up and shouted angrily at Hardenburg in Italian.