Hanging on Read Free

bad as before, that nothing ever improved.
        "The bridge piers?"
        "Nearside pier is down. I couldn't even locate the struts through the anchorage and down to the pile. All gone. Farside pier's okay, bridge cap in place and the bearings sound. In fact, the farside cantilever arm isn't even bent. The suspended span is gone, of course, but we still have a third of the bridge up."
        "Too bad," Major Kelly said.
        "Sir?"
        It was Major Kelly's duty, as directed by General Blade, to see that this bridge, which spanned a small river and a larger gorge for some nine hundred feet, be kept open. The bridge was presently behind German lines, despite the great advances the Allies had made since Normandy. No one had yet seen any Germans around here, except those in the Stuka dive bombers which had knocked out the damned bridge three times after Kelly's men had rebuilt it. The first time, in its initial existence, the bridge had been destroyed by the British. Now that Allied armored units hoped to cross the gorge at this point, whenever the German Panzer divisions had been turned back and finally overwhelmed, it must be maintained. At least, General Blade thought it must. This was one of his private contingency plans, a pet project. Kelly thought that General Blade had lost his mind, perhaps because of chronic syphilis, and that they were all going to die before any Allied armored units could ever use the bridge. Though Kelly believed these things with a deep and abiding pessimism, he also believed in getting along with his superiors, in not taking chances, in hanging on. Though they were all going to die, there was a slim chance he would last out the war and go home and never have to look at a bridge again. Because this slender thread of hope was there, Major Kelly didn't tell the general what he feared.
        Beame, wiping at the grime on his face, still waiting for some sort of explanation, coughed.
        "What I meant," Kelly said, "was that I wished they'd taken out the entire bridge."
        "Sir?"
        "Beame, what is your civilian profession?"
        "Civil engineer, sir."
        "Beame, if you had no bridge to keep rebuilding here, more than two hundred miles behind German lines, if no one bombed this bridge so that you could repair it, what the hell would you do with yourself?"
        Beame scratched bis nose, looked around at the clearing, the encircling trees, the smoking gorge. "I don't know, sir. What would I do?"
        "You'd go mad," Major Kelly said. He looked at the sky, which was very blue; and he looked at the cantilevered bridge, which was very demolished. He said, "Thank Christ for Stukas."

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        Lieutenant Richard Slade, darker and chubbier than Lieutenant Beame and looking somewhat like a choirboy with a vicious streak, was called The Snot by everyone in the unit except Sergeant Coombs. Slade did not know this, and he would have been enraged if he had heard the nickname. He was a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. Now, he came trotting out from HQ to tell Kelly that General Blade was going to call through in fifteen minutes. "The General's aide just placed the alert call in code," Slade said.
        Kelly tried to keep his torn trousers out of sight. "That's not supposed to be until tonight." He dreaded talking to the general.
        "Nevertheless, he'll be on in… about twelve minutes now. I suggest you be there, sir." He pushed his thick, brown hair back from his forehead and surveyed the bridge below. "I imagine we'll be requiring supplies again."
        "I imagine so," Kelly said. He wanted to punch Slade in the mouth. Even when Lieutenant Slade used the correct form of address, he imbued the obligatory "sir" with a sarcasm that infuriated the major.
        Slade said, "Sir, you'd better make a supplies list before he calls, so you can read it quickly-and so you won't forget anything."
        Major Kelly gritted