Hanging on

hear the bit about Aesop, about how all of this is just a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design."
        Major Kelly said nothing.
        "Well?" Coombs asked. He held the lantern higher, to give them a better view of the crap-covered vehicles. "What kind of fairy tales, I'd like to know, are full of crap?"
        "All of them," Kelly said, "I thought you understood that."

----

    5
        
        The following day was the hottest they had endured since they'd been dropped behind enemy lines. The thermometer registered over ninety degrees. The sun was high, hard, and merciless, baking the earth and the men who moved upon it. The whispering trees were quiet now, lifeless, rubbery growths that threw warm shadows into the gorge and across the fringes of the camp. The river continued to flow, but it was syrupy, a flood of brown molasses surging sluggishly over rocks and between the high banks.
        In the gorge, Kelly's men worked despite the heat, wrestling with the steel beams that never wanted to go where they were supposed to go. The men cursed the beams, each other, the sun, the still air, Germans, and being born.
        Private Vito Angelli, whose bloody nose Nurse Pullit had treated last night, worked on the near side, wielding a pegging mallet against the newly placed bridge plates, tightening connections which Private Joe Bob Wilson tempered with a gasoline hand torch. Angelli slammed the mallet in a slow, easy rhythm designed to accomplish the most work with the least effort. Each blow rang across the camp like the tolling of a flat bell, punctuating the other men's curses.
        At the other end of the bridge, Privates Hoskins and Malzberg were working hard to line up and secure the couplings between the farside pier and its cantilever arm. They were in charge of a dozen men, and they were the only two in the detail with preliminary engineering training, but they were hefting the wooden wedges and driving the hammers as hard as anyone. This surprised the men working with them, for no one had ever seen Hoskins or Malzberg work. Between them, the two men controlled all the gambling in Kelly's camp: poker games, blackjack, craps, bets on the hour of the next Stuka attack, penny pitching, everything. Hoskins and Malzberg were natural con men. They were the only men in the entire unit who had thought to bring cards and dice along when the unit had been flown behind German lines, and both of them acted as if this were the only contribution they should have to make for the rest of the war. However, now that Kelly had warned them about the possibility of more Panzers coming this way, they were as desperate as the other men to get the bridge repaired. If the bridge weren't in shape when the Panzers came, and if the Nazis had to stay by the bridge all night and everyone in Kelly's camp was killed, that would put quite a crimp in their rake-off from the games.
        In the gorge, the cement mixers rattled as some of the strongest men in camp turned them by hand. Saws scraped through damaged planking, cutting new boards for braces and flooring. Stoically, the men worked. Fearfully, too.
        As Major Kelly paraded back and forth from one crisis point to another, he saw that, as usual, the most valuable worker was Danny Dew whose expertise with the big D-7 dozer made the whole thing possible. Because of Dew, the unit put the bridge in place in a record, for them, twenty-six hours.
        As Coombs often said, "Even if he's a nigger, and he is, he can handle that machine like a man should handle a woman."
        Sergeant Coombs was always the first to admit that a black man could be good at something. He didn't like them, he said, but he was willing to give them their due. Once when some of the men went to Eisenhower, the village, to a dance that Maurice had arranged, all the young village girls wanted to dance with Danny Dew. "All them niggers," Coombs observed, "have a natural rhythm." Later, when the men discovered some of the village girls were not averse to a well-presented proposition, Danny Dew seemed always to be disappearing with one or another. "That's a darkie," Sergeant Coombs told Slade. "They have puds like elephant trunks and always ready. It's a primitive trait that's been refined out of white men." When the men played Softball, they all wanted Danny Dew on their team, because he was the best player. "Natural for his kind," Coombs said. "They're all good at sports,