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It was so bewildering. This was the biggest game he had ever played—uniforms, bigger guns and everything and—
    The long dusty trip inland over jolting roads and glorified cowpaths was little more than bumps, shouts and sweat to Johnny Choir. This didn’t smell like Africa. It smelled like sun, wind, rain, mud, heat, sweat, cigarettes, trucks, oil, gasoline. Universal odours that denied all the Dark menace of the old geography book Africa. He looked hard but he didn’t see any coloured men with juju paint on their black faces. The rest of the time he was too engrossed spooning food into his mouth, and coming down the hash-line for second helpings.
    It was one hot noon one hundred miles from the Tunisian border, with Johnny just finishing his lunch, when a German Stuka fell out of the sun, coming right for Johnny. It spit bullets.
    Johnny stood there and watched it. Tin plates, eating utensils, helmets clattered, shining, on the hard-packed sand as the other company members scattered, yelling, and dug their noses into ditches and behind boulders, behind trucks and jeeps.
    Johnny stood there grinning the kind of grin you always use when you look straight at the sun. Someone yelled, “Choir, duck!”
    The dive bomber strafed, slugging, punching. Johnny stood straight up with his spoon raised to his mouth. Little pocks exploded dust into a showered line a few feet to one side of him. He watched the line tiptoe instantly by him and go spattering on a few yards before the Stuka lifted gilded wings and went away.
    Johnny watched it out of sight.
    Eddie Smith peered over the edge of a jeep. “Choir, you nut. Why didn’t you get behind the truck?”
    Johnny ate again. “That guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn-door with a bucket of paint.”
    Smith looked at him as if he were a Saint in a niche in a church. “You’re either the bravest guy I know or the dumbest.”
    “I guess maybe I’m brave,” said Johnny though his voice sounded a bit uncertain, as if he couldn’t make up his mind yet.
    Smith snorted. “Hell. The way you talk.”
    * * * *
    The inland movement continued. Rommel was entrenched at Mareth and the British 8th was drawing up, readying its heavy artillery for a barrage that, rumour had it, would start in approximately five days. The long queue of trucks reached the Tunisian border, ground over and up into hill country….
    The Afrika Korps had stormed through Kasserine Pass almost to the border of Tunisia, and now they were retreating back toward Gafsa.
    “That’s swell,” was all Johnny Choir would say. “That’s the way it should be.”
    Choir’s infantry moved up at long last for their first engagement. Their first look at the way the enemy ran, fell down, got up or stayed down for a longer interval, flew, shot, yelled or just plain vanished in a cumulus of dust.
    A certain laughing tenseness went through the members of his unit. Johnny felt it and couldn’t figure it out. But he pretended to be tense, too, once in a while. It was fun. He didn’t smoke the cigarettes offered him.
    “They make me choke,” he explained.
    Now the orders were given. American units, coming down onto Tunisian plain, would drive toward Gafsa. Johnny Choir was going with them in his role as buck private.
    Instructions were barked out, maps were supplied to company commanders, tank groups, anti-tank half-tracks, artillery, infantry.
    The air arm swung, shining hard, overhead. Johnny thought they looked mighty pretty.
    Things started exploding. The hot plainland was running over with a lethal tide of snipers’ shots, machine-gun fire, artillery blasts. And Johnny Choir ran along behind a screen of advancing tanks with Eddie Smith about ten yards ahead of him.
    “Keep your head down, Johnny. Don’t stand so straight!”
    “I’ll be all right,” Johnny panted. “You get on. I’m fine.”
    “Just keep that big head of yours low, that’s all!”
    They ran. Johnny sucked breath out and in. It felt like a