"Andy Duncan - Fortitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Andy)

good soldier."
"The recruiters had a suite with a potted date palm in the middle of the
floor. 'Didn't know the dashed things grew here naturally,' the sergeant
said. He had one leg, and a chipped front tooth. 'Might have saved some
money on the passage, what, if we'd left that bastard in Cairo.' I laughed
and shook everyone's hand. They called me pasha Patton, which is a title
of great respect in Egypt, you know."
"You ain't gonna die this way, Colonel. Not if we can help it. Not if I
can help it."
"Oh, I signed my name to everything, I did. When I came home that evening
the family met me at the door, saying Mama had fallen again, and before I
hung up my hat and cane I knew that I would never go."
"I ain't leaving you, Colonel. I'll wait on our boys, or the Germans,
whichever comes first."
"At Kashgil, that November, Hicks was ambushed, and the expedition was
wiped out very nearly to the last man. I read the news on the streetcar,
headed for yet another victory dinner for President Cleveland."
I coughed. "That was good luck, wasn't it, Papa?"
"Don't try to talk, Colonel. Want some water?"
"Yes, they were lucky, son. They died like your grandfather, and your
granduncle. They died like men."
"Here you go, Colonel. Have a drink. That's right."
I spluttered. "No, Papa. I mean, it was good luck for me. Papa -- what if
you had died?"
"Hm? Oh, of course, Georgie, of course you're right. I have no regrets.
I've been blessed with a wonderful family, Georgie, and a wonderful son. A
son who's making the most of his big chance." He leaned forward and patted
my leg, and I felt pain such as I had never known. I screamed.
"Christ! Colonel, shut up, sir," Private Angelo said, lunging toward me.
My father was getting up, patting his pockets, preparing to leave. "Papa!"
I cried. "Papa!"
"Geez, he wants his old man now. Listen, Colonel," Private Angelo
whispered into my ear, "you've gotta hold out just a while longer, and lay
low and be quiet, you got me? We ain't got a hell of a lot of friends in
this neighborhood, you know?"
"Papa," I said, my leg throbbing, my forehead sizzling. Papa was making
his way over the lip of the hole, rubbing the small of his back. He looked
back at me as Angelo upended his canteen over my face, blurring the
slope-shouldered outline of the only Patton I had ever known.
I heard Papa's voice: "Another chance. Imagine that. Well, Georgie, maybe
that's true for you. I hope it is. I hope it is true for one of us ... "
His last words were swallowed by the spitting rumbling grind of tank
engines, and by the shouts of what sounded like a thousand men.
"We're done for, Colonel," Private Angelo said, still swabbing my face.
Up on the crest behind him, where Papa had stood a moment before, was a
tall, gangling, sunken-cheeked soldier through whom I could see nothing.
He turned, cupped his mouth, and called, "Criminy, Sarge! There's someone
alive down here!"
I later found out he was one of a hundred troops of the 138th Regiment of
the 35th Division, who had arrived on the scene a good ninety minutes