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

streaming. I touched the mask hanging from my saddle, tapped its goggles,
decided against it. Some officers, I knew, had donned their masks before
they were a block from Fort Myer.
Above me, looking down from the office windows, a hundred anguished faces
in a row. "Shame!" cried a woman's voice. "Shame!" I selected a woman in a
wide white hat, saluted her, and rode on.
Coming down a side street toward Pennsylvania was a lone tank, an old
Renault. Hadn't that idiot been issued a map? A gang of boys in knickers
chased the tank, hanging all over it, throwing round projectiles that
splattered off the plate. Apples. Still in service after fourteen years --
amazing.
Much later, after the charge across the bridge, after the clearing of the
Flats, after the fire that swept "Hooverville" into ash, after it all was
left to the newspapers and the politicians, I was standing, as before,
talking to several of my fellow regimental officers at the picket lines,
when I heard the footsteps on the sidewalk behind me: two men marching
smartly, one man shuffling. Once again, without turning, I knew who he
was.
In the wards, after Cheppy, I had talked to boys who were bayoneted. They
described what it was like. I had begun to feel something similar whenever
I thought of Private Joe Angelo.
I turned to face him. He was the same. His face and uniform were filthy,
matted with grass and mud and flecked with -- blood? Had he been dragged?
The Distinguished Service Cross was in place, though. Crooked, but there.
Runnels of sweat, or tears, had smoothed the dirt on his cheeks. I
couldn't meet his gaze, God help me, not yet. Never noticed before how
bowlegged he was, I'll be damned; in Virginia they'd say you could throw a
hog through his legs.
"Major Patton," said the sergeant at his right elbow, "this one says he
knows you, won't come quietly until he speaks with you -- begging your
pardon, sir," he added, misreading my expression.
Before, my shame had turned to embarrassment and anger. I had snorted:
"Sergeant, I do not know this man. Take him away, and under no
circumstances permit him to return!"
And then I had turned my back on Joe Angelo, who did not speak, and who
went so quietly that I heard nothing as I stood there chatting with my
fellow Cavalry officers about what a sad spectacle it was, a damn good
enlisted man gone to rack and ruin, hat in hand with the Bolsheviks, each
word welling up like acid in my throat.
Not this time. But the hell of it was, as I stood there, looking at Joe
Angelo again, knowing this was my second, perhaps last, chance, I felt
those very same words roiling out; I very nearly said them. "Sergeant -- I
mean, I -- " I had to clench my jaw, get hold of myself (discipline or
death, Georgie, discipline or death), force myself instead to say the
words I had practiced so bitterly, so often.
"I do know this man, Sergeant." Damn my throat; I was barking like Willie,
Willie who wasn't even born. "This man is Joe Angelo. Fourteen years ago,
Sergeant, in a hole in the ground near a pissant crossroads in France, Joe
Angelo saved the life of a cowboy lieutenant colonel who let himself get
shot in the ass while daydreaming." I twitched a smile, and forced myself