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

"Isn't that right, Willie? Willie."
Damn dog can't sit still two minutes without sleeping, even in the damp
and miserable Limey outdoors. Didn't they teach him any discipline in the
R.A.F., before his owner got shot out of the sky?
"Willie!"
I tap him with my crop. He looks up and yawns.
"Look alive, Willie. God knows we need some signs of life around here."
I tug the leash and he flops to his feet, raises one leg and waters the
tread of a tank. The balsa wood darkens and streaks. "Good dog, Willie."
So many great battles, great campaigns.
Enemy scouts rustled in the hillside firs as I splashed my face and head
with the cold foam of the rushing Rhine and stood up grinning, slinging
droplets to left and right, daring some filthy goatherd to draw his bow
against me, against Caesar, against Rome...
The pipes wailed like our women and the mud gripped my toes as the clans
marched across the sodden moor, pacing off the minutes until we could lift
our swords and shed our blood for the one true king of Scotland...
My granduncle put his callused hand in mine as we charged side by side and
whooping across the northernmost ground claimed by the Seventh Virginia,
hearing nothing but our blended gasping voices and the rush of tall grass
against our legs before we leapt as one over that last stone wall --
God, that death was good!
But this is not Gaul, not Culloden, not Gettysburg. It's the first thing I
wrote down, back in my tent in Mexico, the chief thing -- besides the
obvious -- that I wanted to avoid: FORTITUDE.
But here I am. Stuck here in England once again, a puppet commander of a
paper army, mounting a phantom invasion out of canvas and paint.
Willie depleted, he and I step into the road, lined for a hundred yards in
both directions with facing rows of dummy tanks. Shermans, mostly. We
stand there, all alone, blinking at the sunset. This has been one of those
endless Limey midsummer days, when everybody but me looks up at the sun
and pretends the day is over and retires for drinks and din-nah, with
teatime still lead in their guts. What a place. Even the nights are fake.
Over my head is one of the 75-millimeter-sized "guns." I grab it with both
hands and squeeze. It's Ike's neck, and Hitler's too. The tin buckles with
a plank. When I let go, the barrel is crooked. Those few inches off true
would be enough to send a shell a dozen yards wide of the enemy. If there
were a shell. If there were an enemy.
"Dammit, Georgie, of course there's an enemy," I say aloud.
Willie snorts and wags his tail and nuzzles my jodhpurs. "Want to kill
some Nazis, boy?" I scratch rough between his ears. "Want to kill some
krauts?"
He lolls on his side and twitches one hind leg as I rub his belly.
"Well, first we've got to sit here awhile. We've got to play pretend. Yes
we do we do we do. We're just having a good time, a good good time, aren't
we Willie, playing with our toys, playing war in our cold wet sandbox?
Goddamn Eisenhower."
I stand and kick a splintered dent in the front of a tank. Its walls sway
in and out, back and forth, like a tent in a sandstorm.
"If he thinks old Georgie is going to sit out Overlord a second time in