"Joe Haldeman - Old Twentieth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

1943
A Memory
13. Doppelg├дngers
14. Calls
Wild Year
15. Duck!
16. Causes of Death
17. Loving, Leaving
1957
18. Anger Management
19. Revelations
20. Conspiracy
Wild Year: 1968
21. Family Planning
22. Slide into Darkness
1989




file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...enten/spaar/Joe%20Haldeman%20-%20Old%20Twentieth.htm (2 of 184)20-2-2006 21:45:02
Old Twentieth




PROLOGUE

1915
The smell of death is always with you, like a rotten oily stain in the back of your mouth. Rum won't
burn it out and a cheap cigar won't cover it. An unwelcome condiment with every mouthful of
rations.
It had never been worse than today. Thousands of dead baking and rotting under the Gallipoli sun,
and me on the burial detail.
Three days ago, the Turks had gathered what they thought was an overwhelming force and attacked
us around three in the morning, quietly, which was unusualтАФnormally they'd be screaming Allah
this and Allah that, bugles blaring.
But we had been warned and were ready for them, and it was a pigeon shoot. For most of the Anzac
line, they had one to two hundred yards to cover between our trenches and theirs. Very few of them
made it even close enough to throw a bomb, although some few did get close enough to find out
what an Aussie can do with a bayonet in his hand and nothing at his back but a cliff that falls to the
sea.
So No Man's Land became a charnel field in which hundreds of wounded men whispered or groaned
or shouted for help, and none came. To give aid would be suicide. Snipers on both sides had clear
shots at every square inch of blasted ground, and the best of them could hit any square inch they
wanted.
But the Turks as well as we knew that we were separated by a cauldron of pestilence no less than
misery. If those corpses were not burned or buried soon, we would all be in danger of infection. So
there was a temporary access of common sense, as sometimes can happen in any war, even this
absurd one: their generals met ours under a white flag and agreed on a nine-hour truce to bury the