"Christopher Priest - The Discharge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

I was at last moving across the notorious southern continent, the theatre of the land war, but throughout
the three days of my cold and exhausting journey by train and truck I saw signs of neither battles nor their
aftermath. The terrain I passed through had clearly never been lived inтАФI saw a seemingly endless
prospect of treeless plains, rocky hills, frozen rivers. I received orders every day: my torment was a
lonely one but my route was known and monitored, arrangements had been made. Other troops travelled
with me, none of them for long. We all had different destinations, different orders. Whenever the train
halted it was met by trucks that either were standing by the side of the rails where we stopped, or which
appeared from somewhere after we had waited an hour or two. Fuel and food was taken on at these
stops and my brief companions came and went. Eventually it was my own turn to leave the train at one of
these halts.

I travelled under a tarpaulin in the back of the truck for another day, cold and hungry, bruised by the
constant lurching of the vehicle and at last terrified by the closeness of the landscape around me. I was
now so much a part of it. The winds that scoured the bleak grasses and thorny, leafless bushes also
scoured me, the rocks and boulders that littered the ground were the immediate cause of the truck's
violent movements, the cold that seeped everywhere sapped my strength and will. I passed the journey in
a state of mental and physical suspension, waiting for the interminable journey to end.

I stared in dismay at the terrain. I found the dark landscape oppressive, the gradual contours
discouraging. I loathed the sight of the grey, flinty soil, the waterless plains, the neutral sky, the broken
ground with its scattered rocks and shards of quartz, the complete absence of signs of human occupation
or of agriculture or animals or buildingsтАФabove all I hated the endless blast of freezing winds and the
shrouds of sleet, the blizzard gales. I could only huddle in my freezing, exposed corner of the truck's
compartment, waiting for this deadly journey to end.

Finally we arrived somewhere, at a unit which was occupying a strategic position at the base of a steep,
broken rockface. As soon as I arrived I noticed the grenade launcher positions, each constructed exactly
as I had myself been trained to construct them, each concealed position manned to the right strength.
After the torment and discomforts of the long journey I felt a sudden sense of completeness, an
unexpected satisfaction that at last the disagreeable job I had been forced to take on was about to start.



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However, fighting the war itself was not yet my destiny. After I joined the grenade unit and shared duties
with the other soldiers for a day or two, the first frightening reality of the army was borne in on me.
Grenade launchers we had, but as yet no grenades. This did not appear to alarm the others so I did not
allow it to alarm me. I had been in the army long enough to have developed the foot-soldier's
unquestioning frame of mind when it came to direct orders about fighting, or preparation for fighting.

We were told that we were going to retreat from this position, re-equip ourselves with materiel, then
occupy a new position from which we could confront the enemy directly.

We dismantled our weapons, we abandoned our position in the dead of night, we travelled a long
distance to the east. Here we finally rendezvoused with a column of trucks. We were driven in convoy
for two nights and a day to a large stores depot. Here we learned that the grenade launchers with which