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

we were armed were now obsolescent. We were to be issued with the latest version, but the entire
escadron would need to be re-trained.

So we marched cross-country to another camp. So we re-trained. So, finally, we were issued with the
latest armament and the ammunition for it and now at last fully prepared we marched off once again to
fight the war.

We never reached our reallocated position, where the enemy was to be confronted. We were diverted
instead to relieve another column of troops, five days away across some of the harshest countryside I had
yet encountered: it was a broken, frozen landscape of flints and glinting pebbles, devoid of plants, of
color, even of shape.

It didn't sink in straight away, but already the pattern had become established in those first few days and
weeks of aimless activity. This purposeless and constant movement was to be my experience of war.

I never lost count of the days or the years. The three thousandth anniversary loomed ahead of me like an
unstated threat. We marched at intervals from one place to the next; we slept rough; we marched again
or were transported by trucks; we were billeted in wooden huts that were uninsulated and infested with
rats and which leaked under the incessant rains. At intervals we were withdrawn to be re-trained. An
issue of new or upgraded weapons invariably followed, making more training essential. We were always
in transit, making camp, taking up new positions, digging trenches, heading south or north or east or
anywhere to reinforce our alliesтАФwe were put on trains, removed from trains, flown here and there,
sometimes without food or water, often without warning, always without explanation. Once when we
were hiding in trenches close to the snowline a dozen fighter planes screamed overhead and we stood
and cheered unheard after them; at another time there were other aircraft, from which we were ordered
to take cover. No one attacked us, then or ever, but we were always on our guard. In some of the
northerly areas of the continent, to which we were sent from time to time, and depending on the season, I
was in turn baked by the heat of the sun, immobilized by thigh-deep mud, bitten by thousands of flying
insects, swept away by flooding snow-meltтАФI suffered sores, sunburn, bruises, boredom, ulcerated legs,
exhaustion, constipation, frostbite and unceasing humiliation. Sometimes we were told to stand our
ground with our grenade launchers loaded and primed, waiting for action.

We never went into action.

This then was the war, of which it had always been said there would never be an end.



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I lost all sense of contextual time, past and future. All I knew was the daily marking off of the calendar,
sensing the fourth millennium of the war approach ineluctably. As I marched, dug, waited, trained, froze, I
dreamed only of freedom, of putting this behind me, of heading back to the islands.

At some forgotten moment during one of our route marches, one of our training camps, one of our
attempts to dig trenches in the permafrost, I lost the notebook containing all the island names I had
written down. When I first discovered the loss it seemed like an unparalleled disaster, worse than
anything the army had inflicted on me. But later I found that my memory of the islands' names was intact.
When I concentrated I realized I could still recite the romantic litany of islands, still place them against
imagined shapes on a mental map.