"Smith, Wilbur - Courtney 01 - The Burning Shore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

He decided that he would not reach across to his gold half-hunter on the
inverted packing-case which acted as a bedside table. It would be time
all too soon. So he snuggled down in the blankets and thought about his
fear.

All of them suffered under the affliction of fear, and yet the rigid
conventions under which they lived and flew and died forbade them to
speak of it, forbade them to refer to it in even the most oblique terms.

Would it have been a comfort, Michael wondered, if last night he had
been able to say to Andrew as they sat with the bottle of whisky between
them, discussing this morning's mission, Andrew, I'm frightened gutless
by what we are going to do?

He grinned in the darkness as he imagined Andrew's embarrassment, yet he
knew that Andrew shared it with him. It was in his eyes, and in the way
the little nerve twitched and jumped in his cheek so that he had
constantly to touch it with a fingertip to still it. All the old hands
had their little idiosyncracies; Andrew had the nerve in his cheek and
the empty cigarette-holder which he sucked like an infant's comforter.
Michael ground his teeth in his sleep so loudly that he woke himself; he
bit the nail of his left thumb down into the quick and every few minutes
he blew on the fingers of his right hand as though he had just touched a
hot coal.

The fear drove them all a little mad, and forced them to drink far too
much, enough to destroy the reflexes of normal men. But they were not
normal men and the alcohol did not seem to affect them, it did not dull
their eyesight nor slow their feet on the rudder bars. Normal men died
in the first three weeks, they went down flaming like fir trees in a
forest fire, or they smashed into the doughy, shell-ploughed earth with
a force that shattered their bones and drove the splinters out through
their flesh.

Andrew had survived fourteen months, and Michael eleven, many times the
life-span that the gods of war had allotted to the men who flew these
frail contraptions of wire and wood and canvas. So they twitched and
fidgeted, and blinked their eyes, and drank whisky with every thing, and
laughed in a quick loud bray and then shuffled their feet with
embarrassment, and lay in their cots at dawn, stiff with terror, and
listened for footsteps.

Michael heard the footsteps now, it must be later than he had realized.
Outside the tent Biggs muttered a curse as he splashed into a puddle,
and his boots made obscene little sucking noises in the mud. His
bull's-eye lantern glowed through the canvas as he fumbled with the flap
and then he stooped into the tent.

Top of the mornin& Sir, his tone was cheerful, but he kept it low, out
of courtesy to the officers in the neighbouring tents who were not