Redemption - Leon Uris [196]
Mordechai Pearlman’s mind leapt ahead. He had been told bluntly by Lieutenant Jeremy that the sand was running through the clock a lot faster than they wanted it to.
“You have classroom, I saw.”
They walked over to the ring where the stadium seats had been built. One company at a time for each lecture. Four lectures a day. Give me a month, he thought. Thank God they know horses.
“Each company should have given men with special veterinary training. They will be used the same way you use medics. We have an aid station. We have them on the trail with mule trains.”
“I’ll talk to the Lieutenant tomorrow,” Johnny said.
“I want to pick these boys myself,” Modi asserted. “I train them, they’ll be great.”
Jesus! They’d come upon a work monster. They returned to Pig Island and kept going on the manual for four hours after the midnight oil was burned out. Modi stretched and produced a bottle of vodka.
“I know it’s not regulations, but I’m unregulated,” Modi said. “Besides, it’s the last bottle of Russian vodka in Palestine and I think we should finish it.”
Rory locked them in and Mordechai Pearlman opened wide his accordion and introduced them to the first of his repertoire of Russian-Yiddish-Hebrew-Arabic-and-Greek songs. It was a golden kind of moment. They were dead tired and tipsy, and Modi’s voice was filled with passion and soul. Not even knowing what the words meant, one could be brought to tears. Jesus!
“Got a wife, Modi?”
“What makes you think?”
“You’re an old fart, like Johnny. Past thirty.”
“Past forty,” Modi answered, “almost fifty. No, no wife.”
Modi turned over the vodka bottle and grimaced. Empty. “Only thing good to come out of Russia,” he said setting the bottle aside.
“Did I hear once that Jews don’t drink?” Johnny asked.
“They don’t,” Modi answered, “so I have to drink for all of them that don’t drink.” He scratched his beard in thought. “We’re all comrades, right?”
They agreed.
“I have something to tell you three men. It is something the rest of the battalion is not to know until combat. Obviously we will rotate our mule trains so each animal same and rests the same number of hours. It appears we will be working very tough terrain, and if we develop a static front we will have very little room to maneuver. Fahrstaht? Understand?”
“Aye.”
“We will have no room…no pasture to rehabilitate an injured animal and rest him up till he can return to the trains. Any animal too sick or lame, who can’t go back to duty in two or three days, is to be destroyed. New mules will be fed in to us.”
Rory fell back in his chair and closed his eyes.
“Rory, you are paddock master?”
“Aye.”
“And yourself, Johnny?”
“I’ve got a title, I’m not sure what it means or how to do it. Apparently there is nothing in the books on my kind of duty.”
“What is it?” Modi asked.
“I’m to be the beach master. Indicates we’ll be landing from ships, I’d say.”
“That answers a lot of questions about destroying the animals. We’re probably to be supplied from the sea. Well, Rory, you and I will have to make the decisions to destroy…and when we get the pack master, he can also do it.”
Rory led a silence in which he came close to fainting. He felt Pearlman pat his shoulder over and over. “That’s war. It’s worse to see men die.”
“At least they had a choice,” Rory mumbled.
“I don’t think so,” Modi answered, with a knowing of wars past.
Two days later Serjeant Yurlob Singh, Third Sikh Mountain Howitzers, was brought to Pig Island. He was slender but military-ramrod, turbaned, his beard meticulously groomed hair by hair. From a sect of legendary fighters, Yurlob was annoyed to be transferred, yet totally proper and totally unfriendly as he snapped out his answers. He gave off an air that anyone who asked him a question was to be answered as though he were an idiot for asking.
For the next several days Yurlob tortured Chester Goodwood, demanding letter-perfect instructions on the very intricate art of packing.
“Yurlob is driving us nutty,” Rory complained to Johnny Tarbox.