Redemption - Leon Uris [278]
The gunners broke down, tied their weapons to the lines, and lowered them. Colonel Markham continued to stand near Malone, confused as to what to do.
I went away from them with a growing feeling of fright as the last of the stragglers holding the rear guard went over the cliffside.
The Navy was really giving it to us. I went down, sensing a close hit. It splattered all about me. I looked up to see Markham being hurled off the cliff by concussion. Where the hell was…oh no…Malone was down. I took a couple of steps toward him, then saw it. The top of his head had been ripped off.
I can’t be the last one up here! I can’t be! Someone’s late pulling back! No! Come on! Wait…Willumsen on the dead run.
“Let’s go, Landers,” he said. “Our lines are cleared.”
“Where’s the Major and Jeremy?”
“They won’t be coming out,” he said, grabbing me hard. “I found them in a shellhole. They’re both dead.”
I don’t remember the march back. Nothing of it. Nor do I remember much of what happened for the next several days.
The first I recalled was hearing Chester’s voice through a mist, and I do remember reaching out to find him. I felt his hand on my shoulder and his fingers stroking my head. I knew I had to push through the dense field that shrouded my mind. As memory started to filter in I realized that in a moment I would be faced with something terrible.
I remembered and wanted to crawl back into the fog but the sharpness of pain was too powerful. I could hide it no more.
“You remember now?” Chester asked.
I grunted.
“You’ve a decision to make, Rory. You cannot delay it,” he said softly. “Rory, you have to tell me. Do you want to go on living?”
Oh Jeremy, Jeremy, my brother Jeremy!
Another voice, the sonorous sound of Modi. “If you will not accept that Jeremy is dead, then we must leave you alone with it,” he said.
“Don’t leave me alone,” I rasped.
“Look at me and tell me that Jeremy is dead,” Chester said.
“I can’t do it.”
“If you let it linger, it can put you into a serious black hole,” Modi said.
I felt a rage well up in me. This is no time to hound me! I thought they were my friends. I wanted to destroy something, anything. Modi smelled my rage and blocked the entrance.
“If you go out and kill a thousand Turks, Jeremy will still be dead,” Modi said.
“Get out of my way!”
“Sure,” Modi said, stepping aside.
I stood but could not balance myself in my weakness, and I slumped down again.
Chester started in on me again. “Do you choose to go on living or not?”
“What the hell do you know? And you, Modi, what made you desert the Russian Army! Don’t fucking preach to me! What do you know?”
Modi grabbed my hair and lifted my face so his beard was almost on me. “I’ll tell you what I know. My village was burned before my eyes by Cossacks. My wife was raped by twenty of them and murdered. My baby daughter was decapitated. It’s called a pogrom, Landers. Want me to sit and whimper with you! Yes? I live!”
Lord, I felt so low. I wrapped my arms about his knees and whispered that I was never more sorry in my life. “Tell me what to do,” I begged.
“In a place like this,” Modi said, “despair is a greater enemy than the Turks. You’ll rot as fast as a corpse in no-man’s-land unless you take what happened face-on. Do you want to live as a cripple or as a man?”
“I hear you.”
“Now tell us. Who died on Chunuk Bair?”
“Colonel Malone,” I said with voice dry and croaky.
“And Major Chris?”
“Yes, Chris is dead.”
“Who else?”
“Jeremy is dead.”
Having opted for life and admitting to Jeremy’s death was a very necessary first step. Either Chester or Modi was with me all the time, encouraging me to speak about Chunuk Bair and Jeremy.
Modi was right. Unless I took it on and fought it, I would be setting up a wreckage for a life. I needed power and wisdom from every source I could draw upon….
I had to convince myself I was not trying to assign the battlefield as a distant memory. A man must carry such as this for all his days. The question was, how much of the battle do I let dictate how I will live from now