Captain by Sam Angus

Author:Sam Angus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

GAZA

1917

In Sinai, Firkins took to talking about Samson and the Philistines, and how we were in the wilderness. Of course we could all see that without Firkins saying anything about it, but he kept on about how beyond Gaza there’d be fig trees and vines and flowers and milk and honey. We groaned and rolled our eyes but we had a terrible time of it at Gaza. We had two pitiful and bungled attempts at it. The second time we attacked Gaza was the same as the first—all choking dust and blinding sun. You can’t think, you see, when it’s like that, when the enemy is blanketed in smoke, and sand is spurting up and the men and horses around you are writhing and screaming. I was still on that young gelding at Gaza, and he was caught by shrapnel and that sent him rearing up, poor chap. I fell from him as he spun and fled wildly, reins trailing, for the back lines.

I staggered back, step by sinking step, mirage and madness mixed in me, reeling like a drunk in the soft sand, foaming at the mouth like a wild dog. Thirst is most agonizing at sundown and in the back lines I scrambled for the water on my hands and knees like a beast. My gelding was there with the Veterinary Corps, already bandaged, and Captain and Hey-Ho were there too in the back lines, going amongst the men who were naked and delirious, their tongues black and swollen.

It was a terrible journey from there back to the Wadi Ghuzzee, heads aching from the sun, eyes bloodshot with the blinding glare that came off the sand, stragglers falling and left to die in our wake, the blind linking arms, the whole desert and sky the color of dust, the dust so thick you could lose sight of the horse in front. Only by listening could I tell where the camels were, the mules, the limbers, the artillery wagons, and all the rattling paraphernalia of war.

In the dusk of the second day, the sky turned lurid, the light strange and fitful. A hot wind blew in, the heat of it increasing minute by minute till it had the blast of a furnace. My gelding was a noble thing and he never played up with me for nothing. When an immense cloud came at us, huge and gauzy, he dug his hoofs in and shook and quivered and pawed the sand. Officers were charging down the lines, their tempers ragged, urging us on. That cloud was coming towards us at a licking pace. My gelding put his head down and whimpered, and all around us men were cowering, and suddenly we were in the teeth of a storm, a hurricane-force wind, heavy with sand. I thought of Liza and the paddock with the elderly apple tree, in the lee of the westerly breezes. I was glad Liza couldn’t see then how the horses suffered, their eyes bloodshot and weeping with sand, their blind and stumbling attempts to move.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.