Casca 40: Blitzkrieg by Tony Roberts

Author:Tony Roberts [Roberts, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B00KO3AKBW
Published: 2014-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The winter came, and it proved to be an endless sequence of training camps and classroom lectures. For Langer and his four crew, it provided a useful period in which to mold together into a decent team. Langer found the outgoing and loud Gus a foil for the quieter and taciturn Teacher, while Felix was a more relaxed figure than Steffan; nothing seemed to perturb Felix and he had the same indifferent attitude to everything. It wasn’t that he was lazy, he was efficient enough, but he constantly needed telling. Once told to do something he would, but he wouldn’t then go do the next logical thing to continue an action.

Steffan did his job competently enough, knowing what was expected of him. He always seemed a little nervous though, especially around Gus, who seemed to delight in telling him about the more outrageous tales of his life. Langer wondered whether they were just fiction designed to impress the wide-eyed boy. With Gus, you never knew.

Teacher was intelligent and took to his task like a duck to water. He sailed through the theory and after a couple of teething issues with the cannon, settled down into a more than competent gunner. Langer was very satisfied with him. His was quiet, but when he spoke everyone, even Gus, listened. Langer was amused that they all saw Teacher as the senior citizen of the crew, for at nineteen and a half centuries, Langer outdid all of them by far. It was the man’s appearance and habits that marked him as the ‘older’ man. At that Langer wondered for a while. He’d lived since roughly the beginning of the Christian period, so that now it was 1940 and that was roughly how old he was, give or take a year or two. He’d been around thirty when the Jew’s blood had turned him immortal, and therefore physically that was how old he appeared to all.

But mentally?

He once had a conversation a long time ago with Shiu Lao Tze, that Chinese sage, about that very thing. Did he change with the ages? Did he continue to ‘grow’ and ‘develop’ with each new experience? To be sure, he was no longer the unthinking grunt he’d been when a legionary. He’d ended up commanding whole armies, and for a time, an entire nation. He’d run holds, castles, provinces and other forms of area in his life, and all of them had required an ability to administer, command, and delegate. Those attributes he certainly had not had when he’d been an ordinary Roman soldier. So had he changed? Nobody could tell him for all were dead who had known him before the crucifixion, and he made sure that nobody remained with him for any length of time for fear of being found out for what he was.

He learned constantly, yes. He had to, in order to get along with an ever changing world. And it seemed these changes were gathering pace and speeding up. Could he keep pace with them? He didn’t know.

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