Alex_ander: переводы

→In the course of a half-century or more spent in the armed services I have often had cause to remark upon the fact that, among the military, comradeship, honour and kindliness all decrease the further one gets from the front line. In my younger days I would often wonder why this should be; but it was only with time that it gradually dawned upon me that it is precisely those qualities of honesty, selflessness and courage that tend to land men in the firing line—and their opposites that facilitate the wangling of safe little jobs in the rear.

→I tried to comfort her by saying that her fiancé was not killed, just missing, and that a patrol might yet find him alive in the mountains. But I knew that it was hopeless: that he had probably died of cold and shock on the first night. And I think that she knew as well. I left her parents to comfort her and walked back to the flying field. On the Carso the guns were thundering away in the preparatory barrage for the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo, the Italians having pushed forward some three kilometres since mid-September at a cost of about 150,000 lives.

→They gave me the job of breaking the news to Magdalena, there in the front room of her father’s house in Caprovizza. I had expected tears, but the girl just became dreadfully quiet, the colour draining from her normally rosy face as if someone had opened a tap.

→The glacier will make its grinding way down the mountain trough, a metre or so a year, until one summer it will melt and crumble open at the bottom of the valley to reveal Toth’s frozen body and the remains of the aeroplane, perhaps thousands of years hence, when we are all dust and the Habsburg Monarchy (if anyone remembers anything about it at all) will be known only to scholars: one with the kingdom of the Seleucids, the Egyptian Second Dynasty and all the other gaudy, tinsel-and-paste empires that were to have lasted for eternity.

→I realised suddenly that something was wrong, even if at first I put it down to the light-headedness of exhaustion: I had stopped walking, but I was still moving perceptibly downhill. I tried desperately to scramble sideways on to firm snow. Too late. I went over, then was buried by the sliding white mass, then surfaced for a moment, then went under again like a swimmer being swept over a weir.

→I quickly said the Act of Contrition—then launched myself into space. The belly-landing on the filthy snow beneath knocked the breath out of me, and I almost rolled over with the tin sheet on top of me. There were shouts from above, and lights, then pistol shots as I hurtled away into the dusk down a near-vertical ice-slope. But luck was with me. An unknown distance later I came to an abrupt halt in a snowdrift among trees.

→“Tenente, are you in there? Open this door and come out with your hands above your head or I shoot at the count of ten. Uno, due, tre . . .”

→I had my leather gauntlets in my pockets, so I put them on to save my hands from being cut to pieces by the edge of the metal. It seemed like suicide: for all I knew the slope below might run down into the darkness, then turn into a five-hundred-metre sheer drop. I stood on the seat holding the makeshift sledge in front of me, trying to nerve myself to jump. Suddenly the door rattled.

→I tried the back wall, above the board with a hole in it which served as the seat. A sheet of tinplate was loose. Slowly and carefully I worked it free and pulled it out. Snowflakes came pouring in through the gap. It was about a metre and a half long by perhaps three-quarters of a metre across. It might be worth a try. I placed it on the seat, stood on it and bent the front edge upwards to make a crude toboggan.

→“Nice piece of work. But these overalls—did you capture them from the Austrians as well? Ours are black, not brown, and they have a fur lining. I know because we had to go up last month to bring down the body of one of our fliers. But don’t you want to take the jacket off?” “No, no thank you. These jackets have to dry on the body, otherwise they get stiff.” I realised that if I did not make my escape now it would soon be too late. “Sergente, I must go outside—you understand.” “Ah yes, the latrine’s out along the path there. I’ve kept it swept of snow.”

→“I picked it upon the Isonzo last year and decided to keep it. It’s better than our issue.” This was nonsense and he must have known it: the 9mm Steyr pistol must have been one of the most substandard military firearms ever devised. I only carried mine because regulations required it—and to put a bullet through my head if need be to escape death by fire. He examined it.

→“We’ve been using this rifugio as a base all summer,” he said, pouring me a steaming tin mug of coffee, “but we’re going to have to move down the mountain in a few weeks I reckon. The snow’s early this year and they all say it’s going to be a hard winter.” “Has there been much fighting up here?” “Not a great deal so far. There’s been a lot going on down in the Tofane and the Marmolada these past few months, quite heavy some of it. But for the time being it looks like neither our generals nor the Austrians want these mountains badly enough to do any serious fighting over them.” “Where are the lines? Are they far from here?”

→The Sergeant’s men were not too much trouble: to my surprise, most of them were not Tyroleans but came from the Abruzzi or even further south. But Agorda himself was a tougher proposition. He was a local man—his peacetime job had been as a mountain guide in Cortina d’Ampezzo—but he had travelled widely enough in northern Italy to be able to pick me up on more than one detail of my story.

→My flying-boots had smooth soles and the first of the winter’s snow was making the crags slippery, while the windeddies tried their best to pluck me from the cliff as I panted in the thin air. Then at last, after an infinity of scrambling and clawing, I found myself on the saw edge of the ridge, perhaps a thousand metres above the glacier, where I could just make out the wreck of the aeroplane lying in the snow.

→But at last I reached the edge of the glacier, a chaotic jumble of ice-blocks and fallen boulders where the mountainside and the billions of tonnes of ice had spent millennia grinding against one another. The climb up the rock-face must have taken me a good hour and a half.

→I took the greatest care crossing the glacier, probing gingerly in front of me with a broken wooden strut. Even so I slipped into a small crevasse at one point and spent five or so terror-filled minutes dragging myself back over the edge, lying exhausted on the ice with wildly beating heart before I was able to get up and go on.

→Before I left I assured Toth as best I could in my execrable school-Latin that he would soon be rescued: that the Dolomites were really not much more than a mountain park criss-crossed with paths, where even maiden aunts could come “rockclimbing” in their long loden skirts and little hats with the cord around the brim. As I set off I wished that I felt as confident as I sounded about the suburban tameness of this particular Alpine range.

→Surely we would have been missed at Judenburg by now. I also moved up the machine gun near him, cocked it and told him to fire it if he heard searchers. For myself I took the aeroplane compass and the rocket pistol.

→I knew in particular that I must not attempt to follow the glacier down to wherever it went, winding out of sight among the peaks: my brother and I had both nearly perished on the Oetztal glacier in 1908 when we had attempted something similar. No, I must leave Toth and head for the edge of the glacier, then climb the rock-face of the valley side and get over the ridge into the next valley, which might be deeper and extend below the snowline.

→We could not fly under it because of the mountains, we could certainly not fly over it, and we could no longer avoid it by flying around it. Our only line of retreat now was to turn around and fly due south—straight towards the Italian lines with a pouch of ultra-secret documents on board. No. I swallowed hard; duty left only one course open: we would have to try to fly through it, hoping that it was only a line storm and that we would emerge on the other side before we ran into a mountain-top.