I missed the detail that Fourre's guards are "...hairy..." (p. 13), unlike regular soldiers.
Child-packs hide in a ruined cathedral and attack armed men with broken bottles and rusty bayonets.
The story begins with rain and, on its second page:
"The thin, sad rain blew into his face and weighted his beard. Night rolled out of the east, like a message from Soviet lands plunged into chaos and murder." (p. 14)
Of course the rain itself is not sad but we get the idea and are used to an identification of weather with emotions. Can we imagine that the rain is apologizing? War has passed, leaving ruins. A storm has passed, leaving a merely thin rain. That second sentence sounds familiar:
"The last thing he heard was thunder. It sounded like the hoofs of horses bearing westward the Hunnish midnight." (Time Patrol, p. 465)
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Even regular soldiers can get DISHEVELED in frontline, field combat conditions when it becomes very difficult to maintain military neatness. But, of course you knew that!
Sean
Everyone gets filthy after a while at the sharp end. Until insecticides, lice infestation was always nearly universal too -- and that killed whole armies because lice carry typhus.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Too true! I have read of how many armies were destroyed more by disease and lice than by enemy action.
Sean
I think Anderson's point was just that Fourre's men did not have military haircuts.
Kaor, Paul!
Hmmmmm, at that particular point in "Marius," possibly! Mention was made of how Fourre's men had to settle for bits and pieces of different kinds of ragged uniforms.
Sean
Recent research has shown it was typhus that killed Napoleon's "Grand Army" in Russia, not the cold. Or not directly -- the cold made them huddle together and wear every scrap of cloth they could and never take it off. That made an ideal environment for swapping lice around, and the typhus piggybacked on the lice.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Meaning it was even more a mistake for Napoleon to stay on Moscow all those weeks after capturing it. The Emperor should have cut his losses and retreated westwards before the weather got really bad.
Sean
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