Flag, with his frost-benumbed mitts, readying to start down. I curse him in language that would get me strung up under tamer circumstances.
I can’t let him go down.
It has to be me.
I make it somehow, belayed by the line Flag lowers from the ledge.
Tollo doesn’t know me. Even when I shout in his ear. His leg is turned around completely. When I touch it, it’s hard as a block of stone.
“My cap,” he says. “Can you see my cap?”
He has lost his boar’s-tusk skullcap. It must have fallen off, he says. There it is. He points it out to me. About ten feet down, across the ice. “Can you get it for me?” he asks in a voice so faint I have to put my ear right next to the ice-hole which is his beard, and even then I can barely hear him. He is like a child. My heart is wrung. At the same time I hate him. I hate him for falling. The selfish bastard will kill me. My life will end on this face and all he wants is his salt-sucking cap.
“Let it go, Tollo.”
“My cap.” He says he has to have it.
“What for?”
He coughs something I can’t understand.
What? I shout at him.
“In hell,” he says. It will be disrespectful to appear without a cap.
Sure, why not? Why shouldn’t I die for his bung-fucked cap?
I get it. I plant it on his skull, beneath his fleece hood. I press my mouth to his ear: “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We rope Tollo under the arms, Flag and I. The back of his cloak is solid ice; it makes a sledge. If we climb, pitch to pitch, we can haul Tollo up behind us. One stage at a time. We start up. One traverse. Two. Except now Flag is failing too. He can’t talk. I fear for his extremities. I can still feel my own. I’m all right. Youth. Youth is everything.
“…the crest…” Flag manages to croak. He means we must regain the trail.
“Why? So we can die there instead of here?”
I have entered a state of rage so towering, words cannot give it expression. “Tollo!” I shout down. “How about pulling your weight? Use your arms, damn you!”
“Shut up,” barks Flag.
“Why didn’t he rope himself? We’re gonna top off because of this ass-wit.”
“Shut up.”
I keep babbling. I know I’m cracking but I can’t stop. A part of me has entered delirium and I know it, but another part remains surprisingly lucid. I figure I have half an hour before I lose all sensation in my hands and feet. Beyond that, what? An hour till I’m frozen head to foot. What is particularly galling about going into the books this way is that within twenty days there’ll be flowers on this slope. It will be spring. In a month, Panjshiris will be grazing sheep here. They’ll strip our corpses and jig over our bones-ours and however many other hundreds of our compatriots will have gone briskets-down before the column gets over these mountains.
“Wake up!”
I gape at Flag like a man surfacing from a nightmare. He bawls into my ear: “Got to make the trail!”
I can’t tell whether he’s lost his mind or I have. What’s waiting for us at the trail? Nothing. The column has moved on. We’ll never be able to track them in the dark, and certainly not sledging Tollo. Our only hope is if the section following us has come up. But they’d be crazy to do that. Cross the Clothesline in this cold and dark? Never. They’ve scratched out a camp somewhere below.
“Right,” I shout back. Make the trail. Good plan.
The way we climb is with the butts of our half-pikes. Plunge the spike into the ice, pull your weight up by the shaft. Knee first, then foot; when you know it’s solid, seat the rope over your shoulder, the one that’s hauling Tollo; then push up with that leg.
At places the slope isn’t bad. We can chop steps into the ice. Have we climbed a hundred feet or a thousand? I know I’m hallucinating. It seems like I can hear Biscuits’ voice. In Greek. Pretty good Greek too. She has waited for us. The column is gone but she’s still there, at the trail. That’s a good hallucination. I appreciate it. It’s like one of those dreams you have, where you say, By heaven, that is imaginative! I glance over to Flag, wondering if he’s seeing the same mirage I am. Apparently not. He just keeps climbing. By Zeus’s iron balls, he’s got guts. What a soldier! I’m proud to step off for hell beside him.
“Hey! Flag!” I’m going to tell him I love him; I don’t care how unmilitary it is.
“Shut up!”
I want to tell him about Biscuits. Where did she learn Greek so well? Must have been from Macks who had her before we came on the scene. She’s above us, shouting down. Something about a rope. “Grab it! Pull yourselves up!” I am really impressed with her Greek.
Flag struggles to catch the rope. This is strange. How can he be after the rope that’s in my mirage?
Now I’ve got the rope. Somehow we’ve reached the trail. Crawling. Facedown. Rolling over the lip, propelled by our knees. Stand? I can’t. Biscuits and Flag haul up the rope that I seem to remember is attached to Tollo. It occurs to me that this might not be delirium.
“Hey!”
Biscuits kneels over me. I’m on my face on the ice; she rolls me over.
Hey!
What?
She grabs me by the hair and shakes me so hard the roots almost come out.
“Hey!” she shouts into my ear. “Are you stupid?”
18
What saves our lives are Tollo’s fleece and military cloak. With these we roof the shallow kennel that Biscuits has chopped out of the ice. I am struggling, she tells me later, to drag Tollo in with us. It takes Flag pummeling me with both elbows (he can no longer feel his hands) before I understand our Color Sergeant is dead.
“He was croaked at the bottom,” Flag declares.
I’m furious. Why didn’t Flag tell me? He has made us break our backs. But I am in awe of him too. My God, what a soldier! What a friend.
“Strip the corpse!” Biscuits shouts over the wind. Without Tollo’s kit, the three of us cannot survive the night.
Never! I cry. And leave him naked?
The absurdity hits me. Flag too. We start laughing. We can’t stop.
It takes ten minutes to beat Tollo’s garments apart from his frozen flesh. Flag and I remain convulsed. Flag takes the boar’s-tusk cap. This prompts another round of hilarity. Tears freeze round our eyes; ice mats our beards.
Poor Tollo lies naked. Blue with frost. Slippery. We have to moor him like a dinghy, to a half-pike planted in the ice, to keep him from plunging again over the side. We are ashamed of our hysteria but we can’t stop.
We endure the endless night in our ice-hole, Biscuits and I, with Flag between us. His feet ride against my belly; she clamps his hands under her arms. In the morning, we are rescued by advance elements of the column coming up from behind. They prize us from our tomb, rigid as the dead. Incredibly, the day turns warm. By noon, when we reunite with Knuckles and Little Red, sent back in search of us by Stephanos, the sun blazes so fiercely that we have to strip our cloaks. We tie them atop the oxhide sledge on which we haul Tollo’s corpse.
The descent to the plains takes nine more days. It is on this stretch, the northern (sunless) flanks of the Hindu Kush, that the army’s suffering approaches its apogee. We transit the Khawak Pass for six days. It seems we will never get out. Twenty-two miles to the summit, twenty-four more to the Foothill Trail. Flag has vowed to pack Tollo all the way down to the plains; he will not see his mate interred in some icebound den, to be dishonored in
