Nile Shadows

howitzers, watching them fire and recoil, fire and recoil. The cannon crews were moving quickly, hurrying back and forth as if they had a certain number of rounds to fire off that day.

What do you think? he shouted. Are they working against a quota of rounds they're supposed to expend?

Very likely, yelled Bletchley. Supplies have to be regulated for maximum effect in wartime, so naturally quotas and rationing are the order of the day.

Joe nodded, still groping in his mind for a rational explanation to this furious and relentless artillery barrage, aimed at nothing.

But aren't they wasting a lot of valuable ammunition? he shouted. Just firing off into the empty desert like that?

So it seems, yelled Bletchley, but no one has ever claimed war is a force for conservation. It spends and consumes and destroys, that's all. The only reason we seem to have it around is because there's a streak in man that finds it exhilarating. Or more accurately, the idea of it. Not one of our nobler streaks, but there you are. And I think it would also be safe to say the nature of that exhilaration won't bear very close scrutiny.

Agreed, thought Joe. It won't and doesn't. Because that streak is the killing of people and the exhilaration in that is just plain unspeakable, a blackness at the bottom of the soul. Very deep is the blackness, may we not call it bottomless?

Better try again, thought Joe, put it some other way to Bletchley. There has to be some explanation for behavior, even when it's idiotic. It may be human nature to want to bombard an empty desert, but someone as smart as Bletchley would have to have some kind of reasonable reason for it. The greater good? The grand design? The missing link and the unknowable universe?

Listen, shouted Joe. If you feel that way about it, the uselessness of war and so forth, why did you want to make the army a career? Family tradition aside.

I suppose because the army provides a form and a structure, yelled Bletchley. A regulation for everything. Not a reason for doing something, but a clear order that it's to be done. As human beings, we like that. Gods provide the orders for some people, political systems for others. But without orders and commands and regulations, the chaos of being is simply that. Chaotic. And that tends to be too hot a situation for most people to handle.

Too hot to handle, hummed Joe, recalling a bawdy line from one of Liffy's music- hall tunes, watching the artillerymen slam home shells and slam closed breechblocks as the howitzers puffed and recoiled, the air crackling and the dust billowing in the unending cannonade.

Hold on, yelled Bletchley. There's rough going here.

Joe lurched forward and grabbed hold of the handle in front of him. Rough going here, he hummed, recalling another line from one of Liffy's bawdy tunes. Off in the desert ahead he spied what appeared to be a railway boxcar coming into view. The boxcar was undersized and lying on its back, its wheels in the air with no railway tracks in sight.

How did that get out here? he shouted.

Bletchley was staring straight ahead, concentrating on the driving, unable to take his eye off the rough roadbed.

What is it? One of those old Forty and Eights?

Looks like it, shouted Joe, remembering the term that had been used in the last war for a small French freight car, so named because it had been able to carry forty men or eight horses to the slaughter at the front. But of course the French hadn't been fighting in the Egyptian desert then, they'd been dying back home in muddy trenches. Joe hummed, It's a long way to Tipperary.

Wouldn't it have been more logical to call those boxcars Forty or Eights? he shouted. After all, that's what they were.

Nothing very logical about war, Bletchley grimly yelled back.

All true, thought Joe. No arguing with that one.

In fact when you look back at the last war, yelled Bletchley, the whole thing seems utterly senseless.

Joe nodded and looked back at the endless barren wastelands. The overturned French boxcar had dropped out of sight, but now there was an overturned chariot standing on the horizon. It was of a heavy primitive design, its huge wooden wheels capped with iron that had rusted very little in the dry desert air.

I've seen one of those before, thought Joe. In pictures anyway. The Assyrians used them back at the beginning of the Iron Age when they were a-thundering out of the north, taking their turn as the much a-feared barbarians of the day.

Which last war were you referring to? he shouted.

How's that? yelled Bletchley.

I said, which last war? Whose? The one you said was utterly senseless when we look back on it?

Oh, well anybody's. What difference does it make? Don't all last wars look pretty much the same when you look back at them? Murder and mutilation and wreckage, and all for what?

For what? thought Joe. What? It's a regular Whatley, that's what.

Bletchley glanced at him sideways.

Are you all right? he yelled.

Not particularly, shouted Joe, but listen. What are you really afraid of, Bletchley? Can you tell me that?

What do you mean? In what context?

Personal context. Deep down, right there where you are in this world. What are you really afraid of?

The Germans winning the war, yelled Bletchley. I'd do anything to keep that from happening.

And that's surely reasonable, thought Joe, surely sound and sane and then some. The man doesn't want to let the Mongols in. Of course that anything of his is a warning to me in regard to Stern, but who would argue with keeping out these mechanized barbarians who go by the name of Nazis?

Bletchley? he shouted. Have you ever wondered why the Germans make so much out of defending the Eastern Front against the barbarians? National destiny, holy assignment, racial mission and so forth? Why is it the Mongols of this world always tell us they're defending us against the Mongols?

Human nature, yelled Bletchley. Men always justify wars by claiming they're fighting the barbarians. What they don't bother to add is that the reason wars are continuous in history is because the barbarians are inside us. Have you ever been in a crowd when it's transforming itself into a mob? There's a Genghis Khan on every side of you. Give any one of them a horde of men on horseback and you'd see the thirteenth century in flames again.

And that's the truth, thought Joe. And Bletchley is just plain sound today, his thinking as clear as a bell.

***

Soon they were passing other strange relics cast off in the wastes.

An abandoned battery of Napoleonic muzzle loaders loomed up beside them, facing south toward the heart of the Dark Continent, stubby three-pounders mired in the sand, the debris of another civilizing adventure in Africa. But apparently the muzzle loaders had been no match in their day for Lord Nelson's swift barkentines, one of which had brilliantly outmaneuvered Napoleon's cannons and was now resting comfortably on its side behind them, clearly commanding a superior field of fire.

A barkentine way out here in the desert, thought Joe. Extraordinary when you think of it, even though the winds of the Mediterranean have always been known for their treachery. But what can match man's, and I wonder what the local bedouin make of the sight? Probably they think Europeans are a little daft.

A single arch from an ancient Roman aqueduct came into view, a magnificent arch fully one hundred feet high and leading east or west as the case might be, barren desert stretching off in both directions. While not far away the solid surface of a well-engineered Roman road emerged from a sand dune and traveled at least ten feet before being swallowed up in another sand dune. There were also whole fleets of glittering sunspots on the sand, although they didn't seem to be going anywhere either.

Lord Nelson also had one eye, thought Joe.

But by far the most awesome spectacle Joe saw was an enormous siege machine bristling with fire buckets and catapults and battering rams, covered with animal skins in receding tiers so that it had roughly the shape of a