THE LONG MARCH INTO LEGEND

 

Major Richard Blaine and his Spartans find themselves, not up against a brick wall, but facing a sheer, unclimbable cliff.

The Nazi reinforcements are soon to arrive. What will they do?

THE LONG MARCH INTO LEGEND

“Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.”

 -Helen Hayes

 

Death is the only god that comes whether you want her to or not.

I knew that because she was right on my and André’s heels.

No legend matters. But man forgets reality and remembers legend.

I wonder what legend would be born of André’s photos of this day. Not that Life Magazine would publish his photos of Sentient as the Angel of Death.

Too sensational. Too unbelievable.

‘No. They would not which is why I have sent them to the McCord News Service and its attendant newspapers.’

‘But they have just been taken.’

“You have yet to learn? Time is meaningless to me. I flit from age to age as a pollinating bee from flower to flower.’

‘Sounds like a disconcerting way to experience life.’

‘And your way of experiencing it seem to me as static and frozen as a fly caught in amber.’

Sentient must have been playing her games with Time for André and I caught up with the other Spartans while they were still a third of the way to the cliffs.

We caught up with Stew Taylor first, of course. He did a double take when he saw André.

“That’s ….”

“That’s André Friedman. His true name. I will never tell you or any other Spartan a lie. I save that for the Army and politicians.”

Nurse Reynolds slowed to get by his side. “Mister, I can take my own clothes off. I don’t need any help from your eyes.”

Then, she sped up to run by Theo, who glared at our newest Spartan.

André flicked nervous eyes to me. “The sergeant is … dangerous, no?”

“Dangerous, yes,” surprisingly growled Porkins. “I’ve lost count of the men he killed right in front of me … and some of them had been too fresh with our nurse.”

Reese looked amused at his “brother.” “Yeah, and we don’t take too kindly to passes thrown at her neither.”

By that time, all of us had made it to the sheer cliffs above which where smoked the ruins of the machine gun emplacements.

 The ashy fingers of the flames reached up to the unfeeling cloudy skies as if in mute pleas for the slain souls of the German soldiers.

I could actually smell the stench of burnt flesh and spent cordite on the breath of the beach breeze.

Speaking of heavenly pleas, I saw Johnny Knight and Jace Mercer of all people take one look at the sheer, unblemished cliff, seemingly impossible to scale, and bow their heads in brief prayer as they crossed themselves.

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

We are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to push back the darkness of our doubts and fears.

We should proceed with utter caution, for the God we think asleep may actually be awake and take offense, drawing us out to where we can never return.

Agent Cloverfield snorted, “Hell’s Teeth, I left my mountain scaling boots in Auckland.”

A screech as loud as a diving, burning bomber pierced our ears.

I  glanced behind me and shouted, “Hit the dirt!”

All fifteen feet of the Angel of Death swept down upon us. Any atheist looking up at that sight would have immediately reconsidered his life options. I know I did.

The black wings, trimmed in flickering fingers of crackling fire, were thirty feet wide if they were an inch. So riveting were they that I barely took in the high-cheek-boned face.

All I saw were the slanted lids, half-closed over twin pools of white-hot lava. Then, with a hot WHOOSH! she was flying low over me and the others …

Straight into the sheer face of the cliff.

A massive explosion that Krakatoa might have envied vibrated the marrow of every bone in my body. All of us were covered in a heavy shroud of white pulverized cliff stone.

We coughed heavily like three-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day smokers. We probably would have enjoyed it more. At least we would have the boost of the inhaled nicotine.

From the shouts of all the Spartans, they felt much the same way.

I stiffened at what Sentient murmured in my mind.

“All right, Spartans. On your feet and into the tunnel the Angel of Death has just made for us. And do not touch the sides of this new tunnel. They are white-hot.”

Predictably, Stew Taylor asked a question: “How come the floor of it won’t melt our boots?”

“Ant” Vincent scoffed, “You ever run out of questions, Taylor?”

“Hey, it’s just who I am is all.”

Dusting himself off with a series of hacking coughs, Chuck Dickens said in between them, “C. G. Jung wrote of  this very characteristic: the persona he called it.”

He spat up a clot of phlegm as a cat would a hairball. “It is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society.”

Dickens blinked his eyes to clear them of the flying dust which his slapping had only made worse.

“It fittingly is a mask designed on the one hand to make a definite impression on others, and on the other hand, to conceal the true nature of the individual.”

Eric Evans groaned, “Would someone please translate that into simple English?”

Cloverfield shook his head. “I am suddenly very afraid, for I understood most of that.”

Rachel once again earned her reputation for being unflappable as she calmly put back on her tiny Spartan helmet and mused, “Well, you do not see that every day.”

Theo snapped, “You heard the Major. Get your as ….”

Rachel raised an amused eyebrow, and he did a midcourse correction, “ … ah, rears into gear and head into that tunnel.”

Lt. Stein moved to my side. “Any further orders, Rick?”

“Like Noah, we go in two by two, staying safe in the center, keeping our fingers off the sides and on our hands unburned.”

As Mercer and Floyd teamed together, Dimitri asked, “Any particular pairing?”

I was suddenly at a loss. Having huge chunks of missing memories from our time in the past was truly inconvenient … and unsettling.

“You know your pairings from Sicily. If you bicker, Sgt. Savalas will gladly assign you a partner.”

The sudden outbursts of groans and protests let me know I had guessed correctly. Each of them would have rather gargled penguin urine than have Theo pick for them.

“André Friedman and I will march in the lead.”

He protested, “Why in the lead?”

“You are our Lowell Thomas to my T. E. Lawrence. Any charging Nazi’s we will meet head on, and you can take the pictures, becoming legend.”

He paled and looked longingly behind us.

We had marched only a few yards, when he slowly turned to me. “Any chance I could go back on the ….”

With a low rumbling, the tunnel’s opening collapsed in on itself, leaving us trapped.

Fortunately, the glow from the white-hot walls illuminated the darkness somewhat.

Predictably, Stew Taylor whined, “Major. what are we going to do when those walls stop …. Ow!”

Eric Evans, next to him, snapped, “Maybe we’ll set your hair on fire! Make me joyful beyond dreams, Taylor, and keep the idiot questions to yourself.”

And so, staying true to our personas, we started our long march into darkness and legend.