Marching Through Georgia Read Online Free PDF

number of things: a long scar on one thigh, certain memories, and a field-promotion to Centurion's rank. When the 1st Airborne Chiliarchy was pulled back into reserve after the fall of Milan, the promotion was confirmed; a rare honor for a man barely twenty-four. With it came fourteen-day leave passes to run from October 1st, 1941, and unlike most of his comrades, he had not disappeared into the pleasure quarter of Alexandria. The new movement orders had already been cut: Draka Forces Base Mosul, Province of Mesopotamia. Paratroopers were cutting-edge assault troops; obviously, the High Command did not expect the de facto truce with Hitler to last. And that would be a more serious matter than overrunning an Italy taken by surprise and abandoned by its Axis allies. It was well for a man to visit the earth that bore him before he died. He would spend his leave in Oakenwald, the von Shrakenberg plantation, now that the quarrel with his father had been patched up. After a fashion.
    Travel space was scarce, as mobilization built toward its climax, but even in the Draka army it helped to be the son of an Arch-Strategos , a staff general. A place was found on a transport-dirigible heading south with a priority cargo of machine-parts; two days nonstop to the high plateau of southern Africa. He spent the last half-hour in the control gallery, for the view; they were coming in to Archona from the north, and it was a side of the capital free citizens seldom saw, unless business took them there. For a citizen, Archona was the marble-and-tile public buildings and low-rise office blocks, parks and broad avenues, the University campus, and pleasant, leafy suburbs with the gardens for which the city was famed.
    Beyond the basin that held the freemen's city lay the world of the industrial combines, hectare upon hectare, eating ever deeper into the bush country of the middleveld. A spiderweb of roads, rail-sidings, monorails, landing platforms for freight airships. The sky was falling into night, but there was no sleep below, only an unrestfulness full of the light of arc-lamps and the bellowing flares of the blast furnaces; factory-windows carpeted the low hills, shifts working round the clock. Only the serf-compounds were dark, the flesh-and-blood robots of the State exhausted on their pallets, a brief escape from a lockstep existence spent in that wilderness of metal and concrete.
    Eric watched it with a fascination tinged with horror as the crew guided the great bulk of the lighter-than-air ship in, until light-spots danced before his eyes. And remembered.
    In the center of Archona, where the Avenue of Triumph met the Way of the Armies, there was a square with a victory monument. A hundred summers had turned the bronze green and faded the marble plinth; about it were gardens of unearthly loveliness, where children played between the flower-banks. The statue showed a group of Draka soldiers on horseback; their weapons were the Ferguson rifle-muskets and double-barreled dragoon pistols of the eighteenth century. Their leader stood dismounted, reins in one hand, bush-knife in the other. A black warrior knelt before him, and the Draka's boot rested on the man's neck.
    Below, in letters of gold, were words: To the Victors . That was their monument; northern Archona was a monument to the vanquished, and so were the other industrial cities that stretched north a thousand kilometers to Katanga; so were mines and plantations and ranches from the Cape to Shensi.
    Eric slept the night in transit quarters; he got the bed, but there were two other officers on the floor, for lack of space. He would not have minded that, or even their insistence on making love, if the sexual athletics had not been so noisy… In the morning the transport clerk was apologetic; also harried. Private autocars were up on blocks for the duration, mostly; in the end, all she could offer was a van taking two Janissaries south to pick up recruits from the plantations. Eric