They drilled until darkness came. There were several commands covering the handling of the rifles: Shoulder arms. Present arms. Ready, Aim, Fire. At east. The movements were simple, but the weight of the rifles immediately made their arms ache. Aloj wondered if any of them would have strength enough o hold his weapon up, aim and fire with any accuracy, assuming they lasted long enough to even get into a battle. But he watched Davor, Vladisar, and Whistler closely and before long could make a rough copy of the movements, though none of it made any sense. If you were going to shoot somebody, you couldn't expect him to stand there while you shouldered arms, marched forward, dropped to one knee, and then took aim and fired.484Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiuz6Ixe8Vo
Just before full dark, Sergeant Oluja dismissed some of them and marched the rest downhill to where patches of forest covered the flanks of the mountain, almost out of sight of the tents. He lined them up----Aloj and the other new recruits and an equal number of somewhat more experienced boys.
"We will have an exercise now to see how much we have learned. That little rise there"---Sergeant Oluja gestured at a nearby bare knob---"is held by the enemy. We will advance through the trees---silently---to the bottom of the rise, creep up the slope, and then rush the crest and capture it. Keep your weapons up and out of the dirt and make no noise. Vladisar, take these five men. Davor, take the rest. Now...." He nodded toward the shadowy hill.
Aloj, Tokar, and three others fell to Davor's band. They turned and followed him as he angled sharply to the left. Davor ran lightly, making so little noise Aloj felt his feet didn't even hit the ground. Davor held his rifle close, and his back was bent so that he was crouched to take shelter behind the scant cover of bushes.
At the bottom of the little slope Davor paused. With gestures of hand, fingers, gun, he separated his group of five across perhaps 20 feet of space, but where all of them could still see him. Tokar fell over a tree root and Aloj squatted down too close to a bush and hooked the barrel of his rifle in its branches. When Davor's signal, a sharp hiss, came to move forward, both Aloj and Tokar were late. In the gathering darkness Aloj immediately realized he had lost his bearings too, but he knew that if he didn't keep up with the others he would surely take a blow from Sergeant Oluja. Yanking his rifle free of the bush he plunged forward and crashed full into Davor's back. By the time he had scrambled out of the way, recovered his sense of where objects were in the dark, and plunged forward again, he heard cheers break out above them. The other group, led by Vladisar, had "captured" the hill.
Davor stood up, spitting curses. "You filthy stinking pigs!" he hissed. "You couldn't find up from down! Can't you see---are you blind? Idiots? God---what kind of war can we fight with pigs like this?"
Aloj and Tokar drifted closer to the other recruits as Davor turned on his heel and led the way back toward Sergeant Oluja. They fell in line behind the sergeant, sullenly aware of the air of triumph of Vladisar's recruits. The winners said nothing, but the faintest shades of movement told it all, in the way they walked and carried their guns, the way they took the lead in the struggling column, shouldering the losers to the rear.484Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡElviR2bipO
Aloj glared at their backs as they trampled back up the hill. He was filled with a smoking rage. He didn't like being a loser. He hadn't asked for this damn job, but he didn't want to be a loser, stuck at the tail end of a line, laughed at. Dammit, he raged silently, I didn't want to be a soldier, but I damn sure don't want those bastards to beat me at it. I don't want anybody to beat me at anything. "I think we just lost the battle," he grunted to Tokar, who was just ahead of him.
"Battle?" said Tokar grimly as they stumbled through the darkness. "We just lost the war!"
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