Legion of Glory

 

1.

The terrorists stood behind a long yellow banner on which red words were painted.  They had come in great numbers on foot or by bicycle.  The Metro was closed and the buses detoured far around the place where the terrorists had gathered so as not to feed the mob of rioters.

The day was warm and moist.  The Colonel watched as bottles and paving stones flew through the air. Those toward the rear of the procession were also throwing things and the projectiles fell short, landing amidst the front ranks of the terrorists.  The Colonel saw a stone knock down a woman in a blue vest, her face masked against tear gas.  He thought that the security forces would surely be blamed for that injury.  A couple of bottles burst on the pavement in front of him and a questionable liquid splashed in the air.  

So far the soldiers were showing forbearance and good order.  The command was to shoot to wound, not kill.  Dead terrorists just meant more funerals and each of these ceremonies led to additional rioting.  Wounded terrorists were a burden to their movement and a warning more severe, the Colonel thought, than dead martyrs.  

The terrorist mob was a river of people with its headwaters in the suburbs.  All the alleys and side-streets were tributary to the rioters in the public square.  Signs surged on the rippling spine of the crowd.  The lettering was sloppy and words were misspelled.  Terrorists, the Colonel thought, are poor spellers.  He looked to the periphery of the mob: it was important that the rioters not flank the triple line of security forces deployed across the square.  More bottles and rocks arced overhead.  The troops batted them down with their rifles or riot batons.  Some mortars were deployed behind the Colonel and he heard their muzzles coughing as they tossed tear gas canisters in high trajectories down into the mob.

The rain of rocks and bottles ceased.  The terrorists were singing their marching song.  The Colonel thought that this was a good thing – people who are singing aren’t likely to pitch projectiles at the security forces.  He had heard the song before, enough times that he almost knew the words, but had never really paid much attention to it.   He noticed the song to the extent of recognizing that people who are singing aren’t attacking, or, at least, not yet.

The song was built on the melody of an American pop tune that had been played frequently a decade earlier.  The Colonel listened for a moment.  He recalled that he and a girlfriend had danced to that music in a discotheque several years before.  The tune made him a little nostalgic and brought warm memories to him. Why was it that the subversives and hooligans had all the best songs?

At the back corner of the plaza, there was some kind of skirmish.  Some shots sounded.  The Colonel saw two armored personnel carriers slowly lumbering into position along the side of the terrorist procession.  More tear gas canisters burst on the pavement and the air was stinging.  The marching song broke into fragments, here and there a choir of voices, it seemed, still shouting out the words but without melody.  

The terrorist mob suddenly seemed to boil, hissing like the monsoon rain when it fills city lanes with water almost hip-deep and flushes away all the debris in the gutters.  The Colonel saw the shadows of projectiles fleeing across the pavement like black birds.  He didn’t need to give the order to fire.  The troops were shooting sporadically into the crowd on their own initiative and some of the terrorists were motionless under the big yellow banner with red letters.     

2.

That night, at the barracks, the Colonel heard some of the troops gloating about terrorists that they had shot.  The Colonel thought that these remarks were tasteless and he pretended not to hear them.

In the toilet, one of men was whistling the terrorist’s marching song.  The notes were clear and piercing.  

The Colonel admonished the man: “Soldier, who’s side are you on?”

“What do you mean?”  The man asked him.

“That song you’re whistling,” the Colonel said.

The soldier looked bewildered.  Then, he said: “Oh, I hadn’t even noticed.  It’s a catchy tune.  It gets caught in your head.”

“Be more careful,” the Colonel said.  

3.

The terrorists returned the next day in even greater numbers.  But the rioting was anticipated.  The Colonel’s men stood to the rear of the front-line of armored soldiers.  Bottles and cobblestones rained down, rebounding off the shields that the front-line troops wielded.  

The Colonel heard the marching song rising from within the mob.  The melody sounded wind-borne, inflated somehow by the humid breeze, amplified by the concrete towers surrounding the square.  The Colonel remembered his girlfriend and dancing with and resolved to ignore the song.  But today the singers seemed particularly robust and enthusiastic and the Colonel thought that he heard harmony in some of the stanzas.  There were endless words affixed to the song, but they didn’t matter – only the melody had significance and it rose and fell, climbing to high notes that vibrated over the crowd.  

“There’s no reason we shouldn’t sing as well,” the Colonel said to his adjutant.  He ordered that the supporting troops in his column sing their regimental tune, “Legion of Glory.”  The men did as commanded, but, reluctantly, it seemed – their notes were haphazard, words pronounced hesitantly as if half of the men didn’t know the verses that they were supposed to be singing.  “Legion of Glory”, the Colonel thought, is a dull, listless tune, dour and gloomy and monotonous without the fine fire and esprit of the terrorist’s song.  

A bottle ricocheted off the pavement in front of him and smashed into his shin.  The men behind him kept singing monotonously like robots.  Waves of melody rolled across the columns of terrorists.  The soldiers in the front line, dropped their shields, knelt and fired into the mob.  The Colonel wasn’t sure whether they were using live ammunition or rubber bullets.  A swath of terrorists dropped to the concrete and their song turned into a high-pitched atonal wail.  

4.

After his evening meal, the Colonel paced back and forth across the parade-ground between the barracks.  Fires set in the city’s center painted the sky orange and red.  The Colonel found that his steps fell into a certain rhythm.  Then, he found himself humming a tune.  To his dismay, he realized that he was humming the terrorist’s marching song.  He jammed a cigarette into his lips and began to smoke to avoid singing along with the terrorist’s melody.  Even when he was silent, however, the song vibrated in his imagination.  For some reason, the melody was caught in his mind and he couldn’t expel it.

5.

Even more terrorists had gathered in the square the next day.  The city workers had only just washed away the blood stains from the day before when the mobs appeared, crowding forward toward the ranks of security forces.  The same badly spelled placards and banners bobbed over the mass of people.  All sorts of things were flung through the air and dropped among his troops.  The Colonel knocked away projectiles and heard stones rattling like hail on the pavement.  

He wished the protesters would sing, but they didn’t.  The soldiers and the terrorists mingled in hand-to-hand combat.  Tear gas boiled off the ground.  Far away, in an alley somewhere, the terrorists were singing, but the melody was distant and hard to hear.  Nonetheless, it seemed to resound in the Colonel’s ear.  

A thunderstorm covered the sky and obliterated the city streets with vertical sheets of rain split by lightning.  

6.

Crowd control was going poorly.  Many of his men had suffered minor wounds in the fighting.  Several trucks came to cart the dead terrorists from the square.  The bodies were sodden and heavy.  Far more rioters were thought to have been killed, but their bodies had been dragged away from the square by their fellow rebels.  

The Colonel thought that the authorities should ban people from singing the terrorist anthem.  The song seemed to be giving the hoodlums strength.  

7.

The next several days were for funerals.  The people who gathered for the funerals were different from the mobs that attacked the police.  But, after each burial, great choruses of mourners sang the terrorist anthem.  The Colonel and his men watched the funerals from a distance.  The song inspired the hooligans to lay down in a solid carpet at several intersections.  City police rode on horseback over the protestors dashing them with the sharp hooves of their horses.  But, when one person was injured, another took his place.

8.

The riots were getting worse, more violent and deadly.  A soldier died when a rock split open his skull.  There was sniper fire and it wasn’t always entirely from the security forces.  When the Colonel sent his men hurtling down the streets on patrol, they quick-marched past acres of burned buildings.

9.

One morning a large mob of terrorists, most of them women and children, had gathered in the plaza.  Their voices were raised in song.  The Colonel thought that he could sing as well as these hooligans, that he had a better and more robust voice.  So, he decided to step forward and show the terrorists that he knew their song as well as they and that he could sing it even more vigorously. 

The heroic melody surged in the humid air.  The Colonel stepped forward, advancing through the open space between the ranks of his men and the terrorists.  Some bottles bursts before him and a couple of tear gas canisters dropped on the pavement were whirling around like tops, hissing and jetting fumes into the air.

The Colonel had a beautiful tenor voice and he began to sing the terrorist anthem. Something knocked him down and he heard the shot barked off the concrete walls of the towers only after he had fallen face down on the pavement.  In his mind, the melody continued even as the darkness gathered around him.