Chapter Fifty-Two
As Pushkin said: “There is an ecstasy in battle, on the very edge of the precipice…” It’s true. All our lives we have wondered why the generation of so-called “war poets” remained stuck in a war that was over long ago, as if there was nothing happening in the life around them any more.
And whenever I asked Afghanistan and Chechnya veterans, or men who fought in Batken, what they felt in battle, their eyes glittered and they looked away.
I can only try to guess what Belgi felt as he held his smoke-blackened gun at the ready somewhere high in the mountains, near the Turo glacier that will never be anything more than a geographical name for us – up among the blinding, almost black, snow, behind one of the rare, sharp rocky outcrops that protected them by night from the pi
