A lifeless dog lay in front of the Sherman and reminded Dennison of a dog he had owned in E, a brown dog: here Tubby, here Tubby. Dog eager to lick your hands and grin. Cocker. Here Tubby.
The treads of the tank spun over gravel: Zinc's machine gun destroyed an emplacement on a roof: Millard's gun mowed down three men, rushing along an alley.
Landel signalled and they rumbled along another alley and the cannon blew apart the front of a store where Nazi gunners were firing. Above a dome, perhaps a mosque, a shell burst, hurling bricks and stucco over doors, the Sherman and along a street.
Dennison jazzed the bus down a wide street and townspeople fled ... ten or twelve on one side, bunched together, men and women, their clothing white and blue; their turbans white. Landel swung his machine gun to kill them: several dropped, a youngster, a boy, stumbled into the gutter, and lay there.
Spitting on the tank wall, Landel cursed them:
You goddamn sons of bitches ... why the hell are you out in the street ... don't you know no better?
Even with all the ports open the air inside the cab writhed. Gun powder stung their eyes and throats. The crewmen's faces were haunted. They stared out of ports and slits, leered, grimaced, mad, incredulous, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, deaf.
Dennison saw the sun directly ahead as the prow wrenched upward ...
Somewhere, sometime, he must do something about the sky, study it, understand its composition, figure out how it originated, whether it altered at night, how it was influenced by storms, changes in temperature.
Only a week ago Al had died on one of the morning attacks: Landel had bellowed through the intercom: he had seen Al crash onto the floor: they had wanted to lug him outside, into the air, but he had died in Dennison's arms, his head saturated with blood, a bullet in his brain.