"Lord Dunsany - Tales of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

somehow, so much about another battalion as one’s own. One’s own gets sort of
homely. And there they were wondering how their own officer was getting on, and
the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank. The bombs were going off thick. All
the Daleswood men were firing half right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn’t
last long, as if it would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on the
right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn’t notice the left. Nothing to speak of.

``Then a runner came from the left. `Hullo!’ they said, `How are things over there?’

```The Boche is through,’ he said. `Where’s the officer?’ `Through!’ they said. It didn’t
seem possible. However did he do that? they thought. And the runner went on to
the right to look for the officer.

``And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed over them, but
the bursts were further away. That is always a relief. Probably they felt it. But it was
bad for all that. Very bad. It meant the Boche was well past them. They realized it
after a while.

``They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of attack. Like a
bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A platoon was nothing to the Boche;
nothing much perhaps just then to anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for
one long generation.

``The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some one had heard
that he had died since the war. There was no one else in Daleswood but women and
children, and boys up to seventeen.

``The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and the barrage
further away. When they began to realize what that meant they began to talk of
Daleswood. And then they thought that when all of them were gone there would be
nobody who would remember Daleswood just as it used to be. For places alter a little,
woods grow, and changes come, trees get cut down, old people die; new houses are
built now and then in place of a yew tree, or any old thing, that used to be there
before; and one way or another the old things go; and all the time you have people
thinking that the old times were best, and the old ways when they were young. And
the Daleswood men were beginning to say, `Who would there be to remember it just
as it was?’

``There was no gas, the wind being wrong for it, so they were able to talk, that is if they
shouted, for the bullets alone made as much noise as breaking up an old shed, crisper
like, more like new timber breaking; and the shells of course was howling all the time,
that is the barrage that was bursting far back. The trench still stank of them.

``They said that one of them must go over and put his hands up, or run away if he
could, whichever he liked, and when the war was over he would go to some writing
fellow, one of those what makes a living by it, and tell him all about Daleswood, just as
it used to be, and he would write it out proper and there it would be for always. They
all agreed to that. And then they talked a bit, as well as they could above that awful
screeching, to try and decide who it should be. The eldest, they said, would know
Daleswood best. But he said, and they came to agree with him, that it would be a sort