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

of waste to save the life of a man what had had his good time, and they ought to
send the youngest, and they would tell him all they knew of Daleswood before his time,
and everything would be written down just the same and the old time remembered.
``They had the idea somehow that the women thought more of their own man and
their children and the washing and what-not; and that the deep woods and the great
hills beyond, and the plowing and the harvest and snaring rabbits in winter and the
sports in the village in summer, and the hundred things that pass the time of one
generation in an old, old place like Daleswood, meant less to them than the men.
Anyhow they did not quite seem to trust them with the past.

``The youngest of them was only just eighteen. That was Dick. They told him to get
out and put his hands up and be quick getting across, as soon as they had told him one
or two things about the old time in Daleswood that a youngster like him wouldn’t
know.

``Well, Dick said he wasn’t going, and was making trouble about it, so they told Fred to
go. Back, they told him, was best, and come up behind the Boche with his hands up;
they would be less likely to shoot when it was back towards their own supports.

``Fred wouldn’t go, and so on with the rest. Well, they didn’t waste time quarrelling,
time being scarce, and they said what was to be done? There was chalk where they
were, low down in the trench, a little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great
block of it loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on the big
bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood. They would write where it was
and just what it was like, and they would write something of all those little things that
pass with a generation. They reckoned on having the time for it. It would take a direct
hit with something large, what they call big stuff, to do any harm to that bowlder.
They had no confidence in paper, it got so messed up when you were hit; besides, the
Boche had been using thermite. Burns, that does.

``They’d one or two men that were handy at carving chalk; used to do the regimental
crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that. They decided they’d do it in reliefs.

``They started smoothing the chalk. They had nothing more to do but just to think
what to write. It was a great big bowlder with plenty of room on it. The Boche
seemed not to know that they hadn’t killed the Daleswood men, just as the sea
mightn’t know that one stone stayed dry at the coming in of the tide. A gap between
two divisions probably.

``Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything. He was afraid they might cut
them down because of the war, and no one would know of the larks they had had
there as boys. Wonderful old woods they were, with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing
low, and tall old oaks over it. Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves
were like in the wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, `Great
solemn rows,’ he said, `all odd in the dusk. All odd in the evening, going there after
work; and makes you think of fairies.’ There was lots of things about those woods, he
said, that ought to be put down if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to
be when they knew it. What were the good old days without those woods? he said.

``But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with scythes, working all