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

counter-attacks, a regular bastard for Jerry. The French made it and did the Boche in
proper. I got the story from a man with a hell of a great big hammer, long afterwards
when that trench was well behind our line. He was smashing up a huge great chunk of
chalk because he said they all felt it was so damn silly.’’

The Road
The battery Sergeant-Major was practically asleep. He was all worn out by the
continuous roar of bombardments that had been shaking the dugouts and dazing his
brains for weeks. He was pretty well fed up.

The officer commanding the battery, a young man in a very neat uniform and of
particularly high birth, came up and spat in his face. The Sergeant-Major sprang to
attention, received an order, and took a stick at once and beat up the tired men. For a
message had come to the battery that some English (God punish them!) were making
a road at X.

The gun was fired. It was one of those unlucky shots that come on days when or luck is
out. The shell, a 5.9, lit in the midst of the British working party. It did the Germans
little good. It did not stop the deluge of shells that was breaking up their guns and was
driving misery down like a wedge into their spirits. It did not improve the temper of the
officer commanding the battery, so that the men suffered as acutely as ever under the
Sergeant-Major. But it stopped the road for that day.

I seemed to see that road going on in a dream.

Another working party came along next day, with clay pipes and got to work; and next
day and the day after. Shells came, but went short or over; the shell holes were neatly
patched up; the road went on. Here and there a tree had to be cut, but not often, not
many of them were left; it was mostly digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing
wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards, and filling up with stones. Sometimes the
engineers would come: that was when streams were crossed. The engineers made
their bridges, and the infantry working party went on with the digging and laying down
stones. It was monotonous work. Contours altered, soil altered, even the rock beneath
it, but the desolation never; they always worked in desolation and thunder. And so the
road went on.

They came to a wide river. They went through a great forest. They passed the ruins of
what must have been quite fine towns, big prosperous towns with universities in them.
I saw the infantry working party with their stumpy clay pipes, in my dream, a long way
on from where that shell had lit, which stopped the road for a day. And behind them
curious changes came over the road at X. You saw the infantry going up to the
trenches, and going back along it into reserve. They marched at first, but in a few days
they were going up in motors, grey busses with shuttered windows. And then the guns
came along it, miles and miles of guns, following after the thunder which was further
off over the hills. And then one day the cavalry came by. Then stores in wagons, the
thunder muttering further and further away. I saw farm-carts going down the road at
X. And then one day all manner of horses and traps and laughing people, farmers and
women and boys all going by to X. There was going to be a fair.

And far away the road was growing longer and longer amidst, as always, desolation