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

for years, until all the fields are ominous with it, but the very fields themselves have
been mutilated until they are unlike fields, the woods have been shattered right down
to the anemones, and the houses have been piled in heaps of rubbish, and the heaps
of rubbish have been scattered by shells. We see no more trees, no more houses, no
more women, no cattle even now. We have come to the abomination of desolation.
And over it broods, and will probably brood for ever, accursed by men and accursed by
the very fields, the hyena-like memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so many bones.

It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness to know that the monument to it cannot
pass away, to know that the shell holes go too deep to be washed away by the healing
rains of years, to know that the wasted German generations will not in centuries gather
up what has been spilt on the Somme, or France recover in the sunshine of many
summers from all the misery that his devilish folly has caused. It is likely to be to such as
him a source of satisfaction, for the truly vain care only to be talked of in many mouths;
they hysterically love to be thought of, and the notice of mankind is to them a mirror
which reflects their futile postures. The admiration of fools they love, and the praise of
a slavelike people, but they would sooner be hated by mankind than be ignored and
forgotten as is their due. And the truly selfish care only for their imperial selves.

Let us leave him to pass in thought from ruin to ruin, from wasted field to field, from
crater to crater; let us leave his fancy haunting cemeteries in the stricken lands of the
world, to find what glee he can in this huge manifestation of his imperial will.

We neither know to what punishment he moves nor can even guess what fitting one is
decreed. But the time is surely appointed and the place. Poor trifler with Destiny, who
ever had so much to dread?

A Walk to the Trenches

To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all roads before they
end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a trench, even as a road, has its
beginnings somewhere. In the heart of a very strange country you find them suddenly.
A trench may begin in the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a
rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by many men. As to who
is the best builder of trenches there can be little doubt, and any British soldier would
probably admit that for painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few
to rival Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and comfort, and
it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who would deny it.

You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come perhaps to a wood
in an agony of contortions, black, branchless, sepulchral trees, and then no more trees
at all. The country after that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the
map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and radiant with
orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium —- or whatever it be —- is all
gone away, and there stretches for miles instead one of the world’s great deserts, a
thing to take its place no longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and
the Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named the Desert
of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the trenches. Overhead
floats until it is chased away an aëroplane with little black crosses, that you can scarcely
see at his respectful height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the