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

desolation and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out round the
flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him; black puffs break out round
our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint tap-tapping. They have got their machine
guns working.

You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a railway, perhaps
a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a village, and hear English songs, but no
one who has not seen it can imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he
bear a desert clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by
some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country. Would it not be
glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like that?

Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only one field from
skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one goes with companions that this
event in our history has drawn from all parts of the earth. On that road you may hear
all in one walk where is the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they
laid a drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a farmer
lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee crop; you may hear
Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.

In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes of exclamation after
them, written up on notice boards among the ruins. Ruins and German orders. That
turning movement of Von Kluck’s near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it
we might have had ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may
comfort himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny shapes the
world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination can have had no place
amongst the scheme of things.

Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the road lifts its huge
muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and lifts again and fires. It is as though
Polyphemus had lifted his huge shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was
sitting, and hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty regularly
you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by, and it can be a very strong
wind indeed. One’s horse, if one is riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen
horses far more frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting
in the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no great attention
from man or beast.

And so we come in sight of the support trenches where we are to dwell for a week
before we go on for another mile over the hills, where the black fountains are rising.

A Walk in Picardy

Picture any village you know. In such a village as that the trench begins. That is to say,
there are duck-boards along a ditch, and the ditch runs into a trench. Only the village is
no longer there. It was like some village you know, though perhaps a little merrier,
because it was further south and nearer the sun; but it is all gone now. And the trench
runs out of the ruins, and is called Windmill Avenue. There must have been a windmill
standing there once.