"Garry Kilworth - We Are The Music Makers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kilworth Garry)

We are the Music Makers
a short story by Garry Kilworth

In the month of June, at the beginning of the century, the men began to
drift back from the wars. By July they were arriving in Bohemia by the
thousand, some still in soiled and shabby though recognisable regimental
uniform, but mostly they were in rags. Their muskets had been thrown away
to rust in foreign ditches. Their cannons and mortars were stuffed with
dirt and moss. Their swords were broken or hidden under rotten logs, along
with ammunition pouches full of percussion caps.
'It was a massacre,' Alexi said after the attack. 'We were cut down like
wheat under scythes.'
The colonel was shocked. 'What are you saying? It was a the turning point
of the battle. If we had not charged, the day would have been lost.'
The wars were not yet over, in fact they had only just begun again. But
this was not even their fight. The men of Bohemia had joined one army or
the other for various reasons, mostly to do with poverty rather than
patriotism, while their officers had gone out seeking to add glory to
their other accomplishments, needing to be rich in honour if not in
wealth.
'You are my friend, Alexi,' said the colonel, 'but I totally reject your
view of this incident.'
'It was no incident, it was a slaughter.'
There were those of course, who had returned with limbs missing, parts of
their bodies left lying in the mud of some alien land keeping company with
dead and rotting comrades. These men tended to cluster round the Charles
Bridge, in the beautiful city of Prague, where they begged for crusts of
bread. The narrow cobbled streets around the bridge, whose architecture
and statues were the envy of all other European cities, echoed with the
clump of wooden crutches, the scraping of dragged legs, the clip-clip of
the blind man's cane. They clogged the passageways under nearby arches in
the rain and hindered the carriages on the bridge when the sun shone.
Once the war has no more need of such creatures, cripples become an
embarrassment to the state.
'Henceforth,' muttered the colonel, turning from his former friend, 'we
are as strangers.'
'As you wish,' replied Alexi, stiffly, 'but you know, I'm not blaming you.
I'm simply giving my opinion. You should not turn from the truth because
it hurts.'
The authorities issued a decree that any man found loitering in the
streets, with no visible means of occupation, would be deemed a vagrant
and thrown into the city's prison. Thus their numbers were thinned and
those who remained behind gathered together such coin as they had and
purchased barrel organs and hurdy-gurdies, on which they played
punched-paper music written by Haydn, Handel and Mozart. In this respect
they had their occupations, required of them by law, and continued to ply
their trade on and around the Charles Bridge.
There was a cripple who ground his organ from first light to the snuffing
of the evening lamps. He stood on the palace side of the bridge, in the
shadow of a hero's statue, and filled the air around him with the strains