"S. M. Stirling - Draka 01 - Marching Through Georgia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

well-justified nightmares; if those magnificent young animals
could suffer their quota of broken bones and wrenched backs, so
could he. And they would be jumping into the arms of Hitler's
Wehrmacht; his years reporting from Berlin had not endeared
him to the National Socialists…

He glanced across the echoing gloom of the cargo hold to
where Eric sat, smoking a last cigarette. His face was impassive,
showing no more emotion than it had at briefings around the
sand table in Mosul. A strange young man. The eagle-faced blond
good looks were almost a caricature of what a landed aristocrat
of the Domination of the Draka was expected to be; so was his
manner, most of the time. Easy enough to suppose there was
nothing there but the bleakly efficient, intellectual killing
machine of legend, the amoral and ruthless superman driven by
the Will to Power whom Nietzsche had proclaimed.

He had mentioned that to Eric, once. A useful myth, had been
the Draka's reply. That had led them to a discussion of the
German thinker's role in developing the Domination's beliefs;
and of how Nietzsche's philosophy had been modified by the
welcoming environment he found among the Draka, so different
from the incomprehension and contempt of his countrymen.

The Domination was founded by losers, Eric had said, letting
an underlying bitterness show through. Ex-masters like the
Loyalists and all those displaced European aristocrats and
Confederate southerners; prophets without followers like
Carlyle and Gobineau and Nietzsche. The outcasts of Western
civilization, not the "huddled masses" you Yankees got. My
ancestors were the ones who wouldn't give up their grudges.
Now they're coming back for their revenge.

Dreiser shrugged and brought his mind back to the present,
tugging at the straps of his harness one more time. Times like
this you could understand the isolationists; he had been born in
Illinois and raised in Iowa himself, and knew the breed. A lot of
them were decent enough, not fascist sympathizers like the
German-American Bund, or dupes like Lindberg. Just decent
people, and it was so tempting to think the oceans could guard
American wholesomeness and decency from the iron insanities
and corruptions of Europe…

Not that he had ever subscribed to that habit of thought; it
led too easily to white sheets and hatred, destroying a tradition
to protect it. Or to the Babbirtry that had driven him to Paris in
the 1920's; the America he returned to in the Depression years
was more alive than Hoover's had been, finally acknowledging its
problems. Trying to do something about the submerged third of
the population, taking up the cause of the Negro abandoned