"Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of
quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!
Mackay told us that the Children's Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the idea of
raising armies of children in Germany and France, and selling them in North Africa as slaves.
Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine. They were no doubt
idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great cities, nurtured on vice and daring, said
Mackay, and ready for anything.
Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and he was thrilled. 'These
children are awake while we are asleep!' he said.
Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned in
shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where they were sold.
Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave ships
were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kindly by good people there-then given a
little money and a lot of advice and sent back home.
'Hooray for the good people of Genoa,' said Mary O'Hare.

I slept that night in one of the children's bedrooms. O'Hare had put a book for me on the
bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was published in
1908, and its introduction began
It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts to give to an English-
reading public a bird's-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does, architecturally; of how
it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its present bloom; and it calls
attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its Gallery the resort of those seeking
lasting impressions.
I read some history further on
Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth of July began the
cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the paintings had been transported to -the
Konigstein, but some were seriously injured by splinters of bombshells-notably Francia's 'Baptism
of Christ.' Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche tower, from which the enemy's movements had been
watched day and night, stood in flames. It later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful
fate of the Kreuzkirche, stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome the Prussian
bombs -rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally to give up the siege, because he
learned of the fall of Glatz, the critical point of his new conquests. 'We must be off to Silesia,
so that we do not lose everything.'
The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student visited the city, he
still found sad ruins 'Von der Kuppel der Frauenkirche sah ich these leidigen Trümmer zwischen die
schone stddtische Ordnung hineingesät; da rühmte mir der Kiister die Kunst des Baumeisters,
welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so unerüinschten Fall schon eingeyichtet und bombenfest erbaut
hatte. Der gute Sakristan deutete mir alsdann auf Ruinen nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich
lakonisch: Das hat her Feind Gethan!'

The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it,
the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according
to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to
General Motors.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to
keep.

I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for a
couple of years after that. I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again. I