"Джон Пассос. One Man's Initiation: 1917 (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and
unwritten on. At last things have come to pass.
And very faintly, like music heard across the water in the evening,
blurred into strange harmonies, his old watchwords echo a little in his
mind. Like the red flame of the sunset setting fire to opal sea and sky, the
old exaltation, the old flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in
the world, the trumpet-blast under which the walls of Jericho would fall
down, stirs and broods in the womb of his grey lassitude. The bow rises and
falls gently in rhythm with the surging sing-song of the broken water, as
the steamer ploughs through the long swell of the Gulf Stream, eastward.
"See that guy, the feller with the straw hat; he lost five hundred
dollars at craps last night."
"Some stakes."
It is almost dark. Sea and sky are glowing claret colour, darkened to a
cold bluish-green to westward. In a corner of the deck a number of men are
crowded in a circle, while one shakes the dice in his hand with a strange
nervous quiver that ends in a snap of the fingers as the white dice roll on
the deck.
"Seven up." From the smoking-room comes a sound of singing and glasses
banged on tables.
"Oh, we're bound for the Hamburg show,
To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo,
An' we'll all stick together
In fair or foul weather,
For we're going to see the damn show through!"
On the settee a sallow young man is shaking the ice in a
whisky-and-soda into a nervous tinkle as he talks: "There's nothing they can
do against this new gas. . . . It just corrodes the lungs as if they were
rotten in a dead body. In the hospitals they just stand the poor devils up
against a wall and let them die. They say their skin turns green and that it
takes from five to seven days to die--five to seven days of slow choking."



"Oh, but I think it's so splendid of you"--she bared all her teeth,
white and regular as those in a dentist's show-case, in a smile as she
spoke--"to come over this way to help France."
"Perhaps it's only curiosity," muttered Martin.
"Oh no. . . . You're too modest. . . . What I mean is that it's so
splendid to have understood the issues. . . . That's how I feel. I just told
dad I'd have to come and do my bit, as the English say."
"What are you going to do?"
"Something in Paris. I don't know just what, but I'll certainly make
myself useful somehow." She beamed at him provocatively. "Oh, if only I was
a man, I'd have shouldered my gun the first day; indeed I would."
"But the issues were hardly . . . defined then," ventured Martin.
"They didn't need to be. I hate those brutes. I've always hated the
Germans, their language, their country, everything about them. And now that
they've done such frightful things . . ."
"I wonder if it's all true . . ." "True! Oh, of course it's all true;