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

lowering his voice stealthily.
"I don't know. I never did expect it to be what we were taught to
believe. . . . Things aren't."
"But you can't have guessed that it was like this . . . like Alice in
Wonderland, like an ill-intentioned Drury Lane pantomime, like all the dusty
futility of Barnum and Bailey's Circus."
"No, I thought it would be hair-raising," said Martin.
"Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that
must have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this new particular
vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of the press and
the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?"
Martin nodded.
"Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living,
growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . . And
the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they
like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?"
"I agree with you that the little thin noise is very silly," said
Martin.



Martin slammed down the hood of the car and stood upright. A cold
stream of rain ran down the sleeves of his slicker and dripped from his
greasy hands.
Infantry tramped by, the rain spattering with a cold glitter on grey
helmets, on gun-barrels, on the straps of equipment. Red sweating faces,
drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with the
struggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces were the
only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed mud-coloured
bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky. In the cold colourlessness they were
delicate and feeble as the faces of children, rosy and soft under the
splattering of mud and the shagginess of unshaven beards.
Martin rubbed the back of his hand against his face. His skin was like
that, too, soft as the petals of flowers, soft and warm amid all this dead
mud, amid all this hard mud-covered steel.
He leant against the side of the car, his ears full of the heavy
shuffle, of the jingle of equipment, of the splashing in puddles of
water-soaked boots, and watched the endless rosy patches of faces moving by,
the faces that drooped towards the dripping boots that rose and fell,
churning into froth the soupy, putty-coloured mud of the road.



The schoolmaster's garden was full of late roses and marigolds, all
parched and bleached by the thick layer of dust that was over them. Next to
the vine-covered trellis that cut the garden off from the road stood a green
table and a few cane chairs. The schoolmaster, something charmingly
eighteenth-century about the cut of his breeches and the calves of his legs
in their thick woollen golf-stockings, led the way, a brown pitcher of wine
in his hand. Martin Howe and the black-haired, brown-faced boy from New