Читать книгу A Walk with Love and Death - Hans Koning - Страница 15

The flat countryside of Picardy was lying under the rain, left to itself by men who no longer had the strength to organize it. The water had risen from the choking ditches and spread over the fields. There seemed to be no life present but in weeds, rats, mangy dogs, and wolves; yes, even wolves, not seen for a century in the land of the Northwest. Preying plants and beasts, and birds: clouds of crows kept sweeping and circling over the trees and the lanes, cawing for corpses to alight on, rising and falling in a great rush of wings.

Men-at-arms had parceled up the land, gangster knights like Albrest the Ox and Pierre of Audley, killing the poor farmers and ransoming the rich again and again until they were poor. Half the villages I passed were in ruins; the others had become fortresses. Churches were strongholds, peaked-looking children stood on guard like soldiers. Church bells were rung only to give alarm, whenever a band of armed men came in sight. Then the peasants fled or barricaded themselves and waited.

I’d hear those bells from far off and it was as if they were rung prophetically for a fire which hadn’t yet started: for often some time after the bells a column of smoke, smoke from burning huts, rose in the distance. What peasant would fight back against armed and mounted men, men who fought as a profession?

The peasants withdrew and withdrew, they dug in, they hid, they buried themselves, they made themselves well-nigh invisible; and still the men on horseback returned.

Rain fell, and then the sky cleared again, the sun stood on beams of light in the heavy clouds and a moist stench rose from the land.

It was as if the world, as if the earth itself, were tensely waiting, with tired and bated breath, smarting for deliverance.