Читать книгу France at War: On the Frontier of Civilization - Rudyard Kipling - Страница 4

Again a big plume rose; and again the lighter shells broke at their appointed distance beyond it. The smoke died away on that stretch of trench, as the foam of a swell dies in the angle of a harbour wall, and broke out afresh half a mile lower down. In its apparent laziness, in its awful deliberation, and its quick spasms of wrath, it was more like the work of waves than of men; and our high platform's gentle sway and glide was exactly the motion of a ship drifting with us toward that shore.

"The usual work. Only the usual work," the officer explained. "Sometimes it is here. Sometimes above or below us. I have been here since May."

A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its chemical yellow look more foul. A detachment of men moved out on a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then vanished at the foot of a little rise. Other men appeared moving toward us with that concentration of purpose and bearing shown in both Armies when – dinner is at hand. They looked like people who had been digging hard.

"The same work. Always the same work!" the officer said.

"And you could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland in that ditch – and you'll find the same work going on everywhere.

It isn't war."

"It's better than that," said another. "It's the eating-up of a people. They come and they fill the trenches and they die, and they die; and they send more and those die. We do the same, of course, but – look!"

He pointed to the large deliberate smoke-heads renewing themselves along that yellowed beach. "That is the frontier of civilization. They have all civilization against them – those brutes yonder. It's not the local victories of the old wars that we're after. It's the barbarian – all the barbarian. Now, you've seen the whole thing in little. Come and look at our children."