Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 8
5
ОглавлениеScarsdale came to Zonnebeke. He saw the red excrescence which was the corpse of the church, some dead and broken trees, a low hill pitted with shell-holes and crowned with a little mound of red brick. A road, or what had been a road, ran between the church and the hill. Away on his left front a rusty gasometer lay tilted, huge and strange and ridiculous. A gasometer! What next?
He avoided Zonnebeke. He skirted round it towards the north. He saw a few figures in khaki near the mound of broken bricks. A track led up to a little plateau. There were fewer shell-holes here, and some remnants of vegetation.
Suddenly a man came running. He appeared from nowhere; he had his head down.
Scarsdale spoke.
“Is it far to the trenches?”
The man did not stop. He slackened his pace for a moment and stared. His blue eyes had a strange, set look.
“Straight on. Sunken road.”
He ran on. If he felt any surprise at seeing Scarsdale there he did not show it. Loitering was unwholesome. And again Scarsdale was alone.
This little plateau lay sheeted with sunlight, a study in brown against the blue of the sky. It was hot, very hot, and Scarsdale was sweating, yet down there on the duck-board track he had shivered. He went on. He felt a little less afraid, for this little plateau seemed more peaceful. Actually a lark was singing overhead.
Scarsdale smiled. He stood still.
“What do the birds think of our war?”
What a fool was man! For man in the mass was fooled by a phrase, a mere catch-cry. And when the war was over would the crowd listen to other catch-cries, the apt little phrase from the lips of a demagogue? Thank God, the birds and the beasts were neither patriots nor politicians. He walked on; he came to the sunken road; he was passing a cutting in the brown bank when he saw a man sitting in the bottom of the trench. The man was all brown; so was the soil, but the sky was a blue sheet. The man had his back to the earth wall, and his grey shirt lay across his knees.
