"A. E. Merritt - Three Lines of Old French" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

he was one to strike the imagination of the poilus, and they loved him. Twice was he wounded in the
perilous days, and when America came into the war he was transferred to our expeditionary forces. It
was at the siege of Mount Kemmel that he received the wounds that brought him back to his father and
sister. McAndrews had accompanied him overseas, I knew, and had patched him together--or so all
thought.
What had happened then--and why had Laveller gone back to France, to die, as McAndrews put it?

He thrust the cablegram back into his pocket.

"There is a boundary, John," he said to Hawtry. "Laveller's was a borderland case. I'm going to tell it to
you." He hesitated. "I ought not to, maybe; and yet I have an idea that Peter would like it told; after all,
he believed himself a discoverer." Again he paused; then definitely made up his mind, and turned to me.

"Merritt, you may make use of this if you think it interesting enough. But if you do so decide, then change
the names, and be sure to check description short of any possibility of ready identification. After all, it is
what happened that is important--and those to whom it happened do not matter."

I promised, and I have observed my pledge. I tell the story as he whom I call McAndrews reconstructed
it for us there in the shadowed room, while we sat silent until he had ended.

Laveller stood behind the parapet of a first-line trench. It was night--an early April night in northern
France--and when that is said, all is said to those who have been there.

Beside him was a trench periscope. His gun lay touching it. The periscope is practically useless at night;
so through a slit in the sand-bags he peered out over the three-hundred-foot-wide stretch of No Man's
Land.

Opposite him he knew that other eyes lay close to similar slits in the German parapet, watchful as his
were for the least movement.

There were grotesque heaps scattered about No Man's Land, and when the star-shells burst and flooded
it with their glare these heaps seemed to stir to move--some to raise themselves, some to gesticulate, to
protest. And this was very horrible, for those who moved under the lights were the dead--French and
English, Prussian and Bavarian--dregs of a score of carryings to the red wine-press of war set up in this
sector.

There were two Jocks on the entanglements; kilted Scots, one colandered by machine-gun hail just as he
was breaking through. The shock of the swift, manifold death had hurled his left arm about the neck of
the comrade close beside him; and this man had been stricken within the same second. There they
leaned, embracing--and as the star-shells flared and died, flared and died, they seemed to rock, to try to
break from the wire, to dash forward, to return.

Laveller was weary, weary beyond all understanding. The sector was a bad one and nervous. For almost
seventy-two hours he had been without sleep--for the few minutes now and then of dead stupor broken
by constant alarms was worse than sleep.

The shelling had been well-nigh continuous, and the food scarce and perilous to get; three miles back
through the fire they had been forced to go for it; no nearer than that could the ration dumps be brought.

And constantly the parapets had to be rebuilt and the wires repaired--and when this was done the shells