"John Ringo - The Legacy of the Aldenata 7 - Watch On The Rhine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

been. Worse to see the roll of casualties . . . such crippling casualties . . .
from the army of a state in every way more powerful than his own. The
Kanzler trembled with fear for his country, his culture and his people.

Yet, as badly and as plainly as he trembled, the nausea of his disgust
was in every way worse.

Fearing to look at his aide, the Kanzler whispered, "It's the bones,
G├╝nter. It's the little piles of gnawed bones."

G├╝nter, the aideтАФthough he was really rather more than that, heard the
whisper and grimaced. "I know, mein Herr. It's disgusting. We . . . we
have done terrible things in the past. Horrible, awful, damnable things.

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But this? This goes beyond anything . . ."

"Do not fool yourself," corrected the Kanzler. "We have been worse,
G├╝nter, far worse. We were worse because what we did, we did to our
own. Cities burned away. Lampshades. Soap. Dental gold.
Einsatzgruppen. Gas chambers and ovens. A whole gamut of horror
visited upon the innocent by our ancestors . . . and ourselves."

"And Dresden?" answered G├╝nter, with a raised eyebrow and a sardonic
air. "Hamburg? Darmstadt?"

"I didn't say, my young friend, that we were alone in our guilt."

The Kanzler blinked away several snowflakes that had lodged themselves
in his gray eyelashes. "And . . . after all, what is guilt of the past?" he
sighed. "Do our own young people now need to be destroyed because of
what their grandfathers did? Is it right for our children to be eaten, to be
turned into little piles of bare, gnawed bones? How far does the sin of
Adam and Eve go, G├╝nter?"

Straightening that old and worn and overburdened back, the Kanzler
announced, "In any case, it doesn't matter. Whatever we have done,
nothing deserves this . . . this abattoir. And whatever we can do to
prevent it . . . that shall I do."

G├╝nter, the aide, scratched his chin, absently. "But what we can do, we
have done. Production of everything we need for defense or evacuation is
proceeding apace. The old soldiers of the Wehrmacht3 have been
remobilized, what there were of them, and are being rejuvenated. The
conscription is in legal force, and exempts only those whose conscience
cannot abide military service. We are doing all we can."