"Rives, Hallie Erminie - In the Wake of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rives Hallie Erminie)

It was the right of war, but now, after all these years, it had recoiled upon
him in shame. Circumstance had again put in his hand the weapon; the lust of
acquisition called upon him to strike, but as he stood face to face with this
new victim, out of that red mist of the stained past that cry had sounded, and
his hand dropped nerveless before the same helpless, accusing eyes. He would
have shouted that it was not charity, not kindness, that spared that roof, but
self-accusationЧ a yearning for atonement and for absolution.
He received her broken words of gratitude with a sense of shame upon his soul,
and the lawyer's bluff comments upon his benefaction pierced him like swords of
searing.



As Maxwell turned again toward the village, he rested his gaze upon the
hillside, sleeping under the early stars. Field and knoll were covered silvery
with the sheen of hoar-frost lances. It seemed the dwarf symbol of buried
armiesЧ thousands upon thousands of the dead, who died with upthrust bayonets
still standing to guard in death the integrity of homes. And standing thus, with
the sorrow of his thought upon him, Maxwell cried to his own soul, no less than
to his land, to glory, to power, to war, and to victory:
"What have you done? What have you done?"