"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

But he was losing his drift, falling away into the metaphysics of "human
nature." That would be a constant problem in an essay of this length. And
whatever the causes, there stood the year 1914, irreducible, inexplicable,
unchangeable. "AND THE WAR CAME."

In his previous books he had never written about the wars. He was among
those who believed that real history occurred in peacetime, and that in
war you might as well roll dice or skip ahead to the peace treaty. For
anyone but a military historian, what was interesting would begin again
only when the war ended.
Now he wasn't so sure. Current views of the Belle Epoque were distorted
because one only saw it through the lens of the war that ended it; which
meant that the Great War was somehow more powerful than the Belle Epoque,
or at least more powerful than he had thought. It seemed he would have to
write about it, this time, to make sense of the century. And so he would
have to research it.
He walked up to the central catalogue tables. The room darkened as the sun
went behind clouds, and he felt a chill.

For a long time the numbers alone staggered him. To overwhelm trench
defenses, artillery bombardments of the most astonishing size were brought
to bear: on the Somme the British put a gun every twenty yards along a
fourteen-mile front, and fired a million and a half shells. In April 1917
the French fired six million shells. The Germans' Big Bertha shot shells
seventy-five miles high, essentially into space. Verdun was a "battle"
that lasted ten months, and killed almost a million men.
The British section of the front was ninety miles long. Every day of the
war, about seven thousand men along that front were killed or wounded -
not in any battle in particular, but just as the result of incidental
sniper fire or bombardment. It was called "wastage."
Frank stopped reading, his mind suddenly filled with the image of the
Vietnam Memorial. He had visited it right after leaving the Lincoln
Memorial, and the sight of all those names engraved on the black granite
plates had powerfully affected him. For a moment it had seemed possible to
imagine all those people, a little white line for each.
But at the end of every month or two of the Great War, the British had had
a whole Vietnam Memorial's worth of dead. Every month or two, for
fifty-one months.

He filled out book request slips and gave them to the librarians in the
central ring of desks, then picked up the books he had requested the day
before, and took them back to his carrel. He skimmed the books and took
notes, mostly writing down figures and statistics. British factories
produced two hundred and fifty million shells. The major battles all
killed a half million or more. About ten million men died on the field of
baffle, ten million more by revolution, disease, and starvation.
Occasionally he would stop reading and try to write; but he never got far.
Once he wrote several pages on the economy of the war. The organization of
agriculture and business, especially in Germany under Rathenau and England
under Lloyd George, reminded him very strongly of the postmodern economy