"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

that had brought the two great alliances to the brink, but not toppled them over. So when
Austria-Hungary made impossible demands to Serbia after the assassination of Ferdinand, no one could
have known that the situation would domino into the trenches and their slaughter. History as accident.
Well, no doubt there was a lot of truth in that. But now he found himself thinking of the crowds in the
streets of all the major cities, cheering the news of the war's outbreak; of the disappearance of pacifism,
which had seemed such a force; of, in short, the apparently unanimous support for war among the
prosperous citizens of the European powers. Support for a war that had no real reason to be! There was
something irreducibly mysterious about that, and this time he decided he would admit it, and discuss it.
That would require a consideration of the preceding century, the Pax Europeana; which in fact had been
a century of bloody subjugation, the high point of imperialism, with most of the world falling to the great
powers. These powers had prospered at the expense of their colonies, who had suffered in abject
misery. Then the powers had spent their profits building weapons, and used the weapons on each other,
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and destroyed themselves. There was something weirdly just about that development, as when a mass
murderer finally turns the gun on himself. Punishment, an end to guilt, an end to pain. Could that really
explain it? While staying in Washington with his dying father, Frank had visited the Lincoln Memorial, and
there on the right hand wall had been Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, carved in capital letters with
the commas omitted, an oddity which somehow added to the speech's Biblical massiveness, as when it
spoke of the ongoing war: "YET IF GOD WILLS THAT IT CONTINUE UNTIL ALL THE
WEALTH PILED BY THE BONDSMAN'S TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF
UNREQUITED TOIL SHALL BE SUNK AND UNTIL EVERY DROP OF BLOOD DRAWN
WITH THE LASH SHALL BE PAID BY ANOTHER DRAWN WITH THE SWORD AS WAS
SAID THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO SO STILL IT MUST BE SAID 'THE JUDGMENTS OF
THE LORD ARE TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS ALTOGETHER.'" A frightening thought, from that dark
part of Lincoln that was never far from the surface. But as a theory of the Great War's origin it still struck
him as inadequate. It was possible to believe it of the kings and presidents, the generals and diplomats,
the imperial officers around the world; they had known what they were doing, and so might have been
impelled by unconscious guilt to mass suicide. But the common citizen at home, ecstatic in the streets at
the outbreak of general war? That seemed more likely to be just another manifestation of the hatred of
the other. All my problems are your fault! He and Andrea had said that to each other a lot. Everyone did.
And yet... it still seemed to him that the causes were eluding him, as they had everyone else. Perhaps it
was a simple pleasure in destruction. What is the primal response to an edifice? Knock it down. What is
the primal response to a stranger? Attack him. 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