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

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 now running things. One could trace the
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roots of late capitalism to Great War innovations found in Rathenau's Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (the "War
Raw Stuff Department"), or in his Zentral Einkaufs-Gesellschaft. All business had been organized to fight
the enemy; but when the war was over and the enemy vanquished, the organization remained. People
continued to sacrifice the fruits of their work, but now they did it for the corporations that had taken the
wartime governments' positions in the system. So much of the twentieth century, there already in the
Great War. And then the Armistice was signed, at eleven A.M. on November 11th, 1918. That morning
at the front the two sides exchanged bombardments as usual, so that by eleven A.M. many people had
died. That evening Frank hurried home, just beating a thundershower. The air was as dark as smoky
glass.
And the war never ended This idea, that the two world wars were actually one, was not original to him.
Winston Churchill said it at the time, as did the Nazi Alfred Rosenburg. They saw the twenties and thirties
as an interregnum, a pause to regroup in the middle of a two-part conflict. The eye of a hurricane. Nine
o'clock one morning and Frank was still at the Dowlands', lingering over cereal and paging through the
Guardian, and then through his notebooks. Every morning he seemed to get a later start, and although it
was May, the days didn't seem to be getting any longer. Rather the reverse. There were arguments
against the view that it was a single war. The twenties did not seem very ominous, at least after the Treaty
of Locarno in 1925: Germany had survived its financial collapse, and everywhere economic recovery
seemed strong. But the thirties showed the real state of things: the depression, the new democracies
falling to fascism, the brutal Spanish Civil War; the starvation of the kulaks; the terrible sense of fatality in
the air. The sense of slipping on a slope, falling helplessly back into war.
But this time it was different. Total War. German military strategists had coined the phrase in the 1890s,
while analyzing Sherman's campaign in Georgia. And they felt they were waging total war when they
torpedoed neutral ships in 1915. But they were wrong; the Great War was not total war. In 1914 the
rumor that German soldiers had killed eight Belgian nuns was enough to shock all civilization, and later
when the Lusitania was sunk, objections were so fierce that the Germans agre ed to leave passenger
ships alone. This could only happen in a world where people still held the notion that in war armies fought
armies and soldiers killed soldiers, while civilians suffered privation and perhaps got killed accidentally,