"Walter Jon Williams - No Spot of Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

George Pickett had suffered a collapse after days of nerve-wrenching warfare in his attempt to keep the
city safe from Beast Butler's Army of the James; and Pickett's senior brigadier was, perforce, promoted
to command of the whole division.

The new commander was fifty-five years old, and even if he was only a division commander till Pickett
came back, he was still the oldest in the army.

At school he had been an athlete. Once he swam six miles down the James River, fighting against the
tide the whole way, in order to outdo Byron's swim across the Hellespont. Now he was too tired and ill
to ride a horse except in an emergency, so he moved through the streets of Richmond in a two-wheel
buggy driven by Sextus Pompeiius, his personal darky.

He was dressed elegantly, a spotless gray uniform with the wreathed stars of a brigadier on his collar and
bright gold braid on the arms, English riding boots, black doeskin gloves. His new white wide-brimmed
hat, a replacement for the one shot off his head at Port Walthall Junction twenty days ago, was tilted
back atop his high forehead. Even when he was young and couldn't afford anything but old and mended
clothes, he had always dressed well, with the taste and style of a gentleman. Sextus had trimmed his
grizzled mustache that morning, back in camp along the Petersburg and Weldon, and snipped at the long
gray curls that hung over the back of his collar. A fine white-socked thoroughbred gelding, the one he
was too ill to ride, followed the buggy on a lead. When he had gone south in 1861 he had come with
twelve hundred dollars in gold and silver, and with that and his army pay he had managed to keep
himself in modest style for the last three years.

As he rode past the neat brick houses he remembered when it was otherwise. Memories still burned in
his mind: the sneers of Virginia planters' sons when they learned of his background, of his parents in the
theater and stepfather in commerce; his mounting debts when his stepfather Mr. Allan had twice sent
him to college, first to the University of Virginia and then to West Point, and then not given him the
means to remain; the moment Allan had permitted the household slaves to insult him to his face; and
those countless times he wandered the Richmond streets in black despondent reverie, when he couldn't
help gazing with suspicion upon the young people he met, never knowing how many of them might be
living insults to his stepmother, another of Mr. Allan's plentiful get of bastards"┬ж

The brigadier looked up as the buggy rattled over rusting iron tracks, and there it was: Ellis & Allan,
General Merchants, the new warehouse of bright red brick lying along a Virginia Central siding, its
loading dock choked with barrels of army pork. The war that had so devastated the Confederate nation
had been kind only to two classes: carrion crows and merchants. The prosperous Ellis & Allan was run
by his stepbrothers now, he presumed, possibly in partnership with an assortment of Mr. Allan's
bastards--in that family, who could say? The brute Allan, penny-pinching as a Jew with the morals of a
nigger, might well have given part of the business to his illegitimate spawn, if for no other reason than to
spite his foster son. Such was the behavior of the commercial classes that infected this city.



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 No Spot of Ground

Richmond, he thought violently. Why in the name of heaven are we defending the place? Let the Yanks
have it, and let them serve it as Rome served Carthage, burned to the foundations and the scorched plain
sown with salt. There are other parts of the South better worth dying for.