"Джон Пассос. One Man's Initiation: 1917 (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Orleans who was his car-mate followed him. Then came a little grey woman in
a pink knitted shawl, carrying a tray with glasses.
"In the Verdunois our wine is not very good," said the schoolmaster,
bowing them into chairs. "It is thin and cold like the climate. To your
health, gentlemen."
"To France."
"To America."
"And down with the Boches."
In the pale yellow light that came from among the dark clouds that
passed over the sky, the wine had the chilly gleam of yellow diamonds.
"Ah, you should have seen that road in 1916," said the schoolmaster,
drawing a hand over his watery blue eyes. "That, you know, is the Voie
Sacrйe, the sacred way that saved Verdun. All day, all day, a double line of
camions went up, full of ammunition and ravitaillement and men."
"Oh, the poor boys, we saw so many go up, came the voice, dry as the
rustling of the wind in the vine-leaves, of the grey old woman who stood
leaning against the schoolmaster's chair, looking out through a gap in the
trellis at the rutted road so thick with dust, "and never have we seen one
of them come back."
"It was for France."
"But this was a nice village before the war. From Verdun to Bar-le-Duc,
the Courrier des Postes used to tell us, there was no such village, so clean
and with such fine orchards." The old woman leaned over the schoolmaster's
shoulder, joining eagerly in the conversation.
"Even now the fruit is very fine," said Martin.
"But you soldiers, you steal it all," said the old woman, throwing out
her arms. "You leave us nothing, nothing."
"We don't begrudge it," said the schoolmaster, "all we have is our
country's."
"We shall starve then. . . ."
As she spoke the glasses on the table shook. With a roar of heavy
wheels and a grind of gears a camion went by.
"O good God!" The old woman looked out on to the road with terror in
her face, blinking her eyes in the thick dust.
Roaring with heavy wheels, grinding with gears, throbbing with motors,
camion after camion went by, slowly, stridently. The men packed into the
camions had broken through the canvas covers and leaned out waving their
arms and shouting.
"Oh, the poor children," said the old woman, wringing her hands, her
voice lost in the roar and the shouting.
"They should not destroy property that way," said the schoolmaster. .
.. "Last year it was dreadful. There were mutinies."
Martin sat, his chair tilted back, his hands trembling, staring with
compressed lips at the men who jolted by on the strident, throbbing camions.
A word formed in his mind: tumbrils.
In some trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons in
the air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts of things:
"Get to the front!" "Into the trenches with them!" "Down with the war!" In
others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Through the gap in the
trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces,