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

shook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin's face.
"Say, fellers, that was damn near," came a voice from the floor of the
barn.
"We'd better go over to the quarry."
"Oh, hell, I was sound asleep!"
A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.
"Gee, that was in the house behind us. . ."
"I smell gas.
"Ye damn fool, it's carbide."
"One of the Frenchmen said it was gas."
"All right, fellers, put on your masks."
Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled
strangely with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of
the stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in
a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched the
flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept up a
continuous hammering drum-beat. Over their head shells shrieked at
two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the
village on the other side of the valley.
"Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice.
"Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep? . . . They
must be tired like we are."
A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that
they saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that
followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.


Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft
of a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against the
mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men chatting in
the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he worked. Now and
then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell trundled through the air
overhead; after its noise had completely died away would come the thud of
the explosion. It was like battledore and shuttlecock, these huge masses
whirling through the evening far above his head, now from one side, now from
the other. It gave him somehow a cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under
some sort of a bridge over which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.
The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was
a small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of a
long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered about in
every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and began
talking briskly.
"We are exactly four hundred and five metres from the Boche. . . . Five
hundred metres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der
Kaiser.'"
"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la Rйpublique,' I should say."
"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in
Paris."
"The sky is very beautiful to-night."
"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusquйs;