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

it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."
Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and
five metres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was the
latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous stench.
Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had been a cook
shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that zig-zagged in and
out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the crest of a little
hill. The other day he had been there, and had clambered up the oily clay
where the boyau had caved in, and from the level of the ground had looked
for an anxious minute or two at the tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened
soil in the direction of the German outposts. And all along these random
gashes in the mucky clay were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after
clotting of clay, men with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain
and fear and boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the
trenches and the shell-holes.
"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a
serious case all day."
"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb. .
. . You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."
"It was the Boche who did that. . . . We took that slope from them two
months ago. . . . How does it grow?"
"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.
He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the
sky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept asking
himself, that the sky was a beneficent goddess who would stoop gently out of
the infinite spaces and lift him to her breast, where he could lie amid the
amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiously down at the spinning ball
of the earth? It might have beauty if he were far enough away to clear his
nostrils of the stench of pain.
"It is funny," said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how much
nearer we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than to
anyone else."
"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from the
people at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on."
The little doctor nodded.
"God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody's
fighting about anything. . . . God, it's so hideously stupid!" cried Martin,
suddenly carried away, helpless in the flood of his passionate revolt.
"Life is stupid," said the little doctor sententiously.
Suddenly from the lines came a splutter of machine-guns.
"Evensong!" cried the little doctor. "Ah, but here's business. You'd
better get your car ready, my friend."
The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that
led to the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the
lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of the
wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of blood-flecked
uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middle of the man had
been, where had been the curved belly and the genitals, where the thighs had
joined with a strong swerving of muscles to the trunk, was a depression, a
hollow pool of blood, that glinted a little in the cold diffusion of grey