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

"Say, you two, how about a hand of poker?
A champagne cork pops.
"Jiminy, don't spill it all over me."
"Where we goin', boys?"
"Oh, we're going to the Hamburg show
To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo,
And we'll all stick together
In fair or foul weather,
For we're going to see the damn show through!"






Chapter II


BEFORE going to bed Martin had seen the lighthouses winking at the
mouth of the Gironde, and had filled his lungs with the new, indefinably
scented wind coming off the land. The sound of screaming whistles of
tugboats awoke him. Feet were tramping on the deck above his head. The
shrill whine of a crane sounded in his ears and the throaty cry of men
lifting something in unison.
Through his port-hole in the yet colourless dawn he saw the reddish
water of a river with black-hulled sailing-boats on it and a few lanky
little steamers of a pattern he had never seen before. Again he breathed
deep of the new indefinable smell off the land.
Once on deck in the cold air, he saw through the faint light a row of
houses beyond the low wharf buildings, grey mellow houses of four storeys
with tiled roofs and intricate ironwork balconies, with balconies in which
the ironwork had been carefully twisted by artisans long ago dead into
gracefully modulated curves and spirals.
Some in uniform, some not, the ambulance men marched to the station,
through the grey streets of Bordeaux. Once a woman opened a window and
crying, "Vive l'Amйrique," threw out a bunch of roses and daisies. As they
were rounding a corner, a man with a frockcoat on ran up and put his own hat
on the head of one of the Americans who had none. In front of the station,
waiting for the train, they sat at the little tables of cafйs, lolling
comfortably in the early morning sunlight, and drank beer and cognac.
Small railway carriages into which they were crowded so that their
knees were pressed tight together--and outside, slipping by, blue-green
fields, and poplars stalking out of the morning mist, and long drifts of
poppies. Scarlet poppies, and cornflowers, and white daisies, and the
red-tiled roofs and white walls of cottages, all against a background of
glaucous green fields and hedges. Tours, Poitiers, Orlйans. In the names of
the stations rose old wars, until the floods of scarlet poppies seemed the
blood of fighting men slaughtered through all time. At last, in the
gloaming, Paris, and, in crossing a bridge over the Seine, a glimpse of the
two linked towers of Notre Dame, rosy grey in the grey mist up the river.