The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me. William Allen White
two hundredth shell had dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the next day. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spend just so many shells on each enemy point, and no more. The German work of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intact upon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives in the town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagon road that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way, is the object of the German artillery's attention. Upon this road they think the revitalment trains pass up to the front. But the sentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in the place were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city before the war—a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some old and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings—a cloister, a bishop's residence, a school—or what not—that, even crumbled and shattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace and charm and dignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping of men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And the broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores—places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling wreck—where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it—a thousand little details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron—this was the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished their evening strafe.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.