Читать книгу England, Their England онлайн
1 страница из 17
Archibald Gordon Macdonell
England, Their England
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338079541
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
ssss1
THE ENGLISH POET
CHAPTER I
ssss1
The events which are described in this book had their real origin in a conversation which took place between two artillery subalterns on the Western Front in the beginning of October 1917.
But although this first short chapter has to be devoted to the circumstances and substance of that conversation in order that the rest may be more intelligible, and although the words of the conversation were spoken upon the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, no one need be afraid that this is a war book.
From Chapter II. to the end there will be no terrific descriptions of the effect of a chlorine-gas cloud upon a party of nuns in a bombarded nunnery, or pages and pages about the torturing remorse of the sensitive young subaltern who has broken his word to his father, the grey-haired old vicar, by spending a night with a mademoiselle from Armentières. There will be no streams of consciousness, chapters long, in the best style of Bloomsbury, describing minutely the sensations of a man who has been caught in a heavy-howitzer barrage while taking a nap in the local Mortuary. There are going to be no profound moralizings on the inscrutability of a Divine Omnipotence which creates the gillyflower and the saw-bayonet, and Shakespeare and Von Mackensen (or, as in the translations, Unser Shakespeare and Ferdinand Foch), on the lines of the Ode to Baron von Bissing which borrowed, and rightly borrowed, Blake's famous question, "Did He who made the lamb make thee?"