Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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The bus, as usual, was crowded. As they approached the little village of Château-Thierry, Bill Driscoll stood up in front with his megaphone and began to tell his clients how it had looked to him when his division went up to the line five years before.

“It was nine o’clock at night,” he said, “and we came out of a wood and there was the Western Front. I’d read about it for three years back in America, and here it was at last—it looked like the line of a forest fire at night except that fireworks were blazing up instead of grass. We relieved a French regiment in new trenches that weren’t three feet deep. At that, most of us were too excited to be scared until the top sergeant was blown to pieces with shrapnel about two o’clock in the morning. That made us think. Two days later we went over and the only reason I didn’t get hit was that I was shaking so much they couldn’t aim at me.”

The listeners laughed and Milly felt a faint thrill of pride. Jim hadn’t been scared—she’d heard him say so, many times. All he’d thought about was doing a little more than his duty. When others were in the comparative safety of the trenches he had gone into no-man’s land alone.