It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting, the air turned chill, and a battalion’s bugles1 were playing “Retreat” when this knightly2 stranger, a British aëroplane, dipped, and went homeward over the infantry3. That beautiful evening call, and the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which hours of thinking sometimes will not bring) that we live in such a period of romance as the troubadours would have envied.
He came, that British airman, over the border, sheer over No Man’s Land and the heads of the enemy and the mysterious land behind, snatching the secrets that the enemy would conceal4. Either he had defeated the German airmen who would have stopped his going, or they had not dared to try. Who knows what he had done? He had been abroad and was coming home in the evening, as he did every day.
Even when all its romance has been sifted5 from an age (as the centuries sift) and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight6 with the black shells bursting below?
The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as well as with the incidents of the day, incidents that recur7 year in and year out, too often for us to notice them. If a part of the moon were to fall off in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the comment on the lips of the imperturbable8 British watchers that have seen so much would be, “Hullo, what is Jerry up to now?”
And so the British aëroplane glides9 home in the evening, and the light fades from the air, and what is left of the poplars grows dark against the sky, and what is left of the houses grows more mournful in the gloaming, and night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder, for the airman has given his message to the artillery10. It is as though Hermes had gone abroad sailing upon his sandals, and had found some bad land below those winged feet wherein men did evil and kept not the laws of gods or men; and he had brought this message back and the gods were angry.
For the wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga11 and epic12, how shall we tell of them?
England
“Yes,” said the Sergeant, “and beer. And then we used to go home. It was grand in the evenings. We used to go along a lane that was full of them wild roses. And then we come to the road where the houses were. They all had their bit of a garden, every house.”
“Nice, I calls it, a garden,” the Private said.
“Yes,” said the Sergeant, “they all had their garden. It came right down to the road. Wooden palings: none of that there wire.”
“I hates wire,” said the Private.
“They didn’t have none of it,” the N. C. O. went on. “The gardens came right down to the road, looking lovely. Old Billy Weeks he had them tall pale-blue flowers in his garden nearly as high as a man.”
“Hollyhocks?” said the Private.
“No, they wasn’t hollyhocks. Lovely they were. We used to stop and look at them, going by every evening. He had a path up the middle of his garden paved with red tiles, Billy Weeks had; and these tall blue flowers growing the whole way along it, both sides like. They was a wonder. Twenty gardens there must have been, counting them all; but none to touch Billy Weeks with his pale-blue flowers. There was an old windmill away to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing by overhead and screeching15: just about as high again as the houses. Lord, how them birds did fly. And there was the other young fellows, what were not out walking, standing16 about by the roadside, just doing nothing at all. One of them had a flute17: Jim Booker, he was. Those were great days. The bats used to come out, flutter, flutter, flutter; and then there’d be a star or two; and the smoke from the chimneys going all grey; and a little cold wind going up and down like the bats; and all the colour going out of things; and the woods looking all strange, and a wonderful quiet in them, and a mist coming up from the stream. It’s a queer time that. It’s always about that time, the way I see it: the end of the evening in the long days, and a star or two, and me and my girl going home.
“Wouldn’t you like to talk about things for a bit the way you remember them?”
“Oh, no, Sergeant,” said the other, “you go on. You do bring it all back so.”
“I used to bring her home,” the Sergeant said, “to her father’s house. Her father was keeper there, and they had a house in the wood. A fine house with queer old tiles on it, and a lot of large friendly dogs. I knew them all by name, same as they knew me. I used to walk home then along the side of the wood. The owls18 would be about; you could hear them yelling. They’d float out of the wood like, sometimes: all large and white.”
“I knows them,” said the Private.
“I saw a fox once so close I could nearly touch him, walking like he was on velvet19. He just slipped out of the wood.”
“Cunning old brute,” said the Private.
“That’s the time to be out,” said the Sergeant. “Ten o’clock on a summer’s night, and the night full of noises, not many of them, but what there is, strange, and coming from a great way off, through the quiet, with nothing to stop them. Dogs barking, owls hooting20, an old cart; and then just once a sound that you couldn’t account for at all, not anyhow. I’ve heard sounds on nights like that that nobody ‘ud think you’d heard, nothing like the flute that young Booker had, nothing like anything on earth.”
“I know,” said the Private.
“I never told any one before, because they wouldn’t believe you. But it doesn’t matter now. There’d be a light in the window to guide me when I got home. I’d walk up through the flowers of our garden. We had a lovely garden. Wonderful white and strange the flowers looked of a nighttime.”
“You bring it all back wonderful,” said the Private.
“It’s a great thing to have lived,” said the Sergeant.
“Yes, Sergeant,” said the other, “I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything.”
For five days the barrage21 had rained down behind them: they were utterly22 cut off and had no hope of rescue: their food was done, and they did not know where they were.
点击收听单词发音
1 bugles | |
妙脆角,一种类似薯片但做成尖角或喇叭状的零食; 号角( bugle的名词复数 ); 喇叭; 匍匐筋骨草; (装饰女服用的)柱状玻璃(或塑料)小珠 | |
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2 knightly | |
adj. 骑士般的 adv. 骑士般地 | |
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3 infantry | |
n.[总称]步兵(部队) | |
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4 conceal | |
v.隐藏,隐瞒,隐蔽 | |
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5 sifted | |
v.筛( sift的过去式和过去分词 );筛滤;细查;详审 | |
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6 twilight | |
n.暮光,黄昏;暮年,晚期,衰落时期 | |
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7 recur | |
vi.复发,重现,再发生 | |
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8 imperturbable | |
adj.镇静的 | |
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9 glides | |
n.滑行( glide的名词复数 );滑音;音渡;过渡音v.滑动( glide的第三人称单数 );掠过;(鸟或飞机 ) 滑翔 | |
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10 artillery | |
n.(军)火炮,大炮;炮兵(部队) | |
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11 saga | |
n.(尤指中世纪北欧海盗的)故事,英雄传奇 | |
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12 epic | |
n.史诗,叙事诗;adj.史诗般的,壮丽的 | |
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13 sergeant | |
n.警官,中士 | |
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14 mashed | |
a.捣烂的 | |
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15 screeching | |
v.发出尖叫声( screech的现在分词 );发出粗而刺耳的声音;高叫 | |
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16 standing | |
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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17 flute | |
n.长笛;v.吹笛 | |
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18 owls | |
n.猫头鹰( owl的名词复数 ) | |
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19 velvet | |
n.丝绒,天鹅绒;adj.丝绒制的,柔软的 | |
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20 hooting | |
(使)作汽笛声响,作汽车喇叭声( hoot的现在分词 ); 倒好儿; 倒彩 | |
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21 barrage | |
n.火力网,弹幕 | |
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22 utterly | |
adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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