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1、【英文读物】The Red GluttonCHAPTER I A LITTLE VILLAGE CALLED MONTIGNIES ST. CHRISTOPHEWE passed through it late in the afternoonthis little Belgian town called Montignies St. Christophejust twenty-four hours behind a dust-colored German column. I am going to try now to tell how it looked to us.I am inclin
2、ed to think I passed this way a year before, or a little less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that. Traveling cross country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not
3、pass through this little town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through fifty like iteach a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord, along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking tr
4、ough, its priest inPg 14 black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings of saber and belt and shoulder straps.I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking vinegar sold at the drinking place unde
5、r the name of wine; for that time I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other unimportant villages in this upper lefthand corner of the ma
6、p of Europe. The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a side-slap.We came to it just before dusk. All day we had been hurrying along, trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved faster than we did, even though they fought as they went. They had gone round the
7、southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it in with tight bands of steel. Belgiumor this part of itwas all barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.Besides we had stopped often, f
8、or there was so much to see and to hear. There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Chateau, wherePg 15 the English had been; and the hour we spent at La Bussire, on the river Sambre, where a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Chateau is another story and so is la Bussire. Just afte
9、r La Bussire we came to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local Jack-of-all-trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a red cross pa
10、inted on its side over the letters of a bakers sign, went up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the sibilant sound of their voice
11、s ran up and down the line of houses in a long, quavering hiss.The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had been found in the woods beyond the river. He was one of the last to be found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two nights he had been lying
12、 helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and his wounds raw. On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained hard.Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.Pg 16 We had heard the guns distinctly in the
13、 early forenoon, and again, less distinctly, about noontime. Thereafter, for a while, there had been a lull in the firing; but now it was constanta steady, sustained boom-boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound. For t
14、hree days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French frontier. Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the lash of a long whip, and hurried along.There were five of us, all Americans. The t
15、wo who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart. We had bought the outfit that morning and we were to lose it that night. The horse was an aged mare, with high withers, and galls on her shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, afte
16、r the fashion of Belgian horses; and the dogcart was a venerable ruin, which creaked a great protest at every turn of the warped wheels on the axle. We had been able to buy the twothe mare and the cartonly because the German soldiers had not thought them worth the taking.In this order, then, we proc
17、eeded. Pretty soon the mare grew so weary she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were, we who rode dismounted and trudgedPg 17 on, taking turns at dragging her forward by the bit. I presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more, along an interminable straight road and past mi
18、les of the checkered light and dark green fields which in harvest time make a great backgammon board of this whole country of Belgium.The road was empty of nativesempty, too, of German wagon trains; and these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been hardly a minute of the day w
19、hen we were not passing soldiers or meeting refugees.Almost without warning we came on this little village called Montignies St. Christophe. A six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its namea rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty houses, all told. But now tragedy had g
20、iven it distinction; had painted that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture of it is going to live in my memory as long as I do live. At the upper end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old chateau, the seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park o
21、f beeches and elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first intimation that there had been a fight. The gate stood ajar between its chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French cavalry officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar a
22、nd cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree. Beneath thePg 18 tree were a sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire; and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all ready for the pot or the pan. Looking on past these things we saw much scattered dun
23、nage: Frenchmens knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards, fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their topswhich proved them to be French canteenstumbled straw, odd shoes with their lacings undone,
24、a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the clumped trees of the chateau grounds. We were desperately
25、 weary, to begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally shot to bits. From our sidetha
26、t is to say, from the north and likewise from the westthe Germans had shelled it. From the south, plainly, the French had answered. The village, in between, had caught the full force and fury of the contending fires. Probably the inhabitants hadPg 19 warning; probably they fled when the German skirm
27、ishers surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park. One imagined them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage patches. But they had left their belongings behind, all their small petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and racking apart of t
28、heir homes.A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street. Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the crossties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like rows of snaggled teeth. Other shells, dropping in the road, had so wrought w
29、ith the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet deep.Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again. One house would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to the rear walls an
30、d see the pans on the kitchen shelves. Another house would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potters door. The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all gone and in some instances the sas
31、hes as well, leered emptily like eye-sockets without eyes.So it went. Two of the houses had caughtPg 20 fire and the interiors were quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.Our poor tired old nag halted and sniff
32、ed and snorted. If she had had energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horsesa big gray and a roanwith their stark legs sticking out across the road. The gray was shot through and through in three places. The right fore h
33、oof of the roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it, suggesting a natural malformation. Dead only a few hours, their carcasses already had begun to swell. The skin on their bellies was as tight as a drumhead.We
34、 forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses. Beyond them the road was a litter. Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots, pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere. The deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things. The dropped caps and t
35、he abandoned knapsacks were always French caps and French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after the mle.The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French had fallen backor at least so we deduced from the looks ofPg 21 things. In the dbris was no object that bes
36、poke German workmanship or German ownership. This rather puzzled us until we learned that the Germans, as tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to
37、 give the enemy an idea of their losses.We went by the church. Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small flagthe Tricolor of Francestill fluttered from a window where some one had stuck it. We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a sign over its doora creature remotely resembling a bl
38、ue lynx. And through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a table. We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from t
39、he workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. The figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment. Behind the barn we found a whole pile of new knapsacksthe flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the French infantrymen, not half
40、so heavy or a third so substantial as the heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered on the back side with undressed red bullocks hide.Pg 22Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human being. The place fairly ached with emptiness. Cats sat on the do
41、orsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard imprisoned beasts lowing dismally. Cows were there, with agonized udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no dogs. We already had remarked this factthat in every desolated village cats were thick enough; but in
42、variably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters. And it was so in Montignies St. Christophe.On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turfa breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which the Germans had kicked half
43、downI counted three cats, seated side by side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at u
44、s through a break in the wall. He called out to her in French, but she never answeredonly continued to watch him from behind her shelter. He started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.Pg 23Just beyond the town,
45、 though, we met a wagona furniture dealers wagonfrom some larger community, which had been impressed by the Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service. A jaded team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft. One man
46、led the near horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon. All three of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends. Overhauling it we saw that it contained two dead soldiersFrench foot-soldiers. The bodies rested sid
47、e by side on the wagon bed. Their feet somehow were caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about to glide backward and out of the wagon.The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-ar
48、c, encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly. The others head was canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face. It was a young facewe could tell that much, even through the mask of caked mud on the drab-w
49、hite skinand it might once have been a comely face. It was not comely now.Pg 24Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead mans face had been partly shot or shorn awaythe lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an abominable thing to look on. These two had been men the day before. Now they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red poppies, like blobs of red