THE COMPLETE MILITARY WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING. Rudyard 1865-1936 Kipling
Читать онлайн книгу.
The Silent Navy
Presently my friend of the destroyer went back to his stark, desolate life, where feelings do not count, and the fact of his being cold, wet, sea-sick, sleepless, or dog-tired had no bearing whatever on his business, which was to turn out at any hour in any weather and do or endure, decently, according to ritual, what that hour and that weather demanded. It is hard to reach the kernel of Navy minds. The unbribable seas and mechanisms they work on and through have given them the simplicity of elements and machines. The habit of dealing with swift accident, a life of closest and strictest association with their own caste as well as contact with all kinds of men all earth over, have added an immense cunning to those qualities; and that they are from early youth cut out of all feelings that may come between them and their ends, makes them more incomprehensible than Jesuits, even to their own people. What, then, must they be to the enemy?
Here is a Service which prowls forth and achieves, at the lowest, something of a victory. How far-reaching a one only the war's end will reveal. It returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional hoot of the long-shore loafer, after issuing a bulletin which though it may enlighten the professional mind does not exhilarate the layman. Meantime the enemy triumphs, wirelessly, far and wide. A few frigid and perfunctory-seeming contradictions are put forward against his resounding claims; a Naval expert or two is heard talking "off"; the rest is silence. Anon, the enemy, after a prodigious amount of explanation which not even the neutrals seem to take any interest in, revises his claims, and, very modestly, enlarges his losses. Still no sign. After weeks there appears a document giving our version of the affair, which is as colourless, detached, and scrupulously impartial as the findings of a prize-court. It opines that the list of enemy losses which it submits "give the minimum in regard to numbers though it is possibly not entirely accurate in regard to the particular class of vessel, especially those that were sunk during the night attacks." Here the matter rests and remains—just like our blockade. There is an insolence about it all that makes one gasp.
Yet that insolence springs naturally and unconsciously as an oath, out of the same spirit that caused the destroyer to pick up the dog. The reports themselves, and tenfold more the stories not in the reports, are charged with it, but no words by any outsider can reproduce just that professional tone and touch. A man writing home after the fight, points out that the great consolation for not having cleaned up the enemy altogether was that "anyhow those East Coast devils"—a fellow-squadron, if you please, which up till Jutland had had most of the fighting—"were not there. They missed that show. We were as cock-ahoop as a girl who had been to a dance that her sister has missed."
This was one of the figures in that dance:
"A little British destroyer, her midships rent by a great shell meant for a battle-cruiser; exuding steam from every pore; able to go ahead but not to steer; unable to get out of anybody's way, likely to be rammed by any one of a dozen ships; her syren whimpering: 'Let me through! Make way!'; her crew fallen in aft dressed in life-belts ready for her final plunge, and cheering wildly as it might have been an enthusiastic crowd when the King passes."
Let us close on that note. We have been compassed about so long and so blindingly by wonders and miracles; so overwhelmed by revelations of the spirit of men in the basest and most high; that we have neither time to keep tally of these furious days, nor mind to discern upon which hour of them our world's fate hung.
The Neutral
Brethren, how shall it fare with me
When the war is laid aside,
If it be proven that I am he
For whom a world has died?
If it be proven that all my good,
And the greater good I will make,
Were purchased me by a multitude
Who suffered for my sake?
That I was delivered by mere mankind
Vowed to one sacrifice,
And not, as I hold them, battle-blind,
But dying with opened eyes?
That they did not ask me to draw the sword
When they stood to endure their lot,
What they only looked to me for a word,
And I answered I knew them not?
If it be found, when the battle clears,
Their death has set me free,
Then how shall I live with myself through the years
Which they have bought for me?
Brethren, how must it fare with me,
Or how am I justified,
If it be proven that I am he
For whom mankind has died;
If it be proven that I am he
Who being questioned denied?
The End
The War in the Mountains
A Pass, a King, and a Mountain
The Roads of an Army
(June 6, 1917)
When one reached the great Venetian plain near Army Headquarters , the Italian fronts were explained with a clearness that made maps unnecessary.
‘We have three fronts,’ said my informant. , ‘On the first, the Isonzo front, which is the road to Trieste, our troops can walk, though the walking is not good. On the second, the Trentino, to the north, where the enemy comes nearest to our plains, our troops must climb and mountaineer, you will see.’
He pointed south-east and east across the heat haze to some evil-looking ridges a long way off where there was a sound of guns debating ponderously. ‘That is the Carso, where we are going now,’ he said; then he turned north-east and north where nearer, higher mountains showed streaks of snow in their wrinkles.
‘Those are the Julian Alps,’ he went on. ‘Tolmino is behind them , north again . Where the snow is thicker - do you see? - are the Carnic Alps; we fight among them. Then to the west of them come the Dolomites, where tourists use to climb and write books. There we fight, also. The Dolomites join on to the Trentino and the Asiago Plateau, and there we fight. And from there we go round north till we meet the Swiss border. All mountains, you see.’
He picked up the peaks one after another with the ease of a man accustomed to pick up landmarks at any angle and any change of light. A stranger’s eyes could make out nothing except one sheer rampart of brooding mountains - ‘like giants at a hunting’ - all along the northern horizon.
The glass split them into tangled cross-chains of worsted hillocks, hollow-flanked peaks cleft by black or grey ravines, stretches of no-coloured rock gashed and nicked