Цитаты из книги «Tender is the night / Ночь нежна. Книга для чтения на английском языке»

now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate. She didn’t know what to do – she wanted to talk to her mother. “There are lots of people dead since and we’ll all be dead soon,” said Abe consolingly. Rosemary waited tensely for Dick to continue. “See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. This western-front

Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval[109]. Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with sadness. He went on along the trench, and found the others waiting for him in the next traverse. He was full of excitement and he wanted to communicate it to them, to make them understand about this, though actually Abe North had seen battle service and he had not. “This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary. She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were