雙語·夜色溫柔 第一篇 第十三章

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. 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 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 business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five.”

“No, he didn’t—he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Württemberg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.

“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently. “Isn’t that true, Rosemary?”

“I don’t know,” she answered with a grave face. “You know everything.”

They dropped behind the others. Suddenly a shower of earth gobs and pebbles came down on them and Abe yelled from the next traverse:

“The war spirit’s getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I’m going to bomb out this trench.” His head popped up over the embankment. “You’re dead—don’t you know the rules? That was a grenade.”

Rosemary laughed and Dick picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them down.

“I couldn’t kid here,” he said rather apologetically. “The silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken and all that, but an old romantic like me can’t do anything about it.”

“I’m romantic too.”

They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad. But most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battle-field in a thrilling dream.

After that they got in their car and started back toward Amiens. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, abandoned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffeur to stop.

“There’s that girl—and she still has her wreath.”

They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee whom they had met on the train this morning, come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.

“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.”

“Then if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her.

“You reckon that’s what I ought to do?”

“I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”

It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder. She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to Amiens with them.

Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mishap—altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy—one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war, as some railroad stations were: the Gare du Nord and Waterloo station in London. In the daytime one is deflated by such towns, with their little trolley cars of twenty years ago crossing the great gray cobble-stoned squares in front of the cathedral, and the very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs. But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture—the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere. Waiting for the train they sat in a big arcade, tall enough to release the smoke and chatter and music upward and obligingly the orchestra launched into“Yes, We Have No Bananas”—they clapped, because the leader looked so pleased with himself. The Tennessee girl forgot her sorrow and enjoyed herself, even began flirtations of tropical eye-rollings and pawings, with Dick and Abe. They teased her gently.

Then, leaving infinitesimal sections of Württembergers, Prussian Guards, chasseurs alpins, Manchester mill hands and Old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain, they took the train for Paris. They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais. Nicole was abstracted, biting her lip restlessly and reading over the guide-books to the battle-field that Dick had brought along—indeed, he had made a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint resemblance to one of his own parties.

迪克拐了個彎，踩著擋泥板繼續(xù)順著戰(zhàn)壕朝前走，來到一架潛望鏡跟前停下來，用它瞭望了一會兒，然后登上臺階，從胸墻上方放眼望去。前方灰暗的天空下是博蒙特哈默爾，左邊是帶有悲劇色彩的蒂耶普瓦勒高地。他舉起自己隨身帶來的野外雙筒望遠鏡觀望著前面的景象，覺得嗓子眼像被悲傷堵住了一樣。

順著戰(zhàn)壕朝前走，他看見伙伴們在下一個轉(zhuǎn)彎處等他，不由得心潮澎湃，想把心中的感受告訴他們，讓他們了解那段歷史，可是又覺得阿貝·諾思才是打過仗的人，而他卻沒有。

“那年夏天，這片土地每英尺就有二十個人陣亡?！彼麑α_斯瑪麗說。后者聽了，放眼看了看那光禿禿、沒有多少綠色的平原，只能看見一些低矮的僅僅有六年樹齡的小樹。這天下午，即使迪克再補綴幾句，說眼下他們正遭受炮擊，她也會相信的。她對他的愛最終發(fā)展到這么一步，現(xiàn)在她已嘗到了痛苦的滋味，開始感到絕望了。她茫然不知所措，想跟母親講一講目前的狀況。

“戰(zhàn)后仍有許許多多的人死去，咱們不久也會長眠于地下的?！卑⒇愑脤捨康目跉庹f道。

羅斯瑪麗熱切地等著迪克的下文。

“看見那條小河了吧？咱們兩分鐘就可以走到它跟前，而英國人抵達那里卻花了一個月的時間。一個帝國前赴后繼，緩慢地向前推進，而另一個帝國緩慢朝后撤退，一天撤退幾英寸，戰(zhàn)場上真是尸橫遍野、血流成河。這一代歐洲人再也不愿打仗了。”迪克說道。

“還說這一代歐洲人呢！他們剛剛才平息了土耳其的戰(zhàn)事，在摩洛哥又燃起了戰(zhàn)火……”阿貝說。

“那是兩碼子事。在西線是不可能再打了，起碼很長時間內(nèi)都不會再有戰(zhàn)爭。年青一代就是想打，也打不起來了。若說第一次馬恩河戰(zhàn)役那樣的仗，他們還是可以打的，但絕對不是此處發(fā)生的這種。打這樣的仗需要有虔誠的宗教信仰、深厚的經(jīng)濟基礎和物資保障，還要有各階層之間密切的合作。俄國人和意大利人在這些方面是成不了氣候的。打這樣的仗，你必須全身心投入，回顧那一長串記都記不全的歷史。其中，你必須記住圣誕節(jié)，記住印有王儲及其未婚妻肖像的明信片，記住瓦朗斯的小咖啡館、菩提樹大街的啤酒花園以及市政廳的婚禮，記住自己曾去德比看過賽馬，記住你祖父的大胡子?！?/p>

“這樣的戰(zhàn)役是格蘭特將軍一八六五年首創(chuàng)于彼得斯堡?！?/p>

“才不是呢！他只是首創(chuàng)了大屠殺而已。若論首創(chuàng)者，應該是劉易斯·卡羅爾、儒勒·凡爾納以及那個寫《溫蒂妮》的作者，是喜歡打滾木球的鄉(xiāng)村教堂執(zhí)事、馬賽的教母以及在符騰堡和威斯特伐利亞的小胡同里遭誘奸的少女。啊，這是一場愛之戰(zhàn)，中產(chǎn)階級百年的愛情傾瀉于此。這是最后的一場愛之戰(zhàn)！”

“你這是想把這場戰(zhàn)役交給D.H.勞倫斯論輸贏?！卑⒇愓f。

“一陣強烈的愛情暴風雨襲來，將我靜謐的愛情安樂窩夷為了平地?！钡峡擞悬c傷感地繼續(xù)說道，“你說是不是，羅斯瑪麗？”

“我不知道，”羅斯瑪麗一臉嚴肅地回答，“你應該是什么都知道的。”

這時，他們倆落在了其他人的后邊。突然，土塊和小石子雨點般向他們飛來。阿貝躲在另一個轉(zhuǎn)彎處的后面大呼：“戰(zhàn)爭的幽靈又一次鉆進了我的體內(nèi)。我可是有俄亥俄州百年愛情作為后盾的，等著我把這條戰(zhàn)壕炸上天吧。”他從掩體后探出了頭。“你們被炸死了……難道不懂戰(zhàn)爭游戲的規(guī)則嗎？剛才扔的可是手榴彈呀?！?/p>

羅斯瑪麗捧腹大笑。迪克抓起一把小石子要予以還擊，但馬上又扔到了地上，帶著歉意說道：“恕我不能還擊。銀線已經(jīng)剪斷，金碗已經(jīng)打破，滔滔江水東流去，我這樣一個浪漫主義者倍感無能為力。”

“我也是個浪漫主義者。”羅斯瑪麗說。

他們走出那經(jīng)過修復已變得齊整的戰(zhàn)壕，來到一塊悼念紐芬蘭陣亡將士的紀念碑前。羅斯瑪麗讀著碑文，熱淚奪眶而出。像絕大多數(shù)女子一樣，她的情緒也很容易受別人影響——她很想聽聽迪克的見解，以此判斷哪些事物是荒唐的，哪些事物是可悲的。而此時她最渴望的是對方能洞悉她的心思，知道她在愛著他。可是現(xiàn)實顛覆了她的愿望——她懷揣一腔激動人心的愛情夢想，卻行走在昔日的戰(zhàn)場上。

離開紀念碑，他們坐上汽車啟程返回亞眠。一陣溫潤的毛毛細雨飄落在新栽的小樹和低矮的灌木叢上。沿途可見各種六年前丟棄的東西，有啞彈、炮彈殼、炮彈、手榴彈、輜重、鋼盔、刺刀、槍托和破爛的皮靴等，堆放在那里，就像火葬場的柴垛。在道路的轉(zhuǎn)彎處，前邊突然出現(xiàn)了一大片白色的墳頭。迪克讓司機把車停下，說道：“那個女孩在這兒呢，手里仍拿著花環(huán)?！?/p>

大家看著他下了車，目送他向女孩走去——那女孩手拿花環(huán)，心神不寧地站在墓地門口，而她的出租車司機在等著。她是個紅頭發(fā)的田納西姑娘，他們今天上午在火車上遇到過她。她來自諾克斯維爾，是來給哥哥掃墓的。只見她臉上掛著惱怒的淚花，聲音哽咽地對迪克說：“陸軍部給我的號碼肯定是錯的，碑上是別人的名字。我從兩點鐘一直在找，可這么多的墳墓，哪能找得到?！?/p>

“我要是你，就不看碑上的名字，隨便把花環(huán)獻給哪一座墳都可以?！钡峡私ㄗh說。

“你認為我應該這么做？”

“我想你哥哥會希望你這么做的?！?/p>

天漸漸暗下來，雨越下越大。女孩把花環(huán)放在了進門的第一座墳上，并接受迪克的建議，把她的出租車打發(fā)走，搭他們的汽車一起回亞眠。

女孩陳述的事情叫羅斯瑪麗傷感，使得她又落下了眼淚。這實在是一個催人淚下的日子，她似乎知道了某些事的真相，只是那真相究竟是什么她卻不甚了了。日后回想起來，這天下午整體來說還是一個令人高興的下午——當時只覺得它平淡無奇，僅僅是連接過去和未來的一個環(huán)節(jié)，最后才發(fā)現(xiàn)它給人帶來的是歡樂。

亞眠是座能勾起人回憶的紫色的城市，戰(zhàn)爭帶來的那種凄涼氣氛仍未散盡，就像巴黎火車北站和倫敦的滑鐵盧車站那等地方一般令人傷感。白天，這樣的城市讓人沮喪——二十年前的那種狹小的有軌電車從大教堂前面鋪有大塊灰色卵石的廣場駛過；就連天空似乎也帶著過去的那種陳舊的味道，猶如舊照片一般黯然失色。但是天黑以后，街頭便恢復了生機，呈現(xiàn)出法國生活中極為愜意的一面——煙花女子打扮得花枝招展；咖啡館里有人在爭論，唇槍舌劍，往來不休；情侶緊緊地相互依偎，飄然從街上走過，去尋找既省錢又舒適的過夜之地。迪克一行人坐在一個高大的拱廊下等火車——煙霧、嘈雜的說話聲和音樂聲從那高高的拱頂飄散出去。他們身邊有一個管弦樂隊在滿懷激情地演奏《是的，我們沒有香蕉》，樂隊指揮看上去極為投入，似乎陶醉其中，于是他們?yōu)橹氖趾炔?。那個田納西女孩忘掉了悲傷，也高興了起來，甚至還擠眉弄眼同迪克和阿貝調(diào)情。他們倆則善意地跟她開著玩笑。

后來，他們登上了去巴黎的火車，而那些符騰堡人、普魯士近衛(wèi)軍、阿爾卑斯山地步兵、曼徹斯特磨坊主和昔日的伊頓公學的學生則三三兩兩地繼續(xù)在亞眠溫潤的雨霧中尋歡作樂，沒完沒了地過那種醉生夢死的生活。上車后，他們開始吃車站餐館制作的夾有意大利香腸和貝爾培斯乳酪的三明治，喝法國的博若萊葡萄酒。尼科爾有些心不在焉，她煩躁地咬著嘴唇，翻看著迪克帶來的戰(zhàn)場游覽指南——實際上，迪克一如既往地對這次游覽做了深入研究，去其糟粕，取其精華，歸納為指南，手法有點像他平時舉辦晚會。