THE COMPLETE MILITARY WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING. Rudyard 1865-1936 Kipling

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of talk rose, perhaps, half a note. I halted by the painters. Said one, dipping deep in the white lead: ‘Um, ah! This ought to make the French sickish. Almost ’ear ’em coughin’, can’t you?’ Said another, reaching out for the broadest and slabbiest brush: ‘I say, Alf, lend us that Khartoum brush o’ yours.’ After a long pause, stepping back to catch the effect of a peculiarly juicy stroke—head a little aside and one eye shut: ‘Well, we’ve waited about long enough, ’aven’t we?’ Bosun’s mate with a fine mixture of official severity and human tolerance: ‘What are you cacklin’ for over there! Carry on quiet, can’t you?’ And that was how we took the news of the little skirmish called Omdurman.

       Note V Boat-Racing

      Our whaler would go out between lights under pretence of practising, but really for the purpose of insulting other whalers whom she had beaten in inter-ship contests. Boat-racing is to the mariner what horse-racing is to the landsman. The way of it is simple. When your racing crew is in proper condition, you row under the bows of the ship you wish to challenge and throw up an oar. If you are very confident, or have a long string of victories to your credit, you borrow a cock from the hen-coops and make him crow. Then the match arranges itself. A friendly launch tows both of you a couple of miles down the bay, and back you come, digging out for the dear life, to be welcomed by hoarse subdued roars from the crowded foc’sles of the battleships. This deep booming surge of voices is most moving to hear. Some day a waiting fleet will thus cheer a bruised and battered sister staggering in with a prize at her tail—a plugged and splintered wreck of an iron box, her planking brown with what has dried there, and the bright water cascading down her sides. I saw the setting of such a picture one blood-red evening when the hulls of the fleet showed black on olive-green water, and the yellow of the masts turned raw-meat colours in the last light. A couple of racing cutters spun down the fairway, and long after they had disappeared we could hear far-off ships applauding them. It was too dark to catch more than a movement of masses by the bows, and it seemed as though the ships themselves were triumphing all together.

       Note VI The Beauty of Battleships

      Do not believe what people tell you of the ugliness of steam, nor join those who lament the old sailing days. There is one beauty of the sun and another of the moon, and we must be thankful for both. A modern man-of-war photographed in severe profile is not engaging; but you should see her with the life hot in her, head-on across a heavy swell. The ram-bow draws upward and outward in a stately sweep. There is no ruck of figure-head, bow-timbers or bowsprit-fittings to distract the eye from its outline or the beautiful curves that mark its melting into the full bosom of the ship. It hangs dripping an instant, then, quietly and cleanly as a tempered knife, slices into the hollow of the swell, down and down till the surprised sea spits off in foam about the hawse-holes. As the ship rolls in her descent you can watch curve after new curve revealed, humouring and coaxing the water. When she recovers her step, the long sucking hollow of her own wave discloses just enough of her shape to make you wish to see more. In harbour, the still waterline, hard as the collar of a tailor-made jacket, hides that vision; but when she dances the Big Sea Dance, she is as different from her Portsmouth shilling photograph as is a matron in a macintosh from the same lady at a ball. Swaying a little in her gait, drunk with sheer delight of movement, perfectly apt for the work in hand, and in every line of her rejoicing that she is doing it, she shows, to these eyes at least, a miracle of grace and beauty. Her sides are smooth as a water-worn pebble, curved and moulded as the sea loves to have them. Where the box-sponsioned, overhanging, treble-turreted ships of some other navies hammer and batter into an element they do not understand, she, clean, cool, and sweet, uses it to her own advantage. The days are over for us when men piled baronial keeps, flat-irons, candlesticks, and Doré towers on floating platforms. The New Navy offers to the sea precisely as much to take hold of as the trim level-headed woman with generations of inherited experience offers to society. It is the provincial, aggressive, uncompromising, angular, full of excellently unpractical ideas, who is hurt, and jarred, and rasped in that whirl. In other words, she is not a good sea-boat and cannot work her guns in all weathers.

      End.

      France at War

      On the Frontier of Civilization (1915)

       Table of Contents

       France

       I. On the Frontier of Civilization

       An Observation Post

       "The Barbarian"

       Soldiers in Caves

       The Sentinel Hounds

       Work in the Fields

       A Wrecked Town

       In the Cathedral

       II. The Nation's Spirit and a New Inheritance

       The Line That Never Sleeps

       Lesson From the "Boche"

       Tragedy of Rheims

       Iron Nerve and Faith

       III. Battle Spectacle and a Review

       Farm Life Amidst War

       Watching the Gun-Fire

       Behind the German Lines

       Veterans of the War

       An Army in Motion

       Artillery and Cavalry

       The Boche as Mr. Smith

       IV. СКАЧАТЬ