AFable - (EPUB全文下载)

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William Faulkner - A Fable
 
 
Wednesday
Long before the first bugles sounded from
the barracks within the city and the cantonments surrounding it, most of the
people in the city were already awake. They did not need to rise from the straw
mattresses and thin pallet beds of their hive-dense tenements,
because few of them save the children had even lain down. Instead, they had
huddled all night in one vast tongueless brotherhood of dread and anxiety,
about the thin fires of braziers and meagre hearths, until the night wore at
last away and a new day of anxiety and dread had begun.
         The
original regiment had been raised in this district, raised in person, in fact,
by one of those glorious blackguards who later became Napoleon's marshals, who
delivered the regiment into the Emperor's own hand, and along with it became
one of the fiercest stars in that constellation which filled half the sky with
its portent and blasted half the earth with its lightning. And most of its
subsequent replacements had been drawn from this same district, so that most of
these old men were not only veterans of it in their time, and these male
children already dedicated to it when their time should come, but all these
people were parents and kin, not only the actual old parents and kin of the
doomed men, but fathers and mothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts whose
sons and brothers and husbands and fathers and lovers might have been among the
doomed men except for sheer blind chance and luck.
         Even
before the bugles' echoes died away, the warrened purlieus were already
disgorging them. A French or British or American aviator (or a German either
for that matter, if he had had the temerity and the luck) could have watched it
best: hovel and tenement voiding into lane and alley and nameless cul-de-sac,
and lane and alley and cul-de-sac compounding into streets as the trick-les
became streams and the streams became rivers, until the whole city seemed to be
pouring down the broad boulevards converging like wheel spokes into the Place
de Villa, filling the Place and then, pressed on by the weight of its own
converging mass, flowing like an unrecoiling wave up to the blank gates of the
Hotel where the three sentries of the three co-embattled nations flanked the
three empty flagstaffs awaiting the three concordant flags.
         They
met the first troops here. It was a body of garrison cavalry, drawn up across
the mouth of the wide main boulevard leading from the Plac ............

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