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“这个老伙计，”他说，“一直都很瘦。如今，草料也让它打不起精神。草料不算好，但够它吃。”
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“而你们却不够吃。”
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马车夫再次扬起马鞭。
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“我想，”他不带感情地说，“现在没人能帮我找到别的工作了。干这一行太久了。不是等死，就是进济贫院。”
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听到我们小声说这也太残酷了，他第三次苦笑了。
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“是啊，”他缓慢地说，“这对我们是有点残酷，因为我们啥也没做，不应该遭这样的报应。但在我看来，事情就是这样：一件新事物出现了，老的就要被淘汰，循环往复。我想过了——你可以整天坐在这儿，思考事情该不该如此，为此发愁。但我觉得这样做毫无意义。我们不久就完了——要不了多久。没想到，这一行完了我会这样难过，几乎心灰意冷。”
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“不是有一项帮助马车夫的基金吗？”
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“是有这么个基金，帮助我们中的一些人学习开汽车。但我这么大岁数了，这对我有什么用呢？六十岁了，不是我一个人这么大岁数了——有几百个像我这样的人。我们不适合开汽车了，这是事实。我们没那个胆量了。帮助我们需要大量的钱。您刚才说的是事实——人们不想再看到我们了，大家都想坐出租汽车。我不是在抱怨，是你们自己要问我的。”
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他第三次扬起了马鞭。
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“告诉我，如果别人付了你的车费，并且只多给了你六便士，你会做什么？”
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马车夫盯着地面，似乎对这个问题感到迷惑。
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“做什么？为什么问这个，什么也做不了。我能做什么呢？”
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“可是你刚才说，我们给你的那点钱救了你的命。”
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“是的，我说过这话。”他慢慢答道，“我刚才情绪有点低落。有时人禁不住有这种感觉。有什么东西向你袭来，找不到出路——这让你崩溃。我们通常竭力不去想它。”
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这次，说了句“真诚地谢谢你们”，车夫用马鞭拍了拍马儿的侧腹。马儿刚才被遗忘了，这会儿像从梦中被惊醒了，开始拉着马车往前走。马车走得很慢，路灯照在树上，在马路上投下影影绰绰的影子。抬头望去，白帆似的云朵，在黑色河流般的天空上乘着风儿疾驰而过，从风中我们嗅出一种时代变迁的味道。马车渐渐看不见了，风儿仍然把缓慢的车轮声传到我们耳际，这声音渐行渐远，直到完全消失。
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（余苏凌 译）
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西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033850]
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31 FIGHTING IN GALLIPOLI
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By John Masefield
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FIGHTING IN GALLIPOLI, by John Masefield, in his Gallipoli , London, The MacMillan Company, 1916. Reprinted in Chamberlain and Bolton,Progressive Readings in Prose , pp. 256-259.
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John Masefield （1878-1967）, English poet laureate （1930）, regarded generally as the greatest living English poet, has also produced prose of unusual merit. Among his outstanding poems are the tragic narrative, “Dauber”; the war poem, “August, 1914”; and the sailor lyrics, “Salt Water Ballads.” His prose includes “Gallipoli” （1916）, an account of the Dardanelles expedition, in which he himself took part; and “The Mainsail Haul,” a group of sea yarns. In this selection from Gallipoli is illustrated Masefield’s ability to record events sympathetically and vividly.Gallipoli is a conscious literary effort to celebrate a noble failure in a prose epic surcharged with emotion.
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Let the reader imagine himself to be facing three miles of any very rough broken sloping ground known to him, ground for the most part gorse-thyme-and-scrub-covered, being poor soil, but in some places beautiful with flowers （especially “a spiked yellow flower with a whitish leaf”） and on others green from cultivation. Let him say to himself that he and an army of his friends are about to advance up the slope towards the top, and that as they will be advancing in a line, along the whole length of the three miles, he will only see the advance of those comparatively near to him, since folds or dips in the ground will hide the others. Let him, before he advances, look earnestly along the line of the hill, as it shows up clear, in blazing sunlight only a mile from him, to see his tactical objective, one little clump of pines, three hundred yards away, across what seem to be fields. Let him see in the whole length of the hill no single human being, nothing but scrub, earth, a few scattered buildings, of the Levantine type （dirty white with roofs of dirty red） and some patches of dark Scotch pine, growing as the pine loves, on bleak crests. Let him imagine himself to be more weary than he has ever been in his life before, and dirtier than he has ever believed it possible to be, and parched with thirst, nervous, wild-eyed and rather lousy. Let him think that he has not slept for more than a few minutes together for eleven days and nights, and that in all his waking hours he has been fighting for his life, often hand to hand in the dark with a fierce enemy, and that after each fight he has had to dig himself a hole in the ground, often with his hands, and then walk three or four roadless miles to bring up heavy boxes under fire. Let him think, too, that in all those eleven days he has never for an instant been out of the thunder of cannon, that waking or sleeping their devastating crash has been blasting the air across within a mile or two, and this from an artillery so terrible that each discharge beats as it were a wedge of shock between the skull bone and the brain. Let him think, too, that never, for an instant, in all that time, has he been free or even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden and savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful of dynamite in a beef tin, till their blood is caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, already too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to be done, will be gone the same way, and that he himself may reckon that he has done with life, tasted, and spoken and loved his last, and that in a few minutes more may be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still alive, unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain, in a place where none will find him, or be able to help him, a place where he will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing is left of him but a few rags and a few remnants and a little identification disk flapping on his bones in the wind. Then let him hear the intermittent crash and rattle of the fire augment suddenly and awfully in a roaring, blasting roll, unspeakable and unthinkable, while the air above, that has long been whining and whistling, becomes filled with the scream of shells passing like great cats of death in the air; let him see the slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into the white, yellow and black smokes of great explosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of white puffs marking the hill in streaks where the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking in his head, let him pull himself together with his friends, and clamber up out of the trench, to go forward against an invisible enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting him.
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The Twenty-ninth Division went forward under these conditions on the 6th of May. They dashed on, or crawled, for a few yards at a time, then dropped for a few instants before squirming on again. In such an advance men do not see the battlefield. They see the world as the rabbit sees it, crouching on the ground, just their own little patch. On broken ground like that, full of dips and rises, men may be able to see nothing but perhaps the ridge of a bank ten feet ahead, with the dust flying in spouts all along it, as bullets hit it, some thousand a minute, and looking back or to their flanks they may see no one but perhaps a few men of their own platoon lying tense but expectant, ready for the sign to advance while the bullets pipe over them in a never-ending birdlike croon. They may be shut off by some all-important foot of ground from seeing how they are fronting, from all knowledge of what the next platoon is doing or suffering. It may be quite certain death to peep over that foot of ground in order to find out, and while they wait for a few instants shells may burst in their midst and destroy a half of them. Then the rest nerving themselves, rush up the ridge, and fall in a line dead under machine-gun fire. The supports come up, creeping over their corpses, get past the ridge, into scrub which some shell has set on fire. Men fall wounded in the fire, and the cartridges in their bandoliers explode and slowly kill them. The survivors crawl through the scrub, half-choked, and come out on a field full of flowers tangled three feet high with strong barbed wire. They wait for a while, to try to make out where the enemy is. They may see nothing but the slope of the field running up to a sky line, and a flash of distant sea on a flank, but no sign of any enemy, only the crash of guns and the pipe and croon and spurt of bullets. Gathering themselves together their brave men dash out to cut the wire and are killed; others take their places and are killed; others step out with too great a pride even to stoop, and pull up the supports of the wires and fling them down, and fall dead on top of them, having perhaps cleared a couple of yards. Then a couple of machine guns open on the survivors and kill them all in thirty seconds, with the concentrated fire of a battalion.
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The supports come up, and hear about the wire from some wounded man who has crawled back through the scrub. They send back word, “Held up by wire,” and in time the message comes to the telephone which has just been blown to pieces by a shell. Presently when the telephone is repaired, the message reaches the gunners, who fire high-explosive shells on to the wire, and on to the slopes where the machine guns may be hidden. Then the supports go on over the flowers and are met midway by a concentrated fire of shells, shrapnel, machine guns, and rifles. Those who are not killed lie down among the flowers and begin to scrape little heaps of earth with their hands to give protection to their heads. In the light sandy marl this does not take long, though many are blown to pieces or hit in the back as they scrape. As before, they cannot see how the rest of the attack is faring, nor even where the other platoons of the battalion are; they lie scraping in the roots of daffodils and lilies, while bullets sing and shriek a foot or two over their heads. A man peering from his place in the flowers may make out that the man next to him, some three yards away, is dead, and that the man beyond is praying, the man beyond him cursing, and the man beyond him out of his mind from nerves or thirst.