"Tale of the Military Secret"

Page 8

The bourgeois rejoiced and immediately enlisted the boy Plokhish in their bougeois land. They gave him a whole barrel of jam and an entire basket of cookies.

The boy Plokhish sits down, eats, and is happy.

Suddenly, the burning boxes exploded! It was as if a thousand thunderclaps sounded at the same time and a thousand bolts of lightening flashed from the same cloud.

"Treason!" shouted the boy Kibalchish.

"Treason!" shouted all the loyal children.

Out of the smoke and fire, the bourgeois forces swooped down. They surrounded and seized the boy Kibalchish.

They fettered the boy in strong chains. They locked him up in a stone tower. They hurried to ask the Chief Bourgeois what he would order them to do with the captive boy. The Chief Bourgeois thought and thought for a long time, and then said:

"We shall kill this boy. But first let him tell us their Military Secret. Go, bourgeois, and ask him:

"Why, boy, did Forty Tsars and Forty Kings fight and fight with the Red Army only to be themselves defeated?

"Why, boy, with the jails and prison camps full, with police on the streets, with troops on the march, do we still have no peace neither in the light of day nor dark of night?

"Why, you damned boy Kibalchish, in my Grand Bourgeois Land, in the Kingdom of the Plains, in the Snowy Tsardom, in the Hot Arid State, on the same day in early spring, on the same day in late autumn, in different langauages do they sing the same songs, in different hands carry the same banners, give the same speeches, think the same and act the same?"

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