Project Gutenberg Australia



Title: Under Fire
       The Story of a Squad
Author Henri Barbusse (1874-1935)

Translated by W Fitzwater Wray (1867-1938)


To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side
at Crouy and on Hill 119

January, May, and September, 1915





CONTENTS:

The Vision
In the Earth
The Return
Volpatte and Fouillade
Sanctuary
Habits
Entraining
On Leave
The Anger of Volpatte
Argoval
The Dog
The Doorway
The Big Words
Of Burdens
The Egg
An Idyll
The Sap
A Box of Matches
Bombardment
Under Fire
The Refuge
Going About
The Fatigue-Party
The Dawn





I

The Vision





MONT BLANC, the Dent du Midi, and the Aiguille Verte look across at
the bloodless faces that show above the blankets along the gallery
of the sanatorium. This roofed-in gallery of rustic wood-work on the
first floor of the palatial hospital is isolated in Space and
overlooks the world. The blankets of fine wool--red, green, brown,
or white--from which those wasted cheeks and shining eyes protrude
are quite still. No sound comes from the long couches except when
some one coughs, or that of the pages of a book turned over at long
and regular intervals, or the undertone of question and quiet answer
between neighbors, or now and again the crescendo disturbance of a
daring crow, escaped to the balcony from those flocks that seem
threaded across the immense transparency like chaplets of black
pearls.

Silence is obligatory. Besides, the rich and high-placed who have
come here from all the ends of the earth, smitten by the same evil,
have lost the habit of talking. They have withdrawn into themselves,
to think of their life and of their death.

A servant appears in the balcony, dressed in white and walking
softly. She brings newspapers and hands them about.

"It's decided," says the first to unfold his paper. "War is
declared."

Expected as the news is, its effect is almost dazing, for this
audience feels that its portent is without measure or limit. These
men of culture and intelligence, detached from the affairs of the
world and almost from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened
by suffering and meditation, as far remote from their fellow men as
if they were already of the Future--these men look deeply into the
distance, towards the unknowable land of the living and the insane.

"Austria's act is a crime," says the Austrian.

"France must win," says the Englishman.

"I hope Germany will be beaten," says the German.

They settle down again under the blankets and on the pillows,
looking to heaven and the high peaks. But in spite of that vast
purity, the silence is filled with the dire disclosure of a moment
before.

War!

Some of the invalids break the silence, and say the word again under
their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the
age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which
they gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage.

The tranquil expanses of the valley, adorned with soft and smooth
pastures and hamlets rosy as the rose, with the sable shadow-stains
of the majestic mountains and the black lace and white of pines and
eternal snow, become alive with the movements of men, whose
multitudes swarm in distinct masses. Attacks develop, wave by wave,
across the fields and then stand still. Houses are eviscerated like
human beings and towns like houses. Villages appear in crumpled
whiteness as though fallen from heaven to earth. The very shape of
the plain is changed by the frightful heaps of wounded and slain.

Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing
from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force. One's
eyes follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of
Death. To north and south and west ajar there are battles on every
side. Turn where you will, there is war in every corner of that
vastness.

One of the pale-faced clairvoyants lifts himself on his elbow,
reckons and numbers the fighters present and to come--thirty
millions of soldiers. Another stammers, his eyes full of slaughter,
"Two armies at death-grips--that is one great army committing
suicide."

"It should not have been," says the deep and hollow voice of the
first in the line. But another says, "It is the French Revolution
beginning again." "Let thrones beware!" says another's undertone.

The third adds, "Perhaps it is the last war of all." A silence
follows, then some heads are shaken in dissent whose faces have been
blanched anew by the stale tragedy of sleepless night--"Stop war?
Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease."

Some one coughs, and then the Vision is swallowed up in the huge
sunlit peace of the lush meadows. In the rich colors of the glowing
kine, the black forests, the green fields and the blue distance,
dies the reflection of the fire where the old world burns and
breaks. Infinite silence engulfs the uproar of hate and pain from
the dark swarmings of mankind. They who have spoken retire one by
one within themselves, absorbed once more in their own mysterious
malady.

But when evening is ready to descend within the valley, a storm
breaks over the mass of Mont Blanc. One may not go forth in such
peril, for the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great
veranda, to that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these
victims of a great internal wound encompass with their gaze the
elemental convulsion.

They watch how the explosions of thunder on the mountain upheave the
level clouds like a stormy sea, how each one hurls a shaft of fire
and a column of cloud together into the twilight; and they turn
their wan and sunken faces to follow the flight of the eagles that
wheel in the sky and look from their supreme height down through the
wreathing mists, down to earth.

"Put an end to war?" say the watchers.--"Forbid the Storm!"

Cleansed from the passions of party and faction, liberated from
prejudice and infatuation and the tyranny of tradition, these
watchers on the threshold of another world are vaguely conscious of
the simplicity of the present and the yawning possibilities of the
future.

The man at the end of the rank cries, "I can see crawling things
down there"--"Yes, as though they were alive"--"Some sort of plant,
perhaps"--"Some kind of men"--

And there amid the baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark
disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like
evil spirits, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which
to their seeing is made of mud and water, while figures appear and
fast fix themselves to the surface of it, all blinded and borne down
with filth, like the dreadful castaways of shipwreck. And it seems
to them that these are soldiers.

The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and
scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who
strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty
million slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt
and error, uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning
Will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly
certain that the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose
number and whose misery alike are infinite will transform the old
world.






2

In the Earth





THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation
reveals together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the
night, and a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up
there--so high and so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of
dreadful birds goes circling up with strong and palpitating cries to
look down upon the earth.

The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools
and gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the
water and sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the
convoys of the night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that
glisten in the weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken
stakes protruding from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in
tangled coils. With its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be
an endless gray sheet that floats on the sea and has here and there
gone under. Though no rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing,
washed out and drowned, and even the wan light seems to flow.

Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with
a layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.

I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are
"us." We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking
wrap us up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch
themselves, yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden,
dirt-disfigured, pierced by the little lamps of dull and
heavy-lidded eyes, matted with uncut beards and foul with forgotten
hair.

Crack! Crack! Boom!--rifle fire and cannonade. Above us and all
around, it crackles and rolls, in long gusts or separate explosions.
The flaming and melancholy storm never, never ends. For more than
fifteen months, for five hundred days in this part of the world
where we are, the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning
to night and from night to morning. We are buried deep in an
everlasting battlefield; but like the ticking of the clocks at home
in the days gone by--in the now almost legendary Past--you only hear
the noise when you listen.

A babyish face with puffy eyelids, and cheek-bones as lurid as if
lozenge-shaped bits of crimson paper had been stuck on, comes out of
the ground, opens one eye, then the other. It is Paradis. The skin
of his fat cheeks is scored with the marks of the folds in the
tent-cloth that has served him for night-cap. The glance of his
little eye wanders all round me; he sees me, nods, and
says--"Another night gone, old chap."

"Yes, sonny; how many more like it still?"

He raises his two plump arms skywards. He has managed to scrape out
by the steps of the dug-out and is beside me. After stumbling over
the dim obstacle of a man who sits in the shadows, fervently
scratches himself and sighs hoarsely, Paradis makes off--lamely
splashing like a penguin through the flooded picture.

One by one the men appear from the depths. In the corners, heavy
shadows are seen forming--human clouds that move and break up. One
by one they become recognizable. There is one who comes out hooded
with his blanket--a savage, you would say, or rather, the tent of a
savage, which walks and sways from side to side. Near by, and
heavily framed in knitted wool, a square face is disclosed,
yellow-brown as though iodized, and patterned with blackish patches,
the nose broken, the eyes of Chinese restriction and red-circled, a
little coarse and moist mustache like a greasing-brush.

"There's Volpatte. How goes it, Firmin?"

"It goes, it goes, and it comes," says Volpatte. His heavy and
drawling voice is aggravated by hoarseness. He coughs--"My number's
up, this time. Say, did you hear it last night, the attack? My boy,
talk about a bombardment--something very choice in the way of
mixtures!" He sniffles and passes his sleeve under his concave nose.
His hand gropes within his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds
the skin, and scratches. "I've killed thirty of them in the candle,"
he growls; "in the big dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are
some like crumbs of metal bread. You can see them running about in
the straw like I'm telling you."

"Who's been attacking? The Boches?"

"The Boches and us too--out Vimy way--a counterattack--didn't you
hear it?"

"No," the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; "I was
snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."

"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or
rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look,
see, there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the
ground level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just
body-room for one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares,
wagging the rough and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had
never been finished. "I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was
woke up by the relief of the 129th that went by--not by the noise,
but the smell. Ah, all those chaps with their feet on the level with
my nose! It woke me up, it gave me nose-ache so."

I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the
trail of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.

"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.

"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you
smell, the more you have of 'em."

"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I
was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in
time to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those
muck-heaps was going to pinch it off me."

"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came
could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning
had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful,
he squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes
blinked among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of
his toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His
hands were horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the
palms plastered in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight,
exhaled the scent of an ancient stewpan. Though busily scratching,
he chatted with big Barque, who leaned towards him from a little way
off.

"I wasn't as mucky as this when I was a civvy," he said.

"Well, my poor friend, it's a dirty change for the worse," said
Barque.

"Lucky for you," says Tirette, going one better; "when it comes to
kids, you'll present madame with some little niggers!"

Blaire took offense, and gathering gloom wrinkled his brow. "What
have you got to give me lip about, you? What next? It's war-time. As
for you, bean-face, you think perhaps the war hasn't changed your
phizog and your manners? Look at yourself, monkey-snout,
buttock-skin! A man must be a beast to talk as you do." He passed
his hand over the dark deposit on his face, which the rains of those
days had proved finally indelible, and added, "Besides, if I am as I
am, it's my own choosing. To begin with, I have no teeth. The major
said to me a long time ago, 'You haven't a single tooth. It's not
enough. At your next rest,' he says, 'take a turn round to the
estomalogical ambulance.'"

"The tomatological ambulance," corrected Barque.

"Stomatological," Bertrand amended.

"You have all the making of an army cook--you ought to have been
one," said Barque.

"My idea, too," retorted Blaire innocently. Some one laughed. The
black man got up at the insult. "You give me belly-ache," he said
with scorn. "I'm off to the latrines."

When his doubly dark silhouette had vanished, the others scrutinized
once more the great truth that down here in the earth the cooks are
the dirtiest of men.

"If you see a chap with his skin and toggery so smeared and stained
that you wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole, you can say to
yourself, 'Probably he's a cook.' And the dirtier he is, the more
likely to be a cook."

"It's true, and true again," said Marthereau.

"Tiens, there's Tirloir! Hey, Tirloir!"

He comes up busily, peering this way and that, on an eager scent.
His insignificant head, pale as chlorine, hops centrally about in
the cushioning collar of a greatcoat that is much too heavy and big
for him. His chin is pointed, and his upper teeth protrude. A
wrinkle round his mouth is so deep with dirt that it looks like a
muzzle. As usual, he is angry, and as usual, he rages aloud.

"Some one cut my pouch in two last night!"

"It was the relief of the 129th. Where had you put it?"

He indicates a bayonet stuck in the wall of the trench close to the
mouth of a funk-hole--"There, hanging on the toothpick there."

"Ass!" comes the chorus. "Within reach of passing soldiers! Not
dotty, are you?"

"It's hard lines all the same," wails Tirloir. Then suddenly a fit
of rage seizes him, his face crumples, his little fists clench in
fury, he tightens them like knots in string and waves them about.
"Alors quoi? Ah, if I had hold of the mongrel that did it! Talk
about breaking his jaw--I'd stave in his bread-pan, I'd--there was a
whole Camembert in there, I'll go and look for it." He massages his
stomach with the little sharp taps of a guitar player, and plunges
into the gray of the morning, grinning yet dignified, with his
awkward outlines of an invalid in a dressing-gown. We hear him
grumbling until he disappears.

"Strange man, that," says Pepin; the others chuckle. "He's
daft and crazy," declares Marthereau, who is in the habit of
fortifying the expression of his thought by using two synonyms at
once.

* * * * * *

"Tiens, old man," says Tulacque, as he comes up. "Look at this."

Tulacque is magnificent. He is wearing a lemon-yellow coat made out
of an oilskin sleeping-sack. He has arranged a hole in the middle to
get his head through, and compelled his shoulder-straps and belt to
go over it. He is tall and bony. He holds his face in advance as he
walks, a forceful face, with eyes that squint. He has something in
his hand. "I found this while digging last night at the end of the
new gallery to change the rotten gratings. It took my fancy
off-hand, that knick-knack. It's an old pattern of hatchet."

It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old
brown bone--quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.

"Very handy," said Tulacque, fingering it. "Yes, not badly thought
out. Better balanced than the regulation ax. That'll be useful to
me, you'll see." As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he
would himself pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking
in the bowels of the earth.

One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand's squad and the half-section,
at an elbow of the trench. Just here it is a little wider than in
the straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you
must throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and
your stomach against the stomach of the other.

Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel. No night
watchman works here. At night we are ready for making earthworks in
front, but as long as the day lasts we have nothing to do. Huddled
up together and linked arm in arm, it only remains to await the
evening as best we can.

Daylight has at last crept into the interminable crevices that
furrow this part of the earth, and now it finds the threshold of our
holes. It is the melancholy light of the North Country, of a
restricted and muddy sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is
heavy with the smoke and smell of factories. In this leaden light,
the uncouth array of these dwellers in the depths reveals the stark
reality of the huge and hopeless misery that brought it into being.
But that is like the rattle of rifles and the verberation of
artillery. The drama in which we are actors has lasted much too long
for us to be surprised any more, either at the stubbornness we have
evolved or the garb we have devised against the rain that comes from
above, against the mud that comes from beneath, and against the
cold--that sort of infinity that is everywhere. The skins of
animals, bundles of blankets, Balaklava helmets, woolen caps, furs,
bulging mufflers (sometimes worn turban-wise), paddings and
quiltings, knittings and double-knittings, coverings and roofings
and cowls, tarred or oiled or rubbered, black or all the colors
(once upon a time) of the rainbow--all these things mask and magnify
the men, and wipe out their uniforms almost as effectively as their
skins. One has fastened on his back a square of linoleum, with a big
draught-board pattern in white and red, that he found in the middle
of the dining-room of some temporary refuge. That is Pepin.
We know him afar off by his harlequin placard sooner even than by
his pale Apache face. Here is Barque's bulging chest-protector,
carven from an eiderdown quilt, formerly pink, but now fantastically
bleached and mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises
like a ruined tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass
of moleskin, with the fur inside, adorns little Eudore with the
burnished back of a beetle; while the golden corselet of Tulacque
the Big Chief surpasses all.

The "tin hat" gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the
beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing
it--on the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like
Cadilhac, or on a cotton cap like Barque--produce a complicated
diversity of appearance.

And our legs! I went down just now, bent double, into our dug-out,
the little low cave that smells musty and damp, where one stumbles
over empty jam-pots and dirty rags, where two long lumps lay asleep,
while in the corner a kneeling shape rummaged a pouch by
candle-light. As I climbed out, the rectangle of entry afforded me a
revelation of our legs. Flat on the ground, vertically in the air,
or aslant; spread about, doubled up, or mixed together; blocking the
fairway and cursed by passers-by, they present a collection of many
colors and many shapes--gaiters, leggings black or yellow, long or
short, in leather, in tawny cloth, in any sort of waterproof stuff;
puttees in dark blue, light blue, black, sage green, khaki, and
beige. Alone of all his kind, Volpatte has retained the modest
gaiters of mobilization. Mesnil Andre has displayed for a
fortnight a pair of thick woolen stockings, ribbed and green; and
Tirette has always been known by his gray cloth puttees with white
stripes, commandeered from a pair of civilian trousers that was
hanging goodness knows where at the beginning of the war. As for
Marthereau's puttees, they are not both of the same hue, for he
failed to find two fag-ends of greatcoat equally worn and equally
dirty, to be cut up into strips.

There are legs wrapped up in rags, too, and even in newspapers,
which are kept in place with spirals of thread or--much more
practical--telephone wire. Pepin fascinated his friends and
the passers-by with a pair of fawn gaiters, borrowed from a corpse.
Barque, who poses as a resourceful man, full of ideas--and Heaven
knows what a bore it makes of him at times!--has white calves, for
he wrapped surgical bandages round his leg-cloths to preserve them,
a snowy souvenir at his latter end of the cotton cap at the other,
which protrudes below his helmet and is left behind in its turn by a
saucy red tassel. Poterloo has been walking about for a month in the
boots of a German soldier, nearly new, and with horseshoes on the
heels. Caron entrusted them to Poterloo when he was sent back on
account of his arm. Caron had taken them himself from a Bavarian
machine-gunner, knocked out near the Pylones road. I can hear
Caron telling about it yet--

"Old man, he was there, his buttocks in a hole, doubled up, gaping
at the sky with his legs in the air, and his pumps offered
themselves to me with an air that meant they were worth my while. 'A
tight fit,' says I. But you talk about a job to bring those
beetle-crushers of his away! I worked on top of him, tugging,
twisting and shaking, for half an hour and no lie about it. With his
feet gone quite stiff, the patient didn't help me a bit. Then at
last the legs of it--they'd been pulled about so--came unstuck at
the knees, and his breeks tore away, and all the lot came, flop!
There was me, all of a sudden, with a full boot in each fist. The
legs and feet had to be emptied out."

"You're going it a bit strong!"

"Ask Euterpe the cyclist if it isn't true. I tell you he did it
along of me, too. We shoved our arms inside the boots and pulled out
of 'em some bones and bits of sock and bits of feet. But look if
they weren't worth while!"

So, until Caron returns, Poterloo continues on his behalf the
wearing of the Bavarian machine-gunner's boots.

Thus do they exercise their wits, according to their intelligence,
their vivacity, their resources, and their boldness, in the struggle
with the terrible discomfort. Each one seems to make the revealing
declaration, "This is all that I knew, all I was able, all that I
dared to do in the great misery which has befallen me."

* * * * * *

Mesnil Joseph drowses; Blaire yawns; Marthereau smokes, "eyes
front." Lamuse scratches himself like a gorilla, and Eudore like a
marmoset. Volpatte coughs, and says, "I'm kicking the bucket."
Mesnil Andre has got out his mirror and comb and is tending
his fine chestnut beard as though it were a rare plant. The
monotonous calm is disturbed here and there by the outbreaks of
ferocious resentment provoked by the presence of parasites--endemic,
chronic, and contagious.

Barque, who is an observant man, sends an itinerant glance around,
takes his pipe from his mouth, spits, winks, and says--"I say, we
don't resemble each other much."

"Why should we?" says Lamuse. "It would be a miracle if we did."

* * * * *

Our ages? We are of all ages. Ours is a regiment in reserve which
successive reinforcements have renewed partly with fighting units
and partly with Territorials. In our half-section there are
reservists of the Territorial Army, new recruits, and demi-poils.
Fouillade is forty; Blaire might be the father of Biquet, who is a
gosling of Class 1913. The corporal calls Marthereau "Grandpa" or
"Old Rubbish-heap," according as in jest or in earnest. Mesnil
Joseph would be at the barracks if there were no war. It is a
comical effect when we are in charge of Sergeant Vigile, a nice
little boy, with a dab on his lip by way of mustache. When we were
in quarters the other day, he played at skipping-rope with the
kiddies. In our ill-assorted flock, in this family without kindred,
this home without a hearth at which we gather, there are three
generations side by side, living, waiting, standing still, like
unfinished statues, like posts.

Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere. I look at
the two men beside me. Poterloo, the miner from the Calonne pit, is
pink; his eyebrows are the color of straw, his eyes flax-blue. His
great golden head involved a long search in the stores to find the
vast steel-blue tureen that bonnets him. Fouillade, the boatman from
Cette, rolls his wicked eyes in the long, lean face of a musketeer,
with sunken cheeks and his skin the color of a violin. In good
sooth, my two neighbors are as unlike as day and night.

Cocon, no less, a slight and desiccated person in spectacles, whose
tint tells of corrosion in the chemical vapors of great towns,
contrasts with Biquet, a Breton in the rough, whose skin is gray and
his jaw like a paving-stone; and Mesnil Andre, the
comfortable chemist from a country town in Normandy, who has such a
handsome and silky beard and who talks so much and so well--he has
little in common with Lamuse, the fat peasant of Poitou, whose
cheeks and neck are like underdone beef. The suburban accent of
Barque, whose long legs have scoured the streets of Paris in all
directions, alternates with the semi-Belgian cadence of those
Northerners who came from the 8th Territorial; with the sonorous
speech, rolling on the syllables as if over cobblestone, that the
144th pours out upon us; with the dialect blown from those ant-like
clusters that the Auvergnats so obstinately form among the rest. I
remember the first words of that wag, Tirette, when he arrived--"I,
mes enfants, I am from Clichy-la-Garenne! Can any one beat
that?"--and the first grievance that Paradis brought to me, "They
don't give a damn for me, because I'm from Morvan!"

* * * * * *

Our callings? A little of all--in the lump. In those departed days
when we had a social status, before we came to immure our destiny in
the molehills that we must always build up again as fast as rain and
scrap-iron beat them down, what were we? Sons of the soil and
artisans mostly. Lamuse was a farm-servant, Paradis a carter.
Cadilhac, whose helmet rides loosely on his pointed head, though it
is a juvenile size--like a dome on a steeple, says Tirette--owns
land. Papa Blaire was a small farmer in La Brie. Barque, porter and
messenger, performed acrobatic tricks with his carrier-tricycle
among the trains and taxis of Paris, with solemn abuse (so they say)
for the pedestrians, fleeing like bewildered hens across the big
streets and squares. Corporal Bertrand, who keeps himself always a
little aloof, correct, erect, and silent, with a strong and handsome
face and forthright gaze, was foreman in a case-factory. Tirloir
daubed carts with paint--and without grumbling, they say. Tulacque
was barman at the Throne Tavern in the suburbs; and Eudore of the
pale and pleasant face kept a roadside cafe not very far from
the front lines. It has been ill-used by the shells--naturally, for
we all know that Eudore has no luck. Mesnil Andre, who still
retains a trace of well-kept distinction, sold bicarbonate and
infallible remedies at his pharmacy in a Grande Place. His brother
Joseph was selling papers and illustrated story-books in a station
on the State Railways at the same time that, in far-off Lyons,
Cocon, the man of spectacles and statistics, dressed in a black
smock, busied himself behind the counters of an ironmongery, his
hands glittering with plumbago; while the lamps of Becuwe
Adolphe and Poterloo, risen with the dawn, trailed about the
coalpits of the North like weakling Will-o'-th'-wisps.

And there are others amongst us whose occupations one can never
recall, whom one confuses with one another; and the rural
nondescripts who peddled ten trades at once in their packs, without
counting the dubious Pepin, who can have had none at all.
(While at the depot after sick leave, three months ago, they say, he
got married--to secure the separation allowance.)

The liberal professions are not represented among those around me.
Some teachers are subalterns in the company or Red Cross men. In the
regiment a Marist Brother is sergeant in the Service de
Sante; a professional tenor is cyclist dispatch-rider to the
Major; a "gentleman of independent means" is mess corporal to the
C.H.R. But here there is nothing of all that. We are fighting men,
we others, and we include hardly any intellectuals, or men of the
arts or of wealth, who during this war will have risked their faces
only at the loopholes, unless in passing by, or under gold-laced
caps.

Yes, we are truly and deeply different from each other. But we are
alike all the same. In spite of this diversity of age, of country,
of education, of position, of everything possible, in spite of the
former gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike. Under the
same uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and
habits, the same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state
primeval.

The same language, compounded of dialect and the slang of workshop
and barracks, seasoned with the latest inventions, blends us in the
sauce of speech with the massed multitudes of men who (for seasons
now) have emptied France and crowded together in the North-East.

Here, too, linked by a fate from which there is no escape, swept
willy-nilly by the vast adventure into one rank, we have no choice
but to go as the weeks and months go--alike. The terrible narrowness
of the common life binds us close, adapts us, merges us one in the
other. It is a sort of fatal contagion. Nor need you, to see how
alike we soldiers are, be afar off--at that distance, say, when we
are only specks of the dust-clouds that roll across the plain.

We are waiting. Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking
like warping wood or old hinges. Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles;
more slowly, but deeper. And we begin again, but not in the same
way, to wait. In a state of war, one is always waiting. We have
become waiting-machines. For the moment it is food we are waiting
for. Then it will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have
done with dinner we will think about the letters. After that, we
shall set ourselves to wait for something else.

Hunger and thirst are urgent instincts which formidably excite the
temper of my companions. As the meal gets later they become
grumblesome and angry. Their need of food and drink snarls from
their lips--"That's eight o'clock. Now, why the hell doesn't it
come?"

"Just so, and me that's been pining since noon yesterday," sulks
Lamuse, whose eyes are moist with longing, while his cheeks seem to
carry great daubs of wine-colored grease-paint.

Discontent grows more acute every minute.

"I'll bet Plumet has poured down his own gullet my wine ration that
he's supposed to have, and others with it, and he's lying drunk over
there somewhere."

"It's sure and certain"--Marthereau seconds the proposition.

"Ah, the rotters, the vermin, these fatigue men!" Tirloir bellows.
"An abominable race--all of 'em--mucky-nosed idlers! They roll over
each other all day long at the rear, and they'll be damned before
they'll be in time. Ah, if I were boss, they should damn quick take
our places in the trenches, and they'd have to work for a change. To
begin with, I should say, 'Every man in the section will carry
grease and soup in turns.' Those who were willing, of course--"

"I'm confident," cries Cocon, "it's that Pepere that's
keeping the others back. He does it on purpose, firstly, and then,
too, he can't finish plucking himself in the morning, poor lad. He
wants ten hours for his flea-hunt, he's so finicking; and if he
can't get 'em, monsieur has the pip all day."

"Be damned to him," growls Lamuse. "I'd shift him out of bed if only
I was there! I'd wake him up with boot-toe, I'd--"

"I was reckoning, the other day," Cocon went on; "it took him seven
hours forty-seven minutes to come from thirty-one dug-out. It should
take him five good hours, but no longer."

Cocon is the Man of Figures. He has a deep affection, amounting to
rapacity, for accuracy in recorded computation. On any subject at
all, he goes burrowing after statistics, gathers them with the
industry of an insect, and serves them up on any one who will
listen. Just now, while he wields his figures like weapons, the
sharp ridges and angles and triangles that make up the paltry face
where perch the double discs of his glasses, are contracted with
vexation. He climbs to the firing-step (made in the days when this
was the first line), and raises his head angrily over the parapet.
The light touch of a little shaft of cold sunlight that lingers on
the land sets a-glitter both his glasses and the diamond that hangs
from his nose.

"And that Pepere, too, talk about a drinking-cup with
the bottom out! You'd never believe the weight of stuff he can let
drop on a single journey."

With his pipe in the corner, Papa Blaire fumes in two senses. You
can see his heavy mustache trembling. It is like a comb made of
bone, whitish and drooping.

"Do you want to know what I think? These dinner men, they're the
dirtiest dogs of all. It's 'Blast this' and 'Blast that'--John Blast
and Co., I call 'em."

"They have all the elements of a dunghill about them," says Eudore,
with a sigh of conviction. He is prone on the ground, with his mouth
half-open and the air of a martyr. With one fading eye he follows
the movements of Pepin, who prowls to and fro like a hyaena.

Their spiteful exasperation with the loiterers mounts higher and
higher. Tirloir the Grumbler takes the lead and expands. This is
where he comes in. With his little pointed gesticulations he goads
and spurs the anger all around him.

"Ah, the devils, what? The sort of meat they threw at us yesterday!
Talk about whetstones! Beef from an ox, that? Beef from a bicycle,
yes rather! I said to the boys, 'Look here, you chaps, don't you
chew it too quick, or you'll break your front teeth on the nails!'"

Tirloir's harangue--he was manager of a traveling cinema, it
seems--would have made us laugh at other times, but in the present
temper it is only echoed by a circulating growl.

"Another time, so that you won't grumble about the toughness, they
send you something soft and flabby that passes for meat, something
with the look and the taste of a sponge--or a poultice. When you
chew that, it's the same as a cup of water, no more and no less."

"Tout ca," says Lamuse, "has no substance; it gets no grip on
your guts. You think you're full, but at the bottom of your tank
you're empty. So, bit by bit, you turn your eyes up, poisoned for
want of sustenance."

"The next time," Biquet exclaims in desperation, "I shall ask to see
the old man, and I shall say, 'Mon capitaine'--"

"And I," says Barque, "shall make myself look sick, and I shall say,
'Monsieur le major'--"

"And get nix or the kick-out--they're all alike--all in a band to
take it out of the poor private."

"I tell you, they'd like to get the very skin off us!"

"And the brandy, too! We have a right to get it brought to the
trenches--as long as it's been decided somewhere--I don't know when
or where, but I know it--and in the three days that we've been here,
there's three days that the brandy's been dealt out to us on the end
of a fork!"

"Ah, malheur!"

* * * * * *

"There's the grub!" announces a poilu [note 1] who was on the
look-out at the corner.

"Time, too!"

And the storm of revilings ceases as if by magic. Wrath is changed
into sudden contentment.

Three breathless fatigue men, their faces streaming with tears of
sweat, put down on the ground some large tins, a paraffin can, two
canvas buckets, and a file of loaves, skewered on a stick. Leaning
against the wall of the trench, they mop their faces with their
handkerchiefs or sleeves. And I see Cocon go up to Pepere with a
smile, and forgetful of the abuse he had been heaping on the other's
reputation, he stretches out a cordial hand towards one of the cans
in the collection that swells the circumference of Pepere. after the
manner of a life-belt.

"What is there to eat?"

"It's there," is the evasive reply of the second fatigue man, whom
experience has taught that a proclamation of the menu always evokes
the bitterness of disillusion. So they set themselves to panting
abuse of the length and the difficulties of the trip they have just
accomplished: "Some crowds about, everywhere! It's a tough job to
get along--got to disguise yourself as a cigarette paper,
sometimes."--"And there are people who say they're shirkers in the
kitchens!" As for him, he would a hundred thousand times rather be
with the company in the trenches, to mount guard and dig, than earn
his keep by such a job, twice a day during the night!

Paradis, having lifted the lids of the jars, surveys the recipients
and announces, "Kidney beans in oil, bully, pudding, and
coffee--that's all."

"Nom de Dieu!" bawls Tulacque. "And wine?" He summons the crowd:
"Come and look here, all of you! That--that's the limit! We're done
out of our wine!"

Athirst and grimacing, they hurry up; and from the profoundest
depths of their being wells up the chorus of despair and
disappointment, "Oh, Hell!"

"Then what's that in there?" says the fatigue man, still ruddily
sweating, and using his foot to point at a bucket.

"Yes," says Paradis, "my mistake, there is some."

The fatigue man shrugs his shoulders, and hurls at Paradis a look of
unspeakable scorn--"Now you're beginning! Get your gig-lamps on, if
your sight's bad." He adds, "One cup each--rather less perhaps--some
chucklehead bumped against me, coming through the Boyau du Bois, and
a drop got spilled." "Ah!" he hastens to add, raising his voice, "if
I hadn't been loaded up, talk about the boot-toe he'd have got in
the rump! But he hopped it on his top gear, the brute!"

In spite of this confident assurance, the fatigue man makes off
himself, curses overtaking him as he goes, maledictions charged with
offensive reflections on his honesty and temperance, imprecations
inspired by this revelation of a ration reduced.

All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it
standing, squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks
pulled out of the holes where they sleep--or even prone, their backs
on the ground, disturbed by passers-by, cursed at and cursing. Apart
from these fleeting insults and jests, they say nothing, the primary
and universal interest being but to swallow, with their mouths and
the circumference thereof as greasy as a rifle-breech. Contentment
is theirs.

At the earliest cessation of their jaw-bones' activity, they serve
up the most ribald of raillery. They knock each other about, and
clamor in riotous rivalry to have their say. One sees even Farfadet
smiling, the frail municipal clerk who in the early days kept
himself so decent and clean amongst us all that he was taken for a
foreigner or a convalescent. One sees the tomato-like mouth of
Lamuse dilate and divide, and his delight ooze out in tears.
Poterloo's face, like a pink peony, opens out wider and wider. Papa
Blaire's wrinkles flicker with frivolity as he stands up, pokes his
head forward, and gesticulates with the abbreviated body that serves
as a handle for his huge drooping mustache. Even the corrugations of
Cocon's poor little face are lighted up.

Becuwe goes in search of firewood to warm the coffee. While
we wait for our drink, we roll cigarettes and fill pipes. Pouches
are pulled out. Some of us have shop-acquired pouches in leather or
rubber, but they are a minority. Biquet extracts his tobacco from a
sock, of which the mouth is drawn tight with string. Most of the
others use the bags for anti-gas pads, made of some waterproof
material which is an excellent preservative of shag, be it coarse or
fine; and there are those who simply fumble for it in the bottom of
their greatcoat pockets.

The smokers spit in a circle, just at the mouth of the dug-out which
most of the half-section inhabit, and flood with tobacco-stained
saliva the place where they put their hands and feet when they
flatten themselves to get in or out.

But who notices such a detail?

* * * * * *

Now, a propos of a letter to Marthereau from his wife, they
discuss produce.

"La mere Marthereau has written," he says. "That fat pig
we've got at home, a fine specimen, guess how much she's worth now?"

But the subject of domestic economy degenerates suddenly into a
fierce altercation between Pepin and Tulacque. Words of quite
unmistakable significance are exchanged. Then--"I don't care a what
you say or what you don't say! Shut it up!"--"I shall shut it when I
want, midden!"--"A seven-pound thump would shut it up quick
enough!"--"Who from? Who'll give it me?"--"Come and find out!"

They grind their teeth and approach each other in a foaming rage.
Tulacque grasps his prehistoric ax, and his squinting eyes are
flashing. The other is pale and his eyes have a greenish glint; you
can see in his blackguard face that his thoughts are with his knife.

But between the two, as they grip each other in looks and mangle in
words, Lamuse intervenes with his huge pacific head, like a baby's,
and his face of sanguinary hue: "Allons, allons! You're not going to
cut yourselves up! Can't be allowed!"

The others also interpose, and the antagonists are separated, but
they continue to hurl murderous looks at each other across the
barrier of their comrades. Pepin mutters a residue of slander
in tones that quiver with malice--

"The hooligan, the ruffian, the blackguard! But wait a bit! I'll see
him later about this!"

On the other side, Tulacque confides in the poilu who is beside him:
"That crab-louse! Non, but you know what he is! You know--there's no
more to be said. Here, we've got to rub along with a lot of people
that we don't know from Adam. We know 'em and yet we don't know 'em;
but that man, if he thinks he can mess me about, he'll find himself
up the wrong street! You wait a bit. I'll smash him up one of these
days, you'll see!"

Meanwhile the general conversation is resumed, drowning the last
twin echoes of the quarrel.

"It's every day alike, alors!" says Paradis to me; "yesterday it was
Plaisance who wanted to let Fumex have it heavy on the jaw, about
God knows what--a matter of opium pills, I think. First it's one and
then it's another that talks of doing some one in. Are we getting to
be a lot of wild animals because we look like 'em?"

"Mustn't take them too seriously, these men," Lamuse declares;
"they're only kids."

"True enough, seeing that they're men."

* * * * * *

The day matures. A little more light has trickled through the mists
that enclose the earth. But the sky has remained overcast, and now
it dissolves in rain; With a slowness which itself disheartens, the
wind brings back its great wet void upon us. The rain-haze makes
everything clammy and dull--even the Turkey red of Lamuse s cheeks,
and even the orange armor that caparisons Tulacque. The water
penetrates to the deep joy with which dinner endowed us, and puts it
out. Space itself shrinks; and the sky, which is a field of
melancholy, comes closely down upon the earth, which is a field of
death.

We are still there, implanted and idle. It will be hard to-day to
reach the end of it, to get rid of the afternoon. We shiver in
discomfort, and keep shifting our positions, like cattle enclosed.

Cocon is explaining to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of
our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations.
In the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of
French trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half
leveled; the others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These
parallels are joined up by innumerable galleries which hook and
crook themselves like ancient streets. The system is much more dense
than we believe who live inside it. On the twenty-five kilometers'
width that form the army front, one must count on a thousand
kilometers of hollowed lines--trenches and saps of all sorts. And
the French Army consists of ten such armies. There are then, on the
French side, about 10,000 kilometers [note 2] of trenches, and as
much again on the German side. And the French front is only about
one-eighth of the whole war-front of the world.

Thus speaks Cocon, and he ends by saying to his neighbor, "In all
that lot, you see what we are, us chaps?"

Poor Barque's head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child's, is
underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an
apostrophe: "Yes, it's true, when you come to think of it. What's a
soldier, or even several soldiers?--Nothing, and less than nothing,
in the whole crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the
few drops of blood that we are among all this flood of men and
things."

Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a
chance of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an
undertone: "He was coming along with two horses--Fs-s-s--a shell;
and he's only one horse left."

"You get fed up with it," says Volpatte.

"But you stick it," growls Barque.

"You've got to," says Paradis.

"Why?" asks Marthereau, without conviction.

"No need for a reason, as long as we've got to."

"There is no reason," Lamuse avers.

"Yes, there is," says Cocon. "It's--or rather, there are several."

"Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we've got to
stick it."

"All the same," comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance
slip of airing his pet phrase--"All the same, they'd like to steal
the very skin off us!"

"At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a
heap of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any
more."

"Nor me either."

"Nor me."

"I've never tried to."

"You're not such a fool as you look, flea-face," says the shrill and
jeering voice of Mesnil Andre. Obscurely flattered, the other
develops his theme--

"To begin with, you can't know anything about anything."

Says Corporal Bertrand, "There's only one thing you need know, and
it's this; that the Boches are here in front of us, deep dug in, and
we've got to see that they don't get through, and we've got to put
'em out, one day or another--as soon as possible."

"Oui, oui, they've got to leg it, and no mistake about it. What else
is there? Not worth while to worry your head thinking about anything
else. But it's a long job."

An explosion of profane assent comes from Fouillade, and he adds,
"That's what it is!"

"I've given up grousing," says Barque. "At the beginning of it, I
played hell with everybody--with the people at the rear, with the
civilians, with the natives, with the shirkers. Yes, I played hell;
but that was at the beginning of the war--I was young. Now, I take
things better."

"There's only one way of taking 'em--as they come!"

"Of course! Otherwise, you'd go crazy. We're dotty enough already,
eh, Firmin?"

Volpatte assents with a nod of profound conviction. He spits, and
then contemplates his missile with a fixed and unseeing eye.

"You were saying?" insists Barque.

"Here, you haven't got to look too far in front. You must live from
day to day and from hour to hour, as well as you can."

"Certain sure, monkey-face. We've got to do what they tell us to do,
until they tell us to go away."

"That's all," yawns Mesnil Joseph.

Silence follows the recorded opinions that proceed from these dried
and tanned faces, inlaid with dust. This, evidently, is the credo of
the men who, a year and a half ago, left all the corners of the land
to mass themselves on the frontier: Give up trying to understand,
and give up trying to be yourself. Hope that you will not die, and
fight for life as well as you can.

"Do what you've got to do, oui, but get out of your own messes
yourself," says Barque, as he slowly stirs the mud to and fro.

"No choice"--Tulacque backs him up. "If you don't get out of 'em
yourself, no one'll do it for you."

"He's not yet quite extinct, the man that bothers about the other
fellow."

"Every man for himself, in war!"

"That's so, that's so."

Silence. Then from the depth of their destitution, these men summon
sweet souvenirs--"All that," Barque goes on, "isn't worth much,
compared with the good times we had at Soissons."

"Ah, the Devil!"

A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to
redden their cold faces.

"Talk about a festival!" sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching
himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland.

"Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be
ours! The houses and the beds--"

"And the cupboards!"

"And the cellars!"

Lamuse's eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full.

"Were you there long?" asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the
drafts from Auvergne.

"Several months."

The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again
fiercely at this vision of the days of plenty.

"We used to see," said Paradis dreamily, "the poilus pouring along
and behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round
their middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good
fellow or woman that they hadn't seen and won't ever see again."

We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. "There were
things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We
held all the aces in those days."

"A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops."

"Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you've no idea
of, a sort of devil's delight."

"Believe me or not," said Blaire to Cadilhac, "but in the middle of
it all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and
everywhere else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to
it. Ah, mon vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!"

"Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the
great Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!"

"Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted
without twisting himself."

"Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks
chasing and gabbling about the streets in all directions, blubbering
because they had no coal or wood. But he'd got a fire. When he
hadn't any, he said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you through.' And he
wasn't long about it, either."

"He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his
kitchen, you'd never guess what he'd got the stew going with! With a
violin that he'd found in the house!"

"Rotten, all the same," says Mesnil Andre. "One knows well
enough that a violin isn't worth much when it comes to utility, but
all the same--"

"Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching
one for a cane, but the rest--into the fire! Then the arm-chairs in
the drawing-room went by degrees--mahogany, they were. He did 'em in
and cut them up by night, case some N.C.O. had something to say
about it."

"He knew his way about," said Pepin. "As for us, we got busy
with an old suite of furniture that lasted us a fortnight."

"And what for should we be without? You've got to make dinner, and
there's no wood or coal. After the grub's served out, there you are
with your jaws empty, with a pile of meat in front of you, and in
the middle of a lot of pals that chaff and bullyrag you!"

"It's the War Office's doing, it isn't ours."

"Hadn't the officers a lot to say about the pinching?"

"They damn well did it themselves, I give you my word! Desmaisons,
do you remember Lieutenant Virvin's trick, breaking down a cellar
door with an ax? And when a poilu saw him at it, he gave him the
door for firewood, so that he wouldn't spread it about."

"And poor old Saladin, the transport officer. He was found coming
out of a basement in the dusk with two bottles of white wine in each
arm, the sport, like a nurse with two pairs of twins. When he was
spotted, they made him go back down to the wine-cellar, and serve
out bottles for everybody. But Corporal Bertrand, who is a man of
scruples, wouldn't have any. Ah, you remember that, do you,
sausage-foot!"

"Where's that cook now that always found wood?" asks Cadilhac.

"He's dead. A bomb fell in his stove. He didn't get it, but he's
dead all the same--died of shock when he saw his macaroni with its
legs in the air. Heart seizure, so the doc' said. His heart was
weak--he was only strong on wood. They gave him a proper
funeral--made him a coffin out of the bedroom floor, and got the
picture nails out of the walls to fasten 'em together, and used
bricks to drive 'em in. While they were carrying him off, I thought
to myself, 'Good thing for him he's dead. If he saw that, he'd never
be able to forgive himself for not having thought of the bedroom
floor for his fire.'--Ah, what the devil are you doing, son of a
pig?"

Volpatte offers philosophy on the rude intrusion of a passing
fatigue party: "The private gets along on the back of his pals. When
you spin your yarns in front of a fatigue gang, or when you take the
best bit or the best place, it's the others that suffer."

"I've often," says Lamuse, "put up dodges so as not to go into the
trenches, and it's come off no end of times. I own up to that. But
when my pals are in danger, I'm not a dodger any more. I forget
discipline and everything else. I see men, and I go. But otherwise,
my boy, I look after my little self."

Lamuse's claims are not idle words. He is an admitted expert at
loafing, but all the same he has brought wounded in under fire and
saved their lives. Without any brag, he relates the deed--

"We were all lying on the grass, and having a hot time. Crack,
crack! Whizz, whizz! When I saw them downed, I got up, though they
yelled at me, 'Get down!' Couldn't leave 'em like that. Nothing to
make a song about, seeing I couldn't do anything else,"

Nearly all the boys of the squad have some high deed of arms to
their credit, and the Croix de Guerre has been successively set upon
their breasts.

"I haven't saved any Frenchmen," says Biquet, "but I've given some
Boches the bitter pill." In the May attacks, he ran off in advance
and was seen to disappear in the distance, but came back with four
fine fellows in helmets.

"I, too," says Tulacque, "I've killed some." Two months ago, with
quaint vanity, he laid out nine in a straight row, in front of the
taken trench. "But," he adds, "it's always the Boche officer that
I'm after."

"Ah, the beasts!" The curse comes from several men at once and from
the bottom of their hearts.

"Ah, mon vieux," says Tirloir, "we talk about the dirty Boche race;
but as for the common soldier, I don't know if it's true or whether
we're codded about that as well, and if at bottom they're not men
pretty much like us."

"Probably they're men like us," says Eudore.

"Perhaps!" cries Cocon, "and perhaps not."

"Anyway," Tirloir goes on, "we've not got a dead set on the men, but
on the German officers; non, non, non, they're not men, they're
monsters. I tell you, they're really a specially filthy sort o'
vermin. One might say that they're the microbes of the war. You
ought to see them close to--the infernal great stiff-backs, thin as
nails, though they've got calf-heads."

"And snouts like snakes."

Tirloir continues: "I saw one once, a prisoner, as I came back from
liaison. The beastly bastard! A Prussian colonel, that wore a
prince's crown, so they told me, and a gold coat-of-arms. He was mad
because we took leave to graze against him when they were bringing
him back along the communication trench, and he looked down on
everybody--like that. I said to myself, 'Wait a bit, old cock, I'll
make you rattle directly!' I took my time and squared up behind him,
and kicked into his tailpiece with all my might. I tell you, he fell
down half-strangled."

"Strangled?"

"Yes, with rage, when it dawned on him that the rump of an officer
and nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor
private! He went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an
epileptic--"

"I'm not spiteful myself," says Blaire, "I've got kiddies. And it
worries me, too, at home, when I've got to kill a pig that I
know--but those, I shall run 'em through--Bing!--full in the
linen-cupboard."

"I, too."

"Not to mention," says Pepin, "that they've got silver hats,
and pistols that you can get four quid for whenever you like, and
field-glasses that simply haven't got a price. Ah, bad luck, what a
lot of chances I let slip in the early part of the campaign! I was
too much of a beginner then, and it serves me right. But don't
worry, I shall get a silver hat. Mark my words, I swear I'll have
one. I must have not only the skin of one of Wilhelm's red-tabs, but
his togs as well. Don't fret yourself; I'll fasten on to that before
the war ends."

"You think it'll have an end, then?" asks some one.

"Don't worry!" replies the other.

* * * * * *

Meanwhile, a hubbub has arisen to the right of us, and suddenly a
moving and buzzing group appears, in which dark and bright forms
mingle.

"What's all that?"

Biquet has ventured on a reconnaissance, and returns contemptuously
pointing with his thumb towards the motley mass: "Eh, boys! Come and
have a squint at them! Some people!"

"Some people?"

"Oui, some gentlemen, look you. Civvies, with Staff officers."

"Civilians! Let's hope they'll stick it!" [note 3]

It is the sacramental saying and evokes laughter, although we have
heard it a hundred times, and although the soldier has rightly or
wrongly perverted the original meaning and regards it as an ironical
reflection on his life of privations and peril.

Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes.
Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and
binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or
patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.

With an arm where a brassard glitters in gold-edged silk and golden
ornament, a captain indicates the firing-step in front of an old
emplacement and invites the visitors to get up and try it. The
gentleman in the touring suit clambers up with the aid of his
umbrella.

Says Barque, "You've seen the station-master at the Gare du Nord,
all in his Sunday best, and opening the door of a first-class
compartment for a rich sportsman on the first day of the shooting?
With his 'Montez, monsieur le Propritaire!'--you know, when the
toffs are all togged up in brand-new outfits and leathers and
ironmongery, and showing off with all their paraphernalia for
killing poor little animals!"

Three or four poilus who were quite without their accouterments have
disappeared underground. The others sit as though paralyzed. Even
the pipes go out, and nothing is heard but the babble of talk
exchanged by the officers and their guests.

"Trench tourists," says Barque in an undertone, and then
louder--"This way, mesdames et messieurs"--in the manner of the
moment.

"Chuck it!" whispers Farfadet, fearing that Barque's malicious
tongue will draw the attention of the potent personages.

Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who
detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He
has a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another
follows him, wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black
beard, a white tie and an eyeglass.

"Ah, ah! There are some poilus," says the first gentleman. "These
are real poilus, indeed."

He comes up to our party a little timidly, as though in the
Zoological Gardens, and offers his hand to the one who is nearest to
him--not without awkwardness, as one offers a piece of bread to the
elephant.

"He, he! They are drinking coffee," he remarks.

"They call it 'the juice,'" corrects the magpie-man.

"Is it good, my friends?" The soldier, abashed in his turn by this
alien and unusual visitation, grunts, giggles, and reddens, and the
gentleman says, "He, he!" Then, with a slight motion of the head,
he withdraws backwards.

The assemblage, with its neutral shades of civilian cloth and its
sprinkling of bright military hues--like geraniums and hortensias in
the dark soil of a flowerbed--oscillates, then passes, and moves off
the opposite way it came. One of the officers was heard to say, "We
have yet much to see, messieurs les journalistes."

When the radiant spectacle has faded away, we look at each other.
Those who had fled into the funk-holes now gradually and head first
disinter themselves. The group recovers itself and shrugs its
shoulders.

"They're journalists," says Tirette.

"Journalists?"

"Why, yes, the individuals that lay the newspapers. You don't seem
to catch on, fathead. Newspapers must have chaps to write 'em."

"Then it's those that stuff up our craniums?" says Marthereau.

Barque assumes a shrill treble, and pretending that he has a
newspaper in front of his nose, recites--"'The Crown Prince is mad,
after having been killed at the beginning of the campaign, and
meanwhile he has all the diseases you can name. William will die
this evening, and again to-morrow. The Germans have no more
munitions and are chewing wood. They cannot hold out, according to
the most authoritative calculations, beyond the end of the week. We
can have them when we like, with their rifles slung. If one can wait
a few days longer, there will be no desire to forsake the life of
the trenches. One is so comfortable there, with water and gas laid
on, and shower-baths at every step. The only drawback is that it is
rather too hot in winter. As for the Austrians, they gave in a long
time since and are only pretending.' For fifteen months now it's
been like that, and you can hear the editor saying to his scribes,
'Now, boys, get into it! Find some way of brushing that up again for
me in five secs, and make it spin out all over those four damned
white sheets that we've got to mucky.'"

"Ah, yes!" says Fouillade.

"Look here, corporal; you're making fun of it--isn't it true what I
said?"

"There's a little truth in it, but you're too slashing on the poor
boys, and you'd be the first to make a song about it if you had to
go without papers. Oui, when the paper-man's going by, why do you
all shout, 'Here, here'?"

"And what good can you get out of them all?" cries Papa Blaire.
"Read 'em by the tubful if you like, but do the same as me--don't
believe 'em!"

"Oui, oui, that's enough about them. Turn the page over,
donkey-nose."

The conversation is breaking up; interest in it follows suit and is
scattered. Four poilus join in a game of manille, that will last
until night blacks out the cards. Volpatte is trying to catch a leaf
of cigarette paper that has escaped his fingers and goes hopping and
dodging in the wind along the wall of the trench like a fragile
butterfly.

Cocon and Tirette are recalling their memories of barrack-life. The
impressions left upon their minds by those years of military
training are ineffaceable. Into that fund of abundant souvenirs, of
abiding color and instant service, they have been wont to dip for
their subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. So
that they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual
war in all its forms.

I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it. For it is
everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their
military past;--the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with
words of extreme appropriateness and daring. He wasn't afraid, he
spoke out loud and strong! Some scraps of it reach my ears--

"Alors, d'you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me? Not a
bit, my boy. All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up,
'Mon adjudant,' I says, 'it's possible, but--'" A sentence follows
that I cannot secure--"Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it. He
didn't get shirty; 'Good, that's good,' he says as he hops it, and
afterwards he was as good as all that, with me."

"Just like me, with Dodore, 'jutant of the 13th, when I was on
leave--a mongrel. Now he's at the Pantheon, as caretaker.
He'd got it in for me, so--"

So each unpacks his own little load of historical anecdote. They are
all alike, and not one of them but says, "As for me, I am not like
the others."

* * * * * *

The post-orderly! He is a tall and broad man with fat calves;
comfortable looking, and as neat and tidy as a policeman. He is in a
bad temper. There are new orders, and now he has to go every day as
far as Battalion Headquarters. He abuses the order as if it had been
directed exclusively against himself; and he continues to complain
even while he calls up the corporals for the post and maintains his
customary chat en passant with this man and that. And in spite of
his spleen he does not keep to himself all the information with
which he comes provided. While removing the string from the
letter-packets he dispenses his verbal news, and announces first,
that according to rumor, there is a very explicit ban on the wearing
of hoods.

"Hear that?" says Tirette to Tirloir. "Got to chuck your fine hood
away!"

"Not likely! I'm not on. That's nothing to do with me," replies the
hooded one, whose pride no less than his comfort is at stake.

"Order of the General Commanding the Army."

"Then let the General give an order that it's not to rain any more.
I want to know nothing about it."

The majority of Orders, even when less peculiar than this one, are
always received in this way--and then carried out.

"There's a reported order as well," says the man of letters, "that
beards have got to be trimmed and hair got to be clipped close."

"Talk on, my lad," says Barque, on whose head the threatened order
directly falls; "you didn't see me! You can draw the curtains!"

"I'm telling you. Do it or don't do it--doesn't matter a damn to
me."

Besides what is real and written, there is bigger news, but still
more dubious and imaginative--the division is going to be relieved,
and sent either to rest--real rest, for six weeks--or to Morocco, or
perhaps to Egypt.

Divers exclamations. They listen, and let themselves be tempted by
the fascination of the new, the wonderful.

But some one questions the post-orderly: "Who told you that?"

"The adjutant commanding the Territorial detachment that fatigues
for the H.Q. of the A.C."

"For the what?"

"For Headquarters of the Army Corps, and he's not the only one that
says it. There's--you know him--I've forgotten his name--he's like
Galle, but he isn't Galle--there's some one in his family who is
Some One. Anyway, he knows all about it."

"Then what?" With hungry eyes they form a circle around the
story-teller.

"Egypt, you say, we shall go to? Don't know it. I know there were
Pharaohs there at the time when I was a kid and went to school, but
since--"

"To Egypt!" The idea finds unconscious anchorage in their minds.

"Ah, non," says Blaire, "for I get sea-sick. Still, it doesn't last,
sea-sickness. Oui, but what would my good lady say?"

"What about it? She'll get used to it. You see niggers, and streets
full of big birds, like we see sparrows here."

"But haven't we to go to Alsace?"

"Yes," says the post-orderly, "there are some who think so at the
Pay-office."

"That'd do me well enough."

But common sense and acquired experience regain the upper hand and
put the visions to flight. We have been told so often that we were
going a long way off, so often have we believed it, so often been
undeceived! So, as if at a moment arranged, we wake up.

"It's all my eye--they've done it on us too often. Wait before
believing--and don't count a crumb's worth on it."

We reoccupy our corner. Here and there a man bears in his hand the
light momentous burden of a letter.

"Ah," says Tirloir, "I must be writing. Can't go eight days without
writing."

"Me too," says Eudore, "I must write to my p'tit' femme."

"Is she all right, Mariette?"

"Oui, oui, don't fret about Mariette."

A few have already settled themselves for correspondence. Barque is
standing up. He stoops over a sheet of paper flattened on a
note-book upon a jutting crag in the trench wall. Apparently in the
grip of an inspiration, he writes on and on, with his eyes in
bondage and the concentrated expression of a horseman at full
gallop.

When once Lamuse--who lacks imagination--has sat down, placed his
little writing-block on the padded summit of his knees, and
moistened his copying-ink pencil, he passes the time in reading
again the last letters received, in wondering what he can say that
he has not already said, and in fostering a grim determination to
say something else.

A sentimental gentleness seems to have overspread little Eudore, who
is curled up in a sort of niche in the ground. He is lost in
meditation, pencil in hand, eyes on paper. Dreaming, he looks and
stares and sees. It is another sky that lends him light, another to
which his vision reaches. He has gone home.

In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best
that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its
first expression is to talk once more of fleshly comforts.

Through their outer crust of coarseness and concealment, other
hearts venture upon murmured memories, and the rekindling of bygone
brightness: the summer morning, when the green freshness of the
garden steals in upon the purity of the country bedroom; or when the
wind in the wheat of the level lands sets it slowly stirring or
deeply waving, and shakes the square of oats hard by into quick
little feminine tremors; or the winter evening, with women and their
gentleness around the shaded luster of the lamp.

But Papa Blaire resumes work upon the ring he has begun. He has
threaded the still formless disc of aluminium over a bit of rounded
wood, and rubs it with the file. As he applies himself to the job,
two wrinkles of mighty meditation deepen upon his forehead. Anon he
stops, straightens himself, and looks tenderly at the trifle, as
though she also were looking at it.

"You know," he said to me once, speaking of another ring, "it's not
a question of doing it well or not well. The point is that I've done
it for my wife, d'you see? When I had nothing to do but scratch
myself, I used to have a look at this photo"--he showed me a
photograph of a big, chubby-faced woman--"and then it was quite easy
to set about this damned ring. You might say that we've made it
together, see? The proof of that is that it was company for me, and
that I said Adieu to it when I sent it off to Mother Blaire."

He is making another just now, and this one will have copper in it,
too. He works eagerly. His heart would fain express itself to the
best advantage in this the sort of penmanship upon which he is so
tenaciously bent.

As they stoop reverently, in their naked earth-holes, over the
slender rudimentary trinkets--so tiny that the great hide-bound
hands hold them with difficulty or let them fall--these men seem
still more wild, more primitive, and more human, than at all other
times.

You are set thinking of the first inventor, the father of all
craftsmen, who sought to invest enduring materials with the shapes
of what he saw and the spirit of what he felt.

* * * * * *

"People coming along," announces Biquet the mobile, who acts as
hall-porter to our section of the trench--"buckets of 'em."
Immediately an adjutant appears, with straps round his belly and his
chin, and brandishing his sword-scabbard.

"Out of the way, you! Out of the way, I tell you! You loafers there,
out of it! Let me see you quit, hey!" We make way indolently. Those
at the sides push back into the earth by slow degrees.

It is a company of Territorials, deputed to our sector for the
fortification of the second line and the upkeep of its communication
trenches. They come into view--miserable bundles of implements, and
dragging their feet.

We watch them, one by one, as they come up, pass, and disappear.
They are stunted and elderly, with dusty faces, or big and
broken-winded, tightly enfolded in greatcoats stained and over-worn,
that yawn at the toothless gaps where the buttons are missing.

Tirette and Barque, the twin wags, leaning close together against
the wall, stare at them, at first in silence. Then they begin to
smile.

"March past of the Broom Brigade," says Tirette.

"We'll have a bit of fun for three minutes," announces Barque.

Some of the old toilers are comical. This one whom the file brings
up has bottle-shaped shoulders. Although extremely narrow-chested
and spindle-shanked, he is big-bellied. He is too much for Barque.
"Hullo, Sir Canteen!" he says.

When a more outrageously patched-up greatcoat appears than all the
others can show, Tirette questions the veteran recruit. "Hey, Father
Samples! Hey, you there!" he insists.

The other turns and looks at him, open-mouthed.

"Say there, papa, if you will be so kind as to give me the address
of your tailor in London!"

A chuckle comes from the antiquated and wrinkle-scrawled face, and
then the poilu, checked for an instant by Barque's command, is
jostled by the following flood and swept away.

When some less striking figures have gone past, a new victim is
provided for the jokers. On his red and wrinkled neck luxuriates
some dirty sheep's-wool. With knees bent, his body forward, his back
bowed, this Territorial's carriage is the worst.

"Tiens!" bawls Tirette, with pointed finger, "the famous
concertina-man! It would cost you something to see him at the
fair--here, he's free gratis!"

The victim stammers responsive insults amid the scattered laughter
that arises.

No more than that laughter is required to excite the two comrades.
It is the ambition to have their jests voted funny by their easy
audience that stimulates them to mock the peculiarities of their old
comrades-in-arms, of those who toil night and day on the brink of
the great war to make ready and make good the fields of battle.

And even the other watchers join in. Miserable themselves, they
scoff at the still more miserable.

"Look at that one! And that, look!"

"Non, but take me a snapshot of that little rump-end! Hey,
earth-worm!"

"And that one that has no ending! Talk about a sky-scratcher! Tiens,
la, he takes the biscuit. Yes, you take it, old chap!"

This man goes with little steps, and holds his pickax up in front
like a candle; his face is withered, and his body borne down by the
blows of lumbago.

"Like a penny, gran'pa?" Barque asks him, as he passes within reach
of a tap on the shoulder.

The broken-down poilu replies with a great oath of annoyance, and
provokes the harsh rejoinder of Barque: "Come now, you might be
polite, filthy-face, old muck-mill!"

Turning right round in fury, the old one defies his tormentor.

"Hullo!" cries Barque, laughing, "He's showing fight; the ruin! He's
warlike, look you, and he might be mischievous if only he were sixty
years younger!"

"And if he wasn't alone," wantonly adds Pepin, whose eye is
in quest of other targets among the flow of new arrivals.

The hollow chest of the last straggler appears, and then his
distorted back disappears.

The march past of the worn-out and trench-foul veterans comes to an
end among the ironical and almost malevolent faces of these sinister
troglodytes, whom their caverns of mud but half reveal.

Meanwhile, the hours slip away, and evening begins to veil the sky
and darken the things of earth. It comes to blend itself at once
with the blind fate and the ignorant dark minds of the multitude
there enshrouded.

Through the twilight comes the rolling hum of tramping men, and
another throng. rubs its way through.

"Africans!"

They march past with faces red-brown, yellow or chestnut, their
beards scanty and fine or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats
yellowish-green, and their muddy helmets sporting the crescent in
place of our grenade. Their eyes are like balls of ivory or onyx,
that shine from faces like new pennies, flattened or angular. Now
and again comes swaying along above the line the coal-black mask of
a Senegalese sharpshooter. Behind the company goes a red flag with a
green hand in the center.

We watch them in silence. These are asked no questions. They command
respect, and even a little fear.

All the same, these Africans seem jolly and in high spirits. They
are going, of course, to the first line. That is their place, and
their passing is the sign of an imminent attack. They are made for
the offensive.

"Those and the 75 gun we can take our hats off to. They're
everywhere sent ahead at big moments, the Moroccan Division."

"They can't quite fit in with us. They go too fast--and there's no
way of stopping them."

Some of these diabolical images in yellow wood or bronze or ebony
are serious of mien, uneasy, and taciturn. Their faces have the
disquieting and secret look of the snare suddenly discovered. The
others laugh with a laugh that jangles like fantastic foreign
instruments of music, a laugh that bares the teeth.

We talk over the characteristics of these Africans; their ferocity
in attack, their devouring passion to be in with the bayonet, their
predilection for "no quarter." We recall those tales that they
themselves willingly tell, all in much the same words and with the
same gestures. They raise their arms over their heads--"Kam'rad,
Kam'rad!" "Non, pas Kam'rad!" And in pantomime they drive a bayonet
forward, at belly-height, drawing it back then with the help of a
foot.

One of the sharpshooters overhears our talk as he passes. He looks
upon us, laughs abundantly in his helmeted turban, and repeats our
words with significant shakes of his head: "Pas Kam'rad, non pas
Kam'rad, never! Cut head off!"

"No doubt they're a different race from us, with their tent-cloth
skin," Barque confesses, though he does not know himself what "cold
feet" are. "It worries them to rest, you know; they only live for
the minute when the officer puts his watch back in his pocket and
says, 'Off you go!'"

"In fact, they're real soldiers."

"We are not soldiers," says big Lamuse, "we're men." Though the
evening has grown darker now, that plain true saying sheds something
like a glimmering light on the men who are waiting here, waiting
since the morning. waiting since months ago.

They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the
joy of life. Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are
ignorant and of narrow outlook, full of a sound common sense--which
some-times gets off the rails--disposed to be led and to do as they
are bid, enduring under hardships, long-suffering.

They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive
instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances--the
instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living
through, the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals
they are cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the
silence and the shadows of their great human hearts.

When we can no longer see clearly, we hear down there the murmur of
a command, which comes nearer and rings loud--"Second half-section!
Muster!" We fall in; it is the call.

"Gee up!" says the corporal. We are set in motion. In front of the
tool-depot there is a halt and trampling. To each is given a spade
or pickax. An N.C.O. presents the handles in the gloom: "You, a
spade; there, hop it! You a spade, too; you a pick. Allons, hurry up
and get off."

We leave by the communication trench at right angles to our own, and
straight ahead towards the changeful frontier, now alive and
terrible.

Up in the somber sky, the strong staccato panting of an invisible
aeroplane circles in wide descending coils and fills infinity. In
front, to right and left, everywhere, thunderclaps roll with great
glimpses of short-lived light in the dark-blue sky.

______

[note 1:] The popular and international name for a French soldier.
Its literal meaning is "hairy, shaggy," but the word has conveyed
for over a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose
strength lay in his locks.--Tr.

[note 2:] 6250 miles.

[note 3:] Pourvu que les civils tiennent. In the early days of the
war it was a common French saying that victory was certain--"if the
civilians hold out."--Tr.






3

The Return





RELUCTANTLY the ashen dawn is bleaching the still dark and formless
landscape. Between the declining road on the right that falls into
the gloom, and the black cloud of the Alleux Wood--where we hear the
convoy teams assembling and getting under way--a field extends. We
have reached it, we of the 6th Battalion, at the end of the night.
We have piled arms, and now, in the center of this circle of
uncertain light, our feet in the mist and mud, we stand in dark
clusters (that yet are hardly blue), or as solitary phantoms; and
the heads of all are turned towards the road that comes from "down
there." We are waiting for the rest of the regiment, the 5th
Battalion, who were in the first line and left the trenches after
us.

Noises; "There they are!" A long and shapeless mass appears in the
west and comes down out of the night upon the dawning road.

At last! It is ended, the accursed shift that began at six o'clock
yesterday evening and has lasted all night, and now the last man has
stepped from the last communication trench.

This time it has been an awful sojourn in the trenches. The 18th
company was foremost and has been cut up, eighteen killed and fifty
wounded--one in three less in four days. And this without attack--by
bombardment alone.

This is known to us, and as the mutilated battalion approaches down
there, and we join them in trampling the muddy field and exchanging
nods of recognition, we cry, "What about the 18th?" We are thinking
as we put the question, "If it goes on like this, what is to become
of all of us? What will become of me?"

The 17th, the 19th, and the 20th arrive in turn and pile arms.
"There's the 18th!" It arrives after all the others; having held the
first trench, it has been last relieved.

The light is a little cleaner, and the world is paling. We can make
out, as he comes down the road, the company's captain, ahead of his
men and alone. He helps himself along with a stick, and walks with
difficulty, by reason of his old wound of the Marne battle that
rheumatism is troubling; and there are other pangs, too. He lowers
his hooded head, and might be attending a funeral. We can see that
in his mind he is indeed following the dead, and his thoughts are
with them.

Here is the company, debouching in dire disorder, and our hearts are
heavy. It is obviously shorter than the other three, in the march
past of the battalion.

I reach the road, and confront the descending mass of the 18th. The
uniforms of these survivors are all earth-yellowed alike, so that
they appear to be clad in khaki. The cloth is stiff with the
ochreous mud that has dried underneath. The skirts of their
greatcoats are like lumps of wood, jumping about on the yellow crust
that reaches to their knees. Their faces are drawn and blackened;
dust and dirt have wrinkled them anew; their eyes are big and
fevered. And from these soldiers whom the depths of horror have
given back there rises a deafening din. They talk all at once, and
loudly; they gesticulate, they laugh and sing. You would think, to
see them, that it was a holiday crowd pouring over the road!

These are the second section and its big sub-lieutenant, whose
greatcoat is tightened and strapped around a body as stiff as a
rolled umbrella. I elbow my way along the marching crowd as far as
Marchal's squad, the most sorely tried of all. Out of eleven
comrades that they were, and had been without a break for a year and
a half, there were three men only with Corporal Marchal.

He sees me--with a glad exclamation and a broad smile. He lets go
his rifle-sling and offers me his hands, from one of which hangs his
trench stick--"Eh, vieux frere, still going strong? What's
become of you lately?"

I turn my head away and say, almost under my breath, "So, old chap,
it's happened badly."

His smile dies at once, and he is serious: "Eh, oui, old man; it
can't be helped; it was awful this time. Barbier is killed."

"They told us--Barbier!"

"Saturday night it was, at eleven o'clock. He had the top of his
back taken away by a shell," says Marchal, "cut off like a razor.
Besse got a bit of shell that went clean through his belly and
stomach. Barthlemy and Baubex got it in the head and neck. We passed
the night skedaddling up and down the trench at full speed, to dodge
the showers. And little Godefroy--did you know him?--middle of his
body blown away. He was emptied of blood on the spot in an instant,
like a bucket kicked over. Little as he was, it was remarkable how
much blood he had, it made a stream at least fifty meters long.
Gougnard got his legs cut up by one explosion. They picked him up
not quite dead. That was at the listening post. I was there on duty
with them. But when that shell fell I had gone into the trench to
ask the time. I found my rifle, that I'd left in my place, bent
double, as if some one had folded it in his hands, the barrel like a
corkscrew, and half of the stock in sawdust. The smell of fresh
blood was enough to bring your heart up."

"And Mondain--him, too?"

"Mondain--that was the day after, yesterday in fact, in a dug-out
that a shell smashed in. He was lying down, and his chest was
crushed. Have they told you about Franco, who was alongside Mondain?
The fall of earth broke his spine. He spoke again after they'd got
him out and set him down. He said, with his head falling to one
side, 'I'm dying,' and he was gone. Vigile was with them, too; his
body wasn't touched, but they found him with his head completely
flattened out, flat as a pancake, and huge-as big as that. To see it
spread out on the ground, black and distorted, it made you think of
his shadow--the shadow one gets on the ground sometimes when one
walks with a lantern at night."

"Vigile--only Class 1913--a child! And Mondain and Franco--such good
sorts, in spite of their stripes. We're so many old special pals the
less, mon vieux Marchal."

"Yes," says Marchal. But he is swallowed up in a crowd of his
friends, who worry and catechise him. He bandies jests with them,
and answers their raillery, and all hustle each other, and laugh.

I look from face to face. They are merry, and in spite of the
contractions of weariness, and the earth-stains, they look
triumphant.

What does it mean? If wine had been possible during their stay in
the first line, I should have said, "All these men are drunk."

I single out one of the survivors, who hums as he goes, and steps in
time with it flippantly, as hussars of the stage do. It is
Vanderborn, the drummer.

"Hullo, Vanderborn, you look pleased with yourself!" Vanderborn, who
is sedate in the ordinary, cries, "It's not me yet, you see! Here I
am!" With a mad gesticulation he serves me a thump on the shoulder.
I understand.

If these men are happy in spite of all, as they come out of hell, it
is because they are coming out of it. They are returning, they are
spared. Once again the Death that was there has passed them over.
Each company in its turn goes to the front once in six weeks. Six
weeks! In both great and minor matters, fighting soldiers manifest
the philosophy of the child. They never look afar, either ahead or
around. Their thought strays hardly farther than from day to day.
To-day, every one of those men is confident that he will live yet a
little while.

And that is why, in spite of the weariness that weighs them down and
the new slaughter with which they are still bespattered, though each
has seen his brothers torn away from his side, in spite of all and
in spite of themselves, they are celebrating the Feast of the
Survivors. The boundless glory in which they rejoice is this--they
still stand straight.






4

Volpatte and Fouillade





AS we reached quarters again, some one cried: "But where's
Volpatte?"--"And Fouillade, where's he?"

They had been requisitioned and taken off to the front line by the
5th Battalion. No doubt we should find them somewhere in quarters.
No success. Two men of the squad lost!

"That's what comes of lending men," said the sergeant with a great
oath. The captain, when apprised of the loss, also cursed and swore
and said, "I must have those men. Let them be found at once. Allez!"

Farfadet and I are summoned by Corporal Bertrand from the barn where
at full length we have already immobilized ourselves, and are
growing torpid: "You must go and look for Volpatte and Fouillade."

Quickly we got up, and set off with a shiver of uneasiness. Our two
comrades have been taken by the 5th and carried off to that infernal
shift. Who knows where they are and what they may be by now!

We climb up the hill again. Again we begin, but in the opposite
direction, the journey done since the dawn and the night. Though we
are without our heavy stuff, and only carry rifles and
accouterments, we feel idle, sleepy, and stiff; and the country is
sad, and the sky all wisped with mist. Farfadet is soon panting. He
talked a little at first, till fatigue enforced silence on him. He
is brave enough, but frail, and during all his prewar life, shut up
in the Town Hall office where he scribbled since the days of his
"first sacrament" between a stove and some ageing cardboard files,
he hardly learned the use of his legs.

Just as we emerge from the wood, slipping and floundering, to
penetrate the region of communication trenches, two faint shadows
are outlined in front. Two soldiers are coming up. We can see the
protuberance of their burdens and the sharp lines of their rifles.
The swaying double shape becomes distinct--"It's them!"

One of the shadows has a great white head, all swathed--"One of
them's wounded! It's Volpatte!"

We run up to the specters, our feet making the sounds of sinking in
sponge and of sticky withdrawal, and our shaken cartridges rattle in
their pouches. They stand still and wait for us. When we are close
up, "It's about time!" cries Volpatte.

"You're wounded, old chap?"--"What?" he says; the manifold bandages
all round his head make him deaf, and we must shout to get through
them. So we go close and shout. Then he replies, "That's nothing;
we're coming from the hole where the 5th Battalion put us on
Thursday."

"You've stayed there--ever since?" yells Farfadet, whose shrill and
almost feminine voice goes easily through the quilting that protects
Volpatte's ears.

"Of course we stayed there, you blithering idiot!" says Fouillade.
"You don't suppose we'd got wings to fly away with, and still less
that we should have legged it without orders?"

Both of them let themselves drop to a sitting position on the
ground. Volpatte's head--enveloped in rags with a big knot on the
top and the same dark yellowish stains as his face--looks like a
bundle of dirty linen.

"They forgot you, then, poor devils?"

"Rather!" cries Fouillade, "I should say they did. Four days and
four nights in a shell-hole, with bullets raining down, a hole that
stunk like a cesspool."

"That's right," says Volpatte. "It wasn't an ordinary listening-post
hole, where one comes and goes regularly. It was just a shell-hole,
like any other old shell-hole, neither more nor less. They said to
us on Thursday, 'Station yourselves in there and keep on firing,'
they said. Next day, a liaison chap of the 5th Battalion came and
showed his neb: 'What the hell are you doing there?'--'Why, we're
firing. They told us to fire, so we're firing,' I says. 'If they
told us to do it, there must be some reason at the back of it. We're
wanting for them to tell us to do something else.' The chap made
tracks. He looked a bit uneasy, and suffering from the effects of
being bombed. 'It's 22,' he says."

"To us two," says Fouillade, "there was a loaf of bread and a bucket
of wine that the 18th gave us when they planted us there, and a
whole case of cartridges, my boy. We fired off the cartridges and
drank the booze, but we had sense to keep a few cartridges and a
hunch of bread, though we didn't keep any wine."

"That's where we went wrong," says Volpatte, "seeing that it was a
thirsty job. Say, boys, you haven't got any gargle?"

"I've still nearly half a pint of wine," replies Farfadet. "Give it
to him," says Fouillade, pointing to Volpatte, "seeing that he's
been losing blood. I'm only thirsty."

Volpatte was shivering, and his little strapped-up eyes burned with
fever in the enormous dump of rags set upon his shoulders. "That's
good," he says, drinking.

"Ah! And then, too," he added, emptying--as politeness requires--the
drop of wine that remained at the bottom of Farfadet's cup, "we got
two Boches. They were crawling about outside, and fell into our
holes, as blindly as moles into a spring snare, those chaps did. We
tied 'em up. And see us then--after firing for thirty-six hours,
we'd no more ammunition. So we filled our magazines with the last,
and waited, in front of the parcels of Boche. The liaison chap
forgot to tell his people that we were there. You, the 6th, forgot
to ask for us; the 18th forgot us, too; and as we weren't in a
listening-post where you're relieved as regular as if at H.Q., I
could almost see us staying there till the regiment came back. In
the long run, it was the loafers of the 204th, come to skulk about
looking for fuses, that mentioned us. So then we got the order to
fall back--immediately, they said. That 'immediately' was a good
joke, and we got into harness at once. We untied the legs of the
Boches, led them off and handed them over to the 204th, and here we
are."

"We even fished out, in passing, a sergeant who was piled up in a
hole and didn't dare come out, seeing he was shell-shocked. We
slanged him, and that set him up a bit, and he thanked us. Sergeant
Sacerdote he called himself."

"But your wound, old chap?"

"It's my ears. Two shells, a little one and a big one, my lad--went
off while you're saying it. My head came between the two bursts, as
you might say, but only just; a very close shave, and my lugs got
it."

"You should have seen him," says Fouillade, "it was disgusting,
those two ears hanging down. We had two packets of bandages, and the
stretcher-men fired us one in. That makes three packets he's got
rolled round his nut."

"Give us your traps, we're going back."

Farfadet and I divide Volpatte's equipment between us. Fouillade,
sullen with thirst and racked by stiff joints, growls, and insists
obstinately on keeping his weapons and bundles.

We stroll back, finding diversion--as always--in walking without
ranks. It is so uncommon that one finds it surprising and
profitable. So it is a breach of liberty which soon enlivens all
four of us. We are in the country as though for the pleasure of it.

"We are pedestrians!" says Volpatte proudly. When we reach the
turning at the top of the hill, he relapses upon rosy visions: "Old
man, it's a good wound, after all. I shall be sent back, no mistake
about it."

His eyes wink and sparkle in the huge white clump that dithers on
his shoulders--a clump reddish on each side, where the ears were.

From the depth where the village lies we hear ten o'clock strike.
"To hell with the time," says Volpatte "it doesn't matter to me any
more what time it is."

He becomes loquacious. It is a low fever that inspires his
dissertation, and condenses it to the slow swing of our walk, in
which his step is already jaunty.

"They'll stick a red label on my greatcoat, you'll see, and take me
to the rear. I shall be bossed this time by a very polite sort of
chap, who'll say to me, 'That's one side, now turn the other
way--so, my poor fellow.' Then the ambulance, and then the
sick-train, with the pretty little ways of the Red Cross ladies all
the way along, like they did to Crapelet Jules, then the base
hospital. Beds with white sheets, a stove that snores in the middle
of us all, people with the special job of looking after you, and
that you watch doing it, regulation slippers--sloppy and
comfortable--and a chamber-cupboard. Furniture! And it's in those
big hospitals that you're all right for grub! I shall have good
feeds, and baths. I shall take all I can get hold of. And there'll
be presents--that you can enjoy without having to fight the others
for them and get yourself into a bloody mess. I shall have my two
hands on the counterpane, and they'll do damn well nothing, like
things to look at--like toys, what? And under the sheets my legs'll
be white-hot all the way through, and my trotters'll be expanding
like bunches of violets."

Volpatte pauses, fumbles about, and pulls out of his pocket, along
with his famous pair of Soissons scissors, something that he shows
to me: "Tiens, have you seen this?"

It is a photograph of his wife and two children. He has already
shown it to me many a time. I look at it and express appreciation.

"I shall go on sick-leave," says Volpatte, "and while my ears are
sticking themselves on again, the wife and the little ones will look
at me, and I shall look at them. And while they're growing again
like lettuces, my friends, the war, it'll make progress--the
Russians--one doesn't know, what?" He is thinking aloud, lulling
himself with happy anticipations, already alone with his private
festival in the midst of us.

"Robber!" Feuillade shouts at him. "You've too much luck, by God!"

How could we not envy him? He would be going away for one, two, or
three months; and all that time, instead of our wretched privations,
he would be transformed into a man of means!

"At the beginning," says Farfadet, "it sounded comic when I heard
them wish for a 'good wound.' But all the same, and whatever can be
said about it, I understand now that it's the only thing a poor
soldier can hope for if he isn't daft."

* * * * * *

We were drawing near to the village and passing round the wood. At
its corner, the sudden shape of a woman arose against the sportive
sunbeams that outlined her with light. Alertly erect she stood,
before the faintly violet background of the wood's marge and the
crosshatched trees. She was slender, her head all afire with fair
hair, and in her pale face we could see the night-dark caverns of
great eyes. The resplendent being gazed fixedly upon us, trembling,
then plunged abruptly into the undergrowth and disappeared like a
torch.

The apparition and its flight so impressed Volpatte that he lost the
thread of his discourse.

"She's something like, that woman there!"

"No," said Fouillade, who had misunderstood, "she's called Eudoxie.
I knew her because I've seen her before. A refugee. I don't know
where she comes from, but she's at Gamblin, in a family there."

"She's thin and beautiful," Volpatte certified; "one would like to
make her a little present--she's good enough to eat--tender as a
chicken. And look at the eyes she's got!"

"She's queer," says Fouillade. "You don't know when you've got her.
You see her here, there, with her fair hair on top, then--off!
Nobody about. And you know, she doesn't know what danger is;
marching about, sometimes, almost in the front line, and she's been
seen knocking about in No Man's Land. She's queer."

"Look! There she is again. The spook! She's keeping an eye on us.
What's she after?"

The shadow-figure, traced in lines of light, this time adorned the
other end of the spinney's edge.

"To hell with women," Volpatte declared, whom the idea of his
deliverance has completely recaptured.

"There's one in the squad, anyway, that wants her pretty badly.
See--when you speak of the wolf--"

"You see its tail--"

"Not yet, but almost--look!" From some bushes on our right we saw
the red snout of Lamuse appear peeping, like a wild boar's.

He was on the woman's trail. He had seen the alluring vision,
dropped to the crouch of a setting dog, and made his spring. But in
that spring he fell upon us.

Recognizing Volpatte and Fouillade, big Lamuse gave shouts of
delight. At once he had no other thought than to get possession of
the bags, rifles, and haversacks--"Give me all of it--I'm
resting--come on, give it up."

He must carry everything. Farfadet and I willingly gave up
Volpatte's equipment; and Fouillade, now at the end of his strength,
agreed to surrender his pouches and his rifle.

Lamuse became a moving heap. Under the huge burden he disappeared,
bent double, and made progress only with shortened steps.

But we felt that he was still under the sway of a certain project,
and his glances went sideways. He was seeking the woman after whom
he had hurled himself. Every time he halted, the better to trim some
detail of the load, or puffingly to mop the greasy flow of
perspiration, he furtively surveyed all the corners of the horizon
and scrutinized the edges of the wood. He did not see her again.

I did see her again, and got a distinct impression this time that it
was one of us she was after. She half arose on our left from the
green shadows of the undergrowth. Steadying herself with one hand on
a branch, she leaned forward and revealed the night-dark eyes and
pale face, which showed--so brightly lighted was one whole side of
it--like a crescent moon.

I saw that she was smiling. And following the course of the look
that smiled, I saw Farfadet a little way behind us, and he was
smiling too. Then she slipped away into the dark foliage, carrying
the twin smile with her.

Thus was the understanding revealed to me between this lissom and
dainty gypsy, who was like no one at all, and Farfadet, conspicuous
among us all--slender, pliant and sensitive as lilac. Evidently--!

Lamuse saw nothing, blinded and borne down as he was by the load he
had taken from Farfadet and me, occupied in the poise of them, and
in finding where his laden and leaden feet might tread.

But he looks unhappy; he groans. A weighty and mournful obsession is
stifling him. In his harsh breathing it seems to me that I can hear
his heart beating and muttering. Looking at Volpatte, hooded in
bandages, and then at the strong man, muscular and full-blooded,
with that profound and eternal yearning whose sharpness he alone can
gauge, I say to myself that the worst wounded man is not he whom we
think.

We go down at last to the village. "Let's have a drink," says
Fouillade. "I'm going to be sent back," says Volpatte. Lamuse puffs
and groans.

Our comrades shout and come running, and we gather in the little
square where the church stands with its twin towers--so thoroughly
mutilated by a shell that one can no longer look it in the face.






5

Sanctuary





THE dim road which rises through the middle of the night-bound wood
is so strangely full of obstructing shadows that the deep darkness
of the forest itself might by some magic have overflowed upon it. It
is the regiment on the march, in quest of a new home.

The weighty ranks of the shadows, burdened both high and broad,
hustle each other blindly. Each wave, pushed by the following,
stumbles upon the one in front, while alongside and detached are the
evolutions of those less bulky ghosts, the N.C.O.'s. A clamor of
confusion, compound of exclamations, of scraps of chat, of words of
command, of spasms of coughing and of song, goes up from the dense
mob enclosed between the banks. To the vocal commotion is added the
tramping of feet, the jingling of bayonets in their scabbards, of
cans and drinking-cups, the rumbling and hammering of the sixty
vehicles of the two convoys--fighting and regimental--that follow
the two battalions. And such a thing is it that trudges and spreads
itself over the climbing road that, in spite of the unbounded dome
of night, one welters in the odor of a den of lions.

In the ranks one sees nothing. Sometimes, when one can lift his nose
up, by grace of an eddy in the tide, one cannot help seeing the
whiteness of a mess-tin, the blue steel of a helmet, the black steel
of a rifle. Anon, by the dazzling jet of sparks that flies from a
pocket flint-and-steel, or the red flame that expands upon the
lilliputian stem of a match, one can see beyond the vivid near
relief of hands and faces to the silhouetted and disordered groups
of helmeted shoulders, swaying like surges that would storm the
sable stronghold of the night. Then, all goes out, and while each
tramping soldier's legs swing to and fro, his eye is fixed
inflexibly upon the conjectural situation of the back that dwells in
front of him.

After several halts, when we have allowed ourselves to collapse on
our haversacks at the foot of the stacked rifles--stacks that form
on the call of the whistle with feverish haste and exasperating
delay, through our blindness in that atmosphere of ink-dawn reveals
itself, extends, and acquires the domain of Space. The walls of the
Shadow crumble in vague ruin. Once more we pass under the grand
panorama of the day's unfolding upon the ever-wandering horde that
we are.

We emerge at last from this night of marching, across concentric
circles as it seems, of darkness less dark, then of half-shadow,
then of gloomy light. Legs have a wooden stiffness, backs are
benumbed, shoulders bruised. Faces are still so gray or so black,
one would say they had but half rid themselves of the night. Now,
indeed, one never throws it off altogether.

It is into new quarters that the great company is going--this time
to rest. What will the place be like that we have to live in for
eight days? It is called, they say--but nobody is certain of
anything--Gauchin-l'Abbe. We have heard wonders about it--"It
appears to be just it."

In the ranks of the companies whose forms and features one begins to
make out in the birth of morning, and to distinguish the lowered
heads and yawning mouths, some voices are heard in still higher
praise. "There never were such quarters. The Brigade's there, and
the court-martial. You can get anything in the shops."--"If the
Brigade's there, we're all right."--

"Think we can find a table for the squad?"--"Everything you want, I
tell you."

A pessimist prophet shakes his head: "What these quarters'll be like
where we ye never been, I don't know," he says. "What I do know is
that it'll be like the others."

But we don't believe him, and emerging from the fevered turmoil of
the night, it seems to all that it is a sort of Promised Land we are
approaching by degrees the light brings us out of the east and the
icy air towards the unknown village.

At the foot of a bill in the half-light, we reach some houses, still
slumbering and wrapped in heavy grayness

"There it is!"

Poof! We've done twenty-eight kilometers in the night. But what of
that? There is no halt. We go past the houses, and they sink back
again into their vague vapors and their mysterious shroud.

"Seems we've got to march a long time yet. It's always there, there,
there!"

We march like machines, our limbs invaded by a sort of petrified
torpor; our joints cry aloud, and force us to make echo.

Day comes slowly, for a blanket of mist covers the earth. It is so
cold that the men dare not sit down during the halts, though
overborne by weariness, and they pace to and fro in the damp
obscurity like ghosts. The besom of a biting wintry wind whips our
skin, sweeps away and scatters our words and our sighs.

At last the sun pierces the reek that spreads over us and soaks what
it touches, and something like a fairy glade opens out in the midst
of this gloom terrestrial. The regiment stretches itself and wakes
up in truth, with slow-lifted faces to the gilded silver of the
earliest rays. Quickly, then, the sun grows fiery, and now it is too
hot. In the ranks we pant and sweat, and our grumbling is louder
even than just now, when our teeth were chattering and the fog
wet-sponged our hands and faces.

It is a chalk country through which we are passing on this torrid
forenoon--"They mend this road with lime, the dirty devils!" The
road has become blinding--a long-drawn cloud of dessicated chalk and
dust that rises high above our columns and powders us as we go.
Faces turn red, and shine as though varnished; some of the
full-blooded ones might be plastered with vaseline. Cheeks and
foreheads are coated with a rusty paste which agglutinates and
cracks. Feet lose their dubious likeness to feet and might have
paddled in a mason's mortar-trough. Haversacks and rifles are
powdered in white, and our legion leaves to left and right a long
milky track on the bordering grass. And to crown all--"To the right!
A convoy!"

We bear to the right, hurriedly, and not without bumpings. The
convoy of lorries, a long chain of foursquare and huge projectiles,
rolling up with diabolical din, hurls itself along the road. Curse
it! One after another, they gather up the thick carpet of white
powder that upholsters the ground and send it broadcast over our
shoulders! Now we are garbed in a stuff of light gray and our faces
are pallid masks, thickest on the eyebrows and mustaches, on beards,
and the cracks of wrinkles. Though still ourselves, we look like
strange old men.

"When we're old buffers, we shall be as ugly as this," says Tirette.

"Tu craches blanc," declares Biquet. [note 1]

When a halt puts us out of action, you might take us for rows of
plaster statues, with some dirty indications of humanity showing
through.

We move again, silent and chagrined. Every step becomes hard to
complete. Our faces assume congealed and fixed grimaces under the
wan leprosy of dust. The unending effort contracts us and quite
fills us with dismal weariness and disgust.

We espy at last the long-sought oasis. Beyond a hill, on a still
higher one, some slated roofs peep from clusters of foliage as
brightly green as a salad. The village is there, and our looks
embrace it, but we are not there yet. For a long time it seems to
recede as fast as the regiment crawls towards it.

At long last, on the stroke of noon, we reach the quarters that had
begun to appear a pretense and a legend. In regular step and with
rifles on shoulders, the regiment floods the street of
Gauchin-l'Abbe right to its edges. Most of the villages of
the Pas du Calais are composed of a single street, but such a
street! It is often several kilometers long. In this one, the street
divides in front of the mairie and forms two others, so that the
hamlet becomes a big Y, brokenly bordered by low-built dwellings.

The cyclists, the officers, the orderlies, break away from the long
moving mass. Then, as they come up, a few of the men at a time are
swallowed up by the barns, the still available houses being reserved
for officers and departments. Our half-company is led at first to
the end of the village, and then--by some misunderstanding among the
quartermasters--back to the other end, the one by which we entered.
This oscillation takes up time, and the squad, dragged thus from
north to south and from south to north, heavily fatigued and
irritated by wasted walking, evinces feverish impatience. For it is
supremely important to be installed and set free as early as
possible if we are to carry out the plan we have cherished so
long--to find a native with some little place to let, and a table
where the squad can have its meals. We have talked a good deal about
this idea and its delightful advantages. We have taken counsel,
subscribed to a common fund, and decided that this time we will take
the header into the additional outlay.

But will it be possible? Very many places are already snapped up. We
are not the only ones to bring our dream of comfort here, and it
will be a race for that table. Three companies are coming in after
ours, but four were here before us, and there are the officers, the
cooks of the hospital staff for the Section, and the clerks, the
drivers, the orderlies and others, official cooks of the sergeants'
mess, and I don't know how many more. All these men are more
influential than the soldiers of the line, they have more mobility
and more money, and can bring off their schemes beforehand. Already,
while we march four abreast towards the barn assigned to the squad,
we see some of these jokers across the conquered thresholds,
domestically busy.

Tirette imitates the sounds of lowing and bleating--"There's our
cattle-shed." A fairly big barn. The chopped straw smells of
night-soil, and our feet stir up clouds of dust. But it is almost
enclosed. We choose our places and cast off our equipment.

Those who dreamed yet once again of a special sort of Paradise sing
low--yet once again. "Look now, it seems as ugly as the other
places."--"It's something like the same."--"Naturally."

But there is no time to waste in talking. The thing is to get clear
and be after the others with all strength and speed. We hurry out.
In spite of broken backs and aching feet, we set ourselves savagely
to this last effort on which the comfort of a week depends.

The squad divides into two patrols and sets off at the double, one
to left and one to right along the street, which is already
obstructed by busy questing poilus; and all the groups see and watch
each other--and hurry. In places there are collisions, jostlings,
and abuse.

"Let's begin down there at once, or our goose'll be cooked!" I have
an impression of a kind of fierce battle between all the soldiers,
in the streets of the village they have just occupied. "For us,"
says Marthereau, "war is always struggling and fighting--always,
always."

We knock at door after door, we show ourselves timidly, we offer
ourselves like undesirable goods. A voice arises among us, "You
haven't a bit of a corner, madame, for some soldiers? We would pay."

"No--you see, I've got officers--under-officers, that is--you see,
it's the mess for the band, and the secretaries, and the gentlemen
of the ambulance--"

Vexation after vexation. We close again, one after the other, all
the doors we had half-opened, and look at each other, on the wrong
side of the threshold, with dwindling hope in our eyes.

"Bon Dieu! You'll see that we shan't find anything," growls Barque.
"Damn those chaps that got on the midden before us!"

The human flood reaches high-water mark everywhere. The three
streets are all growing dark as each overflows into another. Some
natives cross our path, old men or ill-shapen, contorted in their
walk, stunted in the face; and even young people, too, over whom
hovers the mystery of secret disorders or political connections. As
for the petticoats, there are old women and many young ones--fat,
with well-padded cheeks, and equal to geese in their whiteness.

Suddenly, in an alley between two houses, I have a fleeting vision
of a woman who crossed the shadowy gap--Eudoxie! Eudoxie, the fairy
woman whom Lamuse hunted like a satyr, away back in the country,
that morning we brought back Volpatte wounded, and Fouillade, the
woman I saw leaning from the spinney's edge and bound to Farfadet in
a mutual smile. It is she whom I just glimpsed like a gleam of
sunshine in that alley. But the gleam was eclipsed by the tail of a
wall, and the place thereof relapsed upon gloom. She here, already!
Then she has followed our long and painful trek! She is attracted--?

And she looks like one allured, too. Brief glimpse though it was of
her face and its crown of fair hair, plainly I saw that she was
serious, thoughtful, absentminded.

Lamuse, following close on my heels, saw nothing, and I do not tell
him. He will discover quite soon enough the bright presence of that
lovely flame where he would fain cast himself bodily, though it
evades him like a Will-o'-th'-wisp. For the moment, besides, we are
on business bent. The coveted corner must be won. We resume the hunt
with the energy of despair. Barque leads us on; he has taken the
matter to heart. He is trembling--you can see it in his dusty scalp.
He guides us, nose to the wind. He suggests that we make an attempt
on that yellow door over there. Forward!

Near the yellow door, we encounter a shape down-bent. Blaire, his
foot on a milestone, is reducing the bulk of his boot with his
knife, and plaster-like debris is falling fast. He might be engaged
in sculpture.

"You never had your feet so white before," jeers Barque. "Rotting
apart," says Blaire, "you don't know where it is, that special van?"
He goes on to explain: "I've got to look up the dentist-van, so they
can grapple with my ivories, and strip off the old grinders that's
left. Oui, seems it's stationed here, the chop-caravan."

He folds up his knife, pockets it, and goes off alongside the wall,
possessed by the thought of his jaw-bones' new lease of life.

Once more we put up our beggars' petition: "Good-day, madame; you
haven't got a little corner where we could feed? We would pay, of
course, we would pay--"

Through the glass of the low window we see lifted the face of an old
man--like a fish in a bowl, it looks--a face curiously flat, and
lined with parallel wrinkles, like a page of old manuscript.

"You've the little shed there."

"There's no room in the shed, and when the washing's done there--"

Barque seizes the chance. "It'll do very likely. May we see it?"

"We do the washing there," mutters the woman, continuing to wield
her broom.

"You know," says Barque, with a smile and an engaging air, "we're
not like those disagreeable people who get drunk and make themselves
a nuisance. May we have a look?"

The woman has let her broom rest. She is thin and inconspicuous. Her
jacket hangs from her shoulders as from a valise. Her face is like
cardboard, stiff and without expression. She looks at us and
hesitates, then grudgingly leads the way into a very dark little
place, made of beaten earth and piled with dirty linen.

"It's splendid," cries Lamuse, in all honesty.

"Isn't she a darling, the little kiddie!" says Barque, as he pats
the round cheek, like painted india-rubber, of a little girl who is
staring at us with her dirty little nose uplifted in the gloom. "Is
she yours, madame?"

"And that one, too?" risks Marthereau, as he espies an over-ripe
infant on whose bladder-like cheeks are shining deposits of jam, for
the ensnaring of the dust in the air. He offers a half-hearted
caress in the direction of the moist and bedaubed countenance. The
woman does not deign an answer.

So there we are, trifling and grinning, like beggars whose plea
still hangs fire.

Lamuse whispers to me, in a torment of fear and cupidity, "Let's
hope she'll catch on, the filthy old slut. It's grand here, and, you
know, everything else is pinched!"

"There's no table," the woman says at last.

"Don't worry about the table," Barque exclaims. "Tenez! there, put
away in that corner, the old door; that would make us a table."

"You're not going to trail me about and upset all my work!" replies
the cardboard woman suspiciously, and with obvious regret that she
had not chased us away immediately.

"Don't worry, I tell you. Look, I'll show you. Hey, Lamuse, old
cock, give me a hand."

Under the displeased glances of the virago we place the old door on
a couple of barrels.

"With a bit of a rub-down," says I, "that will be perfect."

"Eh, oui, maman, a flick with a brush'll do us instead of
tablecloth."

The woman hardly knows what to say; she watches us spitefully:
"There's only two stools, and how many are there of you?"

"About a dozen."

"A dozen. Jesus Maria!"

"What does it matter? That'll be all right, seeing there's a plank
here--and that's a bench ready-made, eh, Lamuse?"

"Course," says Lamuse.

"I want that plank," says the woman. "Some soldiers that were here
before you have tried already to take it away."

"But us, we're not thieves," suggests Lamuse gently, so as not to
irritate the creature that has our comfort at her disposal.

"I don't say you are, but soldiers, vous savez, they smash
everything up. Oh, the misery of this war!"

"Well then, how much'll it be, to hire the table, and to heat up a
thing or two on the stove?"

"It'll be twenty sous a day," announces the hostess with restraint,
as though we were wringing that amount from her.

"It's dear," says Lamuse.

"It's what the others gave me that were here, and they were very
kind, too, those gentlemen, and it was worth my while to cook for
them. I know it's not difficult for soldiers. If you think it's too
much, it's no job to find other customers for this room and this
table and the stove, and who wouldn't be in twelves. They're coming
along all the time, and they'd pay still more, if I wanted. A
dozen!--"

Lamuse hastens to add, "I said 'It's dear,' but still, it'll do, eh,
you others?" On this downright question we record our votes.

"We could do well with a drop to drink," says Lamuse. "Do you sell
wine?"

"No," said the woman, but added, shaking with anger, "You see, the
military authority forces them that's got wine to sell it at fifteen
sous! Fifteen sous! The misery of this cursed war! One loses at it,
at fifteen sous, monsieur. So I don't sell any wine. I've got plenty
for ourselves. I don't say but sometimes, and just to oblige, I
don't allow some to people that one knows, people that knows what
things are, but of course, messieurs, not at fifteen sous."

Lamuse is one of those people "that knows what things are." He grabs
at his water-bottle, which is hanging as usual on his hip. "Give me
a liter of it. That'll be what?"

"That'll be twenty-two sous, same as it cost me. But you know it's
just to oblige you, because you're soldiers."

Barque, losing patience, mutters an aside. The woman throws him a
surly glance, and makes as if to hand Lamuse's bottle back to him.
But Lamuse, launched upon the hope of drinking wine at last, so that
his cheeks redden as if the draught already pervaded them with its
grateful hue, hastens to intervene--

"Don't be afraid--it's between ourselves, la mere, we won't
give you away."

She raves on, rigid and bitter, against the limited price on wine;
and, overcome by his lusty thirst, Lamuse extends the humiliation
and surrender of conscience so far as to say, "No help for it,
madame! It's a military order, so it's no use trying to understand
it."

She leads us into the store-room. Three fat barrels occupy it in
impressive rotundity. "Is this your little private store?"

"She knows her way about, the old lady," growls Barque.

The shrew turns on her heel, truculent: "Would you have me ruin
myself by this miserable war? I've about enough of losing money all
ways at once."

"How?" insists Barque.

"I can see you're not going to risk your money!"

"That's right--we only risk our skins."

We intervene, disturbed by the tone of menace for our present
concern that the conversation has assumed. But the door of the
wine-cellar is shaken, and a man's voice comes through. "Hey,
Palmyra!" it calls.

The woman hobbles away, discreetly leaving the door open. "That's
all right--we've taken root!" Lamuse says.

"What dirty devils these, people are!" murmurs Barque, who finds his
reception hard to stomach.

"It's shameful and sickening," says Marthereau.

"One would think it was the first time you'd had any of it!"

"And you, old gabbler," chides Barque, "that says prettily to the
wine-robber, 'Can't be helped, it's a military order'! Gad, old man,
you're not short of cheek!"

"What else could I do or say? We should have had to go into mourning
for our table and our wine. She could make us pay forty sous for the
wine, and we should have had it all the same, shouldn't we? Very
well, then, got to think ourselves jolly lucky. I'll admit I'd no
confidence, and I was afraid it was no go."

"I know; it's the same tale everywhere and always, but all the
same--"

"Damn the thieving natives, ah, oui! Some of 'em must be making
fortunes. Everybody can't go and get killed."

"Ah, the gallant people of the East!"

"Yes, and the gallant people of the North!"

"Who welcome us with open arms!"

"With open hands, yes--"

"I tell you," Marthereau says again, "it's a shame and it's
sickening."

"Shut it up--there's the she-beast coming back." We took a turn
round to quarters to announce our success, and then went shopping.
When we returned to our new dining-room, we were hustled by the
preparations for lunch. Barque had been to the rations distribution,
and had managed, thanks to personal relations with the cook (who was
a conscientious objector to fractional divisions), to secure the
potatoes and meat that formed the rations for all the fifteen men of
the squad. He had bought some lard--a little lump for fourteen
sous--and some one was frying. He had also acquired some green peas
in tins, four tins. Mesnil Andre's tin of veal in jelly would
be a hors-d'oeuvre.

"And not a dirty thing in all the lot!" said Lamuse, enchanted.

* * * * * *

We inspected the kitchen. Barque was moving cheerfully about the
iron Dutch oven whose hot and steaming bulk furnished all one side
of the room.

"I've added a stewpan on the quiet for the soup," he whispered to
me. Lifting the lid of the stove--"Fire isn't too hot. It's half an
hour since I chucked the meat in, and the water's clean yet."

A minute later we heard some one arguing with the hostess. This
extra stove was the matter in dispute. There was no more room left
for her on her stove. They had told her they would only need a
casserole, and she had believed them. If she had known they were
going to make trouble she would not have let the room to them.
Barque, the good fellow, replied jokingly, and succeeded in soothing
the monster.

One by one the others arrived. They winked and rubbed their hands
together, full of toothsome anticipation, like the guests at a
wedding-breakfast. As they break away from the dazzling light
outside and penetrate this cube of darkness, they are blinded, and
stand like bewildered owls for several minutes.

"It's not too brilliant in here," says Mesnil Joseph. "Come, old
chap, what do you want?" The others exclaim in chorus, "We're damned
well off here." And I can see heads nodding assent in the cavern's
twilight.

An incident: Farfadet having by accident rubbed against the damp and
dirty wall, his shoulder has brought away from it a smudge so big
and black that it can be seen even here. Farfadet, so careful of his
appearance, growls, and in avoiding a second contact with the wall,
knocks the table so that his spoon drops to the ground. Stooping, he
fumbles among the loose earth, where dust and spiders' webs for
years have silently fallen. When he recovers his spoon it is almost
black, and webby threads hang from it. Evidently it is disastrous to
let anything fall on the ground. One must live here with great care.

Lamuse brings down his fat hand, like a pork-pie, between two of the
places at table. "Allons, a table!" We fall to. The meal is
abundant and of excellent quality. The sound of conversation mingles
with those of emptying bottles and filling jaws. While we taste the
joy of eating at a table, a glimmer of light trickles through a
vent-hole, and wraps in dusty dawn a piece of the atmosphere and a
patch of the table, while its reflex lights up a plate, a cap's
peak, an eye. Secretly I take stock of this gloomy little
celebration that overflows with gayety. Biquet is telling about his
suppliant sorrows in quest of a washerwoman who would agree to do
him the good turn of washing some linen, but "it was too damned
dear." Tulacque describes the queue outside the grocer's. One might
not go in; customers were herded outside, like sheep. "And although
you were outside, if you weren't satisfied, and groused too much,
they chased you off."

Any news yet? It is said that severe penalties have been imposed on
those who plunder the population, and there is already a list of
convictions. Volpatte has been sent down. Men of Class '93 are going
to be sent to the rear, and Pepere is one of them.

When Barque brings in the harvest of the fry-pan, he announces that
our hostess has soldiers at her table--ambulance men of the
machine-guns. "They thought they were the best off, but it's us
that's that," says Fouillade with decision, lolling grandly in the
darkness of the narrow and tainted hole where we are just as
confusedly heaped together as in a dug-out. But who would think of
making the comparison?

"Vous savez pas," says Pepin, "the chaps of the 9th, they're
in clover! An old woman has taken them in for nothing, because of
her old man that's been dead fifty years and was a rifleman once on
a time. Seems she's even given them a rabbit for nix, and they're
just worrying it jugged."

"There's good sorts everywhere. But the boys of the 9th had famous
luck to fall into the only shop of good sorts in the whole village."

Palmyra comes with the coffee, which she supplies. She thaws a
little, listens to us, and even asks questions in a supercilious
way: "Why do you call the adjutant 'le juteux'?"

Barque replies sententiously, "'Twas ever thus."

When she has disappeared, we criticize our coffee. "Talk about
clear! You can see the sugar ambling round the bottom of the
glass."--"She charges six sous for it."--"It's filtered water."

The door half opens, and admits a streak of light. The face of a
little boy is defined in it. We entice him in like a kitten and give
him a bit of chocolate.

Then, "My name's Charlie," chirps the child. "Our house, that's
close by. We've got soldiers, too. We always had them, we had. We
sell them everything they want. Only, voila, sometimes they
get drunk."

"Tell me, little one, come here a bit," says Cocon, taking the boy
between his knees. "Listen now. Your papa, he says, doesn't he,
'Let's hope the war goes on,' eh?" [note 2]

"Of course," says the child, tossing his head, "because we're
getting rich. He says, by the end of May, we shall have got fifty
thousand francs."

"Fifty thousand francs! Impossible!"

"Yes, yes!" the child insists, stamping, "he said it to mamma. Papa
wished it could be always like that. Mamma, sometimes, she isn't
sure, because my brother Adolphe is at the front. But we're going to
get him sent to the rear, and then the war can go on."

These confidences are disturbed by sharp cries, coming from the
rooms of our hosts. Biquet the mobile goes to inquire. "It's
nothing," says he, coming back; "it's the good man slanging the
woman because she doesn't know how to do things, he says, because
she's made the mustard in a tumbler, and he never heard of such a
thing, he says."

We get up, and leave the strong odor of pipes, wine, and stale
coffee in our cave. As soon as we have crossed the threshold, a
heaviness of heat puffs in our faces, fortified by the mustiness of
frying that dwells in the kitchen and emerges every time the door is
opened. We pass through legions of flies which, massed on the walls
in black hordes, fly abroad in buzzing swarms as we pass: "It's
beginning again like last year! Flies outside, lice inside.--"

"And microbes still farther inside!"

In a corner of this dirty little house and its litter of old
rubbish, its dusty debris of last year and the relics of so many
summers gone by, among the furniture and household gear, something
is moving. It is an old simpleton with a long bald neck, pink and
rough, making you think of a fowl's neck which has prematurely
molted through disease. His profile is that of a hen, too--no chin
and a long nose. A gray overlay of beard felts his receded cheek,
and you see his heavy eyelids, rounded and horny, move up and down
like shutters on the dull beads of his eyes.

Barque has already noticed him: "Watch him--he's a treasure-seeker.
He says there's one somewhere in this hovel that he's stepfather to.
You'll see him directly go on all-fours and push his old phizog in
every corner there is. Tiens, watch him."

With the aid of his stick, the old man proceeded to take methodical
soundings. He tapped along the foot of the walls and on the
floor-tiles.. He was hustled by the coming and going of the
occupants of the house, by callers, and by the swing of Palmyra's
broom; but she let him alone and said nothing, thinking to herself,
no doubt, that the exploitation of the national calamity is a more
profitable treasure than problematical caskets.

Two gossips are standing in a recess and exchanging confidences in
low voices, hard by an old map of Russia that is peopled with flies.
"Oui, but it's with the Picon bitters that you've got to be careful.
If you haven't got a light touch, you can't get your sixteen glasses
out of a bottle, and so you lose too much profit. I don't say but
what one's all right in one's purse, even so, but one doesn't make
enough. To guard against that, the retailers ought to agree among
themselves, but the understanding's so difficult to bring off, even
when it's in the general interest."

Outside there is torrid sunshine, riddled with flies. The little
beasts, quite scarce but a few days ago, multiply everywhere the
murmur of their minute and innumerable engines. I go out in the
company of Lamuse; we are going for a saunter. One can be at peace
today--it is complete rest, by reason of the overnight march. We
might sleep, but it suits us much better to use the rest for an
extensive promenade. To-morrow, the exercise and fatigues will get
us again. There are some, less lucky than we, who are already caught
in the cogwheels of fatigue. To Lamuse, who invites him to come and
stroll with us, Corvisart replies, screwing up the little round nose
that is laid flatly on his oblong face like a cork, "Can't--I'm on
manure!" He points to the shovel and broom by whose help he is
performing his task of scavenger and night-soil man.

We walk languidly. The afternoon lies heavy on the drowsy land and
on stomachs richly provided and embellished with food. The remarks
we exchange are infrequent.

Over there, we hear noises. Barque has fallen a victim to a
menagerie of housewives; and the scene is pointed by a pale little
girl, her hair tied behind in a pencil of tow and her mouth
embroidered with fever spots, and by women who are busy with some
unsavory job of washing in the meager shade before their doors.

Six men go by, led by a quartermaster corporal. They carry heaps of
new greatcoats and bundles of boots. Lamuse regards his bloated and
horny feet--"I must have some new sheds, and no mistake; a bit more
and you'll see my splay-feet through these ones. Can't go marching
on the skin of my tongs, eh?"

An aeroplane booms overhead. We follow its evolutions with our faces
skyward, our necks twisted, our eyes watering at the piercing
brightness of the sky.

Lamuse declares to me, when we have brought our gaze back to earth,
"Those machines'll never become practical, never."

"How can you say that? Look at the progress they've made already,
and the speed of it."

"Yes, but they'll stop there. They'll never do any better, never."

This time I do not challenge the dull and obstinate denial that
ignorance opposes to the promise of progress, and I let my big
comrade alone in his stubborn belief that the wonderful effort of
science and industry has been suddenly cut short.

Having thus begun to reveal to me his inmost thoughts, Lamuse
continues. Coming nearer and lowering his head, he says to me, "You
know she's here--Eudoxie?"

"Ah!" said I.

"Yes, old chap. You never notice anything, you don't, but I
noticed," and Lamuse smiles at me indulgently. "Now, do you catch
on? If she's come here, it's because we interest her, eh? She's
followed us for one of us, and don't you forget it."

He gets going again. "My boy, d'you want to know what I say? She's
come after me."

"Are you sure of it, old chap?"

"Yes," says the ox-man, in a hollow voice. "First, I want her. Then,
twice, old man, I've found her exactly in my path, in mine, d'you
understand? You may tell me that she ran away; that's because she's
timid, that, yes--"

He stopped dead in the middle of the street and looked straight at
me. The heavy face, greasily moist on the cheeks and nose, was
serious. His rotund fist went up to the dark yellow mustache, so
carefully pointed, and smoothed it tenderly. Then he continued to
lay bare his heart to me "I want her; but, you know, I shall marry
her all right, I shall. She's called Eudoxie Dumail. At first, I
wasn't thinking of marrying her. But since I've got to know her
family name, it seems to me that it's different, and I should get on
all right. Ah, nom de Dieu! She's so pretty, that woman! And it's
not only that she's pretty--ah!"

The huge child was overflowing with sentiment and emotion, and
trying to make them speak to me. "Ah, my boy, there are times when
I've just got to hold myself back with a hook," came the strained
and gloomy tones, while the blood flushed to the fleshy parts of his
cheeks and neck. "She's so beautiful, she's--and me I'm--she's so
unlike--you'll have noticed it, surely, you that notices--she's a
country girl, oui; eh bien, she's got a God knows what that's better
than a Parisienne, even a toffed-up and stylish Parisienne, pas?
She--as for me, I--"

He puckered his red eyebrows. He would have liked to tell me all the
splendor of his thoughts, but he knew not the art of expressing
himself, so he was silent. He remained alone in his voiceless
emotion, as always alone.

We went forward side by side between the rows of houses. In front of
the doors, drays laden with casks were drawn up. The front windows
blossomed with many-hued heaps of jam-pots, stacks of tinder
pipe-lighters--everything that the soldier is compelled to buy.
Nearly all the natives had gone into grocery. Business had been
getting out of gear locally for a long time, but now it was booming.
Every one, smitten with the fever of sum-totals and dazzled by the
multiplication table, plunged into trade.

Bells tolled, and the procession of a military funeral came out. A
forage wagon, driven by a transport man, carried a coffin wrapped in
a flag. Following, were a detachment of men, an adjutant, a padre,
and a civilian.

"The poor little funeral with its tail lopped off!" said Lamuse.
"Ah, those that are dead are very happy. But only sometimes, not
always--voila!"

We have passed the last of the houses. In the country, beyond the
end of the street, the fighting convoy and the regimental convoy
have settled themselves, the traveling kitchens and jingling carts
that follow them with odds and ends of equipment, the Red Cross
wagons, the motor lorries, the forage carts, the baggage-master's
gig. The tents of drivers and conductors swarm around the vehicles.
On the open spaces horses lift their metallic eyes to the sky's
emptiness, with their feet on barren earth. Four poilus are setting
up a table. The open-air smithy is smoking. This heterogeneous and
swarming city, planted in ruined fields whose straight or winding
ruts are stiffening in the heat, is already broadly valanced with
rubbish and dung.

On the edge of the camp a big, white-painted van stands out from the
others in its tidy cleanliness. Had it been in the middle of a fair,
one would have said it was the stylish show where one pays more than
at the others.

This is the celebrated "stomatological" van that Blaire was asking
about. In point of fact, Blaire is there in front, looking at it.
For some long time, no doubt, he has been going round it and gazing.
Field-hospital orderly Sambremeuse, of the Division, returning from
errands, is climbing the portable stair of painted wood which leads
to the van door. In his arms he carries a bulky box of biscuits, a
loaf of fancy bread, and a bottle of champagne. Blaire questions
him--"Tell me, Sir Rump, this horse-box--is it the dentist's?"

"It's written up there," replies Sambremeuse--a little corpulent
man, clean, close-shaven, and his chin starch-white. "If you can't
see it, you don't want the dentist to look after your grinders, you
want the vet to clean your eyesight."

Blaire comes nearer and scrutinizes the establishment. "It's a queer
shop," he says. He goes nearer yet, draws back, hesitates to risk
his gums in that carriage. At last he decides, puts a foot on the
stair, and disappears inside the caravan.

We continue our walk, and turn into a footpath where are high, dusty
bushes and the noises are subdued. The sunshine blazes everywhere;
it heats and roasts the hollow of the way, spreading blinding and
burning whiteness in patches, and shimmers in the sky of faultless
blue.

At the first turning, almost before we had heard the light grating
of a footstep, we are face to face with Eudoxie!

Lamuse utters a deep exclamation. Perhaps he fancies once more that
she is looking for him, and believes that she is the gift of his
destiny. He goes up to her--all the bulk of him.

She looks at him and stops, framed by the hawthorn. Her strangely
slight and pale face is apprehensive, the lids tremble on her
magnificent eyes. She is bareheaded, and in the hollowed neck of her
linen corsage there is the dawning of her flesh. So near, she is
truly enticing in the sunshine, this woman crowned with gold, and
one's glance is impelled and astonished by the moon-like purity of
her skin. Her eyes sparkle; her teeth, too, glisten white in the
living wound of her half-open mouth, red as her heart.

"Tell me--I am going to tell you "pants Lamuse. "I like you so
much--" He outstretches his arm towards the motionless, beloved
wayfarer.

She starts, and replies to him, "Leave me alone--you disgust me!"

The man's hand is thrown over one of her little ones. She tries to
draw it back, and shakes it to free herself. Her intensely fair hair
falls loose, flaming. He draws her to him. His head bends towards
her, and his lips are ready. His desire--the wish of all his
strength and all his life--is to caress her. He would die that he
might touch her with his lips. But she struggles, and utters a
choking cry. She is trembling, and her beautiful face is disfigured
with abhorrence.

I go up and put my hand on my friend's shoulder, but my intervention
is not needed. Lamuse recoils and growls, vanquished.

"Are you taken that way often?" cries Eudoxie.

"No!" groans the miserable man, baffled, overwhelmed, bewildered.

"Don't do it again, vous savez!" she says, and goes off panting, and
he does not even watch her go. He stands with his arms hanging,
gazing at the place whence she has gone, tormented to the quick,
torn from his dreams of her, and nothing left him to desire.

I lead him away and he comes in dumb agitation, sniffling and out of
breath, as though he had run a long way. The mass of his big head is
bent. In the pitiless light of eternal spring, he is like the poor
Cyclops who roamed the shores of ancient Sicily in the beginnings of
time--like a huge toy, a thing of derision, that a child's shining
strength could subdue.

The itinerant wine-seller, whose barrow is hunchbacked with a
barrel, has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He
disappears round the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow
as a Camembert, his scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and
so emaciated himself that one could fancy his feet were fastened to
his trunk by strings through his flopping trousers.

And among the idle poilus of the guard-room at the end of the place,
under the wing of the shaking and rattling signboard which serves as
advertisement of the village, [note 3] a conversation is set up on
the subject of this wandering buffoon.

"He has a dirty neb," says Bigornot; "and I'll tell you what I
think--they've no business to let civvies mess about at the front
with their pretty ringlets, and especially individuals that you
don't know where they come from."

"You're quite crushing, you portable louse," replies Cornet.

"Never mind, shoe-sole face," Bigornot insists; "we trust 'em too
much. I know what I'm saying when I open it."

"You don't," says Canard. "Pepere's going to the
rear."

"The women here," murmurs La Mollette, "they're ugly; they're a lot
of frights."

The other men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space,
watch two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are
spinning. Around the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now
black like crows and now white like gulls, according to the play of
the light, clouds of bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem
like a long flight of snowflakes in the sunshine.

As we are going back, two strollers come up--Carassus and Cheyssier.
They announce that mess-man Pepere is going to the
rear, to be sent to a Territorial regiment, having come under the
operation of the Dalbiez Act.

"That's a hint for Blaire," says Carassus, who has a funny big nose
in the middle of his face that suits him ill.

In the village groups of poilus go by, or in twos, joined by the
crossing bonds of converse. We see the solitary ones unite in
couples, separate, then come together again with a new inspiration
of talk, drawn to each other as if magnetized.

In the middle of an excited crowd white papers are waving. It is the
newspaper hawker, who is selling for two sous papers which should be
one sou. Fouillade is standing in the middle of the road, thin as
the legs of a hare. At the corner of a house Paradis shows to the
sun face pink as ham.

Biquet joins us again, in undress, with a jacket and cap of the
police. He is licking his chops: "I met some pals and we've had a
drink. You see, to-morrow one starts scratching again, and cleaning
his old rags and his catapult. But my greatcoat!--going to be some
job to filter that! It isn't a greatcoat any longer--it's
armor-plate."

Montreuil, a clerk at the office, appears and hails Biquet: "Hey,
riff-raff! A letter! Been chasing you an hour. You're never to be
found, rotter!"

"Can't be both here and there, looney. Give us a squint." He
examines the letter, balances it in his hand, and announces as he
tears the envelope, "It's from the old woman."

We slacken our pace. As he reads, he follows the lines with his
finger, wagging his head with an air of conviction, and his lips
moving like a woman's in prayer.

The throng increases the nearer we draw to the middle of the
village. We salute the commandant and the black-skirted padre who
walks by the other's side like his nurse. We are questioned by
Pigeon, Guenon, young Escutenaire, and Chasseur Clodore. Lamuse
appears blind and deaf, and concerned only to walk.

Bizouarne, Chanrion, and Roquette arrive excitedly to announce big
news--"D'you know, Pepere's going to the rear."

"Funny," says Biquet, raising his nose from his letter, "how people
kid themselves. The old woman's bothered about me!" He shows me a
passage in the maternal epistle: "'When you get my letter,'" he
spells out, "'no doubt you will be in the cold and mud, deprived of
everything, mon pauvre Eugene'" He laughs: "It's ten days
since she put that down for me, and she's clean off it. We're not
cold, 'cos it's been fine since this morning; and we're not
miserable, because we've got a room that's good enough. We've had
hard times, but we're all right now."

As we reach the kennel in which we are lodgers, we are thinking that
sentence over. Its touching simplicity affects me, shows me a
soul--a host of souls. Because the sun has shown himself, because we
have felt a gleam and a similitude of comfort, suffering exists no
longer, either of the past or the terrible future. "We're all right
now." There is no more to say.

Biquet establishes himself at the table, like a gentleman, to write
a reply. Carefully he lays abroad his pen ink, and paper, and
examines each, then smilingly traces the strictly regular lines of
his big handwriting across the meager page.

"You'd laugh," he says, "if you knew what I've written to the old
woman." He reads his letter again, fondles it, and smiles to
himself.

______

[note 1:] Pity to spoil this jest by translation, but Biquet's
primary meaning was "You're cross because you've a throat like a
lime-kiln." His secondary or literal meaning is obvious.--Tr.

[note 2:] See p. 34 ante; [chapter 5, note 3] another reference to
the famous phrase. "Pourvu que les civils tiennent."--Tr.

[note 3:] Every French village has a plaque attached to the first
house on each road of approach, giving its name and the distance to
the next.--Tr.






6

Habits





WE are enthroned in the back yard. The big hen, white as a cream
cheese, is brooding in the depths of a basket near the coop whose
imprisoned occupant is rummaging about. But the black hen is free to
travel. She erects and withdraws her elastic neck in jerks, and
advances with a large and affected gait. One can just see her
profile and its twinkling spangle, and her talk appears to proceed
from a metal spring. She marches, glistening black and glossy like
the love-locks of a gypsy; and as she marches, she unfolds here and
there upon the ground a faint trail of chickens.

These trifling little yellow balls, kept always by a whispering
instinct on the ebb-tide to safety, hurry along under the maternal
march in short, sharp jerks, pecking as they go. Now the train comes
to a full stop, for two of the chickens are thoughtful and immobile,
careless of the parental clucking.

"A bad sign," says Paradis; "the hen that reflects is ill." And
Paradis uncrosses and recrosses his legs. Beside him on the bench,
Blaire extends his own, lets loose a great yawn that he maintains in
placid duration, and sets himself again to observe, for of all of us
he most delights in watching fowls during the brief life when they
are in such a hurry to eat.

And we watch them in unison, not forgetting the shabby old cock,
worn threadbare. Where his feathers have fallen appears the naked
india-rubber leg, lurid as a grilled cutlet. He approaches the white
sitter, which first turns her head away in tart denial, with several
"No's" in a muffled rattle, and then watches him with the little
blue enamel dials of her eyes.

"We're all right," says Barque.

"Watch the little ducks," says Blaire, "going along the
communication trench."

We watch a single file of all-golden ducklings go past--still almost
eggs on feet--their big heads pulling their little lame bodies along
by the string of their necks, and that quickly. From his corner, the
big dog follows them also with his deeply dark eye, on which the
slanting sun has shaped a fine tawny ring.

Beyond this rustic yard and over the scalloping of the low wall, the
orchard reveals itself, where a green carpet, moist and thick,
covers the rich soil and is topped by a screen of foliage with a
garniture of blossom, some white as statuary, others pied and glossy
as knots in neckties. Beyond again is the meadow, where the shadowed
poplars throw shafts of dark or golden green. Still farther again is
a square patch of upstanding hops, followed by a patch of cabbages,
sitting on the ground and dressed in line. In the sunshine of air
and of earth we hear the bees, as they work and make music (in
deference to the poets), and the cricket which, in defiance of the
fable, sings with no humility and fills Space by himself.

Over yonder, there falls eddying from a poplar's peak a magpie--half
white, half black, like a shred of partly-burned paper.

The soldiers outstretch themselves luxuriously on the stone bench,
their eyes half closed, and bask in the sunshine that warms the
basin of the big yard till it is like a bath.

"That's seventeen days we've been here! After thinking we were going
away day after day!"

"One never knows," said Paradis, wagging his head and smacking his
lips.

Through the yard gate that opens on to the road we see a group of
poilus strolling, nose in air, devouring the sunshine; and then, all
alone, Tellurure. In the middle of the street he oscillates the
prosperous abdomen of which he is proprietor, and rocking on legs
arched like basket-handles, he expectorates in wide abundance all
around him.

"We thought, too, that we should be as badly off here as in the
other quarters. But this time it's real rest, both in the time it
lasts and the kind it is."

"You're not given too many exercises and fatigues."

"And between whiles you come in here to loll about."

The old man huddled up at the end of the seat--no other than the
treasure-seeking grandfather whom we saw the day of our
arrival--came nearer and lifted his finger. "When I was a young
man, I was thought a lot of by women," he asserted, shaking his
head. "I have led young ladies astray!"

"Ah!" said we, heedless, our attention taken away from his senile
prattle by the timely noise of a cart that was passing, laden and
laboring.

"Nowadays," the old man went on, "I only think about money."

"Ah, oui, the treasure you're looking for, papa."

"That's it," said the old rustic, though he felt the skepticism
around him. He tapped his cranium with his forefinger, which he then
extended towards the house. "Take that insect there," he said,
indicating a little beast that ran along the plaster. "What does it
say? It says, 'I am the spider that spins the Virgin's thread.'" And
the archaic simpleton added, "One must never judge what people do,
for one can never tell what may happen."

"That's true," replied Paradis politely. "He's funny," said Mesnil
Andre, between his teeth, while he sought the mirror in his
pocket to look at the facial benefit of fine weather. "He's crazy,"
murmured Barque in his ecstasy.

"I leave you," said the old man, yielding in annoyance.

He got up to go and look for his treasure again, entered the house
that supported our backs, and left the door open, where beside the
huge fireplace in the room we saw a little girl, so seriously
playing with a doll that Blaire fell considering, and said, "She's
right."

The games of children are a momentous preoccupation. Only the
grown-ups play.

After we have watched the animals and the strollers go by, we watch
the time go by, we watch everything.

We are seeing the life of things, we are present with Nature,
blended with climates, mingled even with the sky, colored by the
seasons. We have attached ourselves to this corner of the land where
chance has held us back from our endless wanderings in longer and
deeper peace than elsewhere; and this closer intercourse makes us
sensible of all its traits and habits. September--the morrow of
August and eve of October, most affecting of months--is already
sprinkling the fine days with subtle warnings. Already one knows the
meaning of the dead leaves that flit about the flat stones like a
flock of sparrows.

In truth we have got used to each other's company, we and this
place. So often transplanted, we are taking root here, and we no
longer actually think of going away, even when we talk about it.

"The 11th Division jolly well stayed a month and a half resting,"
says Blaire.

"And the 375th, too, nine weeks!" replies Barque, in a tone of
challenge.

"I think we shall stay here at least as long--at least, I say."

"We could finish the war here all right."

Barque is affected by the words, nor very far from believing them.
"After all, it will finish some day, what!"

"After all!" repeat the others.

"To be sure, one never knows," says Paradis. He says this weakly,
without deep conviction. It is, however, a saying which leaves no
room for reply. We say it over again, softly, lulling ourselves with
it as with an old song.

* * * * * *

Farfadet rejoined us a moment ago. He took his place near us, but a
little withdrawn all the same, and sits on an overturned tub, his
chin on his fists.

This man is more solidly happy than we are. We know it well, and he
knows it well. Lifting his head he has looked in turn, with the same
distant gaze, at the back of the old man who went to seek his
treasure, and at the group that talks of going away no more. There
shines over our sensitive and sentimental comrade a sort of personal
glamour, which makes of him a being apart, which gilds him and
isolates him from us, in spite of himself, as though an officer's
tabs had fallen on him from the sky.

His idyll with Eudoxie has continued here. We have had the proofs;
and once, indeed, he spoke of it. She is not very far away, and they
are very near to each other. Did I not see her the other evening,
passing along the wall of the parsonage, her hair but half quenched
by a mantilla, as she went obviously to a rendezvous? Did I not see
that she began to hurry and to lean forward, already smiling?
Although there is no more between them yet than promises and
assurances, she is his, and he is the man who will hold her in his
arms.

Then, too, he is going to leave us, called to the rear, to Brigade
H.Q., where they want a weakling who can work a typewriter. It is
official; it is in writing; he is saved. That gloomy future at which
we others dare not look is definite and bright for him.

He looks at an open window and the dark gap behind it of some room
or other over there, a shadowy room that bemuses him. His life is
twofold in hope; he is happy, for the imminent happiness that does
not yet exist is the only real happiness down here.

So a scanty spirit of envy grows around him. "One never knows,"
murmurs Paradis again, but with no more confidence than when before,
in the straitened scene of our life to-day, he uttered those
immeasurable words.






7

Entraining





THE next day, Barque began to address us, and said: "I'll just
explain to you what it is. There are some i--"

A ferocious whistle cut his explanation off short, on the syllable.
We were in a railway station, on a platform. A night alarm had torn
us from our sleep in the village and we had marched here. The rest
was over; our sector was being changed; they were throwing us
somewhere else. We had disappeared from Gauchin under cover of
darkness without seeing either the place or the people, without
bidding them good-by even in a look, without bringing away a last
impression.

A locomotive was shunting, near enough to elbow us, and screaming
full-lunged. I saw Barque's mouth, stoppered by the clamor of our
huge neighbor, pronounce an oath, and I saw the other faces
grimacing in deafened impotence, faces helmeted and chin-strapped,
for we were sentries in the station.

"After you!" yelled Barque furiously, addressing the white-plumed
whistle. But the terrible mechanism continued more imperiously than
ever to drive his words back in his throat. When it ceased, and only
its echo rang in our ears, the thread of the discourse was broken
for ever, and Barque contented himself with the brief conclusion,
"Oui."

Then we looked around us. We were lost in a sort of town.
Interminable strings of trucks, trains of forty to sixty carriages,
were taking shape like rows of dark-fronted houses, low built, all
alike, and divided by alleys. Before us, alongside the collection of
moving houses, was the main line, the limitless street where the
white rails disappeared at both ends, swallowed up in distance.
Sections of trains and complete trains were staggering in great
horizontal columns, leaving their places, then taking them again. On
every side one heard the regular hammering on the armored ground,
piercing whistles, the ringing of warning bells, the solid metallic
crash of the colossal cubes telescoping their steel stumps, with the
counter-blows of chains and the rattle of the long carcases'
vertebrae. On the ground floor of the building that arises in the
middle of the station like a town ball, the hurried bell of
telegraph and telephone was at work, punctuated by vocal noises. All
about on the dusty ground were the goods sheds, the low stores
through whose doors one could dimly see the stacked interiors--the
pointsmen's cabins, the bristling switches, the hydrants, the
latticed iron posts whose wires ruled the sky like music-paper; here
and there the signals, and rising naked over this flat and gloomy
city, two steam cranes, like steeples.

Farther away, on waste ground and vacant sites in the environs of
the labyrinth of platforms and buildings, military carts and lorries
were standing idle, and rows of horses, drawn out farther than one
could see.

"Talk about the job this is going to be!"--"A whole army corps
beginning to entrain this evening!"--"Tiens, they're coming now!"

A cloud which overspread a noisy vibration of wheels and the rumble
of horses' hoofs was coming near and getting bigger in the approach
to the station formed by converging buildings.

"There are already some guns on board." On some flat trucks down
there, between two long pyramidal dumps of chests, we saw indeed the
outline of wheels, and some slender muzzles. Ammunition wagons, guns
and wheels were streaked and blotched with yellow, brown, and green.

"They're camoufles. [note 1] Down there, there are even
horses painted. Look! spot that one, there, with the big feet as if
he had trousers on. Well, he was white, and they've slapped some
paint on to change his color."

The horse in question was standing apart from the others, which
seemed to mistrust it, and displayed a grayish yellow tone,
obviously with intent to deceive. "Poor devil!" said Tulacque.

"You see," said Paradis, "we not only take 'em to get killed, but
mess them about first!"

"It's for their good, any way!"

"Eh oui, and us too, it's for our good!"

Towards evening soldiers arrived. From all sides they flowed towards
the station. Deep-voiced non-coms. ran in front of the files. They
were stemming the tide of men and massing them along the barriers or
in railed squares--pretty well everywhere. The men piled their arms,
dropped their knapsacks, and not being free to go out, waited,
buried side by side in shadow.

The arrivals followed each other in volume that grew as the twilight
deepened. Along with the troops, the motors flowed up, and soon
there was an unbroken roar. Limousines glided through an enormous
sea of lorries, little, middling, and big. All these cleared aside,
wedged themselves in, subsided in their appointed places. A vast hum
of voices and mingled noises arose from the ocean of men and
vehicles that beat upon the approaches to the station and began in
places to filter through.

"That's nothing yet," said Cocon, The Man of Figures. "At Army Corps
Headquarters alone there are thirty officers' motors; and you don't
know," he added, "how many trains of fifty trucks it takes to
entrain all the Corpsmen and all the box of tricks--except, of
course, the lorries, that'll join the new sector on their feet?
Don't guess, fiat-face. It takes ninety."

"Great Scott! And there are thirty-three Corps?"

"There are thirty-nine, lousy one!"

The turmoil increases; the station becomes still more populous. As
far as the eye can make out a shape or the ghost of a shape, there
is a hurly-burly of movement as lively as a panic. All the hierarchy
of the non-coms. expand themselves and go into action, pass and
repass like meteors, wave their bright-striped arms, and multiply
the commands and counter-commands that are carried by the worming
orderlies and cyclists, the former tardy, the latter maneuvering in
quick dashes, like fish in water.

Here now is evening, definitely. The blots made by the uniforms of
the poilus grouped about the hillocks of rifles become indistinct,
and blend with the ground; and then their mass is betrayed only by
the glow of pipes and cigarettes. In some places on the edge of the
clusters, the little bright points festoon the gloom like
illuminated streamers in a merry-making street.

Over this confused and heaving expanse an amalgam of voices rises
like the sea breaking on the shore: and above this unending murmur,
renewed commands, shouts, the din of a shot load or of one
transferred, the crash of steam-hammers redoubling their dull
endeavors, and the roaring of boilers.

In the immense obscurity, surcharged with men and with all things,
lights begin everywhere to appear. These are the flash-lamps of
officers and detachment leaders, and the cyclists' acetylene lamps,
whose intensely white points zigzag hither and thither and reveal an
outer zone of pallid resurrection.

An acetylene searchlight blazes blindingly out and depicts a dome of
daylight. Other beams pierce and rend the universal gray.

Then does the station assume a fantastic air. Mysterious shapes
spring up and adhere to the sky's dark blue. Mountains come into
view, rough-modeled, and vast as the ruins of a town. One can see
the beginning of unending rows of objects, finally plunged in night.
One guesses what the great bulks may be whose outermost outlines
flash forth from a black abyss of the unknown.

On our left, detachments of cavalry and infantry move ever forward
like a ponderous flood. We hear the diffused obscurity of voices. We
see some ranks delineated by a flash of phosphorescent light or a
ruddy glimmering, and we listen to long-drawn trails of noise.

Up the gangways of the vans whose gray trunks and black mouths one
sees by the dancing and smoking flame of torches, artillerymen are
leading horses. There are appeals and shouts, a frantic trampling of
conflict, and the angry kicking of some restive animal--insulted by
its guide--against the panels of the van where he is cloistered.

Not far away, they are putting wagons on to railway trucks. Swarming
humanity surrounds a hill of trusses of fodder. A scattered
multitude furiously attacks great strata of bales.

"That's three hours we've been on our pins," sighs Paradis.

"And those, there, what are they?" In some snatches of light we see
a group of goblins, surrounded by glowworms and carrying strange
instruments, come out and then disappear.

"That's the searchlight section," says Cocon.

"You've got your considering cap on, camarade; what's it about?"

"There are four Divisions, at present, in an Army Corps," replies
Cocon; "the number changes, sometimes it is three, sometimes five.
Just now, it's four. And each of our Divisions," continues the
mathematical one, whom our squad glories in owning, "includes three
R.I.--regiments of infantry; two B.C.P.--battalions of chasseurs
pied; one R.T.I.--regiment of territorial infantry--without counting
the special regiments, Artillery, Engineers, Transport, etc., and
not counting either Headquarters of the D.I. and the departments not
brigaded but attached directly to the D.I. A regiment of the line of
three battalions occupies four trains, one for H.Q., the machine-gun
company, and the C.H.R. (compagnie hors rang [note 2]), and one to
each battalion. All the troops won't entrain here. They'll entrain
in echelons along the line according to the position of the quarters
and the period of reliefs."

"I'm tired," says Tulacque. "We don't get enough solids to eat, mark
you. We stand up because it's the fashion, but we've no longer
either force or freshness."

"I've been getting information," Cocon goes on; "the troops--the
real troops--will only entrain as from midnight. They are still
mustered here and there in the villages ten kilometers round about.
All the departments of the Army Corps will first set off, and the
E.N.E.--elements non endivisionnes," Cocon
obligingly explains, "that is, attached directly to the A.C. Among
the E.N.E. you won't see the Balloon Department nor the
Squadron--they're too big goods, and they navigate on their own,
with their staff and officers and hospitals. The chasseurs regiment
is another of these E.N.E."

"There's no regiment of chasseurs," says Barque, thoughtlessly,
"it's battalions. One says 'such and such a battalion of
chasseurs.'"

We can see Cocon shrugging his shoulders in the shadows, and his
glasses cast a scornful gleam. "Think so, duck-neb? Then I'll tell
you, since you're so clever, there are two--foot chasseurs and horse
chasseurs."

"Gad! I forgot the horsemen," says Barque.

"Only them!" Cocon said. "In the E.N.E. of the Army Corps, there's
the Corps Artillery, that is to say, the central artillery that's
additional to that of the divisions. It includes the H.A.--heavy
artillery; the T.A.--trench artillery; the A.D.--artillery depot,
the armored cars, the anti-aircraft batteries--do I know, or don't
I? There's the Engineers; the Military Police--to wit, the service
of cops on foot and slops on horseback; the Medical Department; the
Veterinary ditto; a squadron of the Draught Corps; a Territorial
regiment for the guards and fatigues at H.Q.--Headquarters; the
Service de l'lntendance, [note 3] and the supply column. There's
also the drove of cattle, the Remount Depot, the Motor
Department--talk about the swarm of soft jobs I could tell you about
in an hour if I wanted to!--the Paymaster that controls the
pay-offices and the Post, the Council of War, the Telegraphists, and
all the electrical lot. All those have chiefs, commandants, sections
and sub-sections, and they're rotten with clerks and orderlies of
sorts, and all the bally box of tricks. You can see from here the
sort of job the C.O. of a Corp's got!"

At this moment we were surrounded by a party of soldiers carrying
boxes in addition to their equipment, and parcels tied up in paper
that they bore reluctantly and anon placed on the ground, puffing.

"Those are the Staff secretaries. They are a part of the
H.Q.--Headquarters--that is to say, a sort of General's suite. When
they're flitting, they lug about their chests of records, their
tables, their registers, and all the dirty oddments they need for
their writing. Tiens! see that, there; it's a typewriter those two
are carrying, the old papa and the little sausage, with a rifle
threaded through the parcel. They're in three offices, and there's
also the dispatch-riders' section, the Chancellerie, the
A.C.T.S.--Army Corps Topographical Section--that distributes maps to
the Divisions, and makes maps and plans from the aviators and the
observers and the prisoners. It's the officers of all the
departments who, under the orders of two colonels, form the Staff of
the Army Corps. But the H.Q., properly so called, which also
includes orderlies, cooks, storekeepers, workpeople, electricians,
police, and the horsemen of the Escort, is bossed by a commandant."

At this moment we receive collectively a tremendous bump. "Hey, look
out! Out of the way!" cries a man, by way of apology, who is being
assisted by several others to push a cart towards the wagons. The
work is hard, for the ground slopes up, and so soon as they cease to
buttress themselves against the cart and adhere to the wheels, it
slips back. The sullen men crush themselves against it in the depth
of the gloom, grinding their teeth and growling, as though they fell
upon some monster.

Barque, all the while rubbing his back, questions one of the frantic
gang: "Think you're going to do it, old duckfoot?"

"Nom de Dieu!" roars he, engrossed in his job, "mind these setts!
You're going to wreck the show!" With a sudden movement he jostles
Barque again, and this time turns round on him: "What are you doing
there, dung-guts, numskull?"

"Non, it can't be that you're drunk?" Barque retorts. "'What am I
doing here?' It's good, that! Tell me, you lousy gang, wouldn't you
like to do it too!"

"Out of the way!" cries a new voice, which precedes some men doubled
up under burdens incongruous, but apparently overwhelming.

One can no longer remain anywhere. Everywhere we are in the way. We
go forward, we scatter, we retire in the turmoil.

"In addition, I tell you," continues Cocon, tranquil as a scientist,
"there are the Divisions, each organized pretty much like an Army
Corps--"

"Oui, we know it; miss the deal!"

"He makes a fine to-do about it all, that mountebank in the
horse-box on casters. What a mother-in-law he'd make!"

"I'll bet that's the Major's wrong-headed horse, the one that the
vet said was a calf in process of becoming a cow."

"It's well organized, all the same, all that, no doubt about it,"
says Lamuse admiringly, forced back by a wave of artillerymen
carrying boxes.

"That's true," Marthereau admits; "to get all this lot on the way,
you've not got to be a lot of turnip-heads nor a lot of
custards--Bon Dieu, look where you're putting your damned boots, you
black-livered beast!"

"Talk about a flitting! When I went to live at Marcoussis with my
family, there was less fuss than this. But then I'm not built that
way myself."

We are silent; and then we hear Cocon saying, "For the whole French
Army that holds the lines to go by--I'm not speaking of those who
are fixed up at the rear, where there are twice as many men again,
and services like the ambulance that cost nine million francs and
can clear you seven thousand cases a day--to see them go by in
trains of sixty coaches each, following each other without stopping,
at intervals of a quarter of an hour, it would take forty days and
forty nights."

"Ah!" they say. It is too much effort for their imagination; they
lose interest and sicken of the magnitude of these figures. They
yawn, and with watering eyes they follow, in the confusion of haste
and shouts and smoke, of roars and gleams and flashes, the terrible
line of the armored train that moves in the distance, with fire in
the sky behind it.

______

[note 1:] The word is likely to become of international usage. It
stands for the use of paint in blotches of different colors, and of
branches and other things to disguise almost any object that may be
visible to hostile aircraft.--Tr.

[note 2:] Non-combatant.--Tr.

[note 3:] Akin to the British A.S.C.--Tr.






8

On Leave





EUDORE sat down awhile, there by the roadside well, before taking
the path over the fields that led to the trenches, his hands crossed
over one knee, his pale face uplifted. He had no mustache under his
nose--only a little flat smear over each corner of his mouth. He
whistled, and then yawned in the face of the morning till the tears
came.

An artilleryman who was quartered on the edge of the wood--over
there where a line of horses and carts looked like a gypsies'
bivouac--came up, with the well in his mind, and two canvas buckets
that danced at the end of his arms in time with his feet. In front
of the sleepy unarmed soldier with a bulging bag he stood fast.

"On leave?"

"Yes," said Eudore; "just back."

"Good for you," said the gunner as he made off.

"You've nothing to grumble at--with six days' leave in your
water-bottle!"

And here, see, are four more men coming down the road, their gait
heavy and slow, their boots turned into enormous caricatures of
boots by reason of the mud. As one man they stopped on espying the
profile of Eudore.

"There's Eudore! Hello, Eudore! hello, the old sport! You're back
then!" they cried together, as they hurried up and offered him hands
as big and ruddy as if they were hidden in woolen gloves.

"Morning, boys," said Eudore.

"Had a good time? What have you got to tell us, my boy?"

"Yes," replied Eudore, "not so bad."

"We've been on wine fatigue, and we've finished. Let's go back
together, pas?"

In single file they went down the embankment of the road--arm in arm
they crossed the field of gray mud, where their feet fell with the
sound of dough being mixed in the kneading-trough.

"Well, you've seen your wife, your little Mariette--the only girl
for you--that you could never open your jaw without telling us a
tale about her, eh?"

Eudore's wan face winced.

"My wife? Yes, I saw her, sure enough, but only for a little
while--there was no way of doing any better--but no luck, I admit,
and that's all about it."

"How's that?"

"How? You know that we live at Villers-l'Abbaye, a hamlet of four
houses neither more nor less, astraddle over the road. One of those
houses is our cafe, and she runs it, or rather she is running
it again since they gave up shelling the village.

"Now then, with my leave coming along, she asked for a permit to
Mont-St-Eloi, where my old folks are, and my permit was for
Mont-St-Eloi too. See the move?

"Being a little woman with a head-piece, you know, she had applied
for her permit long before the date when my leave was expected. All
the same, my leave came before her permit. Spite o' that I set
off--for one doesn't let his turn in the company go by, eh? So I
stayed with the old people, and waited. I like 'em well enough, but
I got down in the mouth all the same. As for them, it was enough
that they could see me, and it worried them that I was bored by
their company-how else could it be? At the end of the sixth day--at
the finish of my leave, and the very evening before returning--a
young man on a bicycle, son of the Florence family, brings me a
letter from Mariette to say that her permit had not yet come--"

"Ah, rotten luck," cried the audience.

"And that," continued Eudore, "there was only one thing to do.--I
was to get leave from the mayor of Mont-St-Eloi, who would get it
from the military, and go myself at full speed to see her at
Villers."

"You should have done that the first day, not the sixth!"

"So it seems, but I was afraid we should cross and me miss
her--y'see, as soon as I landed, I was expecting her all the time,
and every minute I fancied I could see her at the open door. So I
did as she told me."

"After all, you saw her?"

"Just one day--or rather, just one night."

"Quite sufficient!" merrily said Lamuse, and Eudore the pale and
serious shook his head under the shower of pointed and perilous
jests that followed.

"Shut your great mouths for five minutes, chaps."

"Get on with it, petit."

"There isn't a great lot of it," said Eudore.

"Well, then, you were saying you had got a hump with your old
people?"

"Ah, yes. They had tried their best to make up for Mariette--with
lovely rashers of our own ham, and plum brandy, and patching up my
linen, and all sorts of little spoiled-kid tricks--and I noticed
they were still slanging each other in the old familiar way! But you
talk about a difference! I always had my eye on the door to see if
some time or other it wouldn't get a move on and turn into a woman.
So I went and saw the mayor, and set off, yesterday, towards two in
the afternoon--towards fourteen o'clock I might well say, seeing
that I had been counting the hours since the day before! I had just
one day of my leave left then.

"As we drew near in the dusk, through the carriage window of the
little railway that still keeps going down there on some fag-ends of
line, I recognized half the country, and the other half I didn't.
Here and there I got the sense of it, all at once, and it came back
all fresh to me, and melted away again, just as if it was talking to
me. Then it shut up. In the end we got out, and I found--the limit,
that was--that we had to pad the hoof to the last station.

"Never, old man, have I been in such weather. It had rained for six
days. For six days the sky washed the earth and then washed it
again. The earth was softening and shifting, and filling up the
holes and making new ones."

"Same here--it only stopped raining this morning."

"It was just my luck. And everywhere there were swollen new streams,
washing away the borders of the fields as though they were lines on
paper. There were hills that ran with water from top to bottom.
Gusts of wind sent the rain in great clouds flying and whirling
about, and lashing our hands and faces and necks.

"So you bet, when I had tramped to the station, if some one had
pulled a really ugly face at me, it would have been enough to make
me turn back.

"But when we did get to the place, there were several of us--some
more men on leave--they weren't bound for Villers, but they had to
go through it to get somewhere else. So it happened that we got
there in a lump--five old cronies that didn't know each other.

"I could make out nothing of anything. They've been worse shelled
over there than here, and then there was the water everywhere, and
it was getting dark.

"I told you there are only four houses in the little place, only
they're a good bit off from each other. You come to the lower end of
a slope. I didn't know too well where I was, no more than my pals
did, though they belonged to the district and had some notion of the
lay of it--and all the less because of the rain falling in
bucketsful.

"It got so bad that we couldn't keep from hurrying and began to run.
We passed by the farm of the Alleux--that's the first of the
houses--and it looked like a sort of stone ghost. Bits of walls like
splintered pillars standing up out of the water; the house was
shipwrecked. The other farm, a little further, was as good as
drowned dead.

"Our house is the third. It's on the edge of the road that runs
along the top of the slope. We climbed up, facing the rain that beat
on us in the dusk and began to blind us--the cold and wet fairly
smacked us in the eye, flop!--and broke our ranks like machine-guns.

"The house! I ran like a greyhound--like an African attacking.
Mariette! I could see her with her arms raised high in the doorway
behind that fine curtain of night and rain--of rain so fierce that
it drove her back and kept her shrinking between the doorposts like
a statue of the Virgin in its niche. I just threw myself forward,
but remembered to give my pals the sign to follow me. The house
swallowed the lot of us. Mariette laughed a little to see me, with a
tear in her eye. She waited till we were alone together and then
laughed and cried all at once. I told the boys to make themselves at
home and sit down, some on the chairs and the rest on the table.

"'Where are they going, ces messieurs?' asked Manette.

"'We are going to Vauvelles.'

"'Jesus!' she said, 'you'll never get there. You can't do
those two miles and more in the night, with the roads washed away,
and swamps everywhere. You mustn't even try to.'

"'Well, we'll go on to-morrow, then; only we must find somewhere to
pass the night.'

"'I'll go with you,' I said, 'as far as the Pendu farm--they're not
short of room in that shop. You'll snore in there all right, and you
can start at daybreak.'

"'Right! let's get a move on so far.'

"We went out again. What a downpour! We were wet past bearing. The
water poured into our socks through the boot-soles and by the
trouser bottoms, and they too were soaked through and through up to
the knees. Before we got to this Pendu, we meet a shadow in a big
black cloak, with a lantern. The lantern is raised, and we see a
gold stripe on the sleeve, and then an angry face.

"'What the hell are you doing there?' says the shadow, drawing back
a little and putting one fist on his hip, while the rain rattled
like hail on his hood.

"'They're men on leave for Vauvelles--they can't set off again
to-night--they would like to sleep in the Pendu farm.'

"'What do you say? Sleep here?--This is the police station--I am the
officer on guard and there are Boche prisoners in the buildings.'
And I'll tell you what he said as well--'I must see you hop it from
here in less than two seconds. Bonsoir.'

"So we right about face and started back again--stumbling as if we
were boozed, slipping, puffing, splashing and bespattering
ourselves. One of the boys cried to me through the wind and rain,
'We'll go back with you as far as your home, all the same. If we
haven't a house we've time enough.'

"'Where will you sleep?'

"'Oh, we'll find somewhere, don't worry, for the little time we have
to kill here.'

"'Yes, we'll find somewhere, all right,' I said. 'Come in again for
a minute meanwhile--I won't take no--and Mariette sees us enter once
more in single file, all five of us soaked like bread in soup.

"So there we all were, with only one little room to go round in and
go round again--the only room in the house, seeing that it isn't a
palace.

"'Tell me, madame,' says one of our friends, 'isn't there a cellar
here?'

"'There's water in it,' says Mariette; 'you can't see the bottom
step and it's only got two.'

"'Damn,' says the man, 'for I see there's no loft, either.'

"After a minute or two he gets up: 'Good-night, old pal,' he says to
me, and they get their hats on.

"'What, are you going off in weather like this, boys?'

"'Do you think,' says the old sport, 'that we're going to spoil your
stay with your wife?'

"'But, my good man--'

"'But me no buts. It's nine o'clock, and you've got to take your
hook before day. So good-night. Coming, you others?'

"'Rather,' say the boys. 'Good-night all.'

"There they are at the door and opening it. Mariette and me, we look
at each other--but we don't move. Once more we look at each other,
and then we sprang at them. I grabbed the skirt of a coat and she a
belt--all wet enough to wring out.

"'Never! We won't let you go--it can't be done.'

"'But--'

"'But me no buts,' I reply, while she locks the door."

"Then what?" asked Lamuse.

"Then? Nothing at all," replied Eudore. "We just stayed like that,
very discreetly--all the night--sitting, propped up in the corners,
yawning--like the watchers over a dead man. We made a bit of talk at
first. From time to time some one said, 'Is it still raining?' and
went and had a look, and said, 'It's still raining'--we could hear
it, by the way. A big chap who had a mustache like a Bulgarian
fought against sleeping like a wild man. Sometimes one or two among
the crowd slept, but there was always one to yawn and keep an eye
open for politeness, who stretched himself or half got up so that he
could settle more comfortably.

"Mariette and me, we never slept. We looked at each other, but we
looked at the others as well, and they looked at us, and there you
are.

"Morning came and cleaned the window. I got up to go and look
outside. The rain was hardly less. In the room I could see dark
forms that began to stir and breathe hard. Mariette's eyes were red
with looking at me all night. Between her and me a soldier was
filling his pipe and shivering.

"Some one beats a tattoo on the window, and I half open it. A
silhouette with a streaming hat appears, as though carried and
driven there by the terrible force of the blast that came with it,
and asks--

"'Hey, in the cafe there! Is there any coffee to be had?'

"'Coming, sir, coming,' cried Mariette.

"She gets up from her chair, a little benumbed. Without a word she
looks at her self in our bit of a mirror, touches her hair lightly,
and says quite simply, the good lass--

"'I am going to make coffee for everybody.'

"When that was drunk off, we had all of us to go. Besides, customers
turned up every minute.

"'Hey, la p'tite mere,' they cried, shoving their noses in at
the half-open window, 'let's have a coffee--or three--or four'--'and
two more again,' says another voice.

"We go up to Mariette to say good-by. They knew they had played
gooseberry that night most damnably, but I could see plainly that
they didn't know if it would be the thing to say something about it
or just let it drop altogether.

"Then the Bulgarian made up his mind: 'We've made a hell of a mess
of it for you, eh, ma p'tite dame?'

"He said that to show he'd been well brought up, the old sport.

"Mariette thanks him and offers him her hand--'That's nothing at
all, sir. I hope you'll enjoy your leave.'

"And me, I held her tight in my arms and kissed her as long as I
could--half a minute--discontented--my God, there was reason to
be--but glad that Mariette had not driven the boys out like dogs,
and I felt sure she liked me too for not doing it.

"'But that isn't all,' said one of the leave men, lifting the skirt
of his cape and fumbling in his coat pocket; 'that's not all. What
do we owe you for the coffees?'

"'Nothing, for you stayed the night with me; you are my guests.'

"'Oh, madame, we can't have that!'

"And how they set to to make protests and compliments in front of
each other! Old man, you can say what you like--we may be only poor
devils, but it was astonishing, that little palaver of good manners.

"'Come along! Let's be hopping it, eh?'

"They go out one by one. I stay till the last. Just then another
passer-by begins to knock on the window--another who was dying for a
mouthful of coffee. Mariette by the open door leaned forward and
cried, 'One second!'

"Then she put into my arms a parcel that she had ready. 'I had
bought a knuckle of ham--it was for supper--for us--for us two--and
a liter of good wine. But, ma foi! when I saw there were five of
you, I didn't want to divide it out so much, and I want still less
now. There's the ham, the bread, and the wine. I give them to you so
that you can enjoy them by yourself, my boy. As for them, we have
given them enough,' she says.

"Poor Mariette," sighs Eudore. "Fifteen months since I'd seen her.
And when shall I see her again? Ever?--It was jolly, that idea of
hers. She crammed all that stuff into my bag--"

He half opens his brown canvas pouch.

"Look, here they are! The ham here, and the bread, and there's the
booze. Well, seeing it's there, you don't know what we're going to
do with it? We're going to share it out between us, eh, old pals?"






9

The Anger of Volpatte





WHEN Volpatte arrived from his sick-leave, after two months'
absence, we surrounded him. But he was sullen and silent, and tried
to get away.

"Well, what about it? Volpatte, have you nothing to tell us?"

"Tell us all about the hospital and the sick-leave, old cock, from
the day when you set off in your bandages, with your snout in
parenthesis! You must have seen something of the official shops.
Speak then, nome de Dieu!"

"I don't want to say anything at all about it," said Volpatte.

"What's that? What are you talking about?"

"I'm fed up--that's what I am! The people back there, I'm sick of
them--they make me spew, and you can tell 'em so!"

"What have they done to you?"

"A lot of sods, they are!" says Volpatte.

There he was, with his head as of yore, his ears "stuck on again"
and his Mongolian cheekbones--stubbornly set in the middle of the
puzzled circle that besieged him; amid we felt that the mouth fast
closed on ominous silence meant high pressure of seething
exasperation in the depth of him.

Some words overflowed from him at last. He turned round--facing
towards the rear and the bases--and shook his fist at infinite
space. "There are too many of them," he said between his teeth,
"there are too many!" He seemed to be threatening and repelling a
rising sea of phantoms.

A little later, we questioned him again, knowing well that his anger
could not thus be retained within, and that the savage silence would
explode at the first chance.

It was in a deep communication trench, away back, where we had come
together for a meal after a morning spent in digging. Torrential
rain was falling. We were muddled and drenched and hustled by the
flood, and we ate standing in single file, without shelter, under
the dissolving sky. Only by feats of skill could we protect the
bread and bully from the spouts that flowed from every point in
space; and while we ate we put our hands and faces as much as
possible under our cowls. The rain rattled and bounced and streamed
on our limp woven armor, and worked with open brutality or sly
secrecy into ourselves and our food. Our feet were sinking farther
and farther, taking deep root in the stream that flowed along the
clayey bottom of the trench. Some faces were laughing, though their
mustaches dripped. Others grimaced at the spongy bread and flabby
meat, or at the missiles which attacked their skin from all sides at
every defect in their heavy and miry armor-plate.

Barque, who was hugging his mess-tin to his heart, bawled at
Volpatte: "Well then, a lot of sods, you say, that you've seen down
there where you've been?"

"For instance?" cried Blaire, while a redoubled squall shook and
scattered his words; "what have you seen in the way of sods?"

"There are--" Volpatte began, "and then--there are too many of
them, nom de Dieu! There are--"

He tried to say what was the matter with him, but could only repeat,
"There are too many of them!" oppressed and panting. He swallowed a
pulpy mouthful of bread as if there went with it the disordered and
suffocating mass of his memories.

"Is it the shirkers you want to talk about?"

"By God!" He had thrown the rest of his beef over the parapet, and
this cry, this gasp, escaped violently from his mouth as if from a
valve.

"Don't worry about the soft-job brigade, old cross-patch," advised
Barque, banteringly, but not without some bitterness. "What good
does it do?"

Concealed and huddled up under the fragile and unsteady roof of his
oiled hood, while the water poured down its shining slopes, and
holding his empty mess-tin out for the rain to clean it, Volpatte
snarled, "I'm not daft--not a bit of it--and I know very well
there've got to be these individuals at the rear. Let them have
their dead-heads for all I care--but there's too many of them, and
they're all alike, and all rotters, voila!"

Relieved by this affirmation, which shed a little light on the
gloomy farrago of fury he was loosing among us, Volpatte began to
speak in fragments across the relentless sheets of rain--

"At the very first village they sent me to, I saw duds, and duds
galore, and they began to get on my nerves. All sorts of departments
and sub-departments and managements and centers and offices and
committees--you're no sooner there than you meet swarms of fools,
swam-ms of different services that are only different in name-enough
to turn your brain. I tell you, the man that invented the names of
all those committees, he was wrong in his head.

"So could I help but be sick of it? Ah, mon vieux," said our
comrade, musing, "all those individuals fiddle-faddling and making
believe down there, all spruced up with their fine caps and
officers' coats and shameful boots, that gulp dainties and can put a
dram of best brandy down their gullets whenever they want, and wash
themselves oftener twice than once, and go to church, and never stop
smoking, and pack themselves up in feathers at night to read the
newspaper--and then they say afterwards, 'I've been in the war!'"

One point above all had got hold of Volpatte and emerged from his
confused and impassioned vision: "All those soldiers, they haven't
to run away with their table-tools and get a bite any old
way--they've got to be at their ease--they'd rather go and sit
themselves down with some tart in the district, at a special
reserved table, and guzzle vegetables, and the fine lady puts their
crockery out all square for them on the dining-table, and their pots
of jam and every other blasted thing to eat; in short, the
advantages of riches and peace in that doubly-damned hell they call
the Rear!"

Volpatte's neighbor shook his head under the torrents that fell from
heaven and said," So much the better for them."

"I'm not crazy--" Volpatte began again.

"P'raps, but you're not fair."

Volpatte felt himself insulted by the word. He started, and raised
his head furiously, and the rain, that was waiting for the chance,
took him plump in the face. "Not fair--me? Not fair--to those
dung-hills?"

"Exactly, monsieur," the neighbor replied; "I tell you that you play
hell with them and yet you'd jolly well like to be in the rotters'
place."

"Very likely--but what does that prove, rump-face? To begin with,
we, we've been in danger, and it ought to be our turn for the other.
But they're always the same, I tell you; and then there's young men
there, strong as bulls and poised like wrestlers, and then--there
are too many of them! D'you hear? It's always too many, I say,
because it is so."

"Too many? What do you know about it, vilain? These departments and
committees, do you know what they are?"

"I don't know what they are," Volpatte set off again, "but I
know--"

"Don't you think they need a crowd to keep all the army's affairs
going?"

"I don't care a damn, but--"

"But you wish it was you, eh?" chaffed the invisible neighbor, who
concealed in the depth of the hood on which the reservoirs of space
were emptying either a supreme indifference or a cruel desire to
take a rise out of Volpatte.

"I can't help it," said the other, simply.

"There's those that can help it for you," interposed the shrill
voice of Barque; "I knew one of 'em--"

"I, too, I've seen 'em!" Volpatte yelled with a desperate effort
through the storm. "Tiens! not far from the front, don't know where
exactly, where there's an ambulance clearing-station and a
sous-intendance--I met the reptile there."

The wind, as it passed over us, tossed him the question, "What was
it?"

At that moment there was a lull, and the weather allowed Volpatte to
talk after a fashion. He said: "He took me round all the jumble of
the depot as if it was. a fair, although he was one of the sights of
the place. He led me along the passages and into the dining-rooms of
houses and supplementary barracks. He half opened doors with labels
on them, and said, 'Look here, and here too--look!' I went
inspecting with him, but he didn't go back, like I did, to the
trenches, don't fret yourself, and he wasn't coming back from them
either. don't worry! The reptile, the first time I saw him he was
walking nice and leisurely in the yard--'I'm in the Expenses
Department,' he says. We talked a bit, and the next day he got an
orderly job so as to dodge getting sent away, seeing it was his turn
to go since the beginning of the war.

"On the step of the door where he'd laid all night on a feather bed,
he was polishing the pumps of his monkey master--beautiful yellow
pumps--rubbing 'em with paste, fairly glazing 'em, my boy. I stopped
to watch him, and the chap told me all about himself. Mon vieux, I
don't remember much more of the stuffing that came out of his crafty
skull than I remember of the History of France and the dates we
whined at school. Never, I tell you, bad be been sent to the front,
although he was Class 1903, [note 1] and a lusty devil at that, he
was. Danger and dog-tiredness and all the ugliness of war--not for
him, but for the others, oui. He knew damned well that if he set
foot in the firing-line, the line would see that the beast got it,
so he ran like hell from it, and stopped where he was. He said
they'd tried all ways to get him, but he'd given the slip to all the
captains, all the colonels, all the majors, and they were all
damnably mad with him. He told me about it. How did he work it? He'd
sit down all of a sudden, put on a stupid look, do the scrim-shanker
stunt, and flop like a bundle of dirty linen. 'I've got a sort of
general fatigue,' he'd blubber. They didn't know how to take him,
and after a bit they just let him drop--everybody was fit to spew on
him. And he changed his tricks according to the circumstances, d'you
catch on? Sometimes he had something wrong with his foot--he was
damned clever with his feet. And then he contrived things, and he
knew one head from another, and how to take his opportunities. He
knew what's what, he did. You could see him go and slip in like a
pretty poilu among the depot chaps, where the soft jobs were, and
stay there; and then he'd put himself out no end to be useful to the
pals. He'd get up at three o'clock in the morning to make the juice,
go and fetch the water while the others were getting their grub. At
last, he'd wormed himself in everywhere, he came to be one of the
family, the rotter, the carrion. He did it so he wouldn't have to do
it. He seemed to me like an individual that would have earned five
quid honestly with the same work and bother that he puts into
forging a one-pound note. But there, he'll get his skin out of it
all right, he will. At the front he'd be lost sight of in the throng
of it, but he's not so stupid. Be damned to them, he says, that take
their grub on the ground, and be damned to them still more when
they're under it. When we've all done with fighting, he'll go back
home and he'll say to his friends and neighbors, 'Here I am safe and
sound,' and his pals'll be glad, because be's a good sort, with
engaging manners, contemptible creature that he is, and--and this is
the most stupid thing of all--but he takes you in and you swallow
him whole, the son of a bug.

"And then, those sort of beings, don't you believe there's only one
of them. There are barrels of 'em in every depot, that hang on and
writhe when their time comes to go, and they say, 'I'm not going,'
and they don't go, and they never succeed in driving them as far as
the front."

"Nothing new in all that," said Barque, "we know it, we know it!"

"Then there are the offices," Volpatte went on, engrossed in his
story of travel; "whole houses and streets and districts. I saw that
my little corner in the rear was only a speck, and I had full view
of them. Non, I'd never have believed there'd be so many men on
chairs while war was going on--"

A hand protruded from the rank and made trial of space--"No more
sauce falling"--"Then we're going out, bet your life on it." So
"March!" was the cry.

The storm held its peace. We filed off in the long narrow swamp
stagnating in the bottom of the trench where the moment before it
had shaken under slabs of rain. Volpatte's grumbling began again
amidst our sorry stroll and the eddies of floundering feet. I
listened to him as I watched the shoulders of a poverty-stricken
overcoat swaying in front of me, drenched through and through. This
time Volpatte was on the track of the police--

"The farther you go from the front the more you see of them."

"Their battlefield is not the same as ours."

Tulacque had an ancient grudge against them. "Look," he said, "how
the bobbies spread themselves about to get good lodgings and good
food, and then, after the drinking regulations, they dropped on the
secret wine-sellers. You saw them lying in wait, with a corner of an
eye on the shop-doors, to see if there weren't any poilus slipping
quietly out, two-faced that they are, leering to left and to right
and licking their mustaches."

"There are good ones among 'em. I knew one in my country, the
Cote d'Or, where I--"

"Shut up!" was Tulacque's peremptory interruption; "they're all
alike. There isn't one that can put another right."

"Yes, they're lucky," said Volpatte, "but do you think they're
contented? Not a bit; they grouse. At least," he corrected himself,
"there was one I met, and he was a grouser. He was devilish bothered
by the drill-manual. 'It isn't worth while to learn the drill
instruction,' he said, 'they're always changing it. F'r instance,
take the department of military police; well, as soon as you've got
the gist of it, it's something else. Ah, when will this war be
over?' he says."

"They do what they're told to do, those chaps," ventured Eudore.

"Surely. It isn't their fault at all. It doesn't alter the fact that
these professional soldiers, pensioned and decorated in the time
when we're only civvies, will have made war in a damned funny way."

"That reminds me of a forester that I saw as well," said Volpatte,
"who played hell about the fatigues they put him to. 'It's
disgusting,' the fellow said to me, 'what they do with us. We're old
non-coms., soldiers that have done four years of service at least.
We're paid on the higher scale, it's true, but what of that? We are
Officials, and yet they humiliate us. At H.Q. they set us to
cleaning, and carrying the dung away. The civilians see the
treatment they inflict on us, and they look down on us. And if you
look like grousing, they'll actually talk about sending you off to
the trenches, like foot-soldiers! What's going to become of our
prestige? When we go back to the parishes as rangers after the
war--if we do come back from it--the people of the villages and
forests will say, "Ah, it was you that was sweeping the streets at
X--!" To get back our prestige, compromised by human injustice and
ingratitude, I know well,' he says, 'that we shall have to make
complaints, and make complaints and make 'em with all our might, to
the rich and to the influential!' he says."

"I knew a gendarme who was all right," said Lamuse. "'The police are
temperate enough in general,' he says, 'but there are always dirty
devils everywhere, pas? The civilian is really afraid of the
gendarme,' says he, 'and that's a fact; and so, I admit it, there
are some who take advantage of it, and those ones--the tag-rag of
the gendarmerie--know where to get a glass or two. If I was Chief or
Brigadier, I'd screw 'em down; not half I wouldn't,' he says; 'for
public opinion,' he says again. 'lays the blame on the whole force
when a single one with a grievance makes a complaint.'"

"As for me," says Paradis, "one of the worst days of my life was
once when I saluted a gendarme, taking him for a lieutenant, with
his white stripes. Fortunately--I don't say it to console myself,
but because it's probably true--fortunately, I don't think he saw
me."

A silence. "Oui, 'vidently," the men murmured; "but what about it?
No need to worry."

* * * * * *

A little later, when we were seated along a wall, with our backs to
the stones, and our feet plunged and planted in the ground, Volpatte
continued unloading his impressions.

"I went into a big room that was a Depot office--bookkeeping
department, I believe. It swarmed with tables, and people in it like
in a market. Clouds of talk. All along the walls on each side and in
the middle, personages sitting in front of their spread-out goods
like waste-paper merchants. I put in a request to be put back into
my regiment, and they said to me, 'Take your damned hook, and get
busy with it.' I lit on a sergeant, a little chap with airs, spick
as a daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass--eye-glasses with a tape on
them. He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the
right not to go to the front. I said to him, 'Sergeant!' But he
didn't hear me, being busy slanging a secretary--it's unfortunate,
mon garcon,' he was saying; 'I've told you twenty times that
you must send one notice of it to be carried out by the Squadron
Commander, Provost of the C.A., and one by way of advice, without
signature, but making mention of the signature, to the Provost of
the Force Publique d'Amiens and of the centers of the district, of
which you have the list--in envelopes, of course, of the general
commanding the district. It's very simple,' he says.

"I'd drawn back three paces to wait till he'd done with jawing. Five
minutes after, I went up to the sergeant. He said to me, 'My dear
sir, I have not the time to bother with you; I have many other
matters to attend to.' As a matter of fact, he was all in a flummox
in front of his typewriter, the chump, because he'd forgotten, he
said, to press on the capital-letter lever, and so, instead of
underlining the heading of his page, he'd damn well scored a line of
8's in the middle of the top. So he couldn't hear anything, and he
played hell with the Americans, seeing the machine came from there.

"After that, he growled against another woolly-leg, because on the
memorandum of the distribution of maps they hadn't put the names of
the Ration Department, the Cattle Department, and the Administrative
Convoy of the 328th D.I.

"Alongside, a fool was obstinately trying to pull more circulars off
a jellygraph than it would print, doing his damnedest to produce a
lot of ghosts that you could hardly read. Others were talking:
'Where are the Parisian fasteners?' asked a toff. And they don't
call things by their proper names: 'Tell me now, if you please, what
are the elements quartered at X--?' The elements! What's all that
sort of babble?" asked Volpatte.

"At the end of the big table where these fellows were that I've
mentioned and that I'd been to, and the sergeant floundering about
behind a hillock of papers at the top of it and giving orders, a
simpleton was doing nothing but tap on his blotting-pad with his
hands. His job, the mug, was the department of leave-papers, and as
the big push had begun and all leave was stopped, he hadn't anything
to do--'Capital!' he says.

"And all that, that's one table in one room in one department in one
depot. I've seen more, and then more, and more and more again. I
don't know, but it's enough to drive you off your nut, I tell you."

"Have they got brisques?" [note 2]

"Not many there, but in the department of the second line every one
had 'em. You had museums of 'em there--whole Zoological Gardens of
stripes."

"Prettiest thing I've seen in the way of stripes," said Tulacque,
"was a motorist, dressed in cloth that you'd have said was satin,
with new stripes, and the leathers of an English officer, though a
second-class soldier as he was. With his finger on his cheek, he
leaned with his elbows on that fine carriage adorned with windows
that he was the valet de chambre of. He'd have made you sick, the
dainty beast. He was just exactly the poilu that you see pictures of
in the ladies' papers--the pretty little naughty papers."

Each has now his memories, his tirade on this much-excogitated
subject of the shirkers, and all begin to overflow and to talk at
once. A hubbub surrounds the foot of the mean wall where we are
heaped like bundles, with a gray, muddy, and trampled spectacle
lying before us, laid waste by rain.

"--orderly in waiting to the Road Department, then at the Bakery,
then cyclist to the Revictualing Department of the Eleventh
Battery."

"--every morning he had a note to take to the Service de
l'Intendance, to the Gunnery School, to the Bridges Department, and
in the evening to the A.D. and the A.T.--that was all."

"--when I was coming back from leave,' said that orderly, 'the
women cheered us at all the level-crossing gates that the train
passed.' 'They took you for soldiers,' I said."

"--'Ah,' I said, 'you're called up, then, are you?' 'Certainly,'
he says to me, 'considering that I've been a round of meetings in
America with a Ministerial deputation. P'raps it's not exactly being
called up, that? Anyway, mon ami,' he says, 'I don't pay any rent,
so I must be called up.' 'And me--'"

"To finish," cries Volpatte, silencing the hum with his authority of
a traveler returned from "down there," "to finish, I saw a whole
legion of 'em all together at a blow-out. For two days I was a sort
of helper in the kitchen of one of the centers of the C.O.A., 'cos
they couldn't let me do nothing while waiting for my reply, which
didn't hurry, seeing they'd sent another inquiry and a super-inquiry
after it, and the reply had too many halts to make in each office,
going and coming.

"In short, I was cook in the shop. Once I waited at table, seeing
that the head cook had just got back from leave for the fourth time
and was tired. I saw and I heard those people every time I went into
the dining-room, that was in the Prefecture, and all that hot and
illuminated row got into my head. They were only auxiliaries in
there, but there were plenty of the armed service among the number,
too. They were almost all old men, with a few young ones besides,
sitting here and there.

"I'd begun to get about enough of it when one of the broomsticks
said, 'The shutters must be closed; it's more prudent.' My boy. they
were a lump of a hundred and twenty-five miles from the firing-line,
but that pock-marked puppy he wanted to make believe there was
danger of bombardment by aircraft--"

"And there's my cousin," said Tulacque, fumbling, "who wrote to
me--Look, here's what he says: 'Mon cher Adolphe, here I am
definitely settled in Paris as attache to Guard-Room 60.
While you are down there. I must stay in the capital at the mercy of
a Taube or a Zeppelin!'"

The phrase sheds a tranquil delight abroad, and we assimilate it
like a tit-bit, laughing.

"After that," Volpatte went on, "those layers of soft-jobbers fed me
up still more. As a dinner it was all right--cod, seeing it was
Friday, but prepared like soles a la Marguerite--I know all
about it. But the talk!--"

"They call the bayonet Rosalie, don't they?"

"Yes, the padded luneys. But during dinner these gentlemen talked
above all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he
wasn't somewhere else, as good as said (but all the while saying
something else and gorging like an ogre), 'I'm ill, I'm feeble, look
at me, ruin that I am. Me, I'm in my dotage.' They were all seeking
inside themselves to find diseases to wrap themselves up in--'I
wanted to go to the war, but I've a rupture, two ruptures, three
ruptures.' Ah, non, that feast!--'The orders that speak of sending
everybody away,' explained a funny man, 'they're like the comedies,'
he explained, 'there's always a last act to clear up all the jobbery
of the others. That third act is this paragraph, "Unless the
requirements of the Departments stand in the way."' There was one
that told this tale, 'I had three friends that I counted on to give
me a lift up. I was going to apply to them; but, one after another,
a little before I put my request, they were killed by the enemy;
look at that,' he says, 'I've no luck!' Another was explaining to
another that, as for him, he would very much have liked to go, but
the surgeon-major had taken him round the waist to keep him by force
in the depot with the auxiliary. 'Eh bien,' he says, 'I resigned
myself. After all, I shall be of greater value in putting my
intellect to the service of the country than in carrying a
knapsack.' And him that was alongside said, 'Oui,' with his
headpiece feathered on top. He'd jolly well consented to go to
Bordeaux at the time when the Boches were getting near Paris, and
then Bordeaux became the stylish place; but afterwards he returned
firmly to the front--to Paris--and said something like this, 'My
ability is of value to France; it is absolutely necessary that I
guard it for France.'

"They talked about other people that weren't there--of the
commandant who was getting an impossible temper, and they explained
that the more imbecile he got the harsher he got; and the General
that made unexpected inspections with the idea of kicking all the
soft-jobbers out, but who'd been laid up for eight days, very
ill--'he's certainly going to die; his condition no longer gives
rise to any uneasiness,' they said, smoking the cigarettes that
Society swells send to the depots for the soldiers at the front.
'D'you know,' they said, 'little Frazy, who is such a nice boy, the
cherub, he's at last found an excuse for staying behind. They wanted
some cattle slaughterers for the abattoir, and he's enlisted himself
in there for protection, although he's got a University degree and
in spite of being an attorney's clerk. As for Flandrin's son, he's
succeeded in getting himself attached to the
roadmenders.--Roadmender, him? Do you think they'll let him stop
so?' 'Certain sure,' replies one of the cowardly milksops. 'A
road-mender's job is for a long time.'

"Talk about idiots," Marthereau growls.

"And they were all jealous, I don't know why, of a chap called
Bourin. Formerly he moved in the best Parisian circles. He lunched
and dined in the city. He made eighteen calls a day, and fluttered
about the drawing-rooms from afternoon tea till daybreak. He was
indefatigable in leading cotillons, organizing festivities,
swallowing theatrical shows, without counting the motoring parties,
and all the lot running with champagne. Then the war came. So he's
no longer capable, the poor boy, of staying on the look-out a bit
late at an embrasure, or of cutting wire. He must stay peacefully in
the warm. And then, him, a Parisian, to go into the provinces and
bury himself in the trenches! Never in this world! 'I realize, too,'
replied an individual, 'that at thirty-seven I've arrived at the age
when I must take care of myself!' And while the fellow was saying
that, I was thinking of Dumont the gamekeeper, who was forty-two,
and was done in close to me on Hill 132, so near that after he got
the handful of bullets in his head, my body shook with the trembling
of his."

"And what were they like with you, these thieves?"

"To hell with me, it was, but they didn't show it too much, only now
and again when they couldn't hold themselves in. They looked at me
out of the corner of their eyes, and took damn good care not to
touch me in passing, for I was still war-mucky.

"It disgusted me a bit to be in the middle of that heap of
good-for-nothings, but I said to myself, 'Come, it's only for a bit,
Firmin.' There was just one time that I very near broke out with the
itch, and that was when one of 'em said, 'Later, when we return, if
we do return.'--NO! He had no right to say that. Sayings like that,
before you let them out of your gob, you've got to earn them; it's
like a decoration. Let them get cushy jobs, if they like, but not
play at being men in the open when they've damned well run away. And
you hear 'em discussing the battles, for they're in closer touch
than you with the big bugs and with the way the war's managed; and
afterwards, when you return, if you do return, it's you that'll be
wrong in the middle of all that crowd of humbugs, with the poor
little truth that you've got.

"Ah, that evening, I tell you, all those heads in the reek of the
light, the foolery of those people enjoying life and profiting by
peace! It was like a ballet at the theater or the make-believe of a
magic lantern. There were--there were--there are a hundred thousand
more of them," Volpatte at last concluded in confusion.

But the men who were paying for the safety of the others with their
strength and their lives enjoyed the wrath that choked him, that
brought him to bay in his corner, and overwhelmed him with the
apparitions of shirkers.

"Lucky he doesn't start talking about the factory hands who've
served their apprenticeship in the war, and all those who've stayed
at home under the excuse of National Defense, that was put on its
feet in five secs!" murmured Tirette; "he'd keep us going with them
till Doomsday."

"You say there are a hundred thousand of them, flea-bite," chaffed
Barque. "Well, in 1914--do you hear me?--Millerand, the War
Minister, said to the M.P.'s, 'There are no shirkers.'"

"Millerand!" growled Volpatte. "I tell you, I don't know the man;
but if he said that, he's a dirty sloven, sure enough!"

* * * * * *

"One is always," said Bertrand, "a shirker to some one else."

"That's true; no matter what you call yourself, you'll
always--always--find worse blackguards and better blackguards than
yourself."

"All those that never go up to the trenches, or those who never go
into the first line, and even those who only go there now and then,
they're shirkers, if you like to call 'em so, and you'd see how many
there are if they only gave stripes to the real fighters."

"There are two hundred and fifty to each regiment of two
battalions," said Cocon.

"There are the orderlies, and a bit since there were even the
servants of the adjutants."--"The cooks and the under-cooks."--"The
sergeant-majors, and the quartermaster-sergeants, as often as
not."--"The mess corporals and the mess fatigues."--"Some
office-props and the guard of the colors."--"The baggage-masters."
"The drivers, the laborers, and all the section, with all its
non-coms., and even the sappers."--"The cyclists." "Not all of
them."--"Nearly all the Red Cross service."--"Not the
stretcher-bearers, of course; for they've not only got a devilish
rotten job, but they live with the companies, and when attacks are
on they charge with their stretchers; but the hospital attendants."

"Nearly all parsons, especially at the rear. For, you know, parsons
with knapsacks on, I haven't seen a devil of a lot of 'em, have
you?"

"Nor me either. In the papers, but not here."

"There are some, it seems."--"Ah!"

"Anyway, the common soldier's taken something on in this war."

"There are others that are in the open. We're not the only ones."

"We are!" said Tulacque, sharply; "we're almost the only ones!"

He added, "You may say--I know well enough what you'll tell me--that
it was the motor lorries and the heavy artillery that brought it off
at Verdun. It's true, but they've got a soft job all the same by the
side of us. We're always in danger, against their once, and we've
got the bullets and the bombs, too, that they haven't. The heavy
artillery reared rabbits near their dug-outs, and they've been
making themselves omelettes for eighteen months. We are really in
danger. Those that only get a bit of it, or only once, aren't in it
at all. Otherwise, everybody would be. The nursemaid strolling the
streets of Paris would be, too, since there are the Taubes and the
Zeppelins, as that pudding-head said that the pal was talking about
just now."

"In the first expedition to the Dardanelles, there was actually a
chemist wounded by a shell. You don't believe me, but it's true all
the same--an officer with green facings, wounded!"

"That's chance, as I wrote to Mangouste, driver of a remount horse
for the section, that got wounded--but it was done by a motor
lorry."

"That's it, it's like that. After all, a bomb can tumble down on a
pavement, in Paris or in Bordeaux."

"Oui, oui; so it's too easy to say, 'Don't let's make distinctions
in danger!' Wait a bit. Since the beginning, there are some of those
others who've got killed by an unlucky chance; among us there are
some that are still alive by a lucky chance. It isn't the same
thing, that, seeing that when you're dead, it's for a long time."

"Yes," says Tirette, "but you're getting too venomous with your
stories of shirkers. As long as we can't help it, it's time to turn
over. I'm thinking of a retired forest-ranger at Cherey, where we
were last month, who went about the streets of the town spying
everywhere to rout out some civilian of military age, and he smelled
out the dodgers like a mastiff. Behold him pulling up in front of a
sturdy goodwife that had a mustache, and he only sees her mustache,
so he bullyrags her--'Why aren't you at the front, you?'"

"For my part," says Pepin, "I don't fret myself about the
shirkers or the semi-shirkers, it's wasting one's time; but where
they get on my nerves, it's when they swank. I'm of Volpatte's
opinion. Let 'em shirk, good, that's human nature; but afterwards
they shouldn't say, 'I've been a soldier.' Take the engages,
[note 3] for instance--"

"That depends on the engages. Those who have offered for the
infantry without conditions, I look up to those men as much as to
those that have got killed; but the engages in the
departments or special arms, even in the heavy artillery, they begin
to get my back up. We know 'em! When they're doing the agreeable in
their social circle, they'll say, 'I've offered for the war.'--'Ah,
what a fine thing you have done; of your own free will you have
defied the machine-guns! '--'Well, yes, madame la marquise, I'm
built like that!' Eh, get out of it, humbug!"

"Oui, it's always the same tale. They wouldn't be able to say in the
drawing-rooms afterwards, 'Tenez, here I am; look at me for a
voluntary engage!'"

"I know a gentleman who enlisted in the aerodromes. He had a fine
uniform--he'd have done better to offer for the
Opera-Comique. What am I saying--'he'd have done better?'
He'd have done a damn sight better, oui. At least he'd have made
other people laugh honestly, instead of making them laugh with the
spleen in it."

"They're a lot of cheap china, fresh painted, and plastered with
ornaments and all sorts of falderals, but they don't go under fire."

"If there'd only been people like those, the Boches would be at
Bayonne."

"When war's on, one must risk his skin, eh, corporal?"

"Yes," said Bertrand, "there are some times when duty and danger are
exactly the same thing; when the country, when justice and liberty
are in danger, it isn't in taking shelter that you defend them. On
the contrary, war means danger of death and sacrifice of life for
everybody, for everybody; no one is sacred. One must go for it,
upright, right to the end, and not pretend to do it in a fanciful
uniform. These services at the bases, and they're necessary, must be
automatically guaranteed by the really weak and the really old."

"Besides, there are too many rich and influential people who have
shouted, 'Let us save France!--and begin by saving ourselves!' On
the declaration of war, there was a big rush to get out of it,
that's what there was, and the strongest succeeded. I noticed
myself, in my little corner, it was especially those that jawed most
about patriotism previously. Anyway, as the others were saying just
now, if they get into a funk-hole, the worst filthiness they can do
is to make people believe they've run risks. 'Cos those that have
really run risks, they deserve the same respect as the dead."

"Well, what then? It's always like that, old man; you can't change
human nature."

"It can't be helped. Grouse, complain? Tiens! talking about
complaining, did you know Margoulin?"

"Margoulin? The good sort that was with us, that they left to die at
le Crassier because they thought he was dead?"

"Well, he wanted to make a complaint. Every day he talked about
protesting against all those things to the captain and the
commandant. He'd say after breakfast, 'I'll go and say it as sure as
that pint of wine's there.' And a minute later, 'If I don't speak,
there's never a pint of wine there at all.' And if you were passing
later you'd hear him again, 'Tiens! is that a pint of wine there?
Well, you'll see if I don't speak! Result--he said nothing at all.
You'll say, 'But he got killed.' True, but previously he had God's
own time to do it two thousand times if he'd dared."

"All that, it makes me ill," growled Blaire, sullen, but with a
flash of fury.

"We others, we've seen nothing--seeing that we don't see
anything--but if we did see--!"

"Old chap," Volpatte cried, "those depots--take notice of what I
say--you'd have to turn the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone and the
Loire into them to clean them. In the interval, they're living, and
they live well, and they go to doze peacefully every night, every
night!"

The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they
would pass it--cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep
darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws
showed in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn
into the sky.

Bitterly said Cocon: "All that, it doesn't give you any desire to
die."

"Yes, it does," some one replies tranquilly. "Yes, it does. Don't
exaggerate, old kipper-skin."

______

[note 1:] Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.--Tr.

[note 2:] A-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the
duration of service at the front.--Tr.

[note 3:] Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three.
four, or five years. Those enlisted for four or five year' have the
right to choose their arm of the service, subject to conditions.--






10

Argoval





THE twilight of evening was coming near from the direction of the
country, and a gentle breeze, soft as a whisper, came with it.

In the houses alongside this rural way--a main road, garbed for a
few paces like a main street--the rooms whose pallid windows no
longer fed them with the limpidity of space found their own light
from lamps and candles, so that the evening left them and went
outside, and one saw light and darkness gradually changing places.

On the edge of the village, towards the fields, some unladen
soldiers were wandering, facing the breeze. We were ending the day
in peace, and enjoying that idle ease whose happiness one only
realizes when one is really weary. It was fine weather, we were at
the beginning of rest, and dreaming about it. Evening seemed to make
our faces bigger before it darkened them, and they shone with the
serenity of nature.

Sergeant Suilhard came to me, took my arm, and led me away. "Come,"
he said, "and I'll show you something."

The approaches to the village abounded in rows of tall and tranquil
trees, and we followed them along. Under the pressure of the breeze
their vast verdure yielded from time to time in slow majestic
movements.

Suilhard went in front of me. He led me into a deep lane, which
twisted about between high banks; and on each side grew a border of
bushes, whose tops met each other. For some moments we walked in a
bower of tender green. A last gleam of light, falling aslant across
the lane, made points of bright yellow among the foliage, and round
as gold coins. "This is pretty," I said.

He said nothing, but looked aside and hard. Then he stopped. "It
must be there."

He made me climb up a bit of a track to a field, a great quadrangle
within tall trees, and full of the scent of hay.

"Tiens!" I said, looking at the ground, "it's all trampled here;
there's been something to do."

"Come," said Suilhard to me. He led me into the field, not far from
its gate. There was a group of soldiers there, talking in low
voices. My companion stretched out his hand. "It's there," he said.

A very short post, hardly a yard high, was implanted a few paces
from the hedge, composed just there of young trees. "It was there,"
he said, "that they shot a soldier of the 204th this morning. They
planted that post in the night. They brought the chap here at dawn,
and these are the fellows of his squad who killed him. He tried to
dodge the trenches. During relief he stayed behind, and then went
quietly off to quarters. He did nothing else; they meant, no doubt,
to make an example of him."

We came near to the conversation of the others. "No. no, not at
all," said one. "He wasn't a ruffian, he wasn't one of those toughs
that we all know. We all enlisted together. He was a decent sort,
like ourselves, no more, no less--a bit funky, that's all. He was in
the front line from the beginning, he was, and I've never seen him
boozed, I haven't."

"Yes, but all must be told. Unfortunately for him, there was a
'previous conviction.' There were two, you know, that did the
trick--the other got two years. But Cajard, [note 1] because of the
sentence he got in civil life couldn't benefit by extenuating
circumstances. He'd done some giddy-goat trick in civil life, when
he was drunk."

"You can see a little blood on the ground if you look," said a
stooping soldier.

"There was the whole ceremonial," another went on, "from A to Z--the
colonel on horseback, the degradation; then they tied him to the
little post, the cattle-stoup. He had to be forced to kneel or sit
on the ground with a similar post."

"It's past understanding," said a third, after a silence, "if it
wasn't for the example the sergeant spoke about."

On the post the soldiers had scrawled inscriptions and protests. A
croix de guerre, cut clumsily of wood, was nailed to it, and read:
"A. Cajard, mobilized in August, 1914, in gratitude to France."

Returning to quarters I met Volpatte, still surrounded and talking.
He was relating some new anecdotes of his journey among the happy
ones.

______

[note 1:] I have altered the name of this soldier as well as that of
the village.--H. B.






11

The Dog





THE weather was appalling. Water and wind attacked the passers-by;
riddled, flooded, and upheaved the roads.

I was returning from fatigue to our quarters at the far end of the
village. The landscape that morning showed dirty yellow through the
solid rain, and the sky was dark as a slated roof. The downpour
flogged the horse-trough as with birchen rods. Along the walls.
human shapes went in shrinking files, stooping, abashed, splashing.

In spite of the rain and the cold and bitter wind, a crowd had
gathered in front of the door of the barn where we were lodging. All
close together and back to back, the men seemed from a distance like
a great moving sponge. Those who could see, over shoulders and
between heads, opened their eyes wide and said, "He has a nerve, the
boy!" Then the inquisitive ones broke away, with red noses and
streaming faces, into the down-pour that lashed and the blast that
bit, and letting the hands fall that they had upraised in surprise,
they plunged them in their pockets.

In the center, and running with rain, abode the cause of the
gathering--Fouillade, bare to the waist and washing himself in
abundant water. Thin as an insect, working his long slender arms in
riotous frenzy, he soaped and splashed his head, neck, and chest,
down to the upstanding gridirons of his sides. Over his
funnel-shaped cheeks the brisk activity had spread a flaky beard
like snow, and piled on the top of his head a greasy fleece that the
rain was puncturing with little holes.

By way of a tub, the patient was using three mess-tins which he had
filled with water--no one knew how--in a village where there was
none; and as there was no clean spot anywhere to put anything down
in that universal streaming of earth and sky, he thrust his towel
into the waistband of his trousers, while the soap went back into
his pocket every time he used it.

They who still remained wondered at this heroic gesticulation in the
face of adversity, and said again, as they wagged their heads, "It's
a disease of cleanliness he's got."

"You know he's going to be carpeted, they say, for that affair of
the shell-hole with Volpatte." And they mixed the two exploits
together in a muddled way, that of the shell-hole, and the present,
and looked on him as the hero of the moment, while he puffed,
sniffled, grunted, spat, and tried to dry himself under the
celestial shower-bath with rapid rubbing and as a measure of
deception; then at last he resumed his clothes.

* * * * * *

After his wash, Fouillade feels cold. He turns about and stands in
the doorway of the barn that shelters us. The arctic blast discolors
and disparages his long face, so hollow and sunburned; it draws
tears from his eyes, and scatters them on the cheeks once scorched
by the mistral; his nose, too, weeps increasingly.

Yielding to the ceaseless bite of the wind that grips his ears in
spite of the muffler knotted round his head, and his calves in spite
of the yellow puttees with which his cockerel legs are enwound, he
reenters the barn, but comes out of it again at once, rolling
ferocious eyes, and muttering oaths with the accent one hears in
that corner of the land, over six hundred miles from here, whence he
was driven by war.

So he stands outside, erect, more truly excited than ever before in
these northern scenes. And the wind comes and steals into him, and
comes again roughly, shaking and maltreating his scarecrow's slight
and flesh-less figure.

Ye gods! It is almost uninhabitable, the barn they have assigned to
us to live in during this period of rest. It is a collapsing refuge,
gloomy and leaky, confined as a well. One half of it is under
water--we see rats swimming in it--and the men are crowded in the
other half. The walls, composed of laths stuck together with dried
mud, are cracked, sunken, holed in all their circuit, and
extensively broken through above. The night we got here--until the
morning--we plugged as well as we could the openings within reach,
by inserting leafy branches and hurdles. But the higher holes, and
those in the roof, still gaped and always. When dawn hovers there,
weakling and early, the wind for contrast rushes in and blows round
every side with all its strength, and the squad endures the hustling
of an everlasting draught.

When we are there, we remain upright in the ruined obscurity,
groping, shivering, complaining.

Fouillade, who has come in once more, goaded by the cold, regrets
his ablutions. He has pains in his loins and back. He wants
something to do, but what?

Sit down? Impossible; it is too dirty inside there. The ground and
the paving-stones are plastered with mud; the straw scattered for
our sleeping is soaked through, by the water that comes through the
holes and by the boots that wipe themselves with it. Besides, if you
sit down, you freeze; and if you lie on the straw, you are troubled
by the smell of manure, and sickened by the vapors of ammonia.
Fouillade contents himself by looking at his place, and yawning wide
enough to dislocate his long jaw, further lengthened by a goatee
beard where you would see white hairs if the daylight were really
daylight.

"The other pals and boys," said Marthereau, "they're no better off
than we are. After breakfast I went to see a jail-bird of the 11th
on the farm near the hospital. You've to clamber over a wall by a
ladder that's too short--talk about a scissor-cut!" says Marthereau,
who is short in the leg; "and when once you're in the hen-run and
rabbit-hutch you're shoved and poked by everybody and a nuisance to
'em all. You don't know where to put your pasties down. I vamoosed
from there, and sharp."

"For my part," says Cocon, "I wanted to go to the blacksmith's when
we'd got quit of grubbing, to imbibe something hot, and pay for it.
Yesterday he was selling coffee, but some bobbies called there this
morning, so the good man's got the shakes, and he's locked his
door."

Lamuse has tried to clean his rifle. But one cannot clean his rifle
here, even if he squats on the ground near the door, nor even if he
takes away the sodden tent-cloth, hard and icy, which hangs across
the doorway like a stalactite; it is too dark. "And then, old chap,
if you let a screw fall, you may as well hang yourself as try to
find it, 'specially when your fists are frozen silly."

"As for me, I ought to be sewing some things, but--what cheer!"

One alternative remains--to stretch oneself on the straw, covering
the head with handkerchief or towel to isolate it from the searching
stench of fermenting straw, and sleep. Fouillade, master of his time
to-day, being on neither guard nor fatigues, decides. He lights a
taper to seek among his belongings, and unwinds the coils of his
comforter, and we see his emaciated shape, sculptured in black
relief, folding and refolding it.

"Potato fatigue, inside there, my little lambs!" a sonorous voice
bellows at the door. The hooded shape from which it comes is
Sergeant Henriot. He is a malignant sort of simpleton, and though
all the while joking in clumsy sympathy he supervises the evacuation
of quarters with a sharp eye for the evasive malingerer.

Outside, on the streaming road in the perpetual rain. the second
section is scattered, also summoned and driven to work by the
adjutant. The two sections mingle together. We climb the street and
the hillock of clayey soil where the traveling kitchen is smoking.

"Now then, my lads, get on with it; it isn't a long job when
everybody sets to--Come--what have you got to grumble about, you?
That does no good."

Twenty minutes later we return at a trot. As we grope about in the
barn, we cannot touch anything but what is sodden and cold, and the
sour smell of wet animals is added to the vapor of the liquid manure
that our beds contain.

We gather again, standing, around the props that hold the barn up,
and around the rills that fall vertically from the holes in the
roof--faint columns which rest on vague bases of splashing water.
"Here we are again!" we cry.

Two lumps in turn block the doorway, soaked with the rain that
drains from them--Lamuse and Barque. who have been in quest of a
brasier, and now return from the expedition empty-handed, sullen and
vicious. "Not a shadow of a fire-bucket, and what's more, no wood or
coal either, not for a fortune." It is impossible to have any fire.
"If I can't get any, no one can," says Barque, with a pride which a
hundred exploits justify.

We stay motionless, or move slowly in the little space we have,
aghast at so much misery. "Whose is the paper?"

"It's mine," says Becuwe.

"What does it say? Ah, zut, one can't read in this darkness!"

"It says they've done everything necessary now for the soldiers, to
keep them warm in the trenches. They've got all they want, and
blankets and shirts and brasiers and fire-buckets and bucketsful of
coal; and that it's like that in the first-line trenches."

"Ah, damnation!" growl some of the poor prisoners of the barn, and
they shake their fists at the emptiness without and at the newspaper
itself.

But Fouillade has lost interest in what they say. He has bent his
long Don Quixote carcase down in the shadow, and outstretched the
lean neck that looks as if it were braided with violin strings.
There is something on the ground that attracts him.

It is Labri, the other squad's dog, an uncertain sort of mongrel
sheep-dog, with a lopped tail, curled up on a tiny litter of
straw-dust. Fouillade looks at Labri, and Labri at him.
Becuwe comes up and says, with the intonation of the Lille
district, "He won't eat his food; the dog isn't well. Hey, Labri,
what's the matter with you? There's your bread and meat; eat it up;
it's good when it's in your bucket. He's poorly. One of these
mornings we shall find him dead."

Labri is not happy. The soldier to whom he is entrusted is hard on
him, and usually ill-treats him--when he takes any notice of him at
all. The animal is tied up all day. He is cold and ill and left to
himself. He only exists. From time to time, when there is movement
going on around him, he has hopes of going out, rises and stretches
himself, and bestirs his tail to incipient demonstration. But he is
disillusioned, and lies down again, gazing past his nearly full
mess-tin.

He is weary, and disgusted with life. Even if he has escaped the
bullet or bomb to which he is as much exposed as we, he will end by
dying here. Fouillade puts his thin hand on the dog's head, and it
gazes at him again. Their two glances are alike--the only difference
is that one comes from above and the other from below.

Fouillade sits down also--the worse for him!--in a corner, his hands
covered by the folds of his greatcoat, his long legs doubled up like
a folding bed. He is dreaming, his eyes closed under their bluish
lids; there is something that he sees again. It is one of those
moments when the country from which he is divided assumes in the
distance the charms of reality--the perfumes and colors of
l'Herault. the streets of Cette. He sees so plainly and so
near that he hears the noise of the shallops in the Canal du Midi,
and the unloading at the docks; and their call to him is distinctly
clear.

Above the road where the scent of thyme and immortelles is so strong
that it is almost a taste in the mouth, in the heart of the sunshine
whose winging shafts stir the air into a warmed and scented breeze,
on Mont St. Clair, blossoms and flourishes the home of his folks. Up
there, one can see with the same glance where the Lake of Thau,
which is green like glass, joins hands with the Mediterranean Sea,
which is azure; and sometimes one can make out as well, in the
depths of the indigo sky, the carven phantoms of the Pyrenees.

There was he born, there he grew up, happy and free. There he
played, on the golden or ruddy ground; played--even--at soldiers.
The eager joy of wielding a wooden saber flushed the cheeks now
sunken and seamed. He opens his eyes, looks about him, shakes his
head, and falls upon regret for the days when glory and war to him
were pure, lofty, and sunny things.

The man puts his hand over his eyes, to retain the vision within.
Nowadays, it is different.

It was up there in the same place, later, that he came to know
Clemence. She was just passing, the first time, sumptuous
with sunshine, and so fair that the loose sheaf of straw she carried
in her arms seemed to him nut-brown by contrast. The second time,
she had a friend with her, and they both stopped to watch him. He
heard them whispering, and turned towards them. Seeing themselves
discovered, the two young women made off, with a sibilance of
skirts, and giggles like the cry of a partridge.

And it was there, too, that he and she together set up their home.
Over its front travels a vine, which he coddled under a straw hat,
whatever the season. By the garden gate stands the rose-tree that he
knows so well--it never used its thorns except to try to hold him
back a little as he went by.

Will he return again to it all? Ah, he has looked too deeply into
the profundity of the past not to see the future in appalling
accuracy. He thinks of the regiment, decimated at each shift; of the
big knocks and hard he has had and will have, of sickness, and of
wear--

He gets up and snorts, as though to shake off what was and what will
be. He is back in the middle of the gloom, and is frozen and swept
by the wind, among the scattered and dejected men who blindly await
the evening. He is back in the present, and he is shivering still.

Two paces of his long legs make him butt into a group that is
talking--by way of diversion or consolation--of good cheer.

"At my place," says one, "they make enormous loaves, round ones, big
as cart-wheels they are!" And the man amuses himself by opening his
eyes wide, so that he can see the loaves of the homeland.

"Where I come from," interposes the poor Southerner, "holiday feasts
last so long that the bread that's new at the beginning is stale at
the end!"

"There's a jolly wine--it doesn't look much, that little wine where
I come from; but if it hasn't fifteen degrees of alcohol it hasn't
anything!"

Fouillade speaks then of a red wine which is almost violet, which
stands dilution as well as if it had been brought into the world to
that end.

"We've got the jurancon wine," said a Bearnais, "the
real thing, not what they sell you for jurancon, which comes
from Paris; indeed, I know one of the makers."

"If it comes to that," said Fouillade, "in our country we've got
muscatels of every sort, all the colors of the rainbow, like
patterns of silk stuff. You come home with me some time, and every
day you shall taste a nonsuch, my boy."

"Sounds like a wedding feast," said the grateful soldier.

So it comes about that Fouillade is agitated by the vinous memories
into which he has plunged, which recall to him as well the dear
perfume of garlic on that far-off table. The vapors of the blue wine
in big bottles, and the liqueur wines so delicately varied, mount to
his head amid the sluggish and mournful storm that fills the barn.

Suddenly he calls to mind that there is settled in the village where
they are quartered a tavern-keeper who is a native of
Beziers, called Magnac. Magnac had said to him, "Come and see
me, mon camarade, one of these mornings, and we'll drink some wine
from down there, we will! I've several bottles of it, and you shall
tell me what you think of it."

This sudden prospect dazzles Fouillade. Through all his length runs
a thrill of delight, as though he had found the way of salvation.
Drink the wine of the South--of his own particular South,
even--drink much of it--it would be so good to see life rosy again,
if only for a day! Ah yes, he wants wine; and he gets drunk in a
dream.

But as he goes out he collides at the entry with Corporal Broyer,
who is running down the street like a peddler, and shouting at every
opening, "Morning parade!"

The company assembles and forms in squares on the sticky mound where
the traveling kitchen is sending soot into the rain. "I'll go and
have a drink after parade," says Fouillade to himself.

And he listens listlessly, full of his plan, to the reading of the
report. But carelessly as he listens, he hears the officer read, "It
is absolutely forbidden to leave quarters before 5 p.m. and after 8
p.m.," and he hears the captain, without noticing the murmur that
runs round the poilus, add this comment on the order: "This is
Divisional Headquarters. However many there are of you, don't show
yourselves. Keep under cover. If the General sees you in the street,
he will have you put to fatigues at once. He must not see a single
soldier. Stay where you are all day in your quarters. Do what you
like as long as no one sees you--no one!"

We go back into the barn.

* * * * * *

Two o'clock. It is three hours yet, and then it will be totally
dark, before one may risk going outside without being punished.

Shall we sleep while waiting? Fouillade is sleepy no longer; the
hope of wine has shaken him up. And then, if one sleeps in the day,
he will not sleep at night. No! To lie with your eyes open is worse
than a nightmare. The weather gets worse; wind and rain increase,
without and within.

Then what? If one may not stand still, nor sit down, nor lie down,
nor go for a stroll, nor work--what?

Deepening misery settles on the party of benumbed and tired
soldiers. They suffer to the bone, nor know what to do with their
bodies. "Nom de Dieu, we're badly off!" is the cry of the
derelicts--a lamentation, an appeal for help.

Then by instinct they give themselves up to the only occupation
possible to them in there--to walk up and down on the spot, and thus
ward off anchylosis.

So they begin to walk quickly to and fro in the scanty place that
three strides might compass; they turn about and cross and brush
each other, bent forward, hands pocketed--tramp, tramp. These human
beings whom the blast cuts even among their straw are like a crowd
of the wretched wrecks of cities who await, under the lowering sky
of winter, the opening of some charitable institution. But no door
will open for them--unless it Le four days hence, one evening at the
end of the rest, to return to the trenches.

Alone in a corner, Cocon cowers. He is tormented by lice; but
weakened by the cold and wet he has not the pluck to change his
linen; and he sits there sullen, unmoving--and devoured.

As five o'clock draws near, in spite of all, Fouillade begins again
to intoxicate himself with his dream of wine, and he waits, with its
gleam in his soul. What time is it?--A quarter to five.--Five
minutes to five.--Now!

He is outside in black night. With great splashing skips he makes
his way towards the tavern of Magnac, the generous and communicative
Biterrois. Only with great trouble does he find the door in the dark
and the inky rain. By God, there is no light! Great God again, it is
closed! The gleam of a match that his great lean hand covers like a
lamp-shade shows him the fateful notice--"Out of Bounds." Magnac,
guilty of some transgression, has been banished into gloom and
idleness!

Fouillade turns his back on the tavern that has become the prison of
its lonely keeper. He will not give up his dream. He will go
somewhere else and have vin ordinaire, and pay for it, that's all.
He puts his hand in his pocket to sound his purse; it is there.
There ought to be thirty-seven sous in it, which will not run to the
wine of Prou, but--

But suddenly he starts, stops dead, and smites himself on the
forehead. His long-drawn face is contracted in a frightful grimace,
masked by the night. No, he no longer has thirty-seven sous, fool
that he is! He has forgotten the tin of sardines that he bought the
night before--so disgusting did he find the dark macaroni of the
soldiers' mess--and the drinks he stood to the cobbler who put him
some nails in his boots.

Misery! There could not be more than thirteen sous left!

To get as elevated as one ought, and to avenge himself on the life
of the moment, he would certainly need--damn'ation--a liter and a
half, In this place, a liter of red ordinary costs twenty-one sous.
It won't go.

His eyes wander around him in the darkness, looking for some one.
Perhaps there is a pal somewhere who will lend him money, or stand
him a liter.

But who--who? Not Becuwe, he has only a marraine [note 1:]
who sends him tobacco and note-paper every fortnight. Not Barque,
who would not toe the line; nor Blaire, the miser--he wouldn't
understand. Not Biquet, who seems to have something against him; nor
Pepin who himself begs, and never pays, even when he is host.
Ah, if Volpatte were there! There is Mesnil Andre, but he is
actually in debt to Fouillade on account of several drinks round.
Corporal Bertrand? Following on a remark of Fouillade's, Bertrand
told him to go to the devil, and now they look at each other
sideways. Farfadet? Fouillade hardly speaks a word to him in the
ordinary way. No, he feels that he cannot ask this of Farfadet. And
then--a thousand thunders!--what is the use of seeking saviors in
one s imagination? Where are they, all these people, at this hour?

Slowly he goes back towards the barn. Then mechanically he turns and
goes forward again, with hesitating steps. He will try, all the
same. Perhaps he can find convivial comrades. He approaches the
central part of the village just when night has buried the earth.

The lighted doors and windows of the taverns shine again in the mud
of the main street. There are taverns every twenty paces. One dimly
sees the heavy specters of soldiers, mostly in groups, descending
the street. When a motor-car comes along, they draw aside to let it
pass, dazzled by the head-lights, and bespattered by the liquid mud
that the wheels hurl over the whole width of the road.

The taverns are full. Through the steamy windows one can see they
are packed with compact clouds of helmeted men. Fouillade goes into
one or two, on chance. Once over the threshold, the dram-shop's
tepid breath, the light, the smell and the hubbub, affect him with
longing. This gathering at tables is at least a fragment of the past
in the present.

He looks from table to table, and disturbs the groups as he goes up
to scrutinize all the merrymakers in the room. Alas, he knows no
one! Elsewhere, it is the same; he has no luck. In vain he has
extended his neck and sent his desperate glances in search of a
familiar head among the uniformed men who in clumps or couples drink
and talk or in solitude write. He has the air of a cadger, and no
one pays him heed.

Finding no soul to come to his relief, he decides to invest at least
what he has in his pocket. He slips up to the counter. "A pint of
wine--and good."

"White?"

"Eh, oui."

"You, mon garcon, you're from the South," says the landlady,
handing him a little full bottle and a glass, and gathering his
twelve sous.

He places himself at the corner of a table already overcrowded by
four drinkers who are united in a game of cards. He fills the glass
to the brim and empties it, then fills it again.

"Hey, good health to you! Don't drink the tumbler!" yelps in his
face a man who arrives in the dirty blue jumper of fatigues, and
displays a heavy cross-bar of eyebrows across his pale face, a
conical head, and half a pound's weight of ears. It is Harlingue,
the armorer.

It is not very glorious to be seated alone before a pint in the
presence of a comrade who gives signs of thirst. But Fouillade
pretends not to understand the requirements of the gentleman who
dallies in front of him with an engaging smile, and he hurriedly
empties his glass. The other turns his back, not without grumbling
that "they're not very generous, but on the contrary greedy, these
Southerners."

Fouillade has put his chin on his fists, and looks unseeing at a
corner of the room where the crowded poilus elbow, squeeze, and
jostle each other to get by.

It was pretty good, that swig of white wine, but of what use are
those few drops in the Sahara of Fouillade? The blues did not far
recede, and now they return.

The Southerner rises and goes out, with his two glasses of wine in
his stomach and one sou in his pocket. He plucks up courage to visit
one more tavern, to plumb it with his eyes, and by way of excuse to
mutter, as he leaves the place, "Curse him! He's never there, the
animal!"

Then he returns to the barn, which still--as always--whistles with
wind and water. Fouillade lights his candle, and by the glimmer of
the flame that struggles desperately to take wing and fly away, he
sees Labri. He stoops low, with his light over the miserable
dog--perhaps it will die first. Labri is sleeping, hut feebly, for
he opens an eye at once, and his tail moves.

The Southerner strokes him, and says to him in a low voice, "It
can't be helped, it--" He will not say more to sadden him, but the
dog signifies appreciation by jerking his head before closing his
eyes again. Fouillade rises stiffly, by reason of his rusty joints,
and makes for his couch. For only one thing more he is now
hoping--to sleep, that the dismal day may die, that wasted day, like
so many others that there will be to endure stoically and to
overcome, before the last day arrives of the war or of his life.

______

[note 1:] French soldiers have extensively developed a system of
corresponding with French women whom they do not know from Eve and
whose acquaintance they usually make through newspaper
advertisements. As typical of the latter I copy the following:
"Officier artilleur, 30 ans, desire correspondance
discrete avec jeune marraine, femme du monde. Ecrire," etc.
The "lonely soldier" movement in this country is similar.--Tr.






12

The Doorway





"IT's foggy. Would you like to go?"

It is Poterloo who asks, as he turns towards me and shows eyes so
blue that they make his fine, fair head seem transparent.

Poterloo comes from Souchez, and now that the Chasseurs have at last
retaken it, he wants to see again the village where he lived happily
in the days when he was only a man.

It is a pilgrimage of peril; not that we should have far to
go--Souchez is just there. For six months we have lived and worked
in the trenches almost within hail of the village. We have only to
climb straight from here on to the Bethune road along which
the trench creeps, the road honeycombed underneath by our shelters,
and descend it for four or five hundred yards as it dips down
towards Souchez. But all that ground is under regular and terrible
attention. Since their recoil, the Germans have constantly sent huge
shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in our caverns from time to
time, and we see, high above the scarps, now here now there, the
great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the piled columns of
smoke, as high as churches. Why do they bombard Souchez? One cannot
say why, for there is no longer anybody or anything in the village
so often taken and retaken, that we have so fiercely wrested from
each other.

But this morning a dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great
curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are
sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the
perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there,
enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of
partition between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and
Angres, whence the enemy spies upon us.

"Right you are!" I say to Poterloo.

Adjutant Barthe, informed of our project, wags his head up and down,
and lowers his eyelids in token that he does not see.

We hoist ourselves out of the trench, and behold us both, upright,
on the Bethune road!

It is the first time I have walked there during the day. I have
never seen it, except from afar, the terrible road that we have so
often traveled or crossed in leaps, bowed down in the darkness, and
under the whistling of missiles.

"Well, are you coming, old man?"

After some paces, Poterloo has stopped in the middle of the road,
where the fog like cotton-wool unravels itself into pendent
fragments, and there he dilates his sky-blue eyes and half opens his
scarlet mouth.

"Ah, la, la! Ah, la, la!" he murmurs. When I turn to him he points
to the road, shakes his head and says, "This is it, Bon Dieu, to
think this is it! This bit where we are, I know it so well that if I
shut my eyes I can see it as it was, exactly. Old chap, it's awful
to see it again like that. It was a beautiful road, planted all the
way along with big trees.

"And now, what is it? Look at it--a sort of long thing without a
soul--sad, sad. Look at these two trenches on each side, alive; this
ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these trees uprooted, split,
scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by
bullets--look, this pock-marked pestilence, here! Ah, my boy, my
boy, you can't imagine how it is disfigured, this road!" And he goes
forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.

It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are
crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year
and a half. It is a great disheveled highway, traveled only by
bullets and by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and
upheaved it, covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and
laid bare its bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no
color, burned and old, sinister and awful to see.

"If you'd only known it--how clean and smooth it was!" says
Poterloo. "All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and
colors--like butterflies; and there was always some one passing on
it to give good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets,
or people shouting [note 1] to each other in a chaise, with the good
wind ballooning their smocks. Ah, how happy life was once on a
time!"

He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the
roadway towards the land of parapets. Stooping, he stops by some
faint swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed--tombs,
recessed at intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the
Cross in a church.

I call him--we shall never get there at such a funeral pace. Allons!

We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo
lagging behind, his head confused and heavy with thought as he tries
in vain to exchange with inanimate things his glances of
recognition. Just there the road is lower, a fold secretes it from
the side towards the north. On this sheltered ground there is a
little traffic.

Along the hazy, filthy, and unwholesome space, where withered grass
is embedded in black mud, there are rows of dead. They are carried
there when the trenches or the plain are cleared during the night.
They are waiting--some of them have waited long--to be taken back to
the cemeteries after dark.

We approach them slowly. They are close against each other, and each
one indicates with arms or legs some different posture of stiffened
agony. There are some with half-moldy faces, the skin rusted, or
yellow with dark spots. Of several the faces are black as tar, the
lips hugely distended--the heads of negroes blown out in
goldbeaters' skin. Between two bodies, protruding uncertainly from
one or the other, is a severed wrist, ending with a cluster of
strings.

Others are shapeless larvae of pollution, with dubious items of
equipment pricking up, or bits of bone. Farther on, a corpse has
been brought in in such a state that they have been obliged--so as
not to lose it on the way--to pile it on a lattice of wire which was
then fastened to the two ends of a stake. Thus was it carried in the
hollow of its metal hammock, and laid there. You cannot make out
either end of the body; alone, in the heap that it makes, one
recognizes the gape of a trouser-pocket. An insect goes in and out
of it.

Around the dead flutter letters that have escaped from pockets or
cartridge pouches while they were being placed on the ground. Over
one of these bits of white paper, whose wings still beat though the
mud ensnares them, I stoop slightly and read a sentence--"My dear
Henry, what a fine day it is for your birthday!" The man is on his
belly; his loins are rent from hip to hip by a deep furrow; his head
is half turned round; we see a sunken eye; and on temples, cheek and
neck a kind of green moss is growing.

A sickening atmosphere roams with the wind around these dead and the
heaped-up debris, that lies about them--tent-cloth or clothing in
stained tatters, stiff with dried blood, charred by the scorch of
the shell, hardened, earthy and already rotting, quick with swarming
and questing things. It troubles us. We look at each other and shake
our heads, nor dare admit aloud that the place smells bad. All the
same, we go away slowly.

Now come breaking out of the fog the bowed backs of men who are
joined together by something they are carrying. They are Territorial
stretcher-bearers with a new corpse. They come up with their old wan
faces, toiling, sweating, and grimacing with the effort. To carry a
dead man in the lateral trenches when they are muddy is a work
almost beyond human power. They put down the body, which is dressed
in new clothes.

"It's not long since, now, that he was standing," says one of the
bearers. "It's two hours since he got his bullet in the head for
going to look for a Boche rifle in the plain. He was going on leave
on Wednesday and wanted to take a rifle home with him. He is a
sergeant of the 405th, Class 1914. A nice lad, too."

He takes away the handkerchief that is over the face. It is quite
young, and seems to sleep, except that an eyeball has gone, the
cheek looks waxen, and a rosy liquid has run over the nostrils,
mouth, and eyes.

The body strikes a note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this
still pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if
to lie better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than
the others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic,
nearer to one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything
in the presence of all that heap of beings destroyed, it would have
been "Poor boy!"

We take the road again, which at this point begins to slope down to
the depth where Souchez lies. Under our feet in the whiteness of the
fog it appears like a valley of frightful misery. The piles of
rubbish, of remains and of filthiness accumulate on the shattered
spine of the road's paving and on its miry borders in final
confusion. The trees bestrew the ground or have disappeared, torn
away, their stumps mangled. The banks of the road are overturned and
overthrown by shell-fire. All the way along, on both sides of this
highway where only the crosses remain standing, are trenches twenty
times blown in and re-hollowed, cavities--some with passages into
them--hurdles on quagmires.

The more we go forward, the more is everything turned terribly
inside out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic. We walk on a surface
of shell fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step. We go
among them as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of
broken weapons or bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles,
fire-buckets, sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical
wiring, the French and German accouterments all mutilated and
encrusted in dried mud, and among the sinister piles of clothing,
stuck together with a reddish-brown cement. And one must look out,
too, for the unexploded shells, which everywhere protrude their
noses or reveal their flanks or their bases, painted red, blue, and
tawny brown.

"That's the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end."
It is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes.
The sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled,
emptied, scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams arc
splintered, and point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim
with earth and with--no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed
of a river, smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have
abandoned. In one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the
guns. The wide fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of
new-turned earth, made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in
length and in breadth.

I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to
have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very
vitals in the metamorphosis of the country's face.

He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a
stupefied air, as though he came out of a dream--"The Red Tavern!"
It is a flat field, carpeted with broken bricks.

And what is that, there? A milestone? No, it is not a milestone. It
is a head, a black head, tanned and polished. The mouth is all
askew, and you can see something of the mustache bristling on each
side--the great head of a carbonized cat. The corpse--it is
German--is underneath, buried upright.

"And that?" It is a ghastly collection containing an entirely white
skull, and then, six feet away, a pair of boots, and between the two
a heap of frayed leather and of rags, cemented by brown mud.

"Come on, there's less fog already. We must hurry."

A hundred yards in front of us, among the more transparent waves of
fog that are changing places with us and hide us less and less, a
shell whistles and bursts. It has fallen in the spot we are just
nearing. We are descending, and the gradient is less steep. We go
side by side. My companion says nothing, but looks to right and to
left. Then he stops again, as he did at the top of the road. I hear
his faltering voice, almost inaudible--"What's this! We're
there--this is it--"

In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared
and barren--but we are in Souchez!

The village has disappeared, nor have I seen a village go so
completely. Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency. these still retained
some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses,
their yards heaped high with plaster and tiles. Here, within the
framework of slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral
background in the fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not
even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing; and it
amazes one to discover that there are paving-stones under the tangle
of beams, stones, and scrap-iron. This--here--was a street.

It might have been a dirty and boggy waste near a big town, whose
rubbish of demolished buildings and its domestic refuse had been
shot here for years, till no spot was empty. We plunge into a
uniform layer of dung and debris, and make but slow and difficult
progress. The bombardment has so changed the face of things that it
has diverted the course of the millstream, which now runs haphazard
and forms a pond on the remains of the little place where the cross
stood.

Here are several shell-holes where swollen horses are rotting; in
others the remains of what were once human beings are scattered,
distorted by the monstrous injury of shells.

Here, athwart the track we are following, that we ascend as through
an avalanche or inundation of ruin, under the unbroken melancholy of
the sky, here is a man stretched out as if he slept, but he has that
close flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man
from a sleeper. He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves
threaded over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades' water-bottles
slung on his shoulder by a skein of straps. It must have been only
last night that the fragment of a shell caught him in the back. No
doubt we are the first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly
dead. Perhaps he will be scattered before others find him, so we
look for his identity disc--it is stuck in the clotted blood where
his right hand stagnates. I copy down the name that is written in
letters of blood.

Poterloo lets me do it by myself--he is like a sleepwalker. He
looks, and looks in despair, everywhere. He seeks endlessly among
those evanished and eviscerated things; through the void he gazes to
the haze of the horizon. Then he sits down on a beam, having first
sent flying with a kick a saucepan that lay on it, and I sit by his
side. A light drizzle is falling. The fog's moisture is resolving in
little drops that cover everything with a slight gloss. He murmurs,
"Ah, la, la!"

He wipes his forehead and raises imploring eyes to me. He is trying
to make out and take in the destruction of all this corner of the
earth, and the mournfulness of it. He stammers disjointed remarks
and interjections. He takes off his great helmet and his head is
smoking. Then he says to me with difficulty, "Old man, you cannot
imagine, you cannot, you cannot--"

He whispers: "The Red Tavern, where that--where that Boche's head
is, and litters of beastliness all around, that sort of cesspool--it
was on the edge of the road, a brick house and two out-buildings
alongside--how many times, old man, on the very spot where we stood,
how many times, there, the good woman who joked with me on her
doorstep, I've given her good-day as I wiped my mouth and looked
towards Souchez that I was going back to! And then, after a few
steps, I've turned round to shout some nonsense to her! Oh, you
cannot imagine! But that, now, that!" He makes an inclusive gesture
to indicate all the emptiness that surrounds him.

"We mustn't stay here too long, old chap. The fog's lifting, you
know."

He stands up with an effort--"Allons."

The most serious part is yet to come. His house--

He hesitates, turns towards the east, goes. "It's there--no, I've
passed it. It's not there. I don't know where it is--or where it
was. Ah, misery, misery!" He wrings his hands in despair and
staggers in the middle of the medley of plaster and bricks. Then,
bewildered by this encumbered plain of lost landmarks, he looks
questioningly about in the air, like a thoughtless child, like a
madman. He is looking for the intimacy of the bedrooms scattered in
infinite space, for their inner form and their twilight now cast
upon the winds!

After several goings and comings, he stops at one spot and draws
back a little--"It was there, I'm right. Look--it's that stone there
that I knew it by. There was a vent-hole there, you can see the mark
of the bar of iron that was over the hole before it disappeared."

Sniffling he reflects, and gently shaking his head as though he
could not stop it: "It is when you no longer have anything that you
understand how happy you were. Ah, how happy we were!"

He comes up to me and laughs nervously: "It's out of the common,
that, eh? I'm sure you've never seen yourself like it--can't find
the house where you've always lived since--since always--"

He turns about, and it is he who leads me away:

"Well, let's leg it, since there is nothing. Why spend a whole hour
looking at places where things were? Let's be off, old man."

We depart--the only two living beings to be seen in that unreal and
miasmal place, that village which bestrews the earth and lies under
our feet.

We climb again. The weather is clearing and the fog scattering
quickly. My silent comrade, who is making great strides with lowered
head, points out a field: "The cemetery," he says; "it was there
before it was everywhere, before it laid hold on everything without
end, like a plague."

Half-way, we go more slowly, and Poterloo comes close to me-"You
know, it's too much, all that. It's wiped out too much--all my life
up to now. It makes me afraid--it is so completely wiped out."

"Come; your wife's in good health, you know; your little girl, too."

He looks at me comically: "My wife--I'll tell you something; my
wife--"

"Well?"

"Well, old chap, I've seen her again."

"You've seen her? I thought she was in the occupied country?"

"Yes, she's at Lens, with my relations. Well, I've seen her--ah,
and then, after all, zut!--I'll tell you all about it. Well, I was
at Lens, three weeks ago. It was the eleventh; that's twenty days
since."

I look at him, astounded. But he looks like one who is speaking the
truth. He talks in sputters at my side. as we walk in the increasing
light--

"They told us--you remember, perhaps--but you weren't there, I
believe--they told us the wire had got to be strengthened in front
of the Billard Trench. You know what that means, eh? They hadn't
been able to do it till then. As soon as one gets out of the trench
he's on a downward slope, that's got a funny name."

"The Toboggan."

"Yes, that's it; and the place is as bad by night or in fog as in
broad daylight, because of the rifles trained on it before hand on
trestles, and the machine-guns that they point during the day. When
they can't see any more, the Boches sprinkle the lot.

"They took the pioneers of the C.H.R., hut there were some missing,
and they replaced 'em with a few poilus. I was one of 'em. Good. We
climb out. Not a single rifle-shot! 'What does it mean?' we says,
and behold. we see a Boche, two Boches, three Boches, coming out of
the ground--the gray devils!--and they make signs to us and shout
'Kamarad!' 'We're Alsatians,' they says. coming more and more out of
their communication trench--the International. 'They won't fire on
you, up there,' they says; 'don't be afraid, friends. Just let us
bury our dead.' And behold us working aside of each other, and even
talking together since they were from Alsace. And to tell the truth,
they groused about the war and about their officers. Our sergeant
knew all right that it was forbidden to talk with the enemy, and
they'd even read it out to us that we were only to talk to them with
our rifles. But the sergeant he says to himself that this is God's
own chance to strengthen the wire, and as long as they were letting
us work against them, we'd just got to take advantage of it,

"Then behold one of the Boches that says, 'There isn't perhaps one
of you that comes from the invaded country and would like news of
his family?'

"Old chap, that was a bit too much for me. Without thinking if I did
right or wrong, I went up to him and I said, 'Yes, there's me.' The
Boche asks me questions. I tell him my wife's at Lens with her
relations, and the little one, to. He asks where she's staying. I
explain to him, and he says he can see it from there. 'Listen,' he
says, 'I'll take her a letter, and not only that, but I'll bring you
an answer.' Then all of a sudden he taps his forehead, the Boche,
and comes close to me--'Listen, my friend, to a lot better still. If
you like to do what I say, you shall see your wife, and your kids as
well, and all the lot, sure as I see you.' He tells me, to do it,
I've only got to go with him at a certain time with a Boche
greatcoat and a shako that he'll have for me. He'd mix me up in a
coal-fatigue in Lens, and we'd go to our house. I could go and have
a look on condition that I laid low and didn't show myself, and he'd
be responsible for the chaps of the fatigue, but there were
non-coms. in the house that he wouldn't answer for--and, old chap, I
agreed!"

"That was serious."

"Yes, for sure, it was serious. I decided all at once. without
thinking and without wishing to think, seeing I was dazzled with the
idea of seeing my people again; and if I got shot afterwards, well,
so much the worse--but give and take. The supply of law and demand
they call it, don't they?

"My boy, it all went swimmingly. The only hitch was they had such
hard work to find a shako big enough, for, as you know, I'm well off
for head. But even that was fixed up. They raked me out in the end a
lousebox big enough to hold my head. I've already some Boche
boots--those that were Caron's, you know. So, behold us setting off
in the Boche trenches--and they're most damnably like ours--with
these good sorts of Boche comrades, who told me in very good
French--same as I'm speaking--not to fret myself.

"There was no alarm, nothing. Getting there came off all right.
Everything went off so sweet and simple that I fancied I must be a
defaulting Boche. We got to Lens at nightfall. I remember we passed
in front of La Perche and went down the Rue du Quatorze-Juillet. I
saw some of the townsfolk walking about in the streets like they do
in our quarters. I didn't recognize them because of the evening, nor
them me, because of the evening too, and because of the seriousness
of things. It was so dark you couldn't put your finger into your eye
when I reached my folk's garden.

"My heart was going top speed. I was all trembling from head to foot
as if I were only a sort of heart myself. And I had to hold myself
back from carrying on aloud, and in French too, I was so happy and
upset. The Kamarad says to me, 'You go, pass once, then another
time, and look in at the door and the window. Don't look as if you
were looking. Be careful.' So I get hold of myself again, and
swallow my feelings all at a gulp. Not a bad sort, that devil,
seeing he'd have had a hell of a time if I'd got nailed.

"At our place, you know, same as everywhere in the Pas de Calais,
the outside doors of the houses are cut in two. At the bottom, it's
a sort of barrier, half-way up your body; and above, you might call
it a shutter. So you can shut the bottom half and be one-half
private.

"The top half was open, and the room, that's the dining-room, and
the kitchen as well, of course, was lighted up and I heard voices.

"I went by with my neck twisted sideways. There were heads of men
and women with a rosy light on them, round the round table and the
lamp. My eyes fell on her, on Clotilde. I saw her plainly. She was
sitting between two chaps, non-coms., I believe, and they were
talking to her. And what was she doing? Nothing; she was smiling,
and her face was prettily bent forward and surrounded with a light
little framework of fair hair, and the lamp gave it a bit of a
golden look.

"She was smiling. She was contented. She had a look of being well
off, by the side of the Boche officer, and the lamp, and the fire
that puffed an unfamiliar warmth out on me. I passed, and then I
turned round, and passed again. I saw her again, and she was always
smiling. Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile
that came from her, that she gave. And during that time of
illumination that I passed in two senses, I could see my baby as
well, stretching her hands out to a great striped simpleton and
trying to climb on his knee; and then, just by, who do you think I
recognized? Madeleine Vandaert, Vandaert's wife, my pal of
the 19th, that was killed at the Maine, at Montyon.

"She knew he'd been killed because she was in mourning. And she, she
was having good fun, and laughing outright, I tell you--and she
looked at one and the other as much as to say, 'I'm all right here!'

"Ah, my boy, I cleared out of that, and butted into the Kamarads
that were waiting to take me back. How I got back I couldn't tell
you. I was knocked out. I went stumbling like a man under a curse,
and if any-body had said a wrong word to me just then--! I should
have shouted out loud; I should have made a row, so as to get killed
and be done with this filthy life!

"Do you catch on? She was smiling, my wife, my Clotilde, at this
time in the war! And why? Have we only got to be away for a time for
us not to count any more? You take your damned hook from home to go
to the war, and everything seems finished with; and they worry for a
while that you're gone, but bit by bit you become as if you didn't
exist, they can do without you to be as happy as they were before,
and to smile. Ah, Christ! I'm not talking of the other woman that
was laughing, but my Clotilde, mine, who at that chance moment when
I saw her, whatever you may say, was getting on damned well without
me!

"And then, if she'd been with friends or relations; but no, actually
with Boche officers! Tell me, shouldn't I have had good reason to
jump into the room, fetch her a couple of swipes, and wring the neck
of the other old hen in mourning?

"Yes, yes; I thought of doing it. I know all right I was getting
violent, I was getting out of control.

"Mark me. I don't want to say more about it than I have said. She's
a good lass, Clotilde. I know her, and I've confidence in her. I'm
not far wrong, you know. If I were done in, she'd cry all the tears
in her body to begin with. She thinks I'm alive, I admit, but that
isn't the point. She can't prevent herself from being; well off, and
contented, and letting herself go, when she's a good fire, a good
lamp, and company, whether I'm there or not--"

I led Poterloo away: "You exaggerate, old chap; you're getting
absurd notions, come." We had walked very slowly and were still at
the foot of the hill. The fog was becoming like silver as it
prepared for departure. Sunshine was very near.

* * * * * *

Poterloo looked up and said, "We'll go round by the Carency road and
go in at the back." We struck off at an angle into the fields. At
the end of a few minutes he said to me, "I exaggerate, you think?
You say that I exaggerate?" He reflected. "Ah!" Then he added, with
the shaking of the head that had hardly left him all the morning,
"What about it? All the same, it's a fact--"

We climbed the slope. The cold had become tepidity. Arrived on a
little plateau--"Let's sit here again before going in," he proposed.
He sat down, heavy with the world of thought that entangled him. His
forehead was wrinkled. Then he turned towards me with an awkward
air, as if he were going to beg some favor: "Tell me, mate, I'm
wondering if I'm right."

But after looking at me, he looked at everything else, as though he
would rather consult them than me.

A transformation was taking place in the sky and on the earth. The
fog was hardly more than a fancy. Distances revealed themselves. The
narrow plain, gloomy and gray, was getting bigger, chasing its
shadows away, and assuming color. The light was passing over it from
east to west like sails.

And down there at our very feet, by the grace of distance and of
light, we saw Souchez among the trees--the little place arose again
before our eyes, new-born in the sunshine!

"Am I right?" repeated Poterloo, more faltering, more dubious.

Before I could speak he replied to himself, at first almost in a
whisper, as the light fell on him--"She's quite young, you know;
she's twenty-six. She can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of
her all over, and when she's resting in the lamp-light and the
warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it
would just simply be her youth, singing in her throat. It isn't on
account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of herself.
It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives, and that's all. It isn't
her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her die? Very well, what
do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the Boches?
Grouse? One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months.
Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there is to
it."

He stops speaking to look at the view of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, now
wholly illuminated.

"Same with the kid; when she found herself alongside a simpleton
that doesn't tell her to go and play with herself, she ends by
wanting to get on his knee. Perhaps she'd prefer that it was her
uncle or a friend or her father--perhaps--but she tries it on all
the same with the only man that's always there, even if it's a great
hog in spectacles.

"Ah," he cries, as he gets up and comes gesticulating before me.
"There's a good answer one could give me. If I didn't come back from
the war, I should say, 'My lad, you've gone to smash, no more
Clotilde, no more love! You'll be replaced in her heart sooner or
later; no getting round it; your memory, the portrait of you that
she carries in her, that'll fade bit by bit and another'll come on
top of it, and she'll begin another life again.' Ah, if I didn't
come back!"

He laughs heartily. "But I mean to come back. Ah, yes! One must be
there. Otherwise--I must be there, look you," he says again more
seriously; "otherwise, if you're not there, even if you're dealing
with saints and angels, you'll be at fault in the end. That's life.
But I am there." He laughs. "Well, I'm a little there, as one might
say!"

I get up too, and tap him on the shoulder. "You're right, old pal,
it'll all come to an end."

He rubs his hands and goes on talking. "Yes, by God! it'll all
finish, don't worry. Oh, I know well there'll be hard graft before
it's finished, and still more after. We've got to work, and I don't
only mean work with the arms.

"It'll be necessary to make everything over again. Very well, we'll
do it. The house? Gone. The garden? Nowhere. All right, we'll
rebuild the house, we'll remake the garden. The less there is the
more we'll make over again. After all, it's life, and we're made to
remake, eh? And we'll remake our life together, and happiness. We'll
make the days again; we'll remake the nights.

"And the other side, too. They'll make their world again. Do you
know what I say?--perhaps it won't be as long as one thinks--"

"Tiens! I can see Madeleine Vandaert marrying another chap.
She's a widow; but, old man, she's been a widow eighteen months. Do
you think it's not a big slice, that, eighteen months? They even
leave off wearing mourning, I believe, about that time! People don't
remember that when they say 'What a strumpet she is,' and when, in
effect, they ask her to commit suicide. But mon vieux, one forgets.
One is forced to forget. It isn't the people that make you forget;
you do it yourself; it's just forgetfulness, mind you. I find
Madeleine again all of a sudden, and to see her frivvling there it
broke me up as much as if her husband had been killed
yesterday--it's natural. But it's a devil of a long time since he
got spiked, poor lad. It's a long time since, it's too long since.
People are no longer the same. But, mark you, one must come back,
one must be there! We shall be there, and we shall be busy with
beginning again!"

On the way, he looks and winks, cheered up by finding a peg on which
to hang his ideas. He says--"I can see it from here, after the war,
all the Souchez people setting themselves again to work and to
life--what a business! Tiens, Papa Ponce, for example, the
back-number! He was so pernickety that you could see him sweeping
the grass in his garden with a horsehair brush, or kneeling on his
lawn and trimming the turf with a pair of scissors. Very well, he'll
treat himself to that again! And Madame Imaginaire, that lived in
one of the last houses towards the Chateau de Carleul, a large woman
who seemed to roll along the ground as if she'd got casters under
her big circular petticoats. She had a child every year, regular,
punctual--a proper machine-gun of kids. Very well, she'll take that
occupation up again with all her might."

He stops and ponders, and smiles a very little--almost within
himself: "Tiens, I'll tell you; I noticed--it isn't very important,
this," he insists, as though suddenly embarrassed by the triviality
of this parenthesis--"but I noticed (you notice it in a glance when
you're noticing something else) that it was cleaner in our house
than in my time--"

We come on some little rails in the ground, climbing almost hidden
in the withered grass underfoot. Poterloo points out with his foot
this bit of abandoned track, and smiles; "That, that's our railway.
It was a cripple, as you may say; that means something that doesn't
move. It didn't work very quickly. A snail could have kept pace with
it. We shall remake it. But certainly it won't go any quicker. That
can't be allowed!"

When we reached the top of the hill, Poterloo turned round and threw
a last look over the slaughtered places that we had just visited.
Even more than a minute ago, distance recreated the village across
the remains of trees shortened and sliced that now looked like young
saplings. Better even than just now, the sun shed on that white and
red accumulation of mingled material an appearance of life and even
an illusion of meditation. Its very stones seemed to feel the vernal
revival. The beauty of sunshine heralded what would be, and revealed
the future. The face of the watching soldier, too, shone with a
glamour of reincarnation, and the smile on it was born of the
springtime and of hope. His rosy cheeks and blue eyes seemed
brighter than ever.

We go down into the communication trench and there is sunshine
there. The trench is yellow, dry, and resounding. I admire its
finely geometrical depth, its shovel-smoothed and shining flanks;
and I find it enjoyable to hear the clean sharp sound of our feet on
the hard ground or on the caillebotis--little gratings of wood,
placed end to end and forming a plankway.

I look at my watch. It tells me that it is nine o'clock, and it
shows me, too, a dial of delicate color where the sky is reflected
in rose-pink and blue, and the fine fret-work of bushes that are
planted there above the marges of the trench.

And Poterloo and I look at each other with a kind of confused
delight. We are glad to see each other, as though we were meeting
after absence! He speaks to me, and though I am quite familiar with
the singsong accent of the North, I discover that he is singing.

We have had bad days and tragic nights in the cold and the rain and
the mud. Now, although it is still winter, the first fine morning
shows and convinces us that it will soon be spring once more.
Already the top of the trench is graced by green young grass, and
amid its new-born quivering some flowers are awakening. It means the
end of contracted and constricted days. Spring is coming from above
and from below. We inhale with joyful hearts; we are uplifted.

Yes, the had days are ending. The war will end, too, que diable! And
no doubt it will end in the beautiful season that is coming, that
already illumines us, whose zephyrs already caress us.

A whistling sound--tiens, a spent bullet! A bullet? Nonsense--it's a
blackbird! Curious how similar the sound was! The blackbirds and the
birds of softer song, the countryside and the pageant of the
seasons, the intimacy of dwelling-rooms, arrayed in light--Oh! the
war will end soon; we shall go back for good to our own; wife,
children, or to her who is at once wife and child, and we smile
towards them in this young glory that already unites us again.

At the forking of the two trenches, in the open and on the edge,
here is something like a doorway. Two posts lean one upon the other,
with a confusion of electric wires between them, hanging down like
tropical creepers. It looks well. You would say it was a theatrical
contrivance or scene. A slender climbing plant twines round one of
the posts, and as you follow it with your glance, you see that it
already dares to pass from one to the other.

Soon, passing along this trench whose grassy slopes quiver like the
flanks of a fine horse, we come out into our own trench on the
Bethune road, and here is our place. Our comrades are there,
in clusters. They are eating, and enjoying the goodly temperature.

The meal finished, we clean our aluminium mess-tins or plates with a
morsel of bread. "Tiens, the sun's going!" It is true; a cloud has
passed over and hidden it. "It's going to splash, my little lads,"
says Lamuse "that's our luck all over! Just as we are going off!"

"A damned country!" says Fouillade. In truth this Northern climate
is not worth much. It drizzles and mizzles, reeks and rains. And
when there is any sun it soon disappears in the middle of this great
damp sky.

Our four days in the trenches are finished, and the relief will
commence at nightfall. Leisurely we get ready for leaving. We fill
and put aside the knapsacks and bags. We give a rub to the rifles
and wrap them up.

It is already four o'clock. Darkness is falling quickly, and we grow
indistinct to each other. "Damnation. Here's the rain!" A few drops
and then the downpour. Oh, la, la, la! We don our capes and
tent-cloths. We go back unto the dug-out, dabbling, and gathering
mud on our knees, hands, and elbows, for the bottom of the trench is
getting sticky. Once inside, we have hardly time to light a candle,
stuck on a bit of stone, and to shiver all round--"Come on, en
route!"

We hoist ourselves into the wet and windy darkness outside. I can
dimly see Poterloo's powerful shoulders; in the ranks we are always
side by side. When we get going I call to him, "Are you there, old
chap?"--"Yes, in front of you," he cries to me, turning round. As he
turns he gets a buffet in the face from wind and rain, but he
laughs. His happy face of the morning abides with him. No downpour
shall rob him of the content that he carries in his strong and
steadfast heart; no evil night put out the sunshine that I saw
possess his thoughts some hours ago.

We march, and jostle each other, and stumble. The rain is
continuous, and water runs in the bottom of the trench. The
floor-gratings yield as the soil becomes soaked; some of them slope
to right or left and we skid on them. In the dark, too, one cannot
see them, so we miss them at the turnings and put our feet into
holes full of water.

Even in the grayness of the night I will not lose sight of the slaty
shine of Poterloo's helmet, which streams like a roof under the
torrent, nor of the broad back that is adorned with a square of
glistening oilskin. I lock my step in his, and from time to time I
question him and he answers me--always in good humor, always serene
and strong.

When there are no more of the wooden floor-gratings, we tramp in the
thick mud. It is dark now. There is a sudden halt and I am thrown on
Poterloo. Up higher we hear half-angry reproaches--"What the devil,
will you get on? We shall get broken up!"

"I can't get my trotters unstuck!" replies a pitiful voice.

The engulfed one gets clear at last, and we have to run to overtake
the rest of the company. We begin to pant and complain, and bluster
against those who are leading. Our feet go down haphazard; we
stumble and hold ourselves up by the wails, so that our hands are
plastered with mud. The march becomes a stampede, full of the noise
of metal things and of oaths.

In redoubled rain there is a second halt; some one has fallen, and
the hubbub is general. He picks himself up and we are off again. I
exert myself to follow Poterloo's helmet closely that gleams feebly
in the night before my eyes, and I shout from time to time, "All
right?"--"Yes, yes, all right," he replies, puffing and blowing, and
his voice always singsong and resonant.

Our knapsacks, tossed in this rolling race under the assault of the
elements, drag and hurt our shoulders.

The trench is blocked by a recent landslide, and we plunge unto it.
We have to tear our feet out of the soft and clinging earth, lifting
them high at each step. Then, when this crossing is laboriously
accomplished, we topple down again into the slippery stream, in the
bottom of which are two narrow ruts, boot-worn, which hold one's
foot like a vice, and there are pools into which it goes with a
great splash. In one place we must stoop very low to pass under a
heavy and glutinous bridge that crosses the trench, and we only get
through with difficulty. It obliges us to kneel in the mud, to
flatten ourselves on the ground, and to crawl on all fours for a few
paces. A little farther there are evolutions to perform as we grasp
a post that the sinking of the ground has set aslope across the
middle of the fairway.

We come to a trench-crossing. "Allons, forward! Look out for
yourselves, boys!" says the adjutant, who has flattened himself in a
corner to let us pass and to speak to us. "This is a bad spot."

"We're done up," shouts a voice so hoarse that I cannot identify the
speaker.

"Damn! I've enough of it, I'm stopping here," groans another, at the
end of his wind and his muscle.

"What do you want me to do?" replies the adjutant, "No fault of
mine. eh? Allons, get a move on, it's a bad spot--it was shelled at
the last relief!"

We go on through the tempest of wind and water. We seem to be going
ever down and down, as in a pit. We slip and tumble, butt into the
wall of the trench, into which we drive our elbows hard, so as to
throw ourselves upright again. Our going is a sort of long slide, on
which we keep up just how and where we can. What matters is to
stumble only forward, and as straight as possible.

Where are we? I lift my head, in spite of the billows of rain, out
of this gulf where we are struggling. Against the hardly discernible
background of the buried sky, I can make out the rim of the trench;
and there, rising before my eyes all at once and towering over that
rim, is something like a sinister doorway, made of two black posts
that lean one upon the other, with something hanging from the middle
like a torn-off scalp. It is the doorway.

"Forward! Forward!"

I lower my head and see no more; but again I hear the feet that sink
in the mud and come out again, the rattle of the bayonets, the heavy
exclamations, and the rapid breathing.

Once more there is a violent back-eddy. We pull up sharply, and
again I am thrown upon Poterloo and lean on his back, his strong
back and solid, like the trunk of a tree, like healthfulness and
like hope. He cries to me, "Cheer up, old man, we're there!"

We are standing still. It is necessary to go hack a little--Nom de
Dieu!--no, we are moving on again!

Suddenly a fearful explosion falls on us. I tremble to my skull; a
metallic reverberation fills my head; a scorching and suffocating
smell of sulphur pierces my nostrils. The earth has opened in front
of me. I feel myself lifted and hurled aside--doubled up, choked,
and half blinded by this lightning and thunder. But still my
recollection is clear; and in that moment when I looked wildly and
desperately for my comrade-in-arms, I saw his body go up, erect and
black, both his arms outstretched to their limit, and a flame in the
place of his head!

______

[note 1:] All these high roads are stone-paved, and traffic is
noisy.--Tr.






13

The Big Words





BARQUE notices that I am writing. He comes towards me on all fours
through the straw and lifts his intelligent face to me, with its
reddish forelock and the little quick eyes over which circumflex
accents fold and unfold them-selves. His mouth is twisting in all
directions, by reason of a tablet of chocolate that he crunches and
chews, while he holds the moist stump of it in his fist.

With his mouth full, and wafting me the odor of a sweetshop, he
stammers--"Tell me, you writing chap, you'll be writing later about
soldiers, you'll be speaking of us, eh?"

"Why yes, sonny, I shall talk about you, and about the boys, and
about our life."

"Tell me, then"--he indicates with a nod the papers on which I have
been making notes. With hovering pencil I watch and listen to him.
He has a question to put to me--"Tell me, then, though you needn't
if you don't want--there's something I want to ask you. This is it;
if you make the common soldiers talk in your book, are you going to
make them talk like they do talk, or shall you put it all
straight--into pretty talk? It's about the big words that we use.
For after all, now, besides falling out sometimes and blackguarding
each other, you'll never hear two poilus open their heads for a
minute without saying and repeating things that the printers
wouldn't much like to print. Then what? If you don't say 'em, your
portrait won't be a lifelike one it's as if you were going to paint
them and then left out one of the gaudiest colors wherever you found
it. All the same, it isn't usually done."

"I shall put the big words in their place, dadda, for they're the
truth."

"But tell me, if you put 'em in, won't the people of your sort say
you're swine, without worrying about the truth?"

"Very likely, but I shall do it all the same, without worrying about
those people."

"Do you want my opinion? Although I know nothing about books, it's
brave to do that, because it isn't usually done, and it'll be spicy
if you dare do it--but you'll find it hard when it comes to it,
you're too polite. That's just one of the faults I've found in you
since we've known each other; that, and also that dirty habit you've
got, when they're serving brandy out to us, you pretend it'll do you
harm, and instead of giving your share to a pal, you go and pour it
on your head to wash your scalp."






14

Of Burdens





AT the end of the yard of the Muets farm, among the outbuildings,
the barn gapes like a cavern. It is always caverns for us, even in
houses! When you have crossed the yard, where the manure yields
underfoot with a spongy sound or have gone round it instead on the
narrow paved path of difficult equilibrium, and when you have
arrived at the entrance to the barn, you can see nothing at all.

Then, if you persist, you make out a misty hollow where equally
misty and dark lumps are asquat or prone or wandering from one
corner to another. At the back, on the right and on the left, the
pale gleams of two candles, each with the round halo of a distant
moon allow you at last to make out the human shape of these masses,
whose mouths emit either steam or thick smoke.

Our hazy retreat, which I allow carefully to swallow me whole, is a
scene of excitement this evening. We leave for the trenches
to-morrow morning, and the nebulous tenants of the barn are
beginning to pack up.

Although darkness falls on my eyes and chokes them as I come in from
the pallid evening, I still dodge the snares spread over the ground
by water-bottles, mess-tins and weapons, but I butt full into the
loaves that are packed together exactly in the middle, like the
paving of a yard. I reach my corner. Something alive is there with a
huge back, fleecy and rounded, squatting and stooping over a
collection of little things that glitter on the ground, and I tap
the shoulder upholstered in sheepskin. The being turns round, and by
the dull and fitful gleam of a candle which a bayonet stuck in the
ground upholds, I see one half of a face, an eye, the end of a
mustache, and the corner of a half-open mouth. It growls in a
friendly way, and resumes the inspection of its possessions.

"What are you doing there?"

"I'm fixing things, and clearing up."

The quasi-brigand who appears to be checking his booty, is my
comrade Volpatte. He has folded his tent-cloth in four and placed it
on his bed--that is, on the truss of straw assigned to him--and on
this carpet he has emptied and displayed the contents of his
pockets.

And it is quite a shop that he broods over with a housewife's
solicitous eyes, watchful and jealous, lest some one walks over him.
With my eye I tick off his copious exhibition.

Alongside his handkerchief, pipe, tobacco-pouch (which also contains
a note-book), knife, purse, and pocket pipe-lighter, which comprise
the necessary and indispensable groundwork, here are two leather
laces twisted like earthworms round a watch enclosed in a case of
transparent celluloid, which has curiously dulled and blanched with
age. Then a little round mirror, and another square one; this last,
though broken, is of better quality, and bevel-edged. A flask of
essence of turpentine, a flask of mineral oil nearly empty, and a
third flask, empty. A German belt-plate, bearing the device, "Gott
mit uns"; a dragoon's tassel of similar origin; half wrapped in
paper, an aviator's arrow in the form of a steel pencil and pointed
like a needle; folding scissors and a combined knife and fork of
similar pliancy; a stump of pencil and one of candle; a tube of
aspirin, also containing opium tablets, and several tin boxes.

Observing that my inspection of his personal possessions is
detailed, Volpatte helps me to identify certain items--

"That, that's a leather officer's glove. I cut the fingers off to
stop up the mouth of my blunderbuss with; that, that's telephone
wire, the only thing to fasten buttons on your greatcoat with if you
want 'em to stay there; and here, inside here, d'you know what that
is? White thread, good stuff, not what you're put off with when they
give you new things, a sort of macaroni au fromage that you pull out
with a fork; and there's a set of needles on a post-card. The
safety-pins, they're there, separate."

"And here, that's the paper department. Quite a library."

There is indeed a surprising collection of papers among the things
disgorged by Volpatte's pockets--the violet packet of writing-paper,
whose unworthy printed envelope is out at heels; an Army squad-book,
of which the dirty and desiccated binding, like the skin of an old
tramp, has perished and shrunk all over: a note-book with a chafed
moleskin cover, and packed with papers and photographs, those of his
wife and children enthroned in the middle.

Out of this bundle of yellowed and darkened papers Volpatte extracts
this photograph and shows it to me once more. I renew acquaintance
with Madame Volpatte and her generous bosom, her mild and mellow
features; and with the two little boys in white collars, the elder
slender, the younger round as a ball.

"I've only got photos of old people," says Biquet, who is twenty
years old. He shows us a portrait holding it close to the candle, of
two aged people who look at us with the same well-behaved air as
Volpatte's children.

"I've got mine with me, too," says another; "I always stick to the
photo of the nestlings."

"Course! Every man carries his crowd along," adds another.

"It's funny," Barque declares, "a portrait wears itself out just
with being looked at. You haven't got to gape at it too often, or be
too long about it; in the long run, I don't know what happens, but
the likeness mizzles."

"You're right," says Blaire, "I've found it like that too,
exactly.''

"I've got a map of the district as well, among my papers," Volpatte
continues. He unfolds it to the light. Illegible and transparent at
the creases, it looks like one of those window-blinds made of
squares sewn together.

"I've some newspaper too"--he unfolds a newspaper article upon
poilus--"and a book"--a twopence-half-penny novel, called Twice a
Maid--"Tiens, another newspaper cutting from the Etampes Bee. Don't
know why I've kept that, but there must be a reason somewhere. I'll
think about it when I have time. And then, my pack of cards, and a
set of draughts, with a paper board and the pieces made of
sealing-wax."

Barque comes up, regards the scene, and says, "I've a lot more
things than that in my pockets." He addresses himself to Volpatte.
"Have you got a Boche pay-book, louse-head, some phials of iodine,
and a Browning? I've all that, and two knives."

"I've no revolver," says Volpatte, "nor a Boche pay-book, but I
could have had two knives or even ten knives; but I only need one."

"That depends," says Barque. "And have you any mechanical buttons,
fathead?"

"I haven't any," cries Becuwe.

"The private can't do without 'em," Lamuse asserts. "Without them,
to make your braces stick to your breeches, the game's up."

"And I've always got in my pocket," says Blaire, "so's they're
within reach, my case of rings." He brings it cut, wrapped up in a
gas-mask bag, and shakes it. The files ring inside, and we hear the
jingle of aluminium rings in the rough.

"I've always got string," says Biquet, "that's the useful stuff!"

"Not so useful as nails," says Pepin, and he shows three in
his hand, big, little, and average.

One by one the others come to join in the conversation. to chaffer
and cadge. We are getting used to the half-darkness. But Corporal
Salavert, who has a well-earned reputation for dexterity, makes a
banging lamp with a candle and a tray, the latter contrived from a
Camembert box and some wire. We light up, and around its
illumination each man tells what he has in his pockets, with
parental preferences and bias.

"To begin with, how many have we?"

"How many pockets? Eighteen," says some one--Cocon, of course, the
man of figures.

"Eighteen pockets! You're codding, rat-nose," says big Lamuse.

"Exactly eighteen," replies Cocon. "Count them, if you're as clever
as all that."

Lamuse is willing to be guided by reason in the matter, and putting
his two hands near the light so as to count accurately, he tells off
his great brick-red fingers: Two pockets in the back of the
greatcoat; one for the first-aid packet, which is used for tobacco;
two inside the greatcoat in front; two outside it on each side, with
flaps; three in the trousers, and even three and a half, counting
the little one in front.

"I'll bet a compass on it," says Farfadet.

'And I, my bits of tinder."

"I," says Tirloir, "I'll bet a teeny whistle that my wife sent me
when she said, 'If you're wounded in the battle you must whistle, so
that your comrades will come and save your life.'"

We laugh at the artless words. Tulacque intervenes, and says
indulgently to Tiloir, "They don't know what war is back there; and
if you started talking about the rear, it'd be you that'd talk rot."

"We won't count that pocket," says Salavert, "it's too small. That
makes ten."

"In the jacket, four. That only makes fourteen after all."

"There are the two cartridge pockets, the two new ones that fasten
with straps."

"Sixteen," says Salavert.

"Now, blockhead and son of misery, turn my jacket back. You haven't
counted those two pockets. Now then, what more do you want? And yet
they're just in the usual place. They're your civilian pockets,
where you shoved your nose-rag, your tobacco, and the address where
you'd got to deliver your parcel when you were a messenger."

"Eighteen!" says Salavert, as grave as a judge. "There are eighteen,
and no mistake; that's done it."

At this point in the conversation, some one makes a series of noisy
stumbles on the stones of the threshold with the sound of a horse
pawing the ground--and blaspheming. Then, after a silence, the
barking of a sonorous and authoritative voice--"Hey, inside there!
Getting ready? Everything must be fixed up this evening and packed
tight and solid, you know. Going into the first line this time, and
we may have a hot time of it."

"Right you are, right you are, mon adjutant." heedless voices
answer.

"How do you write 'Arnesse'?" asks Benech, who is on all fours, at
work with a pencil and an envelope. While Cocon spells "Ernest" for
him and the voice of the vanished adjutant is heard afar repeating
his harangue, Blaire picks up the thread, and says--

"You should always, my children--listen to what I'm telling you--put
your drinking-cup in your pocket. I've tried to stick it everywhere
else, but only the pocket's really practical, you take my word. If
you're in marching order, or if you've doffed your kit to navigate
the trenches either, you've always got it under your fist when
chances come, like when a pal who's got some gargle, and feels good
towards you says, 'Lend us your cup,' or a peddling wine-seller,
either. My young bucks, listen to what I tell you; you'll always
find it good--put your cup in your pocket."

"No fear," says Lamuse, "you won't see me put my cup in my pocket;
damned silly idea, no more or less. I'd a sight sooner sling it on a
strap with a hook."

"Fasten it on a greatcoat button, like the gas-helmet bag, that's a
lot better; for suppose you take off your accouterments and there's
any wine passing, you look soft."

"I've got a Boche drinking-cup," says Barque; "it's flat, so it goes
into a side pocket if you like, or it goes very well into a
cartridge-pouch, once you've fired the damn things off or pitched
them into a bag."

"A Boche cup's nothing special," says Pepin; "it won't stand
up, it's just lumber."

"You wait and see, maggot-snout," says Tirette, who is something of
a psychologist. "If we attack this time, same as the adjutant seemed
to hint, perhaps you'll find a Boche cup, and then it'll be
something special!"

"The adjutant may have said that," Eudore observes. "but he doesn't
know."

"It holds more than a half-pint, the Boche cup," remarks Cocon,
"seeing that the exact capacity of the half-pint is marked in the
cup three-quarters way up; and it's always good for you to have a
big one, for if you've got a cup that only just holds a half-pint,
then so that you can get your half-pint of coffee or wine or holy
water or what not, it's get to be filled right up, and they don't
ever do it at serving-out, and if they do, you spill it."

"I believe you that they don't fill it," says Paradis, exasperated
by the recollection of that ceremony. "The quartermaster-sergeant,
he pours it with his blasted finger in your cup and gives it two
raps on its bottom. Result, you get a third, and your cup's in
mourning with three black bands on top of each other."

"Yes," says Barque, "that's true; but you shouldn't have a cup too
big either, because the chap that's pouring it out for you, he
suspects you, and let's it go in damned drops, and so as not to give
you more than your measure he gives you less, and you can whistle
for it. with your tureen in your fists."

Volpatte puts back in his pockets, one by one, the items of his
display. When he came to the purse, he looked at it with an air of
deep compassion.

"He's damnably flat, poor chap!" He counted the contents. "Three
francs! My boy, I most set about feathering this nest again or I
shall be stony when we get back."

"You're not the only one that's broken-backed in the treasury."

"The soldier spends more than he earns, and don't you forget it. I
wonder what'd become of a man that only had his pay?"

Paradis replies with concise simplicity, "He'd kick the bucket."

"And see here, look what I've got in my pocket and never let go
of"--Pepin, with merry eyes, shows us some silver
table-things. "They belonged," he says, "to the ugly trollop where
we were quartered at Grand-Rozoy."

"Perhaps they still belong to her?"

Pepin made an uncertain gesture, in which pride mingled with
modesty; then, growing bolder, he smiled and said, "I knew her, the
old sneak. Certainly, she'll spend the rest of her life looking in
every corner for her silver things."

"For my part," says Volpatte, "I've never been able to rake in more
than a pair of scissors. Some people have the luck. I haven't. So
naturally I watch 'em close, though I admit I've no use for 'em."

"I've pinched a few bits of things here and there, but what of it?
The sappers have always left me behind in the matter of pinching; so
what about it?"

"You can do what you like, you're always got at by some one in your
turn, eh, my boy? Don't fret about it."

"I keep my wife's letters," says Blaire.

"And I send mine back to her."

"And I keep them, too. Here they are." Eudore exposes a packet of
worn and shiny paper, whose grimy condition the twilight modestly
veils. "I keep them. Sometimes I read them again. When I'm cold and
humpy, I read 'em again. It doesn't actually warm you up, but it
seems to."

There must be a deep significance in the curious expression, for
several men raise their heads and say, "Yes, that's so."

By fits and starts the conversation goes on in the bosom of this
fantastic barn and the great moving shadows that cross it; night is
heaped up in its corners, and pointed by a few scattered and sickly
candles.

I watch these busy and burdened flitters come and go, outline
themselves strangely, then stoop and slide down to the ground; they
talk to themselves and to each other. their feet are encumbered by
the litter. They are showing their riches to each other. "Tiens,
look!"--"Great!" they reply enviously.

What they have not got they want. There are treasures among the
squad long coveted by all; the two-liter water-bottle, for instance,
preserved by Barque, that a skillful rifle-shot with a blank
cartridge has stretched to the capacity of two and a half liters;
and Bertrand's famous great knife with the horn handle.

Among the heaving swarm there are sidelong glances that skim these
curiosities, and then each man resumes "eyes right," devotes himself
to his belongings, and concentrates upon getting it in order.

They are mournful belongings, indeed. Everything made for the
soldier is commonplace, ugly, and of bad quality; from his cardboard
boots, attached to the uppers by a criss-cross of worthless thread,
to his badly cut, badly shaped, and badly sewn clothes, made of
shoddy and transparent cloth--blotting-paper--that one day of
sunshine fades and an hour of rain wets through, to his emaciated
leathers, brittle as shavings and torn by the buckle spikes, to his
flannel underwear that is thinner than cotton, to his straw-like
tobacco.

Marthereau is beside me, and he points to our comrades: "Look at
them, these poor chaps gaping into their bags o' tricks. You'd say
it was a mothers' meeting, ogling their kids. Hark to 'em. They're
calling for their knick-knacks. Tiens, that one, the times he says
'My knife!' same as if be was calling 'Lon,' or 'Charles,' or
'Dolphus.' And you know it's impossible for them to make their load
any less. Can't be did. It isn't that they don't want--our job isn't
one that makes us any stronger, eh? But they can't. Too proud of
'em."

The burdens to be borne are formidable, and one knows well enough,
parbleu, that every item makes them more severe, each little
addition is one bruise more.

For it is not merely a matter of what one buries in his pockets and
pouches. To complete the burden there is what one carries on his
back. The knapsack is the trunk and even the cupboard; and the old
soldier is familiar with the art of enlarging it almost miraculously
by the judicious disposal of his household goods and provisions.
Besides the regulation and obligatory contents--two tins of pressed
beef, a dozen biscuits, two tablets of coffee and two packets of
dried soup, the bag of sugar, fatigue smock, and spare boots--we
find a way of getting in some pots of jam, tobacco, chocolate,
candles, soft-soled shoes; and even soap, a spirit lamp, some
solidified spirit, and some woolen things. With the blanket, sheet,
tentcloth, trenching-tool, water-bottle, and an item of the
field-cooking kit, [note 1] the burden gets heavier and taller and
wider, monumental and crushing. And my neighbor says truly that
every time he reaches his goal after some miles of highway and
communication trenches, the poilu swears hard that the next time
he'll leave a heap of things behind and give his shoulders a little
relief from the yoke of the knapsack. But every time he is preparing
for departure, he assumes again the same overbearing and almost
superhuman load; he never lets it go, though he curses it always.

"There are some bad boys," says Lamuse, "among the shirkers, that
find a way of keeping something in the company wagon or the medical
van. I know one that's got two shirts and a pair of drawers in an
adjutant's canteen [note 2]--but, you see, there's two hundred and
fifty chaps in the company, and they're all up to the dodge and not
many of 'em can profit by it; it's chiefly the non-coms.; the more
stripes they've got, the easier it is to plant their luggage, not
forgetting that the commandant visits the wagons sometimes without
warning and fires your things into the middle of the road if he
finds 'em in a horse-box where they've no business--Be off with
you!--not to mention the bully-ragging and the clink."

"In the early days it was all right, my boy. There were some
chaps--I've seen 'em--who stuck their bags and even their knapsacks
in baby-carts and pushed 'em along the road."

"Ah, not half! Those were the good times of the war. But all that's
changed."

Volpatte, deaf to all the talk, muffled in his blanket as if in a
shawl which makes him look like an old witch, revolves round an
object that lies on the ground. "I'm wondering," lie says,
addressing no one, "whether to take away this damned tin stove. It's
the only one in the squad and I've always carried it. Oui, but it
leaks like a cullender." He cannot decide, and makes a really
pathetic picture of separation.

Barque watches him obliquely, and makes fun of him. We hear him say,
"Senile dodderer!" But he pauses in his chaffing to say, "After all,
if we were in his shoes we should be equally fatheaded."

Volpatte postpones his decision till later. "I'll see about it in
the morning, when I'm loading the camel's back."

After the inspection and recharging of pockets, it is the turn of
the bags, and then of the cartridge-pouches, and Barque holds forth
on the way to make the regulation two hundred cartridges go into the
three pouches. In the lump it is impossible. They must be unpacked
and placed side by side upright, head against foot. Thus can one
cram each pouch without leaving any space, and make himself a
waistband that weighs over twelve pounds.

Rifles have been cleaned already. One looks to the swathing of the
breech and the plugging of the muzzle, precautions which trench-dirt
renders indispensable.

How every rifle can easily be recognized is discussed. "I've made
some nicks in the sling. See, I've cut into the edge."

"I've twisted a bootlace round the top of the sling, and that way, I
can tell it by touch as well as seeing."

"I use a mechanical button. No mistake about that. In the dark I can
find it at once and say, 'That's my pea-shooter. Because, you know,
there are some boys that don't bother themselves; they just roll
around while the pals are cleaning theirs, and then they're devilish
quick at putting a quiet fist on a popgun that's been cleaned; and
then after they've even the cheek to go and say, 'Mon capitaine,
I've got a rifle that's a bit of all right.' I'm not on in that act.
It's the D system, my old wonder--a damned dirty dodge, and there
are times when I'm fed up with it, and more."

And thus, though their rifles are all alike, they are as different
as their handwriting.

* * * * * *

"It's curious and funny," says Marthereau to me "we're going up to
the trenches to-morrow, and there's nobody drunk yet, nor that way
inclined. Ah, I don't say," he concedes at once, "but what those two
there aren't a bit fresh, nor a little elevated; without being
absolutely blind, they're somewhat boozed, pr'aps--"

"It's Poitron and Poilpot, of Broyer's squad."

They are lying down and talking in a low voice. We can make out the
round nose of one, which stands out equally with his mouth, close by
a candle, and with his hand, whose lifted finger makes little
explanatory signs, faithfully followed by the shadow it casts.

"I know how to light a fire, but I don't know how to light it again
when it's gone out," declares Poitron.

"Ass!" says Poilpot, "if you know how to light it you know how to
relight it, seeing that if you light it, it's because it's gone out,
and you might say that you're relighting it when you're lighting
it."

"That's all rot. I'm not mathematical, and to hell with the
gibberish you talk. I tell you and I tell you again that when it
comes to lighting a fire, I'm there, but to light it again when it's
gone out, I'm no good. I can't speak any straighter than that."

I do not catch the insistent retort of Poilpot, but--"But, you
damned numskull," gurgles Poitron, "haven't I told you thirty times
that I can't? You must have a pig's head, anyway!"

Marthereau confides to me, "I've heard about enough of that."
Obviously he spoke too soon just now.

A sort of fever, provoked by farewell libations, prevails in the
wretched straw-spread hole where our tribe--some upright and
hesitant, others kneeling and hammering like colliers--is mending,
stacking, and subduing its provisions, clothes, and tools. There is
a wordy growling, a riot of gesture. From the smoky glimmers,
rubicund faces start forth in relief, and dark hands move about in
the shadows like marionettes. In the barn next to ours, and
separated from it only by a wall of a man's height, arise tipsy
shouts. Two men in there have fallen upon each other with fierce
violence and anger. The air is vibrant with the coarsest expressions
the human ear ever hears. But one of the disputants, a stranger from
another squad, is ejected by the tenants, and the flow of curses
from the other grows feebler and expires.

"Same as us," says Marthereau with a certain pride, "they hold
themselves in!"

It is true. Thanks to Bertrand, who is possessed by a hatred of
drunkenness, of the fatal poison that gambles with multitudes, our
squad is one of the least befouled by wine and brandy.

They are shouting and singing and talking all around. And they laugh
endlessly, for in the human mechanism laughter is the sound of
wheels that work, of deeds that are done.

One tries to fathom certain faces that show up in provocative relief
among this menagerie of shadows, this aviary of reflections. But one
cannot. They are visible, but you can see nothing in the depth of
them.

* * * * * *

"Ten o'clock already, friends," says Bertrand. "We'll finish the
camel's humps off to-morrow. Time for by-by." Each one then slowly
retires to rest, but the jabbering hardly pauses. Man takes all
things easily when he is under no obligation to hurry. The men go to
and fro, each with some object in his hand, and along the wall I
watch Eudore's huge shadow gliding, as he passes in front of a
candle with two little bags of camphor hanging from the end of his
fingers.

Lamuse is throwing himself about in search of a good position; he
seems ill at ease. To-day, obviously. and whatever his capacity may
be, he has eaten too much.

"Some of us want to sleep! Shut them up, you lot of louts!" cries
Mesnil Joseph from his litter.

This entreaty has a subduing effect for a moment, but does not stop
the burble of voices nor the passing to and fro.

"We're going up to-morrow, it's true," says Paradis, "and in the
evening we shall go into the first line. But nobody's thinking about
it. We know it, and that's all."

Gradually each has regained his place. I have stretched myself on
the straw, and Marthereau wraps himself up by my side.

Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise. It
is the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded
simpleton in spectacles. When he has taken off his greatcoat and
appears in his jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about
showing his legs. We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette
of a bearded hippopotamus. He blows, sighs, and mutters.

Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his bead, and says to me,
"Look at him. Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge. When
we ask him what he does in civil life, he won't say 'I'm a school
teacher' he says, leering at you from under his specs with the half
of his eyes, 'I'm a professor.' When he gets up very early to go to
mass, he says, 'I've got belly-ache, I must go and take a turn round
the corner and no mistake.'"

A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland: "Where
I live, it's just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes. There's my old
man there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he's working or
resting, he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the
stove."

I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialized
and technical character: "That's why he makes a paillon. D'you know
what a paillon is? You take a stalk of green corn and peel it. You
split it in two and then in two again, and you have different sizes.
Then with a thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the
stem of his pipe--"

The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.

There are only two candles alight. A wide wing of darkness
overspreads the prostrate collection of men.

Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory,
and some fragments of it reach my ears. Just now, Papa Ramure is
abusing the commandant.

"The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I've
noticed he don't know how to smoke. He sucks all out at his pipes,
and he burns 'em. It isn't a mouth he's got in his head, it's a
snout. The wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it's
coal. Clay pipes, they'll stick it better, but he roasts 'em brown
all the same. Talk about a snout! So, old man, mind what I'm telling
you, he'll come to what doesn't ever happen often; through being
forced to get white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe'll explode
in his nose before everybody. You'll see."

Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of
the barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The
lines of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by
side in their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth
diversified snoring.

With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to
me about himself: "I'm a buyer of rags, you know," he says, "or to
put it better, a rag merchant. But me, I'm wholesale; I buy from the
little rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop--a
warehouse mind you!--which I use as a depot. I deal in all kinds of
rags, from linen to jam-pots, but principally brush-handles, sacks,
and old shoes; and naturally, I make a specialty of rabbit-skins."

And a little later I still hear him: "As for me, little and
queer-shaped as I am, all the same I can carry a bin of two hundred
pounds' weight to the warehouse. up the steps, and my feet in
sabots. Once I had a to-do with a person--"

"What I can't abide," cries Fouillade, all of a sudden, "is the
exercises and marches they give us when we're resting. My back's
mincemeat, and I can't get a snooze even, I'm that cramped."

There is a metallic noise in Volpatte's direction. He has decided to
take the stove, though he chides it constantly for the fatal fault
of its perforations.

One who is but half asleep groans, "Oh, la, la! When will this war
finish!"

A cry of stubborn and mysterious rebellion bursts forth--"They'd
take the very skin off us!"

There follows a single, "Don't fret yourself!" as darkly
inconsequent as the cry of revolt.

I wake up a long time afterwards, as two o'clock is striking; and in
a pallor of light which doubtless comes from the moon, I see the
agitated silhouette of Pinegal. A cock has crowed afar.
Pinegal raises himself halfway to a sitting position, and I
hear his husky voice: "Well now, it's the middle of the night, and
there's a cock loosing his jaw. He's blind drunk, that cock." He
laughs, and repeats, "He's blind, that cock," and he twists himself
again into the woolens, and resumes his slumber with a gurgle in
which snores are mingled with merriment.

Cocon has been wakened by Pinegal. The man of figures
therefore thinks aloud, and says: "The squad had seventeen men when
it set off for the war. It has seventeen also at present, with the
stop-gaps. Each man has already worn out four greatcoats, one of the
original blue, and three cigar-smoke blue, two pairs of trousers and
six pairs of boots. One must count two rifles to each man, but one
can't count the overalls. Our emergency rations have been renewed
twenty-three times. Among us seventeen, we've been mentioned
fourteen times in Army Orders, of which two were to the Brigade,
four to the Division, and one to the Army. Once we stayed sixteen
days in the trenches without relief. We've been quartered and lodged
in forty-seven different villages up to now. Since the beginning of
the campaign, twelve thousand men have passed through the regiment,
which consists of two thousand."

A strange lisping noise interrupts him. It comes from Blaire, whose
new ivories prevent him from talking as they also prevent him from
eating. But he puts them in every evening, and retains them all
night with fierce determination, for he was promised that in the end
he would grow accustomed to the object they have put into his head.

I raise myself on my elbow, as on a battlefield, and look once more
on the beings whom the scenes and happenings of the times have
rolled up all together. I look at them all, plunged in the abyss of
passive oblivion, some of them seeming still to be absorbed in their
pitiful anxieties, their childish instincts, and their slave-like
ignorance.

The intoxication of sleep masters me. But I recall what they have
done and what they will do; and with that consummate picture of a
sorry human night before me, a shroud that fills our cavern with
darkness, I dream of some great unknown light.

______

[note 1] There is a complete set for each squad--stoves, canvas
buckets, coffee-mill, pan, etc--and each man carries some item on
march.--Tr.

[note 2] Cantine vivres, chest containing two days' rations and
cooking utensils for four or five officers.--Tr.






15

The Egg





WE were badly off, hungry and thirsty; and in these wretched
quarters there was nothing!

Something had gone wrong with the revictualing department and our
wants were becoming acute. Where the sorry place surrounded them,
with its empty doors, its bones of houses, and its bald-headed
telegraph posts. a crowd of hungry men were grinding their teeth and
confirming the absence of everything:--"The juice has sloped and the
wine's up the spout, and the bully's zero. Cheese? Nix. Napoo jam,
napoo butter on skewers."

"We've nothing, and no error, nothing; and play hell as you like, it
doesn't help."

"Talk about rotten quarters! Three houses with nothing inside but
draughts and damp."

"No good having any of the filthy here, you might as well have only
the skin of a bob in your purse, as long as there's nothing to buy."

"You might be a Rothschild, or even a military tailor, but what
use'd your brass be?"

"Yesterday there was a bit of a cat mewing round where the 7th are.
I feel sure they've eaten it."

"Yes, there was; you could see its ribs like rocks on the
sea-shore."

"There were some chaps," says Blaire, "who bustled about when they
got here and managed to find a few bottles of common wine at the
bacca-shop at the corner of the street."

"Ah, the swine! Lucky devils to be sliding that down their necks."

"It was muck, all the same, it'd make your cup as black as your
baccy-pipe."

"There are some, they say, who've swallowed a fowl."

"Damn," says Fouillade.

"I've hardly had a bite. I had a sardine left, and a little tea in
the bottom of a bag that I chewed up with some sugar."

"You can't even have a bit of a drunk--it's off the map."

"And that isn't enough either, even when you're not a big eater and
you're got a communication trench as flat as a pancake."

"One meal in two days--a yellow mess, shining like gold, no broth
and no meat--everything left behind."

"And worst of all we've nothing to light a pipe with."

"True, and that's misery. I haven't a single match. I had several
bits of ends, but they've gone. I've hunted in vain through all the
pockets of my flea-case--nix. As for buying them it's hopeless, as
you say."

"I've got the head of a match that I'm keeping." It is a real
hardship indeed, and the sight is pitiful of the poilus who cannot
light pipe or cigarette but put them away in their pockets and
stroll in resignation. By good fortune, Tirloir has his petrol
pipe-lighter and it still contains a little spirit. Those who are
aware of it gather round him, bringing their pipes packed and cold.
There is not even any paper to light, and the flame itself must be
used until the remaining spirit in its tiny insect's belly is
burned.

As for me, I've been lucky, and I see Paradis wandering about, his
kindly face to the wind, grumbling and chewing a bit of wood.
"Tiens," I say to him, "take this."

"A box of matches!" he exclaims amazed, looking at it as one looks
at a jewel. "Egad! That's capital! Matches!"

A moment later we see him lighting his pipe, his face saucily
sideways and splendidly crimsoned by the reflected flame, and
everybody shouts, "Paradis' got some matches!"

Towards evening I meet Paradis near the ruined triangle of a
house-front at the corner of the two streets of this most miserable
among villages.

He beckons to me. "Hist!" He has a curious and rather awkward air.

"I say," he says to me affectionately, but looking at his feet, "a
bit since, you chucked me a box of flamers. Well, you're going to
get a bit of your own back for it. Here!"

He puts something in my hand. "Be careful!" he whispers, "it's
fragile!"

Dazzled by the resplendent purity of his present. hardly even daring
to believe my eyes, I see--an egg!






16

An Idyll





"REALLY and truly," said Paradis, my neighbor in the ranks, "believe
me or not, I'm knocked out--I've never before been so paid on a
march as I have been with this one, this evening."

His feet were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the
burden of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline
seemed almost fantastic. Twice he tripped and stumbled.

Paradis is tough. But he had been running up and down the trench all
night as liaison man while the others were sleeping, so he had good
reason to be exhausted and to growl "Quoi? These kilometers must be
made of india-rubber, there's no way out of it."

Every three steps he hoisted his knapsack roughly up with a hitch of
his hips, and panted under its dragging; and all the heap that he
made with his bundles tossed and creaked like an overloaded wagon.

"We're there," said a non-com.

Non-coms. always say that, on every occasion. But--in spite of the
non-com.'s declaration--we were really arriving in a twilight
village which seemed to be drawn in white chalk and heavy strokes of
black upon the blue paper of the sky, where the sable silhouette of
the church--a pointed tower flanked by two turrets more slender and
more sharp--was that of a tall cypress.

But the soldier, even when he enters the village where he is to be
quartered, has not reached the end of his troubles. It rarely
happens that either the squad or the section actually lodges in the
place assigned to them, and this by reason of misunderstandings and
cross purposes which tangle and disentangle themselves on the spot;
and it is only after several quarter-hours of tribulation that each
man is led to his actual shelter of the moment.

So after the usual wanderings we were admitted to our night's
lodging--a roof supported by four posts, and with the four quarters
of the compass for its walls. But it was a good roof--an advantage
which we could appreciate. It was already sheltering a cart and a
plow, and we settled ourselves by them. Paradis, who had fumed and
complained without ceasing during the hour we had spent in tramping
to and fro, threw down his knapsack and then himself, and stayed
there awhile, weary to the utmost, protesting that his limbs were
benumbed, that the soles of his feet were painful, and indeed all
the rest of him.

But now the house to which our hanging roof was subject, the house
which stood just in front of us, was lighted up. Nothing attracts a
soldier in the gray monotony of evening so much as a window whence
beams the star of a lamp.

"Shall we have a squint?" proposed Volpatte.

"So be it," said Paradis. He gets up gradually, and hobbling with
weariness, steers himself towards the golden window that has
appeared in the gloom, and then towards the door. Volpatte follows
him, and I Volpatte.

We enter, and ask the old man who has let us in and whose twinkling
head is as threadbare as an old hat, if he has any wine to sell.

"No," replies the old man, shaking his head, where a little white
fluff crops out in places.

"No beer? No coffee? Anything at all--"

"No, mes amis, nothing of anything. We don't belong here; we're
refugees, you know."

"Then seeing there's nothing, we'll be off." We right-about face. At
least we have enjoyed for a moment the warmth which pervades the
house and a sight of the lamp. Already Volpatte has gained the
threshold and his back is disappearing in the darkness.

But I espy an old woman, sunk in the depths of a chair in the other
corner of the kitchen, who appears to have some busy occupation.

I pinch Paradis' arm. "There's the belle of the house. Shall we pay
our addresses to her?"

Paradis makes a gesture of lordly indifference. He has lost interest
in women--all those he has seen for a year and a half were not for
him; and moreover, even when they would like to be his, he is
equally uninterested.

"Young or old--pooh!" he says to me, beginning to yawn. For want of
something to do and to lengthen the leaving, he goes up to the
goodwife. "Good-evening, gran'ma," he mumbles, finishing his yawn.

"Good-evening, mes enfants," quavers the old dame. So near, we see
her in detail. She is shriveled, bent and bowed in her old bones,
and the whole of her face is white as the dial of a clock.

And what is she doing? Wedged between her chair and the edge of the
table she is trying to clean some boots. It is a heavy task for her
infantile hands; their movements are uncertain, and her strokes with
the brush sometimes go astray. The boots, too, are very dirty
indeed.

Seeing that we are watching her, she whispers to us that she must
polish them well, and this evening too, for they are her little
girl's boots, who is a dressmaker in the town and goes off first
thing in the morning.

Paradis has stooped to look at the boots more closely, and suddenly
he puts his hand out towards them. "Drop it, gran'ma; I'll spruce up
your lass's trotter-cases for you in three secs."

The old woman lodges an objection by shaking her head and her
shoulders. But Paradis takes the boots with authority, while the
grandmother, paralyzed by her weakness, argues the question and
opposes us with shadowy protest.

Paradis has taken a boot in each hand; he holds them gingerly and
looks at them for a moment, and you would even say that he was
squeezing them a little.

"Aren't they small!" he says in a voice which is not what we hear in
the usual way.

He has secured the brushes as well, and sets himself to wielding
them with zealous carefulness. I notice that he is smiling, with his
eyes fixed on his work.

Then, when the mud has gone from the boots, he takes some polish on
the end of the double-pointed brush and caresses them with it
intently.

They are dainty boots--quite those of a stylish young lady; rows of
little buttons shine on them.

"Not a single button missing," he whispers to me, and there is pride
in his tone.

He is no longer sleepy; he yawns no more. On the contrary, his lips
are tightly closed; a gleam of youth and spring-time lights up his
face; and he who was on the point of going to sleep seems just to
have woke up.

And where the polish has bestowed a beautiful black his fingers move
over the body of the boot, which opens widely in the upper part and
betrays--ever such a little--the lower curves of the leg. His
fingers, so skilled in polishing, are rather awkward all the same as
they turn the boots over and turn them again, as he smiles at them
and ponders--profoundly and afar--while the old woman lifts her arms
in the air and calls me to witness "What a very kind soldier!" he
is.

It is finished. The boots are cleaned and finished off in style;
they are like mirrors. Nothing is left to do.

He puts them on the edge of the table, very carefully, as if they
were saintly relics; then at last his hands let them go. But his
eyes do not at once leave them. He looks at them, and then lowering
his head, he looks at his own boots. I remember that while he made
this comparison the great lad--a hero by destiny, a Bohemian, a
monk--smiled once more with all his heart.

The old woman was showing signs of activity in the depths of her
chair; she had an idea. "I'll tell her! She shall thank you herself,
monsieur! Hey, Josephine!" she cried, turning towards a door.

But Paradis stopped her with an expansive gesture which I thought
magnificent. "No, it's not worth while, gran'ma; leave her where she
is. We're going. We won't trouble her, allez!"

Such decision sounded in his voice that it carried authority, and
the old woman obediently sank into inactivity and held her peace.

We went away to our bed under the wall-less roof, between the arms
of the plow that was waiting for us. And then Paradis began again to
yawn; but by the light of the candle in our crib, a full minute
later, I saw that the happy smile remained yet on his face.






17

In the Sap





IN the excitement of a distribution of letters from which the squad
were returning--some with the delight of a letter, some with the
semi-delight of a postcard, and others with a new load (speedily
reassumed) of expectation and hope--a comrade comes with a
brandished newspaper to tell us an amazing story--"Tu sais, the
weasel-faced ancient at Gauchin?"

"The old boy who was treasure-seeking?"

"Well, he's found it!"

"Gerraway!"

"It's just as I tell you, you great lump! What would you like me to
say to you? Mass? Don't know it. Anyway, the yard of his place has
been bombed, and a chest full of money was turned up out of the
ground near a wall. He got his treasure full on the back. And now
the parson's quietly cut in and talks about claiming credit for the
miracle"

We listen open-mouthed. "A treasure--well! well! The old bald-head!"

The sudden revelation plunges us in an abyss of reflection. "And to
think how damned sick we were of the old cackler when he made such a
song about his treasure and dinned it into our ears!"

"We were right enough down there, you remember, when we were saying
'One never knows.' Didn't guess how near we were to being right,
either."

"All the same, there are some things you can be sure of," says
Farfadet, who as soon as Gauchin was mentioned had remained dreaming
and distant, as though a lovely face was smiling on him. "But as for
this," he added, "I'd never have believed it either! Shan't I find
him stuck up, the old ruin, when I go back there after the war!"

* * * * * *

"They want a willing man to help the sappers with a job," says the
big adjutant.

"Not likely!" growl the men, without moving.

"It'll be of use in relieving the boys," the adjutant goes on.

With that the grumbling ceases, and several heads are raised.
"Here!" says Lamuse.

"Get into your harness, big 'un, and come with me." Lamuse buckles
on his knapsack, rolls up his blanket, and fetters his pouches.
Since his seizure of unlucky affection was allayed, he has become
more melancholy than before, and although a sort of fatality makes
him continually stouter, he has become engrossed and isolated, and
rarely speaks.

In the evening something comes along the trench, rising and falling
according to the lumps and holes in the ground; a shape that seems
in the shadows to be swimming, that outspreads its arms sometimes,
as though appealing for help. It is Lamuse.

He is among us again, covered with mold and mud. He trembles and
streams with sweat, as one who is afraid. His lips stir, and he
gasps, before they can shape a word.

"Well, what is there?" we ask him vainly.

He collapses in a corner among us and prostrates himself. We offer
him wine, and he refuses it with a sign. Then he turns towards me
and beckons me with a movement of his head.

When I am by him he whispers to me, very low, and as if in church,
"I have seen Eudoxie again." He gasps for breath, his chest wheezes,
and with his eyeballs fast fixed upon a nightmare, he says, "She was
putrid."

"It was the place we'd lost," Lamuse went on, "and that the
Colonials took again with the bayonet ten days ago.

"First we made a hole for the sap, and I was in at it. since I was
scooping more than the others I found myself in front. The others
were widening and making solid behind. But behold I find a jumble of
beams. I'd lit on an old trench, caved in, 'vidently; half caved
in--there was some space and room. In the middle of those stumps of
wood all mixed together that I was lifting away one by one from in
front of me, there was something like a big sandbag in height.
upright, and something on the top of it hanging down.

"And behold a plank gives way, and the queer sack falls on me, with
its weight on top. I was pegged down, and the smell of a corpse
filled my throat--on the top of the bundle there was a head, and it
was the hair that I'd seen hanging down.

"You understand, one couldn't see very well; but I recognized the
hair 'cause there isn't any other like it in the world, and then the
rest of the face, all stove in and moldy, the neck pulped, and all
the lot dead for a month perhaps. It was Eudoxie, I tell you.

"Yes, it was the woman I could never go near before, you know--that
I only saw a long way off and couldn't ever touch, same as diamonds.
She used to run about everywhere, you know. She used even to wander
in the lines. One day she must have stopped a bullet, and stayed
there, dead and lost, until the chance of this sap.

"You clinch the position? I was forced to hold her up with one arm
as well as I could, and work with the other. She was trying to fall
on me with all her weight. Old man, she wanted to kiss me, and I
didn't want--it was terrible. She seemed to be saying to me, 'You
wanted to kiss me, well then, come, come now!' She had on her--she
had there, fastened on, the remains of a bunch of flowers, and that
was rotten, too, and the posy stank in my nose like the corpse of
some little beast. "I had to take her in my arms, in both of them,
and turn gently round so that I could put her down on the other
side. The place was so narrow and pinched that as we turned, for a
moment, I hugged her to my breast and couldn't help it. with all my
strength, old chap, as I should have hugged her once on a time if
she'd have let me.

"I've been half an hour cleaning myself from the touch of her and
the smell that she breathed on me in spite of me and in spite of
herself. Ah, lucky for me that I'm as done up as a wretched
cart-horse!"

He turns over on his belly, clenches his fists, and slumbers, with
his face buried in the ground and his dubious dream of passion and
corruption.






18

A Box of Matches





IT is five o'clock in the evening. Three men are seen moving in the
bottom of the gloomy trench. Around their extinguished fire in the
dirty excavation they are frightful to see, black and sinister. Rain
and negligence have put their fire out, and the four cooks are
looking at the corpses of brands that are shrouded in ashes and the
stumps of wood whence the flame has flown.

Volpatte staggers up to the group and throws down the black mass
that he had on his shoulder. "I've pulled it out of a dug-out where
it won't show much."

"We have wood," says Blaire, "but we've got to light it. Otherwise,
how are we going to cook this cab-horse?"

"It's a fine piece," wails a dark-faced man, "thin flank. In my
belief, that's the best bit of the beast, the flank."

"Fire?" Volpatte objects, "there are no more matches, no more
anything."

"We must have fire," growls Poupardin, whose indistinct bulk has the
proportions of a bear as he rolls and sways in the dark depths of
our cage.

"No two ways about it, we've got to have it," Pepin agrees.
He is coming out of a dug-out like a sweep out of a chimney. His
gray mass emerges and appears, like night upon evening.

"Don't worry; I shall get some," declares Blaire in a concentrated
tone of angry decision. He has not been cook long, and is keen to
show himself quite equal to adverse conditions in the exercise of
his functions.

He spoke as Martin Cesar used to speak when he was alive. His
aim is to resemble the great legendary figure of the cook who always
found ways for a fire, just as others, among the non-coms., would
fain imitate Napoleon.

"I shall go if it's necessary and fetch every bit of wood there is
at Battalion H.Q. I shall go and requisition the colonel's
matches--I shall go--"

"Let's go and forage." Poupardin leads the way. His face is like the
bottom of a saucepan that the fire has gradually befouled. As it is
cruelly cold, he is wrapped up all over. He wears a cape which is
half goatskin and half sheepskin, half brown and half whitish, and
this twofold skin of tints geometrically cut makes him like some
strange occult animal.

Pepin has a cotton cap so soiled and so shiny with grease
that it might be made of black silk. Volpatte, inside his Balaklava
and his fleeces, resembles a walking tree-trunk. A square opening
betrays a yellow face at the top of the thick and heavy bark of the
mass he makes, which is bifurcated by a couple of legs.

"Let's look up the 10th. They've always got the needful. They're on
the Pylones road, beyond the Boyau-Neuf."

The four alarming objects get under way, cloud-shape, in the trench
that unwinds itself sinuously before them like a blind alley,
unsafe, unlighted, and unpaved. It is uninhabited, too, in this
part, being a gangway between the second lines and the first lines.

In the dusty twilight two Moroccans meet the fire-questing cooks.
One has the skin of a black boot and the other of a yellow shoe.
Hope gleams in the depths of the cooks' hearts.

"Matches, boys?"

"Napoo," replies the black one, and his smile reveals his long
crockery-like teeth in his cigar-colored mouth of moroccan leather.

In his turn the yellow one advances and asks, "Tobacco? A bit of
tobacco?" And be holds out his greenish sleeve and his great hard
paw, in which the cracks are full of brown dirt, and the nails
purplish.

Pepin growls, rummages in his clothes, and pulls out a pinch
of tobacco, mixed with dust, which he hands to the sharpshooter.

A little farther they meet a sentry who is half asleep--in the
middle of the evening--on a heap of loose earth. The drowsy soldier
says, "It's to the right, and then again to the right, and then
straight forward. Don't go wrong about it."

They march--for a long time. "We must have come a long way," says
Volpatte, after half an hour of fruitless paces and encloistered
loneliness.

"I say, we're going downhill a hell of a lot, don't you think?" asks
Blaire.

"Don't worry, old duffer," scoffs Pepin, "but if you've got
cold feet you can leave us to it."

Still we tramp on in the falling night. The ever-empty trench--a
desert of terrible length--has taken a shabby and singular
appearance. The parapets are in ruins; earthslides have made the
ground undulate in hillocks.

An indefinite uneasiness lays hold of the four huge fire-hunters,
and increases as night overwhelms them in this monstrous road.

Pepin, who is leading just now, stands fast and holds up his
hand as a signal to halt. "Footsteps," they say in a sobered tone.

Then, and in the heart of them, they are afraid. It was a mistake
for them all to leave their shelter for so long. They are to blame.
And one never knows.

"Get in there, quick, quick!" says Pepin, pointing to a
right-angled cranny on the ground level.

By the test of a hand, the rectangular shadow is proved to be the
entry to a funk-hole. They crawl in singly; and the last one,
impatient, pushes the others; they become an involuntary carpet in
the dense darkness of the hole.

A sound of steps and of voices becomes distinct and draws nearer.
From the mass of the four men who tightly hung up the burrow,
tentative hands are put out at a venture. All at once Pepin
murmurs in a stifled voice, "What's this?"

"What?" ask the others, pressed and wedged against him.

"Clips!" says Pepin under his breath, "Boche cartridge-clips
on the shelf! We're in the Boche trench!"

"Let's hop it." Three men make a jump to get out.

"Look out, bon Dieu! Don't stir!--footsteps--"

They hear some one walking, with the quick step of a solitary man.
They keep still and bold their breath. With their eyes fixed on the
ground level, they see the darkness moving on the right, and then a
shadow with legs detaches itself, approaches, and passes. The shadow
assumes an outline. It is topped by a helmet covered with a cloth
and rising to a point. There is no other sound than that of his
passing feet.

Hardly has the German gone by when the four cooks, with no concerted
plan and with a single movement, burst forth, jostling each other,
run like madmen, and hurl themselves on him.

"Kamerad, messieurs!" he says.

But the blade of a knife gleams and disappears. The man collapses as
if he would plunge into the ground. Pepin seizes the helmet
as the Boche is failing and keeps it in his hand.

"Let's leg it," growls the voice of Poupardin.

"Got to search him first!"

They lift him and turn him over, and set the soft, damp and warm
body up again. Suddenly he coughs.

"He isn't dead!"--"Yes, he is dead; that's the air."

They shake him by the pockets; with hasty breathing the four black
men stoop over their task. "The helmet's mine," says Pepin.
"It was me that knifed him, I want the helmet."

They tear from the body its pocket-book of still warm papers, its
field-glass, purse, and leggings.

"Matches!" shouts Blaire, shaking a box, "he's got some!"

"Ah, the fool that you are!" hisses Volpatte.

"Now let's be off like hell." They pile the body in a corner and
break into a run, prey to a sort of panic, and regardless of the row
their disordered flight makes.

"It's this way!--This way!--Hurry, lads--for all you're worth!"

Without speaking they dash across the maze of the strangely empty
trench that seems to have no end.

"My wind's gone," says Blaire, "I'm--" He staggers and stops.

"Come on, buck up, old chap," gasps Pepin, hoarse and
breathless. He takes him by the sleeve and drags him forward like a
stubborn shaft-horse.

'We're right!" says Poupardin suddenly. "Yes, I remember that tree.
It's the Pylones road!"

"Ah!" wails Blaire, whose breathing is shaking him like an engine.
He throws himself forward with a last impulse--and sits down on the
ground.

"Halt!" cries a sentry--"Good Lord!" he stammers as he sees the four
poilus. "Where the--where are you coming from, that way?"

They laugh, jump about like puppets, full-blooded and streaming with
perspiration, blacker than ever in the night. The German officer's
helmet is gleaming in the hands of Pepin. "Oh, Christ!"
murmurs the sentry, with gaping mouth, "but what's been up?"

An exuberant reaction excites and bewitches them. All talk at once.
In haste and confusion they act again the drama which hardly yet
they realize is over. They had gone wrong when they left the sleepy
sentry and had taken the International Trench, of which a part is
ours and another part German. Between the French and German sections
there is no barricade or division. There is merely a sort of neutral
zone, at the two ends of which sentries watch ceaselessly. No doubt
the German watcher was not at his post, or likely he hid himself
when he saw the four shadows, or perhaps be doubled back and had not
time to bring up reinforcements. Or perhaps, too, the German officer
had strayed too far ahead in the neutral zone. In short, one
understands what happened without understanding it.

"The funny part of it," says Pepin, "is that we knew all
about that, and never thought to be careful about it when we set
off."

"We were looking for matches," says Volpatte.

"And we've got some!" cries Pepin. "You've not lost the
flamers, old broomstick?"

"No damned fear!" says Blaire; "Boche matches are better stuff than
ours. Besides, they're all we've got to light our fire! Lose my box?
Let any one try to pinch it off me!"

"We're behind time--the soup-water'll be freezing. Hurry up, so far.
Afterwards there'll be a good yarn to tell in the sewer where the
boys are, about what we did to the Boches."






19

Bombardment





WE are in the flat country, a vast mistiness, but above it is dark
blue. The end of the night is marked by a little falling snow which
powders our shoulders and the folds in our sleeves. We are marching
in fours, hooded. We seem in the turbid twilight to be the wandering
survivors of one Northern district who are trekking to another.

We have followed a road and have crossed the ruins of
Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. We have had confused glimpses of its whitish
heaps of houses and the dim spider-webs of its suspended roofs. The
village is so long that although full night buried us in it we saw
its last buildings beginning to pale in the frost of dawn. Through
the grating of a cellar on the edge of this petrified ocean's waves,
we made out the fire kept going by the custodians of the dead town.
We have paddled in swampy fields, lost ourselves in silent places
where the mud seized us by the feet, we have dubiously regained our
balance and our bearings again on another road, the one which leads
from Carency to Souchez. The tall bordering poplars are shivered and
their trunks mangled; in one place the road is an enormous colonnade
of trees destroyed. Then, marching with us on both sides, we see
through the shadows ghostly dwarfs of trees, wide-cloven like
spreading palms; botched and jumbled into round blocks or long
strips; doubled upon themselves, as if they knelt. From time to time
our march is disordered and bustled by the yielding of a swamp. The
road becomes a marsh which we cross on our heels, while our feet
make the sound of sculling. Planks have been laid in it here and
there. Where they have so far sunk in the mud as to proffer their
edges to us we slip on them. Sometimes there is enough water to
float them, and then under the weight of a man they splash and go
under, and the man stumbles or falls, with frenzied imprecations.

It must be five o'clock. The stark and affrighting scene unfolds
itself to our eyes, but it is still encircled by a great fantastic
ring of mist and of darkness. We go on and on without pause, and
come to a place where we can make out a dark hillock, at the foot of
which there seems to be some lively movement of human beings.

"Advance by twos," says the leader of the detachment. "Let each team
of two take alternately a plank and a hurdle." We load ourselves up.
One of the two in each couple assumes the rifle of his partner as
well as his own. The other with difficulty shifts and pulls out from
the pile a long plank, muddy and slippery, which weighs full eighty
pounds, or a hurdle of leafy branches as big as a door, which he can
only just keep on his back as he bends forward with his hands aloft
and grips its edges.

We resume our march, very slowly and very ponderously, scattered
over the now graying road, with complaints and heavy curses which
the effort strangles in our throats. After about a hundred yards,
the two men of each team exchange loads, so that after two hundred
yards, in spite of the bitter blenching breeze of early morning, all
but the non-coms. are running with sweat.

Suddenly a vivid star expands down yonder in the uncertain direction
that we are taking--a rocket. Widely it lights a part of the sky
with its milky nimbus, blots out the stars, and then falls
gracefully, fairy-like.

There is a swift light opposite us over there; a flash and a
detonation. It is a shell! By the flat reflection that the explosion
instantaneously spreads over the lower sky we see a ridge clearly
outlined in front of us from east to west, perhaps half a mile away.

That ridge is ours--so much of it as we can see from here and up to
the top of it, where our troops are. On the other slope, a hundred
yards from our first line, is the first German line. The shell fell
on the summit, in our lines; it is the others who are firing.
Another shell another and yet another plant trees of faintly violet
light on the top of the rise, and each of them dully illumines the
whole of the horizon.

Soon there is a sparkling of brilliant stars and a sudden jungle of
fiery plumes on the hill; and a fairy mirage of blue and white hangs
lightly before our eyes in the full gulf of night.

Those among us who must devote the whole buttressed power of their
arms and legs to prevent their greasy loads from sliding off their
backs and to prevent themselves from sliding to the ground, these
neither see nor hear anything. The others, sniffing and shivering
with cold, wiping their noses with limp and sodden handkerchiefs,
watch and remark, cursing the obstacles in the way with fragments of
profanity. "It's like watching fireworks," they say.

And to complete the illusion of a great operatic scene, fairy-like
but sinister, before which our bent and black party crawls and
splashes, behold a red star, and then a green; then a sheaf of red
fire, very much tardier. In our ranks, as the available half of our
pairs of eyes watch the display, we cannot help murmuring in idle
tones of popular admiration, "Ah, a red one!"--"Look, a green one!"
It is the Germans who are sending up signals, and our men as well
who are asking for artillery support.

Our road turns and climbs again as the day at last decides to
appear. Everything looks dirty. A layer of stickiness, pearl-gray
and white, covers the road, and around it the real world makes a
mournful appearance. Behind us we leave ruined Souchez, whose houses
are only flat heaps of rubbish and her trees but humps of
bramble-like slivers. We plunge into a hole on our left, the
entrance to the communication trench. We let our loads fall in a
circular enclosure prepared for them, and both hot and frozen we
settled in the trench and wait our hands abraded, wet, and stiff
with cramp.

Buried in our holes up to the chin, our chests heaving against the
solid bulk of the ground that protects us, we watch the dazzling and
deepening drama develop. The bombardment is redoubled. The trees of
light on the ridge have melted into hazy parachutes in the pallor of
dawn, sickly heads of Medusae with points of fire; then, more
sharply defined as the day expands, they become bunches of
smoke-feathers, ostrich feathers white and gray, which come suddenly
to life on the jumbled and melancholy soil of Hill 119, five or six
hundred yards in front of us, and then slowly fade away. They are
truly the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud, circling as one
and thundering together. On the flank of the bill we see a party of
men running to earth. One by one they disappear, swallowed up in the
adjoining anthills.

Now, one can better make out the form of our "guests." At each shot
a tuft of sulphurous white underlined in black forms sixty yards up
in the air, unfolds and mottles itself, and we catch in the
explosion the whistling of the charge of bullets that the yellow
cloud hurls angrily to the ground. It bursts in sixfold squalls, one
after another--bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It is the 77 mm.
gun.

We disdain the 77 mm. shrapnel, in spite of the fact that Blesbois
was killed by one of them three days ago. They nearly always burst
too high. Barque explains it to us, although we know it well: "One's
chamber-pot protects one's nut well enough against the bullets. So
they can destroy your shoulder and damn well knock you down, but
they don't spread you about. Naturally, you've got to be fly, all
the same. Got to be careful you don't lift your neb in the air as
long as they're buzzing about, nor put your hand out to see if it's
raining. Now, our 75 mm.--"

"There aren't only the 77's," Mesnil Andre broke in, "there's
all damned sorts. Spell those out for me--" Those are shrill and
cutting whistles, trembling or rattling; and clouds of all shapes
gather on the slopes yonder whose vastness shows through them,
slopes where our men are in the depths of the dug-outs. Gigantic
plumes of faint fire mingle with huge tassels of steam, tufts that
throw out straight filaments, smoky feathers that expand as they
fall--quite white or greenish-gray, black or copper with gleams of
gold, or as if blotched with ink.

The two last explosions are quite near. Above the battered ground
they take shape like vast balls of black and tawny dust; and as they
deploy and leisurely depart at the wind's will, having finished
their task, they have the outline of fabled dragons.

Our line of faces on the level of the ground turns that way, and we
follow them with our eyes from the bottom of the trench in the
middle of this country peopled by blazing and ferocious apparitions,
these fields that the sky has crushed.

"Those, they're the 150 mm. howitzers."--"They're the 210's,
calf-head."--"There go the regular guns, too; the hogs! Look at that
one!" It was a shell that burst on the ground and threw up earth and
debris in a fan-shaped cloud of darkness. Across the cloven land it
looked like the frightful spitting of some volcano, piled up in the
bowels of the earth.

A diabolical uproar surrounds us. We are conscious of a sustained
crescendo, an incessant multiplication of the universal frenzy. A
hurricane of hoarse and hollow banging, of raging clamor, of
piercing and beast-like screams, fastens furiously with tatters of
smoke upon the earth where we are buried up to our necks, and the
wind of the shells seems to set it heaving and pitching.

"Look at that," bawls Barque, "and me that said they were short of
munitions!"

"Oh, la, la! We know all about that! That and the other fudge the
newspapers squirt all over us!"

A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That
slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens
the heart.

"The coffee-mill! [note 1] One of ours, listen. The shots come
regularly, while the Boches' haven't got the same length of time
between the shots; they go
crack--crack-crack-crack--crack-crack--crack--"

"Don't cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn't an unsewing-machine at
all; it's a motor-cycle on the road to 31 dugout, away yonder."

"Well, I think it's a chap up aloft there, having a look round from
his broomstick," chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and
sweeps the firmament in search of an aeroplane.

A discussion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and
that's all. One tries in vain to become familiar with all those
diverse disturbances. It even happened the other day in the wood
that a whole section mistook for the hoarse howl of a shell the
first notes of a neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray.

"I say, there's a good show of sausages in the air this morning,"
says Lamuse. Lifting our eyes, we count them.

"There are eight sausages on our side and eight on the Boches',"
says Cocon, who has already counted them.

There are, in fact, at regular intervals along the horizon, opposite
the distance-dwindled group of captive enemy balloons, the eight
long hovering eyes of the army, buoyant and sensitive, and joined to
the various headquarters by living threads.

"They see us as we see them. how the devil can one escape from that
row of God Almighties up there?"

There's our reply!

Suddenly, behind our backs, there bursts the sharp and deafening
stridor of the 75's. Their increasing crackling thunder arouses and
elates us. We shout with our guns, and look at each other without
hearing our shouts--except for the curiously piercing voice that
comes from Barque's great mouth--amid the rolling of that fantastic
drum whose every note is the report of a cannon.

Then we turn our eyes ahead and outstretch our necks, and on the top
of the hill we see the still higher silhouette of a row of black
infernal trees whose terrible roots are striking down into the
invisible slope where the enemy cowers.

While the "75" battery continues its barking a hundred yards behind
us--the sharp anvil-blows of a huge hammer, followed by a dizzy
scream of force and fury--a gigantic gurgling dominates the devilish
oratorio; that, also, is coming from our side. "It's a gran'pa, that
one!"

The shell cleaves the air at perhaps a thousand yards above us; the
voice of its gun covers all as with a pavilion of resonance. The
sound of its travel is sluggish, and one divines a projectile
bigger-boweled, more enormous than the others. We can hear it
passing and declining in front with the ponderous and increasing
vibration of a train that enters a station under brakes; then, its
heavy whine sounds fainter. We watch the hill opposite. and after
several seconds it is covered by a salmon-pink cloud that the wind
spreads over one-half of the horizon. "It's a 220 mm."

"One can see them," declares Volpatte, "those shells, when they come
out of the gun. If you're in the right line, you can even see them a
good long away from the gun."

Another follows: "There! Look, look! Did you see that one? You
didn't look quick enough, you missed it. Get a move on! Look,
another! Did you see it?"

"I did not see it."--"Ass! Got to be a bedstead for you to see it!
Look, quick, that one, there! Did you see it, unlucky
good-for-nothing?"--" I saw it; is that all?"

Some have made out a small black object, slender and pointed as a
blackbird with folded wings, pricking a wide curve down from the
zenith.

"That weighs 240 lb., that one, my old bug," says Volpatte proudly,
"and when that drops on a funk-hole it kills everybody inside it.
Those that aren't picked off by the explosion are struck dead by the
wind of it, or they're gas-poisoned before they can say 'ouf!'"

"The 270 mm. shell can be seen very well, too--talk about a bit of
iron--when the howitzer sends it up--allez, off you go!"

"And the 155 Rimailho, too; but you can't see that one because it
goes too straight and too far; the more you look for it the more it
vanishes before your eyes."

In a stench of sulphur amid black powder, of burned stuffs and
calcined earth which roams in sheets about the country, all the
menagerie is let loose and gives battle. Bellowings, roarings,
growlings, strange and savage; feline caterwaulings that fiercely
rend your ears and search your belly, or the long-drawn piercing
hoot like the siren of a ship in distress. At times, even, something
like shouts cross each other in the air-currents, with curious
variation of tone that make the sound human. The country is bodily
lifted in places and falls back again. From one end of the horizon
to the other it seems to us that the earth itself is raging with
storm and tempest.

And the greatest guns, far away and still farther, diffuse growls
much subdued and smothered, but you know the strength of them by the
displacement of air which comes and raps you on the ear.

Now, behold a heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers
over the bombarded region and draws out in every direction. This
touch of strangely incongruous color in the picture summons
attention, and all we encaged prisoners turn our faces towards the
hideous outcrop.

"Gas, probably. Let's have our masks ready."--"The hogs!"

"They're unfair tricks, those," says Farfadet.

"They're what?" asks Barque jeeringly.

"Why, yes, they're dirty dodges, those gases--"

"You make me tired," retorts Barque, "with your fair ways and your
unfair ways. When you've seen men squashed, cut in two, or divided
from top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies
turned inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into
the chest as if by a blow with a club, and in place of the head a
bit of neck, oozing currant jam of brains all over the chest and
back--you've seen that and yet you can say 'There are clean ways!'"

"Doesn't alter the fact that the shell is allowed, it's
recognized--"

"Ah, la, la! I'll tell you what--you make me blubber just as much as
you make me laugh!" And he turns his back.

"Hey, look out, boys!"

We strain our eyes, and one of us has thrown himself flat on the
ground; others look instinctively and frowning towards the shelter
that we have not time to reach. and during these two seconds each
one bends his head. It is a grating noise as of huge scissors which
comes near and nearer to us, and ends at last with a ringing crash
of unloaded iron.

That ore fell not far from us--two hundred yards away, perhaps. We
crouch in the bottom of the trench and remain doubled up while the
place where we are is lashed by a shower of little fragments.

"Don't want this in my tummy, even from that distance," says
Paradis, extracting from the earth of the trench wall a morsel that
has just lodged there. It is like a bit of coke, bristling with
edged and pointed facets, and he dances it in his hand so as not to
burn himself.

There is a hissing noise. Paradis sharply bows his head and we
follow suit. "The fuse!--it has gone over." The shrapnel fuse goes
up and then comes down vertically; but that of the percussion shell
detaches itself from the broken mass after the explosion and usually
abides buried at the point of contact, but at other times it flies
off at random like a big red-hot pebble. One must beware of it. It
may hurl itself on you a very long time after the detonation and by
incredible paths, passing over the embankment and plunging into the
cavities.

"Nothing so piggish as a fuse. It happened to me once--"

"There's worse things," broke in Bags of the 11th, "The Austrian
shells, the 130's and the 74's. I'm afraid of them. They're
nickel-plated, they say, but what I do know, seeing I've been there,
is they come so quick you can't do anything to dodge them. You no
sooner hear em snoring than they burst on you.

"The German 105's, neither, you haven't hardly the time to flatten
yourself. I once got the gunners to tell me all about them."

"I tell you, the shells from the naval guns, you haven't the time to
hear 'em. Got to pack yourself up before they come."

"And there's that new shell, a dirty devil, that breaks wind after
it's dodged into the earth and out of it again two or three times in
the space of six yards. When I know there's one of them about, I
want to go round the corner. I remember one time--"

"That's all nothing, my lads," said the new sergeant, stopping on
his way past, "you ought to see what they chucked us at Verdun,
where I've come from. Nothing but whoppers, 380's and 420's and
244's. When you've been shelled down there you know all about
it--the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked
and burst in even when they've three thicknesses of beams, all the
road-crossings sprinkled, the roads blown into the air and changed
into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted
together as though shoveled up. You could see thirty chaps laid out
by one shot at the cross-roads; you could see fellows whirling
around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of
trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left.
You could see one of these 380's go into a house at Verdun by the
roof, bore through two or three floors, and burst at the bottom, and
all the damn lot's got to go aloft; and in the fields whole
battalions would scatter and lie flat under the shower like poor
little defenseless rabbits. At every step on the ground in the
fields you'd got lumps as thick as your arm and as wide as that, and
it'd take four poilus to lift the lump of iron. The fields looked as
if they were full of rocks. And that went on without a halt for
months on end, months on end!" the sergeant repeated as he passed
on, no doubt to tell again the story of his souvenirs somewhere
else.

"Look, look, corporal, those chaps over there--are they soft in the
head?" On the bombarded position we saw dots of human beings emerge
hurriedly and run towards the explosions.

"They're gunners," said Bertrand; "as soon as a shell's burst they
sprint and rummage for the fuse is the hole, for the position of the
fuse gives the direction of its battery, you see, by the way it's
dug itself in; and as for the distance, you've only got to read
it--it's shown on the range-figures cut on the time-fuse which is
set just before firing."

"No matter--they're off their onions to go out under such shelling."

"Gunners, my boy," says a man of another company who was strolling
in the trench, "are either quite good or quite bad. Either they're
trumps or they're trash. I tell you--"

"That's true of all privates, what you're saying."

"Possibly; but I'm not talking to you about all privates; I'm
talking to you about gunners, and I tell you too that--"

"Hey, my lads! Better find a hole to dump yourselves in, before you
get one on the snitch!"

The strolling stranger carried his story away, and Cocon, who was in
a perverse mood, declared: "We can be doing our hair in the dug-out,
seeing it's rather boring outside."

"Look, they're sending torpedoes over there!" said Paradis,
pointing. Torpedoes go straight up, or very nearly so, like larks,
fluttering and rustling; then they stop, hesitate, and come straight
down again, heralding their fall in its last seconds by a "baby-cry"
that we know well. From here, the inhabitants of the ridge seem like
invisible players, lined up for a game with a ball.

"In the Argonne," says Lamuse, "my brother says in a letter that
they get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They're big heavy things,
fired off very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says,
and when they break wind they don't half make a shindy, he says."

"There's nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase
after you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very
trench, just scraping over the bank."

"Tiens, tiens, did you hear it?" A whistling was approaching us when
suddenly it ceased. The contrivance has not burst. "It's a shell
that cried off," Paradis asserts. And we strain our ears for the
satisfaction of hearing--or of not hearing--others.

Lamuse says: "All the fields and the roads and the villages about
here, they're covered with dud shells of all sizes--ours as well, to
say truth. The ground must be full of 'em, that you can't see. I
wonder how they'll go on, later, when the time comes to say, 'That's
enough of it, let's start work again.'"

And all the time, in a monotony of madness, the avalanche of fire
and iron goes on; shrapnel with its whistling explosion and its
overcharged heart of furious metal and the great percussion shells,
whose thunder is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly
into a wall, the thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling
down a declivity. The air is now glutted and viewless, it is crossed
and recrossed by heavy blasts, and the murder of the earth continues
all around, deeply and more deeply, to the limit of completion.

There are even other guns which now join in--they are ours. Their
report is like that of the 75's, but louder, and it has a prolonged
and resounding echo, like thunder reverberating among mountains.

"They're the long 120's. They're on the edge of the wood half a mile
away. Fine guns, old man, like gray-hounds. They're slender and
fine-nosed, those guns--you want to call them 'Madame.' They're not
like the 220's--they're all snout, like coal-scuttles, and spit
their shells out from the bottom upwards. The 120's get there just
the same, but among the teams of artillery they look like kids in
bassinettes."

Conversation languishes; here and there are yawns. The dimensions
and weight of this outbreak of the guns fatigue the mind. Our voices
flounder in it and are drowned.

"I've never seen anything like this for a bombardment," shouts
Barque.

"We always say that," replies Paradis.

"Just so," bawls Volpatte. "There's been talk of an attack lately; I
should say this is the beginning of something."

The others say simply, "Ah!"

Volpatte displays an intention of snatching a wink of sleep. He
settles himself on the ground with his back against one wall of the
trench and his feet buttressed against the other wall.

We converse together on divers subjects. Biquet tells the story of a
rat he has seen: "He was cheeky and comical, you know. I'd taken off
my trotter-cases, and that rat, he chewed all the edge of the uppers
into embroidery. Of course, I'd greased 'em."

Volpatte, who is now definitely out of action, moves and says, "I
can't get to sleep for your gabbling."

"You can't make me believe, old fraud," says Marthereau, "that you
can raise a single snore with a shindy like this all round you."

Volpatte replies with one.

* * * * * *

Fall in! March!

We are changing our spot. Where are they taking us to? We have no
idea. The most we know is that we are in reserve, and that they may
take us round to strengthen certain points in succession, or to
clear the communication trenches, in which the regulation of passing
troops is as complicated a job, if blocks and collisions are to be
avoided, as it is of the trains in a busy station. It is impossible
to make out the meaning of the immense maneuver in which the rolling
of our regiment is only that of a little wheel, nor what is going on
in all the huge area of the sector. But, lost in the network of
deeps where we go and come without end, weary, harassed and
stiff-jointed by prolonged halts, stupefied by noise and delay,
poisoned by smoke, we make out that our artillery is becoming more
and more active; the offensive seems to have changed places.

* * * * * *

Halt! A fire of intense and incredible fury was threshing the
parapets of the trench where we were halted at the moment: "Fritz is
going it strong; he's afraid of an attack, he's going dotty. Ah,
isn't he letting fly!"

A heavy hail was pouring over us, hacking terribly at atmosphere and
sky, scraping and skimming all the plain.

I looked through a loophole and saw a swift and strange vision. In
front of us, a dozen yards away at most, there were motionless forms
outstretched side by side--a row of mown-down soldiers--and the
countless projectiles that hurtled from all sides were riddling this
rank of the dead!

The bullets that flayed the soil in straight streaks amid raised
slender stems of cloud were perforating and ripping the bodies so
rigidly close to the ground, breaking the stiffened limbs, plunging
into the wan and vacant faces. bursting and bespattering the
liquefied eyes; and even did that file of corpses stir and budge out
of line under the avalanche.

We could hear the blunt sound of the dizzy copper points as they
pierced cloth and flesh, the sound of a furious stroke with a knife,
the harsh blow of a stick upon clothing. Above us rushed jets of
shrill whistling. with the declining and far more serious hum of
ricochets. And we bent our heads under the enormous flight of noises
and voices.

"Trench must be cleared--Gee up!" We leave this most infamous corner
of the battlefield where even the dead are torn, wounded, and slain
anew.

We turn towards the right and towards the rear. The communication
trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a
telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners.
Here there is a further halt. We mark time, and hear the artillery
observer shout his commands, which the telephonist buried beside him
picks up and repeats: "First gun, same sight; two-tenths to left;
three a minute!"

Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have
glimpsed for the space of the lightning's flash all the field of
battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the
morning. I saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind
seemed to be driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places
by a more pointed billow of smoke.

Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white,
the immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our
batteries are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with
short-lived flashes. Another minute, part of the field grew dark
under a steamy and whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.

Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like
cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of
torn paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim
rows of vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the
straight strokes of a written page--these are the roads and their
trees. Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and
forward and rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with
men.

We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human
points who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on
the plain in the horrible face of the flying firmament. It is
difficult to believe that each of those tiny spots is a living thing
with fragile and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full
of deep thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. One is
fascinated by this scattered dust of men as small as the stars in
the sky.

Poor unknowns, poor fellow-men, it is your turn to give battle.
Another time it will be ours. Perhaps to-morrow it will be ours to
feel the heavens burst over our heads or the earth open under our
feet, to be assailed by the prodigious plague of projectiles, to be
swept away by the blasts of a tornado a hundred thousand times
stronger than the tornado.

They urge us into the rearward shelters. For our eyes the field of
death vanishes. To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great
anvil of the clouds. The sound of universal destruction is still.
The squad surrounds itself with the familiar noises of life, and
sinks into the fondling littleness of the dug-outs.

______

[note 1] Military slang for machine-gun--Tr.






20

Under Fire





RUDELY awakened in the dark, I open my eyes: "What? What's up?"

"Your turn on guard--it's two o'clock in the morning," says Corporal
Bertrand at the opening into the hole where I am prostrate on the
floor. I hear him without seeing him.

"I'm coming," I growl, and shake myself, and yawn in the little
sepulchral shelter. I stretch my arms, and my hands touch the soft
and cold clay. Then I cleave the heavy odor that fills the dug-out
and crawl out in the middle of the dense gloom between the collapsed
bodies of the sleepers. After several stumbles and entanglements
among accouterments, knapsacks and limbs stretched out in all
directions, I put my hand on my rifle and find myself upright in the
open air, half awake and dubiously balanced, assailed by the black
and bitter breeze.

Shivering, I follow the corporal; he plunges in between the dark
embankments whose lower ends press strangely and closely on our
march. He stops; the place is here. I make out a heavy mass half-way
up the ghostly wail which comes loose and descends from it with a
whinnying yawn, and I hoist myself into the niche which it had
occupied.

The moon is hidden by mist, but a very weak and uncertain light
overspreads the scene, and one's sight gropes its way. Then a wide
strip of darkness, hovering and gliding up aloft, puts it out. Even
after touching the breastwork and the loophole in front of my face I
can hardly make them out, and my inquiring hand discovers, among an
ordered deposit of things, a mass of grenade handles.

"Keep your eye skinned, old chap," says Bertrand in a low voice.
"Don't forget that our listening-post is in front there on the left.
Allons, so long." His steps die away, followed by those of the
sleepy sentry whom I am relieving.

Rifle-shots crackle all round. Abruptly a bullet smacks the earth of
the wall against which I am leaning. I peer through the loophole.
Our line runs along the top of the ravine, and the land slopes
downward in front of me, plunging into an abyss of darkness where
one can see nothing. One's sight ends always by picking out the
regular lines of the stakes of our wire entanglements, planted on
the shore of the waves of night, and here and there the circular
funnel-like wounds of shells, little, larger, or enormous, and some
of the nearest occupied by mysterious lumber. The wind blows in my
face, and nothing else is stirring save the vast moisture that drain
from it. It is cold enough to set one shivering in perpetual motion.
I look upwards, this way and that; everything is borne down by
dreadful gloom. I might be derelict and alone in the middle of a
world destroyed by a cataclysm.

There is a swift illumination up above--a rocket. The scene in which
I am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The
crest of our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see,
stuck to the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars,
the shadows of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them
by a few spots of light. The trench is shored with sandbags. It is
widened everywhere, and in many places ripped up by landslides. The
sandbags, piled up and dislodged, appear in the starlike light of
the rocket like the great dismantled stones of ancient ruined
buildings. I look through the loophole, and discern in the misty and
pallid atmosphere expanded by the meteor the rows of stakes and even
the thin lines of barbed wire which cross and recross between the
posts. To my seeing they are like strokes of a pen scratched upon
the pale and perforated ground. Lower down, the ravine is filled
with the motionless silence of the ocean of night.

I come down from my look-out and steer at a guess towards my
neighbor in vigil, and come upon him with outstretched hand. "Is
that you?" I say to him in a subdued voice, though I don't know him.

"Yes," he replies, equally ignorant who I am, blind like myself.
"It's quiet at this time," he adds "A bit since I thought they were
going to attack, and they may have tried it on, on the right, where
they chucked over a lot of bombs. There's been a barrage of
75's--vrrrran, vrrrran--Old man, I said to myself, 'Those 75's,
p'raps they've good reason for firing. If they did come out, the
Boches, they must have found something.' Tiens, listen, down there,
the bullets buffing themselves!"

He opens his flask and takes a draught, and his last words, still
subdued, smell of wine: "Ah, la, la! Talk about a filthy war! Don't
you think we should be a lot better at home!--Hullo! What's the
matter with the ass?" A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief
and sudden flash of phosphorescence. Others go off here and there
along our line. Rifle-shots are catching after dark.

We go to inquire of one of the shooters, guessing our way through
the solid blackness that has fallen again upon us like a roof.
Stumbling, and thrown anon on each other, we reach the man and touch
him--"Well, what's up?"

He thought he saw something moving, but there is nothing more. We
return through the density, my unknown neighbor and I, unsteady, and
laboring along the narrow way of slippery mud, doubled up as if we
each carried a crushing burden. At one point of the horizon and then
at another all around, a gun sounds, and its heavy din blends with
the volleys of rifle-fire, redoubled one minute and dying out the
next, and with the clusters of grenade-reports, of deeper sound than
the crack of Lebel or Mauser, and nearly like the voice of the old
classical rifles. The wind has again increased; it is so strong that
one must protect himself against it in the darkness; masses of huge
cloud are passing in front of the moon.

So there we are, this man and I, jostling without knowing each
other, revealed and then hidden from each other in sudden jerks by
the flashes of the guns. oppressed by the opacity, the center of a
huge circle of fires that appear and disappear in the devilish
landscape.

"We're under a curse," says the man.

We separate, and go each to his own loophole, to weary our eyes upon
invisibility. Is some frightful and dismal storm about to break? But
that night it did not. At the end of my long wait, with the first
streaks of day, there was even a lull.

Again I saw, when the dawn came down on us like a stormy evening,
the steep banks of our crumbling trench as they came to life again
under the sooty scarf of the low-hanging clouds, a trench dismal and
dirty, infinitely dirty, humped with debris and filthiness. Under
the livid sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their
vaguely shining and rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera
of giants, nakedly exposed upon the earth.

In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap
of horizontal things like logs. Tree-trunks? No, they are corpses.

* * * * * *

As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the
shadowy fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each
blade of grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening
field and its high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the
bristling of stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and
in front of the opposite slope a wall of night still stands.

Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is
gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms.
There are four of them. They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque,
Biquet, and little Eudore. They rot there quite near us, blocking
one half of the wide, twisting, and muddy furrow that the living
must still defend.

They have been laid there as well as may be, supporting and crushing
each other. The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth. Handkerchiefs
had been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against
them in the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without
noticing them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face
to face with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.

* * * * * *

It was four nights ago that they were all killed together. I
remember the night myself indistinctly--it is like a dream. We were
on patrol--they, I, Mesnil Andre, and Corporal Bertrand; and
our business was to identify a new German listening-post marked by
the artillery observers. We left the trench towards midnight and
crept down the slope in line, three or four paces from each other.
Thus we descended far into the ravine, and saw, lying before our
eyes, the embankment of their International Trench. After we had
verified that there was no listening-post in this slice of the
ground we climbed back, with infinite care. Dimly I saw my neighbors
to right and left, like sacks of shadow, crawling, slowly sliding,
undulating and rocking in the mud and the murk, with the projecting
needle in front of a rifle. Some bullets whistled above us, but they
did not know we were there, they were not looking for us. When we
got within sight of the mound of our line, we took a breather for a
moment; one of us let a sigh go, another spoke. Another turned round
bodily, and the sheath of his bayonet rang out against a stone.
Instantly a rocket shot redly up from the International Trench. We
threw ourselves flat on the ground, closely, desperately, and waited
there motionless, with the terrible star hanging over us and
flooding us with daylight, twenty-five or thirty yards from our
trench. Then a machine-gun on the other side of the ravine swept the
zone where we were. Corporal Bertrand and I had had the luck to find
in front of us, just as the red rocket went up and before it burst
into light, a shell-hole, where a broken trestle was steeped in the
mud. We flattened ourselves against the edge of the hole, buried
ourselves in the mud as much as possible, and the poor skeleton of
rotten wood concealed us. The jet of the machine-gun crossed several
times. We heard a piercing whistle in the middle of each report, the
sharp and violent sound of bullets that went into the earth, and
dull and soft blows as well, followed by groans, by a little cry,
and suddenly by a sound like the heavy snoring of a sleeper, a sound
which slowly ebbed. Bertrand and I waited, grazed by the horizontal
hail of bullets that traced a network of death an inch or so above
us and sometimes scraped our clothes, driving us still deeper into
the mud, nor dared we risk a movement which might have lifted a
little some part of our bodies. The machine-gun at last held its
peace in an enormous silence. A quarter of an hour later we two slid
out of the shell-hole, and crawling on our elbows we fell at last
like bundles into our listening-post. It was high time, too, for at
that moment the moon shone out. We were obliged to stay in the
bottom of the trench till morning, and then till evening, for the
machine-gun swept the approaches without pause. We could not see the
prostrate bodies through the loop-holes of the post, by reason of
the steepness of the ground--except, just on the level of our field
of vision, a lump which appeared to be the back of one of them. In
the evening, a sap was dug to reach the place where they had fallen.
The work could not be finished in one night and was resumed by the
pioneers the following night, for, overwhelmed with fatigue, we
could no longer keep from falling asleep.

Awaking from a leaden sleep, I saw the four corpses that the sappers
had reached from underneath, hooking and then hauling them into the
sap with ropes. Each of them had several adjoining wounds,
bullet-holes an inch or so apart--the mitrailleuse had fired fast.
The body of Mesnil Andre was not found, and his brother
Joseph did some mad escapades in search of it. He went out quite
alone into No Man's Land, where the crossed fire of machine-guns
swept it three ways at once and constantly. In the morning, dragging
himself along like a slug, he showed over the bank a face black with
mud and horribly wasted. They pulled him in again, with his face
scratched by barbed wire, his hands bleeding, with heavy clods of
mud in the folds of his clothes, and stinking of death. Like an
idiot be kept on saying, "He's nowhere." He buried himself in a
corner with his rifle, which he set himself to clean without hearing
what was said to him, and only repeating "He's nowhere."

It is four nights ago since that night, and as the dawn comes once
again to cleanse the earthly Gehenna, the bodies are becoming
definitely distinct.

Barque in his rigidity seems immoderately long, his arms lie closely
to the body, his chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin.
With his head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at
those who come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the
clammy stains of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are
heavily encrusted with blackened blood. Eudore seems very small by
contrast, and his little face is completely white, so white as to
remind you of the be-flowered face of a pierrot, and it is touching
to see that little circle of white paper among the gray and bluish
tints of the corpses. The Breton Biquet, squat and square as a
flagstone, appears to be under the stress of a huge effort; he might
be trying to uplift the misty darkness; and the extreme exertion
overflows upon the protruding cheek-bones and forehead of his
grimacing face, contorts it hideously, sets the dried and dusty hair
bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral cry, and spreads wide the
eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his flinty eyes; and his
hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.

Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat. In
the dragging and carrying they were further injured. Big Lamuse, at
last bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were
gradually sinking in their sockets, one more than the other. They
have wrapped him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where
the neck is. His right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets,
and the arm is held on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads
that they have put in since. The first night he was placed there,
this arm hung outside the heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled
up on a lump of earth, touched passers-by in the face; so they
pinned the arm to the greatcoat.

A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these
beings with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.

When we see them we say, "They are dead, all four"; but they are too
far disfigured for us to say truly, "It is they," and one must turn
away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left
among us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.

Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by
day--by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of
the hand, dead or alive-give a start when faced by these corpses
flattened one on the other in the open trench. Sometimes they are
angry--"What are they thinking about to leave those stiffs
there?"--"It's shameful." Then they add, "It's true they can't be
taken away from there." And they were only buried in the night.

Morning has come. Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine,
Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped, and scratched, veined with
shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal
the clay and the chalky soil. Nothing is stirring there; and our
shells that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge
billows seem to deliver their resounding blows upon a great
breakwater, ruined and abandoned.

My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in
damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of
mud and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein
they are molded, bestir themselves, and come down. For us, it is
rest until evening.

We yawn and stroll. We see a comrade pass and then another. Officers
go to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes. We feel our
feet again, and begin once more to live. The customary remarks cross
and clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken
lines of the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on
our voices, we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines. But
lassitude weighs upon all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the
eyelids reddened; through long watching we look as if we had been
weeping. For several days now we have all of us been sagging and
growing old.

One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a
curve in the trench. They pile themselves where the soil is only
chalky, and where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots,
the excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain
in the darkness for over a hundred thousand years.

There in the widened fairway, Bertrand's squad beaches itself. It is
much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we
no longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac. wounded
in the leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirioir
nor Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the
other for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn--as he says in the
postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital
where he is vegetating.

Once more I see gathered and grouped, soiled by contact with the
earth and dirty smoke, the familiar faces and poses of those who
have not been separated since the beginning, chained and riveted
together in fraternity. But there is less dissimilarity than at the
beginning in the appearance of the cave-men.

Papa Blaire displays in his well-worn mouth a set of new teeth, so
resplendent that one can see nothing in all his poor face except
those gayly-dight jaws. The great event of these foreign teeth's
establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for
eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners. He is
rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly. Now that he has
become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant. For the
moment he is dejected, because--a miracle--he cannot wash himself.
Deeply sunk in a corner, he half opens a lack-luster eye, bites and
masticates his old soldier's mustache--not long ago the only
ornament on his face--and from time to time spits out a hair.

Fouillade is shivering, cold-smitten, or yawns, depressed and
shabby. Marthereau has not changed at all. He is still as always
well-bearded, his eye round and blue, and his legs so short that his
trousers seem to be slipping continually from his waist and dropping
to his feet. Cocon is always Cocon by the dried and parchment-like
head wherein sums are working; but a recurrence of lice, the ravages
of which we see overflowing on to his neck and wrists, has isolated
him for a week now in protracted tussles which leave him surly when
he returns among us. Paradis retains unimpaired the same quantum of
good color and good temper; he is unchanging, perennial. We smile
when he appears in the distance, placarded on the background of
sandbags like a new poster. Nothing has changed in Pepin
either, whom we can just see taking a stroll--we can tell him behind
by his red-and-white squares of an oilcloth draught-board, and in
front by his blade-like face and the gleam of a knife in his cold
gray look. Nor has Volpatte changed, with his leggings, his
shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian tatooed with dirt;
nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some time by blood-red
streaks in his eyes--for some unknown and mysterious reason.
Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the post
is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and then
retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and careful
postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie's end. Lamuse said no more to
any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped her
body. He regretted--I knew it--his whispered confidence to me that
evening, and up to his death he kept the horrible affair sacred to
himself, with tenacious bashfulness. So we see Farfadet continuing
to live his airy existence with the living likeness of that fair
hair, which he only leaves for the scarce monosyllables of his
contact with us. Corporal Bertrand has still the same soldierly and
serious mien among us; he is always ready with his tranquil smile to
answer all questions with lucid explanations, to help each of us to
do his duty.

We are chatting as of yore, as not long since. But the necessity of
speaking in low tones distinguishes our remarks and imposes on them
a lugubrious tranquillity.

* * * * * *

Something unusual has happened. For the last three months the
sojourn of each unit in the first-line trenches has been four days.
Yet we have now been five days here and there is no mention of
relief. Some rumors of early attack are going about, brought by the
liaison men and those of the fatigue-party that renews our rations
every other night--without regularity or guarantee. Other portents
are adding themselves to the whispers of offensive--the stopping of
leave, the failure of the post, the obvious change in the officers,
who are serious and closer to us. But talk on this subject always
ends with a shrug of the shoulders; the soldier is never warned what
is to be done with him; they put a bandage on his eyes, and only
remove it at the last minute. So, "We shall see."--"We can only
wait."

We detach ourselves from the tragic event foreboded. Is this because
of the impossibility of a complete understanding, or a despondent
unwillingness to decipher those orders that are sealed letters to
us, or a lively faith that one will pass through the peril once
more? Always, in spite of the premonitory signs and the prophecies
that seem to be coming true, we fall back automatically upon the
cares of the moment and absorb ourselves in them--hunger, thirst,
the lice whose crushing ensanguines all our nails, the great
weariness that saps us all.

"Seen Joseph this morning?" says Volpatte. "He doesn't look very
grand, poor lad."

"He'll do something daft, certain sure. He's as good as a goner,
that lad, mind you. First chance he has he'll jump in front of a
bullet. I can see he will."

"It'd give any one the pip for the rest of his natural. There were
six brothers of 'em, you know; four of 'em killed; two in Alsace,
one in Champagne, one in Argonne. If Andre's killed he's the
fifth."

"If he'd been killed they'd have found his body--they'd have seen it
from the observation-post; you can't lose the rump and the thighs.
My idea is that the night they went on patrol he went astray coming
back--crawled right round, poor devil, and fell right into the Boche
lines."

"Perhaps he got sewn up in their wire."

"I tell you they'd have found him if he'd been done in; you know
jolly well the Boches wouldn't have brought the body in. And we
looked everywhere. As long as he's not been found you can take it
from me that he's got away somewhere on his feet, wounded or
unwounded."

This so logical theory finds favor, and now it is known that Mesnil
Andre is a prisoner there is less interest in him. But his
brother continues to be a pitiable object--"Poor old chap, he's so
young!" And the men of the squad look at him secretly.

"I've got a twist!" says Cocon suddenly. The hour of dinner has gone
past and we are demanding it. There appears to be only the remains
of what was brought the night before.

"What's the corporal thinking of to starve us? There he is--I'll go
and get hold of him. Hey, corporal! Why can't you get us something
to eat?"--"Yes, yes--something to eat!" re-echoes the destiny of
these eternally hungry men.

"I'm coming," says bustling Bertrand, who keeps going both day and
night.

"What then?" says Pepin, always hot-headed. "I don't feel
like chewing macaroni again; I shall open a tin of meat in less than
two secs?" The daily comedy of dinner steps to the front again in
this drama.

"Don't touch your reserve rations!" says Bertrand; "as soon as I'm
back from seeing the captain I'll get you something."

When he returns he brings and distributes a salad of potatoes and
onions, and as mastication proceeds our features relax and our eyes
become composed.

For the ceremony of eating, Paradis has hoisted a policeman's hat.
It is hardly the right place or time for it, but the hat is quite
new, and the tailor, who promised it for three months ago, only
delivered it the day we came up. The pliant two-cornered hat of
bright blue cloth on his flourishing round head gives him the look
of a pasteboard gendarme with red-painted cheeks. Nevertheless, all
the while he is eating, Paradis looks at me steadily. I go up to
him. "You've a funny old face."

"Don't worry about it," he replies. "I want a chat with you. Come
with me and see something."

His hand goes out to his half-full cup placed beside his dinner
things; he hesitates, and then decides to put his wine in a safe
place down his gullet, and the cup in his pocket. He moves off and I
follow him.

In passing he picks up his helmet that gapes on the earthen bench.
After a dozen paces he comes close to me and says in a low voice and
with a queer air, without looking at me--as he does when he is
upset--"I know where Mesnil Andre is. Would you like to see
him? Come, then."

So saying, he takes off his police hat, folds and pockets it. and
puts on his helmet. He sets off again and I follow him without a
word.

He leads me fifty yards farther, towards the place where our common
dug-out is, and the footbridge of sandbags under which one always
slides with the impression that the muddy arch will collapse on
one's back. After the footbridge, a hollow appears in the wall of
the trench, with a step made of a hurdle stuck fast in the clay.
Paradis climbs there, and motions to me to follow him on to the
narrow and slippery platform. There was recently a sentry's loophole
here, and it has been destroyed and made again lower down with a
couple of bullet-screens. One is obliged to stoop low lest his head
rise above the contrivance.

Paradis says to me, still in the same low voice, "It's me that fixed
up those two shields, so as to see--for I'd got an idea, and I
wanted to see. Put your eye to this--"

"I don't see anything; the hole's stopped up. What's that lump of
cloth?"

"It's him," says Paradis.

Ah! It was a corpse, a corpse sitting in a hole, and horribly
near--

Having flattened my face against the steel plate and glued my eye to
the hole in the bullet-screen, I saw all of it. He was squatting,
the head hanging forward between the legs, both arms placed on his
knees, his hands hooked and half closed. He was easily
identifiable--so near, so near!--in spite of his squinting and
lightless eyes, by the mass of his muddy beard and the distorted
mouth that revealed the teeth. He looked as if he were both smiling
and grimacing at his rifle, stuck straight up in the mud before him.
His outstretched hands were quite blue above and scarlet underneath,
crimsoned by a damp and hellish reflection.

It was he, rain-washed and besmeared with a sort of scum, polluted
and dreadfully pale, four days dead, and close up to our embankment
into which the shell-hole where he had burrowed had bitten. We had
not found him because he was too near!

Between this derelict dead in its unnatural solitude and the men who
inhabited the dug-out there was only a slender partition of earth,
and I realize that the place in it where I lay my head corresponds
to the spot buttressed by this dreadful body.

I withdraw my face from the peep-hole and Paradis and I exchange
glances. "Mustn't tell him yet," my companion whispers. "No, we
mustn't, not at once--" "I spoke to the captain about rooting him
out, and he said, too, we mustn't mention it now to the lad.'" A
light breath of wind goes by. "I can smell it!"--"Rather!" The odor
enters our thoughts and capsizes our very hearts.

"So now," says Paradis, "Joseph's left alone, out of six brothers.
And I'll tell you what--I don't think he'll stop long. The lad won't
take care of himself--he'll get himself done in. A lucky wound's got
to drop on him from the sky, otherwise he's corpsed. Six
brothers--it's too bad, that! Don't you think it's too bad?" He
added, "It's astonishing that he was so near us."

"His arm's just against the spot where I put my head."

"Yes," says Paradis, "his right arm, where there's a wrist-watch."

The watch--I stop short--is it a fancy, a dream? It seems to
me--yes, I am sure now--that three days ago, the night when we were
so tired out, before I went to sleep I heard what sounded like the
ticking of a watch and even wondered where it could come from.

"It was very likely that watch you heard all the same, through the
earth," says Paradis, whom I have told some of my thoughts; "they go
on thinking and turning round even when the chap stops. Damn, your
own ticker doesn't know you--it just goes quietly on making little
circles."

I asked, "There's blood on his hands; but where was be hit?"

"Don't know; in the belly, I think; I thought there was something
dark underneath him. Or perhaps in the face--did you notice the
little stain on the cheek?"

I recall the hairy and greenish face of the dead man. "Yes, there
was something on the cheek. Yes, perhaps it went in there--"

"Look out!" says Paradis hurriedly, "there he is! We ought not to
have stayed here."

But we stay all the same, irresolutely wavering, as Mesnil Joseph
comes straight up to us. Never did he seem so frail to us. We can
see his pallor afar off, his oppressed and unnatural expression; he
is bowed as be walks, and goes slowly, borne down by endless fatigue
and his immovable notion.

"What's the matter with your face?" he asks me--he has seen me point
out to Paradis the possible entry of the bullet. I pretend not to
understand and then make some kind of evasive reply. All at once I
have a torturing idea--the smell! It is there, and there is no
mistaking it. It reveals a corpse; and perhaps he will guess rightly

It seems to me that he has suddenly smelt the sign--the pathetic,
lamentable appeal of the dead. But he says nothing, continues his
solitary walk, and disappears round the corner.

"Yesterday," says Paradis to me, "be came just here, with his
mess-tin full of rice that he didn't want to eat. Just as if he knew
what he was doing, the fool stops here and talks of pitching the
rest of his food over the bank, just on the spot where--where the
other was. I couldn't stick that, old chap. I grabbed his arm just
as he chucked the rice into the air, and it flopped down here in the
trench. Old man, he turned round on me in a rage and all red in the
face, 'What the hell's up with you now?' he says. I looked as
fat-headed as I could, and mumbled some rot about not doing it on
purpose. He shrugs his shoulders, and looks at me same as if I was
dirt. He goes off, saying to himself, 'Did you see him, the
blockhead?' He's bad-tempered, you know, the poor chap, and I
couldn't complain. 'All right, all right,' he kept saying; and I
didn't like it, you know, because I did wrong all the time, although
I was right."

We go back together in silence and re-enter the dugout where the
others are gathered. It is an old headquarters post, and spacious.
Just as we slide in, Paradis listens. "Our batteries have been
playing extra hell for the last hour, don't you think?"

I know what he means, and reply with an empty gesture, "We shall
see, old man, we shall see all right!"

In the dug-out, to an audience of three, Tirette is again pouring
out his barrack-life tales. Marthereau is snoring in a corner; he is
close to the entry, and to get down we have to stride over his short
legs, which seem to have gone back into his trunk. A group of
kneeling men around a folded blanket are playing with cards--

"My turn!"--"40, 42--48--49!--Good!"

"Isn't he lucky, that game-bird; it's imposs', I've got stumped
three times I want nothing more to do with you. You're skinning me
this evening, and you robbed me the other day, too, you infernal
fritter!"--"What did you revoke for, mugwump?"--"I'd only the king,
nothing else."

"All the same," murmurs some one who is eating in a corner, "this
Camembert, it cost twenty-five sous, but you talk about muck!
Outside there's a layer of sticky glue, and inside it's plaster that
breaks."

Meanwhile Tirette relates the outrages inflicted on him during his
twenty-one days of training owing to the quarrelsome temper of a
certain major: "A great hog he was, my boy. everything rotten on
this earth. All the lot of us looked foul when he went by or when we
saw him in the officers' room spread out on a chair that you
couldn't see underneath him, with his vast belly and huge cap. and
circled round with stripes from top to bottom, like a barrel--he was
hard on the private! They called him Loeb--a Boche, you see!"

"I knew him!" cried Paradis; "when war started he was declared unfit
for active service, naturally. While I was doing my term he was a
dodger already--but he dodged round all the street corners to pinch
you--you got a day's clink for an unbuttoned button, and he gave it
you over and above if there was some bit of a thing about you that
wasn't quite O.K.--and everybody laughed. He thought they were
laughing at you, and you knew they were laughing at him, but you
knew it in vain, you were in it up to your head for the clink."

"He had a wife," Tirette goes on, "the old--"

"I remember her, too," Paradis exclaimed. "You talk about a bitch!"

"Some of 'em drag a little pug-dog about with 'em, but him, he
trailed that yellow minx about everywhere, with her broom-handle
hips and her wicked look. It was her that worked the old sod up
against us. He was more stupid than wicked, but as soon as she was
there he got more wicked than stupid. So you bet they were some
nuisance--"

Just then, Marthereau wakes up from his sleep by the entry with a
half-groan. He straightens himself up, sitting on his straw like a
gaol-bird, and we see his bearded silhouette take the vague outline
of a Chinese, while his round eye rolls and turns in the shadows. He
is looking at his dreams of a moment ago. Then he passes his hand
over his eyes and--as if it had some connection with his
dream--recalls the scene that night when we came up to the
trenches--"For all that," he says, in a voice weighty with slumber
and reflection, "there were some half-seas-over that night! Ah, what
a night! All those troops, companies and whole regiments, yelling
and surging all the way up the road! In the thinnest of the dark you
could see the jumble of poilus that went on and up--like the sea
itself, you'd say--and carrying on across all the convoys of
artillery and ambulance wagons that we met that night. I've never
seen so many, so many convoys in the night, never!" Then he deals
himself a thump on the chest, settles down again in self-possession,
groans, and says no more.

Blaire's voice rises, giving expression to the haunting thought that
wakes in the depths of the men: "It's four o'clock. It's too late
for there to be anything from our side."

One of the gamesters in the other corner yelps a question at
another: "Now then? Are you going to play or aren't you, worm-face?"

Tirette continues the story of his major: "Behold one day they'd
served us at the barracks with some suetty soup. Old man, a disease,
it was! So a chap asks to speak to the captain, and holds his
mess-tin up to his nose."

"Numskull!" some one shouts in the other corner. "Why didn't you
trump, then?"

"'Ah, damn it,' said the captain, 'take it away from my nose, it
positively stinks.'"

"It wasn't my game," quavers a discontented but unconvinced voice.

"And the captain, he makes a report to the major. But behold the
major, mad as the devil, he butts in shaking the paper in his paw:
'What's this?' he says. 'Where's the soup that has caused this
rebellion, that I may taste it?' They bring him some in a clean
mess-tin and he sniffs it. 'What now!' he says, 'it smells good.
They damned well shan't have it then, rich soup like this!'"

"Not your game! And he was leading, too! Bungler! It's unlucky, you
know."

"Then at five o'clock as we were coming out of barracks, our two
marvels butt in again and plank themselves in front of the swaddies
coming out, trying to spot some little thing not quite so, and he
said, 'Ah, my bucks, you thought you'd score off me by complaining
of this excellent soup that I have consumed myself along with my
partner here; just wait and see if I don't get even with you. Hey,
you with the long hair, the tall artist, come here a minute!' And
all the time the beast was jawing, his bag-o'-bones--as straight and
thin as a post--went 'oui, oui' with her head."

"That depends; if he hadn't a trump, it's another matter."

"But all of a sudden we see her go white as a sheet, she puts her
fist on her tummy and she shakes like all that, and then suddenly,
in front of all the fellows that filled the square, she drops her
umbrella and starts spewing!"

"Hey, listen!" says Paradis, sharply, "they're shouting in the
trench. Don't you hear? Isn't it 'alarm!' they're shouting?"

"Alarm? Are you mad?"

The words were hardly said when a shadow comes in through the low
doorway of our dug-out and cries--"Alarm, 22nd! Stand to arms!"

A moment of silence and then several exclamations. "I knew it,"
murmurs Paradis between his teeth, and he goes on his knees towards
the opening into the molehill that shelters us. Speech then ceases
and we seem to be struck dumb. Stooping or kneeling we bestir
ourselves; we buckle on our waist-belts; shadowy arms dart from one
side to another; pockets are rummaged. And we issue forth pell-mell,
dragging our knapsacks behind us by the straps, our blankets and
pouches.

Outside we are deafened. The roar of gunfire has increased a
hundredfold, to left, to right, and in front of us. Our batteries
give voice without ceasing.

"Do you think they're attacking?" ventures a man. "How should I
know?" replies another voice with irritated brevity.

Our jaws are set and we swallow our thoughts, hurrying, bustling,
colliding, and grumbling without words.

A command goes forth--"Shoulder your packs."--"There's a
counter-command--" shouts an officer who runs down the trench with
great strides, working his elbows, and the rest of his sentence
disappears with him. A counter-command! A visible tremor has run
through the files, a start which uplifts our heads and holds us all
in extreme expectation.

But no; the counter-order only concerns the knapsacks. No pack; but
the blanket rolled round the body, and the trenching-tool at the
waist. We unbuckle our blankets, tear them open and roll them up.
Still no word is spoken; each has a steadfast eye and the mouth
forcefully shut. The corporals and sergeants go here and there,
feverishly spurring the silent haste in which the men are bowed:
"Now then, hurry up! Come, come, what the hell are you doing? Will
you hurry, yes or no?"

A detachment of soldiers with a badge of crossed axes on their
sleeves clear themselves a fairway and swiftly delve holes in the
wall of the trench. We watch them sideways as we don our equipment.

"What are they doing, those chaps?"--"It's to climb up by."

We are ready. The men marshal themselves, still silently, their
blankets crosswise, the helmet-strap on the chin, leaning on their
rifles. I look at their pale, contracted, and reflective faces. They
are not soldiers, they are men. They are not adventurers, or
warriors, or made for human slaughter, neither butchers nor cattle.
They are laborers and artisans whom one recognizes in their
uniforms. They are civilians uprooted, and they are ready. They
await the signal for death or murder; but you may see, looking at
their faces between the vertical gleams of their bayonets, that they
are simply men.

Each one knows that he is going to take his head, his chest, his
belly, his whole body, and all naked, up to the rifles pointed
forward, to the shells, to the bombs piled and ready, and above all
to the methodical and almost infallible machine-guns--to all that is
waiting for him yonder and is now so frightfully silent--before he
reaches the other soldiers that he must kill. They are not careless
of their lives, like brigands, nor blinded by passion like savages.
In spite of the doctrines with which they have been cultivated they
are not inflamed. They are above instinctive excesses. They are not
drunk, either physically or morally. It is in full consciousness, as
in full health and full strength, that they are massed there to hurl
themselves once more into that sort of madman's part imposed on all
men by the madness of the human race. One sees the thought and the
fear and the farewell that there is in their silence, their
stillness, in the mask of tranquillity which unnaturally grips their
faces. They are not the kind of hero one thinks of, but their
sacrifice has greater worth than they who have not seen them will
ever be able to understand.

They are waiting; a waiting that extends and seems eternal. Now and
then one or another starts a little when a bullet, fired from the
other side, skims the forward embankment that shields us and plunges
into the flabby flesh of the rear wall.

The end of the day is spreading a sublime but melancholy light on
that strong unbroken mass of beings of whom some only will live to
see the night. It is raining--there is always rain in my memories of
all the tragedies of the great war. The evening is making ready,
along with a vague and chilling menace; it is about to set for men
that snare that is as wide as the world.

* * * * * *

New orders are peddled from mouth to mouth. Bombs strung on wire
hoops are distributed--"Let each man take two bombs!"

The major goes by. He is restrained in his gestures, in undress,
girded, undecorated. We hear him say, "There's something good, mes
enfants, the Boches are clearing out. You'll get along all right,
eh?"

News passes among us like a breeze. "The Moroccans and the 21st
Company are in front of us. The attack is launched on our right."

The corporals are summoned to the captain, and return with armsful
of steel things. Bertrand is fingering me; he hooks something on to
a button of my greatcoat. It is a kitchen knife. "I'm putting this
on to your coat," he says.

"Me too!" says Pepin.

"No," says Bertrand, "it's forbidden to take volunteers for these
things."

"Be damned to you!" growls Pepin.

We wait, in the great rainy and shot-hammered space that has no
other boundary than the distant and tremendous cannonade. Bertrand
has finished his distribution and returns. Several soldiers have sat
down, and some of them are yawning.

The cyclist Billette slips through in front of us, carrying an
officer's waterproof on his arm and obviously averting his face.
"Hullo, aren't you going too?" Cocon cries to him.

"No, I'm not going," says the other. "I'm in the 17th. The Fifth
Battalion's not attacking!"

"Ah, they've always got the luck, the Fifth. They've never got to
fight like we have!" Billette is already in the distance, and a few
grimaces follow his disappearance.

A man arrives running, and speaks to Bertrand, and then Bertrand
turns to us--

"Up you go," he says, "it's our turn."

All move at once. We put our feet on the steps made by the sappers,
raise ourselves, elbow to elbow, beyond the shelter of the trench,
and climb on to the parapet.

* * * * * *

Bertrand is out on the sloping ground. He covers us with a quick
glance, and when we are all there he says, "Allons, forward!"

Our voices have a curious resonance. The start has been made very
quickly, unexpectedly almost, as in a dream. There is no whistling
sound in the air. Among the vast uproar of the guns we discern very
clearly this surprising silence of bullets around us--

We descend over the rough and slippery ground with involuntary
gestures, helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle. Mechanically
the eye fastens on some detail of the declivity, of the ruined
ground, on the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up, at the
wreckage in the holes. It is unbelievable that we are upright in
full daylight on this slope where several survivors remember sliding
along in the darkness with such care, and where the others have only
hazarded furtive glances through the loopholes. No, there is no
firing against us. The wide exodus of the battalion out of the
ground seems to have passed unnoticed! This truce is full of an
increasing menace, increasing. The pale light confuses us.

On all sides the slope is covered by men who, like us, are bent on
the descent. On the right the outline is defined of a company that
is reaching the ravine by Trench 97--an old German work in ruins. We
cross our wire by openings. Still no one fires on us. Some awkward
ones who have made false steps are getting up again. We form up on
the farther side of the entanglements and then set ourselves to
topple down the slope rather faster--there is an instinctive
acceleration in the movement. Several bullets arrive at last among
us. Bertrand shouts to us to reserve our bombs and wait till the
last moment.

But the sound of his voice is carried away. Abruptly, across all the
width of the opposite slope, lurid flames burst forth that strike
the air with terrible detonations. In line from left to right fires
emerge from the sky and explosions from the ground. It is a
frightful curtain which divides us from the world, which divides us
from the past and from the future. We stop, fixed to the ground,
stupefied by the sudden host that thunders from every side; then a
simultaneous effort uplifts our mass again and throws it swiftly
forward. We stumble and impede each other in the great waves of
smoke. With harsh crashes and whirlwinds of pulverized earth,
towards the profundity into which we hurl ourselves pell-mell, we
see craters opened here and there, side by side, and merging in each
other. Then one knows no longer where the discharges fall. Volleys
are let loose so monstrously resounding that one feels himself
annihilated by the mere sound of the downpoured thunder of these
great constellations of destruction that form in the sky. One sees
and one feels the fragments passing close to one's head with their
hiss of red-hot iron plunged in water. The blast of one explosion so
burns my hands that I let my rifle fall. I pick it up again,
reeling, and set off in the tawny-gleaming tempest with lowered
head, lashed by spirits of dust and soot in a crushing downpour like
volcanic lava. The stridor of the bursting shells hurts your ears,
beats you on the neck, goes through your temples, and you cannot
endure it without a cry. The gusts of death drive us on, lift us up,
rock us to and fro. We leap, and do not know whither we go. Our eyes
are blinking and weeping and obscured. The view before us is blocked
by a flashing avalanche that fills space.

It is the barrage fire. We have to go through that whirlwind of fire
and those fearful showers that vertically fall. We are passing
through. We are through it, by chance. Here and there I have seen
forms that spun round and were lifted up and laid down, illumined by
a brief reflection from over yonder. I have glimpsed strange faces
that uttered some sort of cry--you could see them without hearing
them in the roar of annihilation. A brasier full of red and black
masses huge and furious fell about me, excavating the ground,
tearing it from under my feet, throwing me aside like a bouncing
toy. I remember that I strode over a smoldering corpse, quite black,
with a tissue of rosy blood shriveling on him; and I remember, too,
that the skirts of the greatcoat flying next to me had caught fire,
and left a trail of smoke behind. On our right, all along Trench 97,
our glances were drawn and dazzled by a rank of frightful flames,
closely crowded against each other like men.

Forward!

Now, we are nearly running. I see some who fall solidly flat, face
forward, and others who founder meekly, as though they would sit
down on the ground. We step aside abruptly to avoid the prostrate
dead, quiet and rigid, or else offensive, and also--more perilous
snares!--the wounded that hook on to you, struggling.

The International Trench! We are there. The wire entanglements have
been torn up into long roots and creepers, thrown afar and coiled
up, swept away and piled in great drifts by the guns. Between these
big bushes of rain-damped steel the ground is open and free.

The trench is not defended. The Germans have abandoned it, or else a
first wave has already passed over it. Its interior bristles with
rifles placed against the bank. In the bottom are scattered corpses.
From the jumbled litter of the long trench, hands emerge that
protrude from gray sleeves with red facings, and booted legs. In
places the embankment is destroyed and its woodwork splintered--all
the flank of the trench collapsed and fallen into an indescribable
mixture. In other places, round pits are yawning. And of all that
moment I have best retained the vision of a whimsical trench covered
with many-colored rags and tatters. For the making of their sandbags
the Germans had used cotton and woolen stuffs of motley design
pillaged from some house-furnisher's shop; and all this hotch-potch
of colored remnants, mangled and frayed, floats and flaps and dances
in our faces.

We have spread out in the trench. The lieutenant, who has jumped to
the other side, is stooping and summoning us with signs and
shouts--"Don't stay there; forward, forward!"

We climb the wall of the trench with the help of the sacks, of
weapons, and of the backs that are piled up there. In the bottom of
the ravine the soil is shot-churned, crowded with jetsam, swarming
with prostrate bodies. Some are motionless as blocks of wood; others
move slowly or convulsively. The barrage fire continues to increase
its infernal discharge behind us on the ground that we have crossed.
But where we are at the foot of the rise it is a dead point for the
artillery.

A short and uncertain calm follows. We are less deafened and look at
each other. There is fever in the eyes, and the cheek-bones are
blood-red. Our breathing snores and our hearts drum in our bodies.

In haste and confusion we recognize each other, as if we had met
again face to face in a nightmare on the uttermost shores of death.
Some hurried words are cast upon this glade in hell--"It's you!
"--"Where's Cocon?"--"Don't know."--"Have you seen the captain?
"--"No."--"Going strong?"--"Yes."

The bottom of the ravine is crossed and the other slope rises
opposite. We climb in Indian file by a stairway rough-hewn in the
ground: "Look out!" The shout means that a soldier half-way up the
steps has been struck in the loins by a shell-fragment; he falls
with his arms forward, bareheaded, like the diving swimmer. We can
see the shapeless silhouette of the mass as it plunges into the
gulf. I can almost see the detail of his blown hair over the black
profile of his face.

We debouch upon the height. A great colorless emptiness is outspread
before us. At first one can see nothing but a chalky and stony
plain, yellow and gray to the limit of sight. No human wave is
preceding ours; in front of us there is no living soul, but the
ground is peopled with dead--recent corpses that still mimic agony
or sleep, and old remains already bleached and scattered to the
wind, half assimilated by the earth.

As soon as our pushing and jolted file emerges, two men close to me
are hit, two shadows are hurled to the ground and roll under our
feet, one with a sharp cry, and the other silently, as a felled ox.
Another disappears with the caper of a lunatic, as if he had been
snatched away. Instinctively we close up as we hustle
forward--always forward--and the wound in our line closes of its
own accord. The adjutant stops, raises his sword, lets it fall, and
drops to his knees. His kneeling body slopes backward in jerks, his
helmet drops on his heels, and he remains there, bareheaded, face to
the sky. Hurriedly the rush of the rank has split open to respect
his immobility.

But we cannot see the lieutenant. No more leaders then--Hesitation
checks the wave of humanity that begins to beat on the plateau.
Above the trampling one hears the hoarse effort of our lungs.
"Forward!" cries some soldier, and then all resume the onward race
to perdition with increasing speed.

* * * * * *

"Where's Bertrand?" comes the laborious complaint of one of the
foremost runners. "There! Here!" He had stooped in passing over a
wounded man, but he leaves him quickly, and the man extends his arms
towards him and seems to sob.

It is just at the moment when he rejoins us that we hear in front of
us, coming from a sort of ground swelling, the crackle of a
machine-gun. It is a moment of agony--more serious even than when we
were passing through the flaming earthquake of the barrage. That
familiar voice speaks to us across the plain, sharp and horrible.
But we no longer stop. "Go on, go on!"

Our panting becomes hoarse groaning, yet still we hurl ourselves
toward the horizon.

"The Boches! I see them!" a man says suddenly. "Yes--their heads,
there--above the trench--it's there, the trench, that line. It's
close, Ah, the hogs!"

We can indeed make out little round gray caps which rise and then
drop on the ground level, fifty yards away, beyond a belt of dark
earth, furrowed and humped. Encouraged they spring forward, they who
now form the group where I am. So near the goal, so far unscathed,
shall we not reach it? Yes, we will reach it! We make great strides
and no longer hear anything. Each man plunges straight ahead,
fascinated by the terrible trench, bent rigidly forward, almost
incapable of turning his head to right or to left. I have a notion
that many of us missed their footing and fell to the ground. I jump
sideways to miss the suddenly erect bayonet of a toppling rifle.
Quite close to me, Farfadet jostles me with his face bleeding,
throws himself on Volpatte who is beside me and clings to him.
Volpatte doubles up without slackening his rush and drags him along
some paces, then shakes him off without looking at him and without
knowing who be is, and shouts at him in a breaking voice almost
choked with exertion: "Let me go, let me go, nom de Dieu! They'll
pick you up directly--don't worry."

The other man sinks to the ground, and his face, plastered with a
scarlet mask and void of all expression, turns in every direction;
while Volpatte, already in the distance, automatically repeats
between his teeth, "Don't worry," with a steady forward gaze on the
line.

A shower of bullets spirts around me, increasing the number of those
who suddenly halt, who collapse slowly, defiant and gesticulating,
of those who dive forward solidly with all the body's burden, of the
shouts, deep, furious, and desperate, and even of that hollow and
terrible gasp when a man's life goes bodily forth in a breath. And
we who are not yet stricken, we look ahead, we walk and we run,
among the frolics of the death that strikes at random into our
flesh.

The wire entanglements--and there is one stretch of them intact. We
go along to where it has been gutted into a wide and deep opening.
This is a colossal funnel-hole, formed of smaller funnels placed
together, a fantastic volcanic crater, scooped there by the guns.

The sight of this convulsion is stupefying; truly it seems that it
must have come from the center of the earth. Such a rending of
virgin strata puts new edge on our attacking fury, and none of us
can keep from shouting with a solemn shake of the head--even just
now when words are but painfully torn from our throats--"Ah, Christ!
Look what hell we've given 'em there! Ah, look!"

Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the
hollows and the earthy mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and
blackened and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet
and we tear them out angrily. The accouterments and stuffs that
cover the soft soil, the linen that is scattered about from sundered
knapsacks, prevent us from sticking fast in it, and we are careful
to plant our feet in this debris when we jump into the holes or
climb the hillocks.

Behind us voices urge us--Forward, boys, forward, nome de Dieu!"

"All the regiment is behind us!" they cry. We do not turn round to
see, but the assurance electrifies our rush once more.

No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are
nearing. Some German dead are crumbling in front of it, in pinnacled
heaps or extended lines. We are there. The parapet takes definite
and sinister shape and detail; the loopholes--we are prodigiously,
incredibly close!

Something falls in front of us. It is a bomb. With a kick Corporal
Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the
trench.

With that fortunate deed the squad reaches the trench.

Pepin has hurled himself flat on the ground and is involved
with a corpse. He reaches the edge and plunges in--the first to
enter. Fouillade, with great gestures and shouts, jumps into the pit
almost at the same moment that Pepin rolls down it.
Indistinctly I see--in the time of the lightning's flash--a whole
row of black demons stooping and squatting for the descent, on the
ridge of the embankment, on the edge of the dark ambush.

A terrible volley bursts point-blank in our faces, flinging in front
of us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earthen verge.
After the stunning shock we shake ourselves and burst into devilish
laughter--the discharge has passed too high. And at once, with
shouts and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into
the belly of the trench!

* * * * * *

We are submerged in a mysterious smoke, and at first I can only see
blue uniforms in the stifling gulf. We go one way and then another,
driven by each other, snarling and searching. We turn about, and
with our hands encumbered by knife, bombs, and rifle, we do not know
at first what to do.

"They're in their funk-holes, the swine!" is the cry. Heavy
explosions are shaking the earth--underground, in the dug-outs. We
are all at once divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are
masked and can see nothing more. We struggle like drowning men
through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night. One
stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and
howl in the bottom. Hardly can one make out the trench walls,
straight up just here and made of white sandbags, which are
everywhere torn like paper. At one time the heavy adhesive reek
sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of the
attackers. Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a
hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and
sinks to the bottom. I hear several shrill cries of "Kamarad!"
proceeding from a pale-faced and gray-clad group in the huge corner
made by a rending shell. Under the inky cloud the tempest of men
flows back, climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling,
along the dark and ruined mole.

* * * * * *

And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and
understand that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has
not encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our
approach. The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender
curtain of defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are
caught like rats or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void,
a great void. We advance in crowds like a terrible array of
spectators.

And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled
white walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a
vanished river that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the
flat round hole of a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the
sloping banks and in the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of
corpses--a dead river that is filled again to overflowing by the new
tide and the breaking wave of our company. In the smoke vomited by
dug-outs and the shaking wind of subterranean explosions, I come
upon a compact mass of men hooked onto each other who are describing
a wide circle. Just as we reach them the entire mass breaks up to
make a residue of furious battle. I see Blaire break away, his
helmet hanging on his neck by the chin-strap and his face flayed,
and uttering a savage yell. I stumble upon a man who is crouching at
the entry to a dug-out. Drawing back from the black hatchway,
yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself with his left hand on a
beam. In his right hand and for several seconds he holds a bomb
which is on the point of exploding. It disappears in the hole,
bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him from the
bowels of the earth. The man seizes another bomb.

Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another
dug-out with a pickax he has found there, causing a landslide, and
the entry is blocked. I see several shadows trampling and
gesticulating over the tomb.

Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this
long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible
shells and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognize
those whom I know, just as though all that had gone before of our
lives had suddenly become very distant. There is some change working
in them. A frenzied excitement is driving them all out of
themselves.

"What are we stopping here for?" says one, grinding his teeth.

"Why don't we go on to the next?" a second asks me in fury. "Now
we're here, we'd be there in a few jumps!'

"I, too, I want to go on."--"Me, too. Ah, the hogs!" They shake
themselves like banners. They carry the luck of their survival as it
were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with
themselves.

We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange
demolished way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown
to the unknown.

Advance to the right!

We begin to flow again in one direction. No doubt it is a movement
planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs. We trample soft bodies
underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their
position; rivulets and cries come from them. Like posts and heaps of
rubbish, corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them
down, suffocate them, strangle them. So that I can get by, I must
push at a slaughtered trunk of which the neck is a spring of
gurgling blood.

In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown
out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together,
athwart the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in
all its environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed,
blood-red with sweat, eyes flashing. Some groups seem to be dancing
as they brandish their knives. They are elated, immensely confident,
ferocious.

The battle dies down imperceptibly. A soldier says, "Well, what's to
be done now?" ft flares up again suddenly at one point. Twenty yards
away in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the gray
embankment makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its
scattered missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits
intermittently and seems to be in difficulties.

Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see
men encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it. Near to me
I make out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight
and with no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking
explosions come in jerky sequence.

A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two.
Joseph halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee. I run to him and
he watches me coming. "It's nothing--my thigh. I can crawl along by
myself." He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways
slowly towards the trench.

I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit
him, and I slip round there by the left, making a detour. No one
there. I only meet another of our squad on the same errand--Paradis.

We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of
iron of all shapes. They block up the trench and separate us. "The
machine-gun's taken by the 7th," they shout, "it won't bark any
more. It was a mad devil--filthy beast! Filthy beast!"

"What's there to do now?"--"Nothing."

We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down. The living have
ceased to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last,
surrounded by smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to
all the ends of the earth. We no longer know where we are. There is
neither earth nor sky--nothing but a sort of cloud. The first period
of inaction is forming in the chaotic drama, and there is a general
slackening in the movement and the uproar. The cannonade grows less;
it still shakes the sky as a cough shakes a man, but it is farther
off now. Enthusiasm is allayed, and there remains only the infinite
fatigue that rises and overwhelms us, and the infinite waiting that
begins over again.

* * * * * *

Where is the enemy? He has left his dead everywhere, and we have
seen rows of prisoners. Yonder again there is. one, drab,
ill-defined and smoky, outlined against the dirty sky. But the bulk
seem to have dispersed afar. A few shells come to us here and there
blunderingly, and we ridicule them. We are saved, we are quiet, we
are alone, in this desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins a
line of the living.

Night has come. The dust has flown away, but has yielded place to
shadow and darkness over the long-drawn multitude's disorder. Men
approach each other, sit down, get up again and walk about, leaning
on each other or hooked together. Between the dug-outs, which are
blocked by the mingled dead, we gather in groups and squat. Some
have laid their rifles on the ground and wander on the rim of the
trench with their arms balancing; and when they come near we can see
that they are blackened and scorched, their eyes are red and slashed
with mud. We speak seldom, but are beginning to think.

We see the stretcher-bearers, whose sharp silhouettes stoop and
grope; they advance linked two and two together by their long
burdens. Yonder on our right one hears the blows of pick and shovel.

I wander into the middle of this gloomy turmoil. In a place where
the embankment has crushed the embankment of the trench into a
gentle slope, some one is seated. A faint light still prevails. The
tranquil attitude of this man as he looks reflectively in front of
him is sculptural and striking. Stooping, I recognize him as
Corporal Bertrand. He turns his face towards me, and I feel that he
is looking at me through the shadows with his thoughtful smile.

"I was coming to look for you," he says; "they're organizing a guard
for the trench until we've got news of what the others have done and
what's going on in front. I'm going to put you on double sentry with
Paradis, in a listening-post that the sappers have just dug."

We watch the shadows of the passers-by and of those who are seated,
outlined in inky blots, bowed and bent in diverse attitudes under
the gray sky, all along the ruined parapet. Dwarfed to the size of
insects and worms, they make a strange and secret stirring among
these shadow-hidden lands where for two years war has caused cities
of soldiers to wander or stagnate over deep and boundless
cemeteries.

Two obscure forms pass in the dark, several paces from us; they are
talking together in low voices--"You bet, old chap, instead of
listening to him, I shoved my bayonet into his belly so that I
couldn't haul it out."

"There were four in the bottom of the hole. I called to 'em to come
out, and as soon as one came out I stuck him. Blood ran down me up
to the elbow and stuck up my sleeves."

"Ah!" the first speaker went on, "when we are telling all about it
later, if we get back, to the other people at home, by the stove and
the candle, who's going to believe it? It's a pity, isn't it?"

"I don't care a damn about that, as long as we do get back," said
the other; "I want the end quickly, and only that."

Bertrand was used to speak very little ordinarily, and never of
himself. But he said, "I've got three of them on my hands. I struck
like a madman. Ah, we were all like beasts when we got here!"

He raised his voice and there was a restrained tremor in it: "it was
necessary," he said, "it was necessary, for the future's sake."

He crossed his arms and tossed his head: "The future!" he cried all
at once as a prophet might. "How will they regard this slaughter,
they who'll live after us, to whom progress--which comes as sure as
fate--will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will
they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don't know
whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch's and
Corneille's heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches?

"And for all that, mind you," Bertrand went on. "there is one figure
that has risen above the war and will blaze with the beauty and
strength of his courage--"

I listened, leaning on a stick and towards him, drinking in the
voice that came in the twilight silence from the lips that so rarely
spoke. He cried with a clear voice--"Liebknecht!"

He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly
serious as a statue's, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once
again from his marble muteness to repeat, "The future, the future!
The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it
out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something
abominable and shameful. And yet--this present--it had to be, it
had to be! Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the
soldier's calling, that changes men by turns into stupid victims or
ignoble brutes. Yes, shame. That's the true word, but it's too true;
it's true in eternity, but it's not yet true for us. It will be true
when there is a Bible that is entirely true, when it is found
written among the other truths that a purified mind will at the same
time let us understand. We are still lost, still exiled far from
that time. In our time of to-day, in these moments, this truth is
hardly more than a fallacy, this sacred saying is only blasphemy!"

A kind of laugh came from him, full of echoing dreams--"To think I
once told them I believed in prophecies, just to kid them!"

I sat down by Bertrand's side. This soldier who had always done more
than was required of him and survived notwithstanding, stood at that
moment in my eyes for those who incarnate a lofty moral conception,
who have the strength to detach themselves from the hustle of
circumstances, and who are destined, however little their path may
run through a splendor of events, to dominate their time.

"I have always thought all those things," I murmured.

"Ah!" said Bertrand. We looked at each other without a word, with a
little surprised self-communion. After this full silence he spoke
again. "It's time to start duty; take your rifle and come."

* * * * * *

From our listening-post we see towards the east a light spreading
like a conflagration, but bluer and sadder than buildings on fire.
It streaks the sky above a long black cloud which extends suspended
like the smoke of an extinguished fire, like an immense stain on the
world. It is the returning morning.

It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering
fatigue. We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth
chatter. Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes
from the sky into the slender framework of the black clouds. All is
frozen, colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere.
There is rime and snow under a burden of mist. Everything is white.
Paradis moves--a heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white.
I had placed my shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and
it looks as if wrapped in paper. In the bottom of the hole a little
snow floats, fretted and gray in the black foot-bath. Outside the
hole, on the piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded
dead, snow rests like muslin.

Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow
darker as they approach and hail us. They are the men who come to
relieve us. Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their
cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not
snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.

Paradis hoists himself out. Over the plain I follow his Father
Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up
white-felted soles. Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the
footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty
whiteness that covers the ground.

Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which
tarpaulins are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white
velvet or mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and
between the watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to
fight against the cold. to exclude it from the meager fireside of
their own chests, or who are simply frozen. A dead man has slid
down. upright and hardly askew, with his feet in the trench and his
chest and arms resting on the bank. He was clasping the earth when
life left him. His face is turned skyward and is covered with a
leprosy of ice, the eyelids are white as the eyes, the mustache
caked with hard slime. Other bodies are sleeping, less white than
that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on lifeless things.

"We must sleep." Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where
we may hide ourselves and shut our eyes. "It can't be helped if
there are stiffs in the dugouts," mutters Paradis; "in a cold like
this they'll keep, they won't be too bad." We go forward, so weary
that we can only see the ground.

I am alone. Where is Paradis? He must have lain down in some hole,
and perhaps I did not hear his call. I meet Marthereau. "I'm looking
where I can sleep, I've been on guard," he says.

"I, too; let's look together."

"What's all the row and to-do?" says Marthereau. A mingled hubbub of
trampling and voices overflows from the communication trench that
goes off here. "The communication trenches are full of men. Who are
you?"

One of those with whom we are suddenly mixed up replies, "We're the
Fifth Battalion." The newcomers stop. They are in marching order.
The one that spoke sits down for a breathing space on the curves of
a sand-bag that protrudes from the line. He wipes his nose with the
back of his sleeve.

"What are you doing here? Have they told you to come?"

"Not half they haven't told us. We're coming to attack. We're going
yonder, right up." With his head he indicates the north. The
curiosity with which we look at them fastens on to a detail. "You've
carried everything with you?"--"We chose to keep it, that's all."

"Forward!" they are ordered. They rise and proceed, incompletely
awake, their eyes puffy, their wrinkles underlined. There are young
men among them with thin necks and vacuous eyes, and old men; and in
the middle, ordinary ones. They march with a commonplace and pacific
step. What they are going to do seems to us, who did it last night,
beyond human strength. But still they go away towards the north.

"The revally of the damned," says Marthereau.

We make way for them with a sort of admiration and a sort of terror.
When they have passed, Marthereau wags his head and murmurs, "There
are some getting ready, too, on the other side, with their gray
uniforms. Do you think those chaps are feeling it about the attack?
Then why have they come? It's not their doing, I know, but it's
theirs all the same, seeing they're here.--I know, I know, but it's
odd, all of it."

The sight of a passer-by alters the course of his ideas: "Tiens,
there's Truc, the big one, d'you know him? Isn't he immense and
pointed, that chap! As for me, I know I'm not quite hardly big
enough; but him, he goes too far. He always knows what's going on,
that two-yarder! For savvying everything, there's nobody going to
give him the go-by! I'll go and chivvy him about a funk-hole."

"If there's a rabbit-hole anywhere?" replies the elongated
passer-by, leaning on Marthereau like a poplar tree, "for sure, my
old Caparthe, certainly. Tiens, there"--and unbending his elbow he
makes an indicative gesture like a flag-signaler--"'Villa von
Hindenburg.' and there, 'Villa Glucks auf.' If that doesn't
satisfy you, you gentlemen are hard to please. P'raps there's a few
lodgers in the basement, but not noisy lodgers, and you can talk out
aloud in front of them, you know!"

"Ah, nom de Dieu!" cried Marthereau a quarter of an hour after we
had established ourselves in one of these square-cut graves,
"there's lodgers he didn't tell us about, that frightful great
lightning-rod, that infinity!" His eyelids were just closing, but
they opened again and he scratched his arms and thighs: "I want a
snooze! It appears it's out of the question. Can't resist these
things."

We settled ourselves to yawning and sighing, and finally we lighted
a stump of candle, wet enough to resist us although covered with our
hands; and we watched each other yawn.

The German dug-out consisted of several rooms. We were against a
partition of ill-fitting planks; and on the other side, in Cave No.
2, some men were also awake. We saw light trickle through the
crannies between the planks and heard rumbling voices. "It's the
other section," said Marthereau.

Then we listened, mechanically. "When I was off on leave," boomed an
invisible talker, "we had the hump at first, because we were
thinking of my poor brother who was missing in March--dead, no
doubt--and of my poor little Julien, of Class 1915, killed in the
October attacks. And then bit by bit, her and me, we settled down to
be happy at being together again, you see. Our little kid, the last,
a five-year-old, entertained us a treat. He wanted to play soldiers
with me, and I made a little gun for him. I explained the trenches
to him; and he, all fluttering with delight like a bird, he was
shooting at me and yelling. Ah, the damned young gentleman, he did
it properly! He'll make a famous poilu later! I tell you, he's quite
got the military spirit!"

A silence; then an obscure murmur of talk, in the midst of which we
catch the name of Napoleon; then another voice, or the same, saying,
"Wilhelm, he's a stinking beast to have brought this war on. But
Napoleon, he was a great man!"

Marthereau is kneeling in front of me in the feeble and scanty rays
of our candle, in the bottom of this dark ill-enclosed hole where
the cold shudders through at intervals, where vermin swarm and where
the sorry crowd of living men endures the faint but musty savor of a
tomb; and Marthereau looks at me. He still hears, as I do, the
unknown soldier who said, "Wilhelm is a stinking beast, but Napoleon
was a great man," and who extolled the martial ardor of the little
boy still left to him. Marthereau droops his arms and wags his weary
head--and the shadow of the double gesture is thrown on the
partition by the lean light in a sudden caricature.

"Ah!" says my humble companion, "we're all of us not bad sorts, and
we're unlucky, and we're poor devils as well. But we're too stupid,
we're too stupid!"

Again he turns his eyes on me. In his bewhiskered and poodle-like
face I see his fine eyes shining in wondering and still confused
contemplation of things which he is setting himself to understand in
the innocence of his obscurity.

We come out of the uninhabitable shelter; the weather has bettered a
little; the snow has melted, and all is soiled anew. "The wind's
licked up the sugar," says Marthereau.

* * * * *

I am deputed to accompany Mesnil Joseph to the refuge on the
Pylones road. Sergeant Henriot gives me charge of the wounded
man and hands me his clearing order. "If you meet Bertrand on the
way," says Henriot, "tell him to look sharp and get busy, will you?"
Bertrand went away on liaison duty last night and they have been
waiting for him for an hour; the captain is getting impatient and
threatens to lose his temper.

I get under way with Joseph, who walks very slowly, a little paler
than usual, and still taciturn. Now and again he halts, and his face
twitches. We follow the communication trenches, and a comrade
appears suddenly. It is Volpatte, and he says, "I'm going with you
to the foot of the hill." As he is off duty, he is wielding a
magnificent twisted walking-stick, and he shakes in his hand like
castanets the precious pair of scissors that never leaves him.

All three of us come out of the communication trench when the slope
of the land allows us to do it without danger of bullets--the guns
are not firing. As soon as we are outside we stumble upon a
gathering of men. It is raining. Between the heavy legs planted
there like little trees on the gray plain in the mist we see a dead
man. Volpatte edges his way in to the horizontal form upon which
these upright ones are waiting; then he turns round violently and
shouts to us, "It's Pepin!"

"Ah!" says Joseph, who is already almost fainting. He leans on me
and we draw near. Pepin is full length, his feet and hands
bent and shriveled, and his rain-washed face is swollen and horribly
gray.

A man who holds a pickax and whose sweating face is full of little
black trenches, recounts to us the death of Pepin: "He'd gone
into a funk-hole where the Boches had planked themselves, and behold
no one knew he was there and they smoked the hole to make sure of
cleaning it out, and the poor lad, they found him after the
operation, corpsed, and all pulled out like a cat's innards in the
middle of the Boche cold meat that he'd stuck--and very nicely stuck
too, I may say, seeing I was in business as a butcher in the suburbs
of Paris."

"One less to the squad!" says Volpatte as we go away.

We are now on the edge of the ravine at the spot where the plateau
begins that our desperate charge traversed last evening, and we
cannot recognize it. This plain, which had then seemed to me quite
level, though it really slopes, is an amazing charnel-house. It
swarms with corpses, and might be a cemetery of which the top has
been taken away.

Groups of men are moving about it, identifying the dead of last
evening and last night, turning the remains over, recognizing them
by some detail in spite of their faces. One of these searchers,
kneeling, draws from a dead hand an effaced and mangled
photograph--a portrait killed.

In the distance, black shell-smoke goes up in scrolls. then
detonates over the horizon. The wide and stippled flight of an army
of crows sweeps the sky.

Down below among the motionless multitude, and identifiable by their
wasting and disfigurement, there are zouaves, tirailleurs, and
Foreign Legionaries from the May attack. The extreme end of our
lines was then on Berthonval Wood, five or six kilometers from here.
In that attack, which was one of the most terrible of the war or of
any war, those men got here in a single rush. They thus formed a
point too far advanced in the wave of attack, and were caught on the
flanks between the machine-guns posted to right and to left on the
lines they had overshot. It is some months now since death hollowed
their eyes and consumed their cheeks, but even in those
storm-scattered and dissolving remains one can identify the havoc of
the machine-guns that destroyed them, piercing their backs and loins
and severing them in the middle. By the side of heads black and
waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with grubs and the wreckage of
insects, where white teeth still gleam in some cavities, by the side
of poor darkening stumps that abound like a field of old roots laid
bare, one discovers naked yellow skulls wearing the red cloth fez,
whose gray cover has crumbled like paper. Some thigh-bones protrude
from the heaps of rags stuck together with reddish mud; and from the
holes filled with clothes shredded and daubed with a sort of tar, a
spinal fragment emerges. Some ribs are scattered on the soil like
old cages broken; and close by, blackened leathers are afloat, with
water-bottles and drinking-cups pierced and flattened. About a
cloven knapsack, on the top of some bones and a cluster of bits of
cloth and accouterments, some white points are evenly scattered; by
stooping one can see that they are the finger and toe constructions
of what was once a corpse.

Sometimes only a rag emerges from long mounds to indicate that some
human being was there destroyed, for all these unburied dead end by
entering the soil.

The Germans, who were here yesterday, abandoned their soldiers by
the side of ours without interring them--as witness these three
putrefied corpses on the top of each other, in each other, with
their round gray caps whose red edge is hidden with a gray band,
their yellow-gray jackets, and their green faces. I look for the
features of one of them. From the depth of his neck up to the tufts
of hair that stick to the brim of his cap is just an earthy mass,
the face become an anthill, and two rotten berries in place of the
eyes. Another is a dried emptiness flat on its belly, the back in
tatters that almost flutter, the hands, feet, and face enrooted in
the soil.

"Look! It's a new one, this--"

In the middle of the plateau and in the depth of the rainy and
bitter air, on the ghastly morrow of this debauch of slaughter,
there is a head planted in the ground, a wet and bloodless head,
with a heavy beard.

It is one of ours, and the helmet is beside it. The distended
eyelids permit a little to be seen of the dull porcelain of his
eyes, and one lip shines like a slug in the shapeless beard. No
doubt he fell into a shell-hole, which was filled up by another
shell, burying him up to the neck like the cat's-head German of the
Red Tavern at Souchez.

"I don't know him," says Joseph, who has come up very slowly and
speaks with difficulty.

"I recognize him," replies Volpatte.

"That bearded man?" says Joseph.

"He has no beard. Look--" Stooping, Volpatte passes the end of his
stick under the chin of the corpse and breaks off a sort of slab of
mud in which the head was set, a slab that looked like a beard. Then
he picks up the dead man's helmet and puts it on his head, and for a
moment holds before the eyes the round handles of his famous
scissors so as to imitate spectacles.

"Ah!" we all cried together, "it's Cocon!"

When you hear of or see the death of one of those who fought by your
side and lived exactly the same life, you receive a direct blow in
the flesh before even understanding. It is truly as if one heard of
his own destruction. It is only later that one begins to mourn.

We look at the hideous head that is murder's jest, the murdered head
already and cruelly effacing our memories of Cocon. Another comrade
less. We remain there around him, afraid.

"He was--"

We should like to speak a little, but do not know what to say that
would be sufficiently serious or telling or true.

"Come," says Joseph, with an effort, wholly engrossed by his severe
suffering, "I haven't strength enough to be stopping all the time."

We leave poor Cocon, the ex-statistician, with a last look, a look
too short and almost vacant.

"One cannot imagine--" says Volpatte.

No, one cannot imagine. All these disappearances at once surpass the
imagination. There are not enough survivors now. But we have vague
idea of the grandeur of these dead. They have given all; by degrees
they have given all their strength, and finally they have given
themselves, en bloc. They have outpaced life, and their effort has
something of superhuman perfection.

* * * * * *

"Tiens, he's just been wounded, that one, and yet--" A fresh wound
is moistening the neck of a body that is almost a skeleton.

"It's a rat," says Volpatte. "The stiffs are old ones, but the rats
talk to 'em. You see some rats laid out--poisoned, p'raps--near
every body or under it. Tiens, this poor old chap shall show us
his." He lifts up the foot of the collapsed remains and reveals two
dead rats.

"I should like to find Farfadet again," says Volpatte. "I told him
to wait just when we started running and he clipped hold of me. Poor
lad, let's hope he waited!"

So he goes to and fro, attracted towards the dead by a strange
curiosity; and these, indifferent, bandy him about from one to
another, and at each step he looks on the ground. Suddenly he utters
a cry of distress. With his hand he beckons us as he kneels to a
dead man.

Bertrand!

Acute emotion grips us. He has been killed; he, too, like the rest,
he who most towered over us by his energy and intelligence. By
virtue of always doing his duty. he has at last got killed. He has
at last found death where indeed it was.

We look at him, and then turn away from the sight and look upon each
other.

The shock of his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his
remains present, for they are abominable to see. Death has bestowed
a grotesque look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so
tranquil. With his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache
trailing in his mouth, and his face swollen--he is laughing. One eye
is widely open, the other shut, and the tongue lolls out. His arms
are outstretched in the form of a cross: the hands open, the fingers
separated. The right leg is straight. The left, whence flowed the
hemorrhage that made him die, has been broken by a shell; it is
twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack, invertebrate. A mournful
irony has invested the last writhe of his agony with the appearance
of a clown's antic.

We arrange him, and lay him straight, and tranquillize the horrible
masks. Volpatte has taken a pocket-book from him and places it
reverently among his own papers, by the side of the portrait of his
own wife and children. That done, he shakes his head: "He--he was
truly a good sort, old man. When he said anything, that was the
proof that it was true. Ah, we needed him badly!"

"Yes," I said, "we had need of him always."

"Ah, la, la!" murmurs Volpatte. and he trembles. Joseph repeats in a
weak voice, "Ah, nom de Dieu! Ah, nom de Dieu!"

The plateau is as covered with people as a public square;
fatigue-parties in detachments, and isolated men. Here and there,
the stretcher-bearers are beginning (patiently and in a small way)
their huge and endless task.

Volpatte leaves us, to return to the trench and announce our new
losses, and above all the great gap left by Bertrand. He says to
Joseph, "We shan't lose sight of you, eh? Write us a line now and
again--just, 'All goes well; signed, Camembert,' eh?" He disappears
among the people who cross each other's path in the expanse now
completely possessed by a mournful and endless rain.

Joseph leans on me and we go down into the ravine. The slope by
which we descend is known as the Zouaves' Cells. In the May attack,
the Zouaves had all begun to dig themselves individual shelters, and
round these they were exterminated. Some are still seen, prone on
the brim of an incipient hole, with their trenching-tools in their
fleshless hands or looking at them with the cavernous hollows where
shrivel the entrails of eyes. The ground is so full of dead that the
earth-falls uncover places that bristle with feet, with half-clothed
skeletons, and with ossuaries of skulls placed side by side on the
steep slope like porcelain globe-jars.

In the ground here there are several strata of dead and in many
places the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set
them out in display on the top of the new ones. The bottom of the
ravine is completely carpeted with debris of weapons, clothing, and
implements. One tramples shell fragments, old iron, loaves and even
biscuits that have fallen from knapsacks and are not yet dissolved
by the rain. Mess-tins, pots of jam. and helmets are pierced and
riddled by bullets--the scrapings and scum of a hell-broth; and the
dislocated posts that survive are stippled with holes.

The trenches that run in this valley have a look of earthquake
crevasses, and as if whole tombs of uncouth things had been emptied
on the ruins of the earth's convulsion. And there, where no dead
are, the very earth is cadaverous.

We follow the International Trench, still fluttering with rainbow
rags--a shapeless trench which the confusion of torn stuffs invests
with an air of a trench assassinated--to a place where the irregular
and winding ditch forms an elbow. All the way along, as far as an
earthwork barricade that blocks the way, German corpses are
entangled and knotted as in a torrent of the damned, some of them
emerging from muddy caves in the middle of a bewildering
conglomerate of beams, ropes, creepers of iron, trench-rollers,
hurdles, and bullet-screens. At the barrier itself, one corpse
stands upright, fixed in the other dead, while another, planted in
the same spot, stands obliquely in the dismal place, the whole
arrangement looking like part of a big wheel embedded in the mud, or
the shattered sail of a windmill. And over all this, this
catastrophe of flesh and filthiness, religious images are broadcast,
post-cards, pious pamphlets, leaflets on which prayers are written
in Gothic lettering--they have scattered themselves in waves from
gutted clothing. The paper words seem to bedeck with blossom these
shores of pestilence, this Valley of Death, with their countless
pallors of barren lies.

I seek a solid footway to guide Joseph in--his wound is paralyzing
him by degrees, and he feels it extending throughout his body. While
I support him, and he is looking at nothing, I look upon the ghastly
upheaval through which we are escaping.

A German sergeant is seated, here where we tread, supported by the
riven timbers that once formed the shelter of a sentry. There is a
little hole under his eye; the thrust of a bayonet has nailed him to
the planks through his face. In front of him, also sitting, with his
elbows on his knees and his fists on his chin, there is a man who
has all the top of his skull taken off like a boiled egg. Beside
them--an awful watchman!--the half of a man is standing, a man
sliced in two from scalp to stomach, upright against the earthen
wall. I do not know where the other half of this human post may be,
whose eye hangs down above and whose bluish viscera curl spirally
round his leg.

Down below, one's foot detaches itself from a matrix of blood,
stiffened with French bayonets that have been bent, doubled, and
twisted by the force of the blow. Through a gap in the mutilated
wall one espies a recess where the bodies of soldiers of the
Prussian Guard seem to kneel in the pose of suppliants, run through
from behind, with blood-stained gaps, impaled. Out of this group
they have pulled to its edge a huge Senegalese tirailleur, who,
petrified in the contorted position where death seized him, leans
upon empty air and holds fast by his feet, staring at his two
severed wrists. No doubt a bomb had exploded in his hands; and since
all his face is alive, he seems to be gnawing maggots.

"It was here," says a passing soldier of an Alpine regiment, "that
they did the white flag trick; and as they'd got Africans to deal
with, you bet they got it hot!--Tiens, there's the white flag itself
that these dunghills used."

He seizes and shakes a long handle that lies there. A square of
white stuff is nailed to it, and unfolds itself innocently.

A procession of shovel-bearers advances along the battered trench.
They have an order to shovel the earth into the relics of the
trenches, to stop everything up, so that the bodies may be buried on
the spot. Thus these helmeted warriors will here perform the work of
the redresser of wrongs as they restore their full shape to the
fields and make level the cavities already half filled by cargoes of
invaders.

* * * * * *

Some one calls me from the other side of the trench, a man sitting
on the ground and leaning against a stake. It is Papa Ramure.
Through his unbuttoned greatcoat and jacket I see bandages around
his chest. "The ambulance men have been to tuck me up," he says, in
a weak and stertorous voice, "but they can't take me away from here
before evening. But I know all right that I'm petering out every
minute."

He jerks his head. "Stay a bit," he asks me. He is much moved, and
the tears are flowing. He offers his hand and holds mine. He wants
to say a lot of things to me and almost to make confession. "I was a
straight man before the war," he says, with trickling tears; "I
worked from morning to night to feed my little lot. And then I came
here to kill Boches. And now, I've got killed. Listen, listen,
listen, don't go away, listen to me--"

"I must take Joseph back--he's at the end of his strength. I'll come
back afterwards."

Ramure lifted his streaming eyes to the wounded man. "Not only
living, but wounded! Escaped from death! Ah, some women and children
are lucky! All right, take him, take him, and come back--I hope I
shall be waiting for you--"

Now we must climb the other slope of the ravine, and we enter the
deformed and maltreated ditch of the old Trench 97.

Suddenly a frantic whistling tears the air and there is a shower of
shrapnel above us. Meteorites flash and scatter in fearful flight in
the heart of the yellow clouds. Revolving missiles rush through the
heavens to break and burn upon the bill, to ransack it and exhume
the old bones of men; and the thundering flames multiply themselves
along an even line.

It is the barrage fire beginning again. Like children we cry,
"Enough, enough!"

In this fury of fatal engines, this mechanical cataclysm that
pursues us through space, there is something that surpasses human
strength and will, something supernatural. Joseph, standing with his
hand in mine, looks over his shoulder at the storm of rending
explosions. He bows his head like an imprisoned beast, distracted:
"What, again! Always, then!" he growls; "after all we've done and
all we've seen--and now it begins again! Ah, non, non!"

He falls on his knees, gasps for breath, and throws a futile look of
full hatred before him and behind him. He repeats, "It's never
finished, never!"

I take him by the arm and raise him. "Come; it'll be finished for
you."

We must dally there awhile before climbing, so I will go and bring
back Ramure in extremis, who is waiting for me. But Joseph clings to
me, and then I notice a movement of men about the spot where I left
the dying man. I can guess what it means; it is no longer worth
while to go there.

The ground of the ravine where we two are closely clustered to abide
the tempest is quivering, and at each shot we feel the deep simoom
of the shells. But in the hole where we are there is scarcely any
risk of being hit. At the first lull, some of the men who were also
waiting detach themselves and begin to go up; stretcher-bearers
redouble their huge efforts to carry a body and climb, making one
think of stubborn ants pushed back by successive grains of sand;
wounded men and liaison men move again.

"Let's go on," says Joseph, with sagging shoulders, as he measures
the hill with his eye--the last stage of his Gethsemane.

There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of
wide countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on
end. The scene through which we are struggling is rent and
convulsed, with hills and chasms, and with such somber swellings as
if all the clouds of storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured
earth, this stampeded file of trunks stands forth against a striped
brown sky, milky in places and obscurely sparkling--a sky of agate.

Across the entry to Trench 97 a felled oak twists his great body,
and a corpse stops up the trench. Its head and legs are buried in
the ground. The dirty water that trickles in the trench has covered
it with a sandy glaze, and through the moist deposit the chest and
belly bulge forth, clad in a shirt. We stride over the frigid
remains, slimy and pale, that suggest the belly of a stranded
crocodile; and it is difficult to do so, by reason of the soft and
slippery ground. We have to plunge our hands up to the wrists in the
mud of the wall.

At this moment an infernal whistle falls on us and we bend like
bushes. The shell bursts in the air in front of us, deafening and
blinding, and buries us under a horribly sibilant mountain of dark
smoke. A climbing soldier has churned the air with his arms and
disappeared, hurled into some hole. Shouts have gone up and fallen
again like rubbish. While we are looking, through the great black
veil that the wind tears from the ground and dismisses into the sky,
at the bearers who are putting down a stretcher, running to the
place of the explosion and picking up something inert--I recall the
unforgettable scene when my brother-in-arms, Poterloo, whose heart
was so full of hope, vanished with his arms outstretched in the
flame of a shell.

We arrive at last on the summit, which is marked as with a signal by
a wounded and frightful man. He is upright in the wind, shaken but
upright, enrooted there. In his uplifted and wind-tossed cape we see
a yelling and convulsive face. We pass by him, and he is like a sort
of screaming tree.

* * * * * *

We have arrived at our old first line, the one from which we set off
for the attack. We sit down on a firing-step with our backs to the
holes cut for our exodus at the last minute by the sappers. Euterpe,
the cyclist, passes and gives us good-day. Then he turns in his
tracks and draws from the cuff of his coat-sleeve an envelope, whose
protruding edge had conferred a white stripe on him.

"It's you, isn't it," he says to me, "that takes Biquet's letters
that's dead?"--"Yes."--" Here's a returned one; the address has
hopped it."

The envelope was exposed, no doubt, to rain on the top of a packet,
and the address is no longer legible among the violet mottlings on
the dried and frayed paper. Alone there survives in a corner the
address of the sender. I pull the letter out gently--"My dear
mother"--Ah, I remember! Biquet, now lying in the open air in the
very trench where we are halted, wrote that letter not long ago in
our quarters at Gauchin-l'Abbe, one flaming and splendid
afternoon, in reply to a letter from his mother, whose fears for him
had proved groundless and made him laugh--"You think I'm in the cold
and rain and danger. Not at all; on the contrary, all that's
finished. It's hot, we're sweating, and we've nothing to do only to
stroll about in the sunshine. I laughed to read your letter--"

I return to the frail and damaged envelope the letter which, if
chance had not averted this new irony, would have been read by the
old peasant woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet
nothing in the cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows
like a dark spring on the wall of the trench.

Joseph has leaned his head backwards. His eyes close for a moment,
his mouth half opens, and his breathing is fitful.

"Courage!" I say to him, and he opens his eyes again.

"Ah!" he replies, "it isn't to me you should say that. Look at those
chaps, there, they're going back yonder, and you too, you're going
back. It all has to go on for you others. Ah, one must be really
strong to go on, to go on!"






21

The Refuge





FROM this point onwards we are in sight of the enemy
observation-posts, and must no longer leave the communication
trenches. First we follow that of the Pylones road. The trench
is cut along the side of the road, and the road itself is wiped out;
so are its trees. Half of it, all the way along, has been chewed and
swallowed by the trench; and what is left of it has been invaded by
the earth and the grass, and mingled with the fields in the fullness
of time. At some places in the trench--there, where a sandbag has
burst and left only a muddy cell--you may see again on the level of
your eyes the stony ballast of the ex-road, cut to the quick, or
even the roots of the bordering trees that have been cut down to
embody in the trench wall. The latter is as slashed and uneven as if
it were a wave of earth and rubbish and dark scum that the immense
plain has spat out and pushed against the edge of the trench.

We arrive at a junction of trenches, and on the top of the
maltreated hillock which is outlined on the cloudy grayness, a
mournful signboard stands crookedly in the wind. The trench system
becomes still more cramped and close, and the men who are flowing
towards the clearing-station from all parts of the sector multiply
and throng in the deep-dug ways.

These lamentable lanes are staked out with corpses. At uneven
intervals their walls are broken into by quite recent gaps,
extending to their full depth, by funnelholes of fresh earth which
trespass upon the unwholesome land beyond, where earthy bodies are
squatting with their chins on their knees or leaning against the
wall as straight and silent as the rifles which wait beside them.
Some of these standing dead turn their blood-bespattered faces
towards the survivors; others exchange their looks with the sky's
emptiness.

Joseph halts to take breath. I say to him as to a child, "We're
nearly there, we're nearly there."

The sinister ramparts of this way of desolation contract still more.
They impel a feeling of suffocation, of a nightmare of falling which
oppresses and strangles: and in these depths where the walls seem to
be coming nearer and closing in, you are forced to halt, to wriggle
a path for yourself, to vex and disturb the dead, to be pushed about
by the endless disorder of the files that flow along these hinder
trenches, files made up of messengers, of the maimed, of men who
groan and who cry aloud, who hurry frantically, crimsoned by fever
or pallid and visibly shaken by pain.

* * * * * *

All this throng at last pulls up and gathers and groans at the
crossways where the burrows of the Refuge open out.

A doctor is trying with shouts and gesticulations to keep a little
space clear from the rising tide that beats upon the threshold of
the shelter, where he applies summary bandages in the open air; they
say he has not ceased to do it, nor his helpers either, all the
night and all the day, that he is accomplishing a superhuman task.

When they leave his hands, some of the wounded are swallowed up by
the black hole of the Refuge; others are sent back to the bigger
clearing-station contrived in the trench on the Bethune road.

In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in
the bottom of a sort of robbers' den, we waited two hours, buffeted,
squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle,
in an odor of blood and butchery. There are faces that become more
distorted and emaciated from minute to minute. One of the patients
can no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods, and as he
shakes his head he sprinkles his neighbors. Another, bleeding like a
fountain, shouts, "Hey, there! have a look at me!" A young man with
burning eyes yells like a soul in hell, "I'm on fire!" and he roars
and blows like a furnace.

* * * * * *

Joseph is bandaged. He thrusts a way through to me and holds out his
hand: "It isn't serious, it seems; good-by," he says.

At once we are separated in the mob. With my last glance I see his
wasted face and the vacant absorption in his trouble as he is meekly
led away by a Divisional stretcher-bearer whose hand is on his
shoulder; and suddenly I see him no more. In war, life separates us
just as death does, without our having even the time to think about
it.

They tell me not to stay there, but to go down into the Refuge to
rest before returning. There are two entries, very low and very
narrow, on the level of the ground. This one is flush with the mouth
of a sloping gallery, narrow as the conduit of a sewer. In order to
penetrate the Refuge, one must first turn round and work backwards
with bent body into the shrunken pipe, and here the feet discover
steps. Every three paces there is a deep step.

Once inside you have a first impression of being trapped--that there
is not room enough either to descend or climb out. As you go on
burying yourself in the gulf, the nightmare of suffocation continues
that you progressively endured as you advanced along the bowels of
the trenches before foundering in here. On all sides you bump and
scrape yourself, you are clutched by the tightness of the passage,
you are wedged and stuck. I have to change the position of my
cartridge pouches by sliding them round the belt and to take my bags
in my arms against my chest. At the fourth step the suffocation
increases still more and one has a moment of agony; little as one
may lift his knee for the rearward step, his back strikes the roof.
In this spot it is necessary to go on all fours, still backwards. As
you go down into the depth, a pestilent atmosphere and heavy as
earth buries you. Your hands touch only the cold, sticky and
sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on all sides and
enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy breath
touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor, one
is assailed by a hot, unearthly clamor that rises from the hole as
from a sort of kitchen.

When you reach at last the bottom of this laddered sap that elbows
and compresses you at every step, the evil dream is not ended, for
you find yourself in a lone but very narrow cavern where gloom
reigns, a mere corridor not more than five feet high. If you cease
to stoop and to walk with bended knees, your head violently strikes
the planks that roof the Refuge, and the newcomers are heard to
growl--more or less forcefully, according to their temper and
condition--"Ah, lucky I've got my tin hat on:"

One makes out the gesture of some one who is squatting in an angle.
It is an ambulance man on guard, whose monotone says to each
arrival, "Take the mud off your boots before going in." So you
stumble into an accumulating pile of mud; it entangles you at the
foot of the steps on this threshold of hell.

In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a
countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of
confused and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings.
Some weak candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only
relieve the darkness in the spots where they pierce it. At the
farthest end faint daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon
prisoner at the bottom of an oubliette. This obscure vent-hole
allows one to make out some big objects ranged along the corridor;
they are low stretchers, like coffins. Around and above them one
then dimly discerns the movement of broken and drooping shadows, and
the stirring of ranks and groups of specters against the walls.

I turn round. At the end opposite that where the faraway light leaks
through, a mob is gathered in front of a tent-cloth which reaches
from the ceiling to the ground, and thus forms an apartment, whose
illumination shines through the oily yellow material. In this
retreat, anti-tetanus injections are going on by the light of an
acetylene lamp. When the cloth is lifted to allow some one to enter
or leave, the glare brutally besplashes the disordered rags of the
wounded stationed in front to await their treatment. Bowed by the
ceiling, seated, kneeling or groveling, they push each other in the
desire not to lose their turn or to steal some other's, and they
bark like dogs, "My turn!"--"Me!"--"Me!" In this corner of
modified conflict the tepid stinks of acetylene and bleeding men are
horrible to swallow.

I turn away from it and seek elsewhere to find a place where I may
sit down. I go forward a little, groping, still stooping and curled
up, and my hands in front.

By grace of the flame which a smoker holds over his pipe I see a
bench before me, full of beings. My eyes are growing accustomed to
the gloom that stagnates in the cave, and I can make out pretty well
this row of people whose bandages and swathings dimly whiten their
beads and limbs. Crippled, gashed, deformed, motionless or restless,
fast fixed in this kind of barge, they present an incongruous
collection of suffering and misery.

One of them cries out suddenly, half rises, and then sits down
again. His neighbor, whose greatcoat is torn and his head bare,
looks at him and says to him--"What's the use of worrying?"

And he repeats the sentence several times at random, gazing straight
in front of him, his hands on his knees. A young man in the middle
of the seat is talking to himself. He says that he is an aviator.
There are burns down one side of his body and on his face. In his
fever he is still burning; it seems to him that he is still gnawed
by the pointed flames that leaped from his engine. He is muttering,
"Gott mit uns!" and then, "God is with us!"

A zouave with his arm in a sling, who sits awry and seems to carry
his shoulder like a torturing burden, speaks to him: "You're the
aviator that fell, aren't you?"

"I've seen--things," replies the flying-man laboriously.

"I too, I've seen some!" the soldier interrupts; "some people
couldn't stick it, to see what I've seen."

"Come and sit here," says one of the men on the seat to me, making
room as he speaks. "Are you wounded?"

"No; I brought a wounded man here, and I'm going back."

"You're worse than wounded then; come and sit down."

"I was mayor in my place," explains one of the sufferers, "but when
I go back no one will know me again, it's so long now that I've been
in misery."

"Four hours now have I been stuck on this bench," groans a sort of
mendicant, whose shaking hand holds his helmet on his knees like an
alms-bowl, whose head is lowered and his back rounded.

"We're waiting to be cleared, you know," I am informed by a big man
who pants and sweats--all the bulk of him seems to be boiling. His
mustache hangs as if it had come half unstuck through the moisture
of his face. He turns two big and lightless eyes on me, and his
wound is not visible.

"That's so," says another; "all the wounded of the Brigade come and
pile themselves up here one after another, without counting them
from other places. Yes, look at it now; this hole here, it's the
midden for the whole Brigade."

"I'm gangrened, I'm smashed, I'm all in bits inside," droned one who
sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; "yet
up to last week I was young and I was clean. They've changed me.
Now, I've got nothing but a dirty old decomposed body to drag
along."

"Yesterday," says another, "I was twenty-six years old. And now how
old am I?" He tries to get up, so as to show us his shaking and
faded face, worn out in a night, to show us the emaciation, the
depression of cheeks and eye-sockets, and the dying flicker of light
in his greasy eye.

"It hurts!" humbly says some one invisible.

"What's the use of worrying?" repeats the other mechanically.

There was a silence, and then the aviator cried, "The padres were
trying on both sides to hide their voices."

"What's that mean?" said the astonished zouave.

"Are you taking leave of 'em, old chap?" asked a chasseur wounded in
the hand and with one arm bound to his body, as his eyes left the
mummified limb for a moment to glance at the flying-man.

The latter's looks were distraught; he was trying to interpret a
mysterious picture which everywhere he saw before his eyes--"Up
there, from the sky, you don't see much, you know. Among the squares
of the fields and the little heaps of the villages the roads run
like white cotton. You can make out, too, some hollow threads that
look as if they'd been traced with a pin-point and scratched through
fine sand. These nets that festoon the plain with regularly wavy
marks, they're the trenches. Last Sunday morning I was flying over
the firing-line. Between our first lines and their first lines,
between their extreme edges, between the fringes of the two huge
armies that are up against each other, looking at each other and not
seeing, and waiting--it's not very far; sometimes forty yards,
sometimes sixty. To me it looked about a stride, at the great height
where I was planing. And behold I could make out two crowds, one
among the Boches, and one of ours, in these parallel lines that
seemed to touch each other; each was a solid, lively lump, and all
around 'em were dots like grains of black sand scattered on gray
sand, and these hardly budged--it didn't look like an alarm! So I
went down several turns to investigate.

"Then I understood. It was Sunday, and there were two religious
services being held under my eyes--the altar, the padre, and all the
crowd of chaps. The more I went down the more I could see that the
two things were alike--so exactly alike that it looked silly. One of
the services--whichever you like--was a reflection of the other, and
I wondered if I was seeing double. I went down lower; they didn't
fire at me. Why? I don't know at all. Then I could hear. I heard one
murmur. one only. I could only gather a single prayer that came up
to me en bloc, the sound of a single chant that passed by me on its
way to heaven. I went to and fro in space to listen to this faint
mixture of hymns that blended together just the same although they
were one against the other; and the more they tried to get on top of
each other, the more they were blended together up in the heights of
the sky where I was floating.

"I got some shrapnel just at the moment when, very low down, I made
out the two voices from the earth that made up the one--'Gott mit
uns!' and 'God is with us!'--and I flew away."

The young man shook his bandage-covered head; he seemed deranged by
the recollection. "I said to myself at the moment, 'I must be mad!'"

"It's the truth of things that's mad," said the zouave.

With his eyes shining in delirium, the narrator sought to express
and convey the deep disturbing idea that was besieging him, that he
was struggling against.

"Now think of it!" he said. "Fancy those two identical crowds
yelling things that are identical and yet opposite, these identical
enemy cries! What must the good God think about it all? I know well
enough that He knows everything, but even if He knows everything, He
won't know what to make of it."

"Rot!" cried the zouave.

"He doesn't care a damn for us, don't fret yourself."

"Anyway, what is there funny about it? That doesn't prevent people
from quarreling with each other--and don't they! And rifle-shots
speak jolly well the same language, don't they?"

"Yes," said the aviator, "but there's only one God. It isn't the
departure of prayers that I don't understand; it's their arrival."

The conversation dropped.

"There's a crowd of wounded laid out in there," the man with the
dull eyes said to me, "and I'm wondering all ways how they got 'em
down here. It must have been a terrible job, tumbling them in here."

Two Colonials, hard and lean, supporting each other like tipsy men,
butted into us and recoiled, looking on the ground for some place to
fall on.

"Old chap, in that trench I'm telling you of," the hoarse voice of
one was relating, "we were three days without rations, three full
days without anything--anything. Willy-nilly, we had to drink our
own water, and no help for it."

The other explained that once on a time he had cholera. "Ah, that's
a dirty business--fever, vomiting, colics; old man, I was ill with
that lot!"

"And then, too," suddenly growled the flying-man, still fierce to
pursue the answer to the gigantic conundrum, "what is this God
thinking of to let everybody believe like that that He's with them?
Why does He let us all--all of us--shout out side by side, like
idiots and brutes, 'God is with us!'--'No, not at all, you're wrong;
God is with us'?"

A groan arose from a stretcher, and for a moment fluttered lonely in
the silence as if it were an answer.

* * * * * *

Then, "I don't believe in God," said a pain-racked voice; "I know He
doesn't exist--because of the suffering there is. They can tell us
all the clap-trap they like, and trim up all the words they can rind
and all they can make up, but to say that all this innocent
suffering could come from a perfect God, it's damned
skull-stuffing."

"For my part," another of the men on the seat goes on, "I don't
believe in God because of the cold. I've seen men become corpses bit
by bit, just simply with cold. If there was a God of goodness, there
wouldn't be any cold. You can't get away from that."

"Before you can believe in God, you've got to do away with
everything there is. So we've got a long way to go!"

Several mutilated men, without seeing each other, combine in
head-shakes of dissent "You're right," says another, "you're right."

These men in ruins, vanquished in victory, isolated and scattered,
have the beginnings of a revelation. There come moments in the
tragedy of these events when men are not only sincere, but
truth-telling, moments when you see that they and the truth are face
to face.

"As for me," said a new speaker, "if I don't believe in God,
it's--" A fit of coughing terribly continued his sentence.

When the fit passed and his cheeks were purple and wet with tears,
some one asked him, "Where are you wounded?"

"I'm not wounded; I'm ill."

"Oh, I see!" they said, in a tone which meant "You're not
interesting."

He understood, and pleaded the cause of his illness:

"I'm done in, I spit blood. I've no strength left, and it doesn't
come back, you know, when it goes away like that."

"Ah, ah!" murmured the comrades--wavering, but secretly convinced
all the same of the inferiority of civilian ailments to wounds.

In resignation he lowered his head and repeated to himself very
quietly, "I can't walk any more; where would you have me go?"

* * * * * *

A commotion is arising for some unknown reason in. the horizontal
gulf which lengthens as it contracts from stretcher to stretcher as
far as the eye can see, as far as the pallid peep of daylight, in
this confused corridor where the poor winking flames of candles
redden and seem feverish, and winged shadows cast themselves. The
odds and ends of heads and limbs are agitated, appeals and cries
arouse each other and increase in number like invisible ghosts. The
prostrate bodies undulate, double up, and turn over.

In the heart of this den of captives, debased and punished by pain,
I make out the big mass of a hospital attendant whose heavy
shoulders rise and fall like a knapsack carried crosswise, and whose
stentorian voice reverberates at speed through the cave. "You've
been meddling with your bandage again, you son of a lubber, you
varmint!" he thunders. "I'll do it up again for you, as long as it's
you, my chick, but if you touch it again, you'll see what I'll do to
you!"

Behold him then in the obscurity, twisting a bandage round the
cranium of a very little man who is almost upright, who has
bristling hair and a beard which puffs out in front. With dangling
arms, he submits in silence. But the attendant abandons him, looks
on the ground and exclaims sonorously, "What the--? Eh, come now,
my friend, are you cracked? There's manners for you, to lie down on
the top of a patient!" And his capacious hand disengages a second
limp body on which the first had extended himself as on a mattress;
while the mannikin with the bandaged head alongside, as soon as he
is let alone, puts his hands to his head without saying a word and
tries once more to remove the encircling lint.

There is an uproar, too, among some shadows that are visible against
a luminous background; they seem to be wildly agitated in the gloom
of the crypt. The light of a candle shows us several men shaken with
their efforts to hold a wounded soldier down on his stretcher. It is
a man whose feet are gone. At the end of his legs are terrible
bandages, with tourniquets to restrain the hemorrhage. His stumps
have bled into the linen wrappings, and he seems to wear red
breeches. His face is devilish, shining and sullen, and he is
raving. They are pressing down on his shoulders and knees, for this
man without feet would fain jump from the stretcher and go away.

"Let me go!" he rattles in breathless, quavering rage. His voice is
low, with sudden sonorities, like a trumpet that one tries to blow
too softly. "By God, let me go, I tell you! Do you think I'm going
to stop here? Allons, let me be, or I'll jump over you on my hands!"

So violently he contracts and extends himself that he pulls to and
fro those who are trying to restrain him by their gripping weight,
and I can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose
other arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely
that he wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the
rest. On all sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen
to the incoherent lamentations which end by dying in the dark. At
the same moment, in another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified
on the ground, so curse each other that one of them has to be
removed before the frantic dialogue is broken up.

I go farther away, towards the point where the light from outside
comes through among the tangled beams as through a broken grating,
and stride over the interminable stretchers that take up all the
width of the underground alley whose oppressive confinement chokes
me. The human forms prone on the stretchers are now hardly stirring
under the Jack-o'-lanterns of the candles; they stagnate in their
rattling breath and heavy groans.

On the edge of a stretcher a man is sitting, leaning against the
wall. His clothes are torn apart, and in the middle of their
darkness appears the white, emaciated breast of a martyr. His head
is bent quite back and veiled in shadow, but I can see the beating
of his heart.

The daylight that is trickling through at the end, drop by drop,
comes in by an earth-fall. Several shells. falling on the same spot,
have broken through the heavy earthen roof of the Refuge.

Here, some pale reflections are cast on the blue of the greatcoats,
on the shoulders and along the folds. Almost paralyzed by the
darkness and their own weakness, a group of men is pressing towards
the gap, like dead men half awaking, to taste a little of the pallid
air and detach themselves from the sepulcher. This corner at the
extremity of the gloom offers itself as a way of escape, an oasis
where one may stand upright, where one is lightly, angelically
touched by the light of heaven.

"There were some chaps there that were blown to bits when the shells
burst," said some one to me who was waiting there in the sickly ray
of entombed light. "You talk about a mess! Look, there's the padre
hooking down what was blown up."

The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter's chestnut waistcoat which
gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails
twisted among the beams of the shattered woodwork. For the purpose
he is using a rifle with fixed bayonet, since he could not find a
stick long enough; and the heavy giant, bald, bearded and asthmatic,
wields the weapon awkwardly. He has a mild face, meek and unhappy,
and while he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the
corners, he mutters a string of "Oh's!" like sighs. His eyes are
masked by blue glasses; his breathing is noisy. The top of his head
is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a
conical shape. To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air
strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a
butcher at some fiendish task.

But I let myself fall in a corner with my eyes half closed, seeing
hardly anything of the spectacle that lies and palpitates and falls
around me. Indistinctly I gather some fragments of sentences--still
the horrible monotony of the story of wounds: "Nom de Dieu! In that
place I should think the bullets were touching each other.--"His
head was bored through from one temple to the other. You could have
passed a thread through."

"Those beggars were an hour before they lifted their fire and
stopped peppering us." Nearer to me some one gabbles at the end of
his story, "When I'm sleeping I dream that I'm killing him over
again!"

Other memories are called up and buzz about among the buried
wounded; it is like the purring of countless gear-wheels in a
machine that turns and turns. And I hear afar him who repeats from
his seat, "What's the use of worrying?" in all possible tones,
commanding a pitiful, sometimes like a prophet and anon like one
shipwrecked; he metrifies with his cry the chorus of choking and
plaintive voices that try so terribly to extol their suffering.

Some one comes forward, blindly feeling the wall with his stick, and
reaches me. It is Farfadet! I call him, and he turns nearly towards
me to tell me that one eye is gone, and the other is bandaged as
well. I give him my place, take him by the shoulders and make him
sit down. He submits, and seated at the base of the wall waits
patiently, with the resignation of his clerkly calling, as if in a
waiting-room.

I come to anchor a little farther away, in an empty space where two
prostrate men are talking to each other in low voices; they are so
near to me that I hear them without listening. They are two soldiers
of the Foreign Legion; their helmets and greatcoats are dark yellow.

"It's not worth while to make-believe about it," says one of them
banteringly. "I'm staying here this time. It's finished--my bowels
are shot through. If I were in a hospital, in a town, they'd operate
on me in time, and it might stick up again. But here! It was
yesterday I got it. We're two or three hours from the Bethune
road, aren't we? And how many hours, think you, from the road to an
ambulance where they can operate? And then, when are they going to
pick us up? It's nobody's fault, I dare say; but you've got to look
facts in the face. Oh, I know it isn't going to be any worse from
now than it is, but it can't be long, seeing I've a hole all the way
through my parcel of guts. You, your foot'll get all right, or
they'll put you another one on. But I'm going to die."

"Ah!" said the other, convinced by the reasoning of his neighbor.
The latter goes on--"Listen, Dominique. You've led a bad life. You
cribbed things, and you were quarrelsome when drunk. You've dirtied
your ticket in the police register, properly."

"I can't say it isn't true, because it is," says the other; "but
what have you got to do with it?"

"You'll lead a bad life again after the war, inevitably; and then
you'll have bother about that affair of the cooper."

The other becomes fierce and aggressive. "What the hell's it to do
with you? Shut your jaw!"

"As for me, I've no more family than you have. I've nobody, except
Louise--and she isn't a relation of mine, seeing we're not married.
And there are no convictions against me, beyond a few little
military jobs. There's nothing on my name."

"Well, what about it? I don't care a damn."

"I'm going to tell you. Take my name. Take it--I give it you; as
long as neither of us has any family."

"Your name?"

"Yes; you'll call yourself Leonard Carlotti, that's all. 'Tisn't a
big job. What harm can it do you? Straight off, you've no more
convictions. They won't hunt you out, and you can be as happy as I
should have been if this bullet hadn't gone through my magazine."

"Oh Christ!" said the other, "you'd do that? You'd--that--well, old
chap, that beats all!"

"Take it. It's there in my pocket-book in my greatcoat. Go on, take
it, and hand yours over to me--so that I can carry it all away with
me. You'll be able to live where you like, except where I come from,
where I'm known a bit, at Longueville in Tunis. You'll remember
that? And anyway, it's written down. You must read it, the
pocket-book. I shan't blab to anybody. To bring the trick off
properly, mum's the word, absolutely."

He ponders a moment, and then says with a shiver "I'll p'raps tell
Louise, so's she'll find I've done the right thing, and think the
better of me, when I write to her to say good-by."

But he thinks better of it, and shakes his head with an heroic
effort. "No--I shan't let on, even to her. She's her, of course, but
women are such chatterers!"

The other man looks at him, and repeats, "Ah, nome de Dieu!"

Without being noticed by the two men I leave the drama narrowly
developing in this lamentable corner and its jostling and traffic
and hubbub.

Now I touch the composed and convalescent chat of two poor
wretches--"Ah, my boy, the affection he had for that vine of his!
You couldn't find anything wrong among the branches of it--"

"That little nipper, that wee little kid, when I went out with him,
holding his tiny fist, it felt as if I'd got hold of the little warm
neck of a swallow, you know."

And alongside this sentimental avowal, here is the passing
revelation of another mind: "Don't I know the 547th! Rather! Listen,
it's a funny regiment. They've got a poilu in it who's called
Petitjean, another called Petitpierre, and another called
Petitlouis. Old man, it's as I'm telling you; that's the kind of
regiment it is."

As I begin to pick out a way with a view to leaving the cavern,
there is a great noise down yonder of a fall and a chorus of
exclamations. It is the hospital sergeant who has fallen. Through
the breach that he was clearing of its soft and bloody relics, a
bullet has taken him in the throat, and he is spread out full length
on the ground. His great bewildered eyes are rolling and his breath
comes foaming. His mouth and the lower part of his face are quickly
covered with a cloud of rosy bubbles. They place his head on a bag
of bandages, and the bag is instantly soaked with blood. An
attendant cries that the packets of lint will be spoiled, and they
are needed. Something else is sought on which to put the head that
ceaselessly makes a light and discolored froth. Only a loaf can be
found, and it is slid under the spongy hair.

While they hold the sergeant's hand and question him, he only
slavers new heaps of bubbles, and we see his great black-bearded
head across this rosy cloud. Laid out like that, he might be a
deep-breathing marine monster, and the transparent red foam gathers
and creeps up to his great hazy eyes, no longer spectacled.

Then his throat rattles. It is a childish rattle, and he dies moving
his head to right and to left as though he were trying very gently
to say "No."

Looking on the enormous inert mass, I reflect that he was a good
man. He had an innocent and impressionable heart. How I reproach
myself that I sometimes abused him for the ingenuous narrowness of
his views, and for a certain clerical impertinence that he always
had! And how glad I am in this distressing scene--yes, happy enough
to tremble with joy--that I restrained myself from an angry protest
when I found him stealthily reading a letter I was writing, a
protest that would unjustly have wounded him! I remember the time
when he exasperated me so much by his dissertation on France and the
Virgin Mary. It seemed impossible to me that he could utter those
thoughts sincerely. Why should he not have been sincere? Has he not
been really killed today? I remember, too, certain deeds of
devotion, the kindly patience of the great man, exiled in war as in
life--and the rest does not matter. His ideas themselves are only
trivial details compared with his heart--which is there on the
ground in ruins in this corner of Hell. With what intensity I
lamented this man who was so far asunder from me in everything!

Then fell the thunder on us! We were thrown violently on each other
by the frightful shaking of the ground and the walls. It was as if
the overhanging earth had burst and hurled itself down. Part of the
armor-plate of beams collapsed, enlarging the hole that already
pierced the cavern. Another shock--another pulverized span fell in
roaring destruction. The corpse of the great Red Cross sergeant went
rolling against the wall like the trunk of a tree. All the timber in
the long frame-work of the cave, those heavy black vertebrae,
cracked with an ear-splitting noise, and all the prisoners in the
dungeon shouted together in horror.

Blow after blow, the explosions resound and drive us in all
directions as the bombardment mangles and devours the sanctuary of
pierced and diminished refuge. As the hissing flight of shells
hammers and crushes the gaping end of the cave with its
thunderbolts, daylight streams in through the clefts. More sharply
now, and more unnaturally, one sees the flushed faces and those
pallid with death, the eyes which fade in agony or burn with fever,
the patched-up white-bound bodies, the monstrous bandages. All that
was hidden rises again into daylight. Haggard, blinking and
distorted, in face of the flood of iron and embers that the
hurricanes of light bring with them, the wounded arise and scatter
and try to take flight. All the terror-struck inhabitants roll about
in compact masses across the miserable tunnel, as if in the pitching
hold of a great ship that strikes the rocks.

The aviator, as upright as he can get and with his neck on the
ceiling, waves his arms and appeals to God, asks Him what He is
called, what is His real name. Overthrown by the blast and cast upon
the others, I see him who, bare of breast and his clothes gaping
like a wound, reveals the heart of a Christ. The greatcoat of the
man who still monotonously repeats, "What's the use of worrying?"
now shows itself all green, bright green, the effect of the picric
acid no doubt released by the explosion that has staggered his
brain. Others--the rest, indeed--helpless and maimed, move and creep
and cringe, worm themselves into the corners. They are like moles.
poor, defenseless beasts, hunted by the hellish hounds of the guns.

The bombardment slackens, and ends in a cloud of smoke that still
echoes the crashes, in a quivering and burning after-damp. I pass
out through the breach; and still surrounded and entwined in the
clamor of despair, I arrive under the free sky, in the soft earth
where mingled planks and legs are sunk. I catch myself on some
wreckage; it is the embankment of the trench. At the moment when I
plunge into the communication trenches they are visible a long way;
they are still gloomily stirring, still filled by the crowd that
overflows from the trenches and flows without end towards the
refuges. For whole days, for whole nights, you will see the long
rolling streams of men plucked from the fields of battle, from the
plain over there that also has feelings of its own, though it bleeds
and rots without end.






22

Going About





WE have been along the Boulevard de la Republique and then
the Avenue Gambetta, and now we are debouching into the Place du
Commerce. The nails in our polished boots ring on the pavements of
the capital. It is fine weather, and the shining sky glistens and
flashes as if we saw it through the frames of a greenhouse; it sets
a-sparkle all the shop-fronts in the square. The skirts of our
well-brushed greatcoats have been let down, and as they are usually
fastened back, you can see two squares on the floating lappets where
the cloth is bluer.

Our sauntering party halts and hesitates for a moment in front of
the Cafe de la Sous-Prefecture, also called the
Grand-Cafe.

"We have the right to go in!" says Volpatte.

"Too many officers in there," replies Blaire, who has lifted his
chin over the guipure curtains in which the establishment is dressed
up and risked a glance through the window between its golden
letters.

"Besides," says Paradis, "we haven't seen enough yet."

We resume our walk and, simple soldiers that we are, we survey the
sumptuous shops that encircle the Place du Commerce; the drapers,
the stationers, the chemists, and--like a General's decorated
uniform--the display of the jeweler. We have put forth our smiles
like ornaments, for we are exempt from all duty until the evening,
we are free, we are masters of our own time. Our steps are gentle
and sedate; our empty and swinging hands are also promenading, to
and fro.

"No doubt about it, you get some good out of this rest," remarks
Paradis.

It is an abundantly impressive city which expands before our steps.
One is in touch with life, with the life of the people, the life of
the Rear, the normal life. How we used to think, down yonder, that
we should never get here!

We see gentlemen, ladies, English officers, aviators-recognizable
afar by their slim elegance and their decorations--soldiers who are
parading their scraped clothes and scrubbed skins and the solitary
ornament of their engraved identity discs, flashing in the sunshine
on their greatcoats; and these last risk themselves carefully in the
beautiful scene that is clear of all nightmares.

We make exclamations as they do who come from afar: "Talk about a
crowd!" says Tirette in wonder. "Ah, it's a wealthy town!" says
Blaire.

A work-girl passes and looks at us. Volpatte gives me a jog with his
elbow and swallows her with his eyes, then points out to me two
other women farther away who are coming up, and with beaming eye he
certifies that the town is rich in femininity--"Old man, they are
plump!" A moment ago Paradis had a certain timidity to overcome
before he could approach a cluster of cakes of luxurious lodging,
and touch and eat them; and every minute we are obliged to halt in
the middle of the pavement and wait for Blaire, who is attracted and
detained by the displays of fancy jumpers and caps, neck-ties in
pale blue drill, slippers as red and shiny as mahogany. Blaire has
reached the final height of his transformation. He who held the
record for negligence and grime is certainly the best groomed of us
all, especially since the further complication of his ivories, which
were broken in the attack and had to be remade. He affects an
off-hand demeanor. "He looks young and youthful," says Marthereau.

We find ourselves suddenly face to face with a toothless creature
who smiles to the depth of her throat. Some black hair bristles
round her hat. Her big, unpleasant features, riddled with
pock-marks, recalls the ill-painted faces that one sees on the
coarse canvas of a traveling show. 'She's beautiful,'' says
Volpatte. Marthereau. at whom she smiled, is dumb with shock.

Thus do the poilus converse who are suddenly placed under the spell
of a town. More and more they rejoice in the beautiful scene, so
neat and incredibly clean. They resume possession of life tranquil
and peaceful, of that conception of comfort and even of happiness
for which in the main houses were built.

"We should easily get used to it again, you know, old man, after
all!"

Meanwhile a crowd is gathered around an outfitter's shop-window
where the proprietor has contrived, with the aid of mannikins in
wood and wax, a ridiculous tableau. On a groundwork of little
pebbles like those in an aquarium, there is a kneeling German, in a
suit so new that the creases are definite, and punctuated with an
Iron Cross in cardboard. He holds up his two wooden pink hands to a
French officer, whose curly wig makes a cushion for a juvenile cap,
who has bulging, crimson cheeks, and whose infantile eye of adamant
looks somewhere else. Beside the two personages lies a rifle
bar-rowed from the odd trophies of a box of toys. A card gives the
title of the animated group--"Kamarad!"

"Ah, damn it, look!"

We shrug our shoulders at sight of the puerile contrivance, the only
thing here that recalls to us the gigantic war raging somewhere
under the sky. We begin to laugh bitterly, offended and even wounded
to the quick in our new impressions. Tirette collects himself, and
some abusive sarcasm rises to his lips; but the protest lingers and
is mute by reason of our total transportation, the amazement of
being somewhere else.

Our group is then espied by a very stylish and rustling lady,
radiant in violet and black silk and enveloped in perfumes. She puts
out her little gloved hand and touches Volpatte's sleeve and then
Blaire's shoulder, and they instantly halt, gorgonized by this
direct contact with the fairy-like being.

"Tell me, messieurs, you who are real soldiers from the front, you
have seen that in the trenches, haven't you?"

"Er--yes--yes." reply the two poor fellows, horribly frightened and
gloriously gratified.

"Ah!" the crowd murmurs, "did you hear? And they've been there, they
have!"

When we find ourselves alone again on the flagged perfection of the
pavement, Volpatte and Blaire look at each other and shake their
heads.

"After all," says Volpatte, "it is pretty much like that you know!"

"Why, yes, of course!"

And these were their first words of false swearing that day.

* * * * * *

We go into the Cafe de l'Industrie et des Fleurs. A roadway
of matting clothes the middle of the floor. Painted all the way
along the walls, all the way up the square pillars that support the
roof, and on the front of the counter, there is purple convolvulus
among great scarlet poppies and roses like red cabbages.

"No doubt about it, we've got good taste in France," says Tirette.

"The chap that did all that had a cartload of patience," Blaire
declares as he looks at the rainbow embellishments.

"In these places," Volpatte adds, "the pleasure of drinking isn't
the only one."

Paradis informs us that he knows all about cafes. On Sundays
formerly, he frequented cafes as beautiful as this one and
even more beautiful. Only, he explains, that was a long time ago,
and he has lost the flavor that they've got. He indicates a little
enameled wash-hand basin hanging on the wall and decorated with
flowers: "There's where one can wash his hands." We steer politely
towards the basin. Volpatte signs to Paradis to turn the tap, and
says, "Set the waterworks going!"

Then all six of us enter the saloon, whose circumference is already
adorned with customers, and install ourselves at a table.

"We'll have six currant-vermouths, shall we?"

"We could very easily get used to it again, after all," they repeat.

Some civilians leave their places and come near us. They whisper,
"They've all got the Croix de Guerre, Adolphe, you
see---"--"Those are real poilus!"

Our comrades overhear, and now they only talk among themselves
abstractedly, with their ears elsewhere, and an unconscious air of
importance appears.

A moment later, the man and woman from whom the remarks proceeded
lean towards us with their elbows on the white marble and question
us: "Life in the trenches, it's very rough, isn't it?"

"Er--yes--well, of course, it isn't always pleasant."

"What splendid physical and moral endurance you have! In the end you
get used to the life, don't you?"

"Why, yes, of course, one gets used to it--one gets used to it all
right."

"All the same, it's a terrible existence--and the suffering!"
murmurs the lady, turning over the leaves of an illustrated paper
which displays gloomy pictures of destruction. "They ought not to
publish these things, Adolphe, about the dirt and the vermin and the
fatigues! Brave as you are, you must be unhappy?"

Volpatte, to whom she speaks, blushes. He is ashamed of the misery
whence he comes, whither he must return. He lowers his head and
lies, perhaps without realizing the extent of his mendacity: "No,
after all, we're not unhappy, it isn't so terrible as all that!"

The lady is of the same opinion. "I know," she says, "there are
compensations! How superb a charge must be, eh? All those masses of
men advancing like they do in a holiday procession, and the trumpets
playing a rousing air in the fields! And the dear little soldiers
that can't be held back and shouting, 'Vive la France!' and even
laughing as they die! Ah! we others, we're not in honor's way like
you are. My husband is a clerk at the Prefecture, and just
now he's got a holiday to treat his rheumatism."

"I should very much have liked to be a soldier," said the gentleman,
"but I've no luck. The head of my office can't get on without me."

People go and come, elbowing and disappearing behind each other. The
waiters worm their way through with their fragile and sparkling
burdens--green, red or bright yellow, with a white border. The
grating of feet on the sanded floor mingles with the exclamations of
the regular customers as they recognize each other, some standing,
others leaning on their elbows, amid the sound of glasses and
dominoes pushed along the tables. In the background, around the
seductive shock of ivory balls, a crowding circle of spectators
emits classical pleasantries.

"Every man to his trade, mon brave," says a man at the other end of
the table whose face is adorned with powerful colors, addressing
Tirette directly; "you are heroes. On our side, we are working in
the economic life of the country. It is a struggle like yours. I am
useful--I don't say more useful than you, but equally so."

And I see Tirette through the cigar-smoke making round eyes, and in
the hubbub I can hardly hear the reply of his humble and dumbfounded
voice--Tirette, the funny man of the squad!--"Yes, that's true;
every man to his trade."

Furtively we stole away.

* * * * * *

We are almost silent as we leave the Cafe des Fleurs. It
seems as if we no longer know how to talk. Something like discontent
irritates my comrades and knits their brows. They look as if they
are becoming aware that they have not done their duty at an
important juncture.

"Fine lot of gibberish they've talked to us, the beasts!" Tirette
growls at last with a rancor that gathers strength the more we unite
and collect ourselves again.

"We ought to have got beastly drunk to-day!" replies Paradis
brutally.

We walk without a word spoken. Then, after a time, "They're a lot of
idiots, filthy idiots," Tirette goes on; "they tried to cod us, but
I'm not on; if I see them again," he says, with a crescendo of
anger, "I shall know what to say to them!"

"We shan't see them again," says Blaire.

"In eight days from now, p'raps we shall be laid out," says
Volpatte.

In the approaches to the square we run into a mob of people flowing
out from the Hotel de Ville and from another big public
building which displays the columns of a temple supporting a
pediment. Offices are closing, and pouring forth civilians of all
sorts and all ages, and military men both young and old, who seem at
a distance to be dressed pretty much like us; but when nearer they
stand revealed as the shirkers and deserters of the war, in spite of
being disguised as soldiers, in spite of their brisques. [note 1]

Women and children are waiting for them, in pretty and happy
clusters. The commercial people are shutting up their shops with
complacent content and a smile for both the day ended and for the
morrow, elated by the lively and constant thrills of profits
increased, by the growing jingle of the cash-box. They have stayed
behind in the heart of their own firesides; they have only to stoop
to caress their children. We see them beaming in the first
starlights of the street, all these rich folk who are becoming
richer, all these tranquil people whose tranquillity increases every
day, people who are full, you feel. and in spite of all, of an
unconfessable prayer. They all go slowly, by grace of the fine
evening, and settle themselves in perfected homes, or in
cafes where they are waited upon. Couples are forming, too,
young women and young men, civilians or soldiers, with some badge of
their preservation embroidered on their collars. They make haste
into the shadows of security where the others go, where the dawn of
lighted rooms awaits them; they hurry towards the night of rest and
caresses.

And as we pass quite close to a ground-floor window which is half
open, we see the breeze gently inflate the lace curtain and lend it
the light and delicious form of lingerie--and the advancing throng
drives us back, poor strangers that we are!

We wander along the pavement, all through the twilight that begins
to glow with gold--for in towns Night adorns herself with jewels.
The sight of this world has revealed a great truth to us at last,
nor could we avoid it: a Difference which becomes evident between
human beings, a Difference far deeper than that of nations and with
defensive trenches more impregnable; the clean-cut and truly
unpardonable division that there is in a country's inhabitants
between those who gain and those who grieve, those who are required
to sacrifice all, all, to give their numbers and strength and
suffering to the last limit, those upon whom the others walk and
advance, smile and succeed.

Some items of mourning attire make blots in the crowd and have their
message for us, but the rest is of merriment, not mourning.

"It isn't one single country, that's not possible," suddenly says
Volpatte with singular precision, "there are two. We're divided into
two foreign countries. The Front, over there, where there are too
many unhappy, and the Rear, here, where there are too many happy."

"How can you help it? It serves its end--it's the background--but
afterwards--"

"Yes, I know; but all the same, all the same, there are too many of
them, and they're too happy, and they're always the same ones, and
there's no reason--"

"What can you do?" says Tirette.

"So much the worse," adds Blaire, still more simply.

"In eight days from now p'raps we shall have snuffed it!" Volpatte
is content to repeat as we go away with lowered heads.

______

[note 1] See p. 117.






23

The Fatigue-Party





EVENING is falling upon the trench. All through the day it has been
drawing near, invisible as fate, and now it encroaches on the banks
of the long ditches like the lips of a wound infinitely great.

We have talked, eaten, slept, and written in the bottom of the
trench since the morning. Now that evening is here, an eddying
springs up in the boundless crevice; it stirs and unifies the torpid
disorder of the scattered men. It is the hour when we arise and
work.

Volpatte and Tirette approach each other. "Another day gone by,
another like the rest of 'em," says Volpatte, looking at the
darkening sky.

"You're off it; our day isn't finished," replies Tirette, whose long
experience of calamity has taught him that one must not jump to
conclusions, where we are, even in regard to the modest future of a
commonplace evening that has already begun.

"Allons! Muster!" We join up with the laggard inattention of custom.
With himself each man brings his rifle, his pouches of cartridges,
his water-bottle, and a pouch that contains a lump of bread.
Volpatte is still eating, with protruding and palpitating cheek.
Paradis, with purple nose and chattering teeth, growls. Fouillade
trails his rifle along like a broom. Marthereau looks at a mournful
handkerchief, rumpled and stiff, and puts it back in his pocket. A
cold drizzle is falling, and everybody shivers.

Down yonder we hear a droning chant--"Two shovels, one pick, two
shovels, one pick "The file trickles along to the tool-store,
stagnates at the door, and departs, bristling with implements.

"Everybody here? Gee up!" says the sergeant. Downward and rolling,
we go forward. We know not where we go. We know nothing, except that
the night and the earth are blending in the same abyss.

As we emerge into the nude twilight from the trench, we see it
already black as the crater of a dead volcano. Great gray clouds,
storm-charged, hang from the sky. The plain, too, is gray in the
pallid light; the grass is muddy, and all slashed with water. The
things which here and there seem only distorted limbs are denuded
trees. We cannot see far around us in the damp reek; besides, we
only look downwards at the mud in which we slide--"Porridge!"

Going across country we knead and pound a sticky paste which spreads
out and flows back from every step--"Chocolate cream--coffee
creams!"

On the stony parts, the wiped-out ruins of roads that have become
barren as the fields, the marching troop breaks through a layer of
slime into a flinty conglomerate that grates and gives way under our
iron-shod soles--"Seems as if we were walking on buttered toast!"

On the slope of a knoll sometimes, the mud is black and thick and
deep-rutted, like that which forms around the horse-ponds in
villages, and in these ruts there are lakes and puddles and ponds,
whose edges seem to be in rags.

The pleasantries of the wags, who in the early freshness of the
journey had cried, "Quack, quack," when they went through the water,
are now becoming rare and gloomy; gradually the jokers are damped
down. The rain begins to fall heavily. The daylight dwindles, and
the confusion that is space contracts. The last lingering light
welters on the ground and in the water.

A steaming silhouette of men like monks appears through the rain in
the west. It is a company of the 204th, wrapped in tent-cloths. As
we go by we see the pale and shrunken faces and the dark noses of
these dripping prowlers before they disappear. The track we are
following through the faint grass of the fields is itself a sticky
field streaked with countless parallel ruts, all plowed in the same
line by the feet and the wheels of those who go to the front and
those who go to the rear.

We have to jump over gaping trenches, and this is not always easy,
for the edges have become soft and slippery, and earth-falls have
widened them. Fatigue, too, begins to bear upon our shoulders.
Vehicles cross our path with a great noise and splashing. Artillery
limbers prance by and spray us heavily. The motor lorries are borne
on whirling circles of water around the wheels, with spirting
tumultuous spokes.

As the darkness increases, the jolted vehicles and the horses' necks
and the profiles of the riders with their floating cloaks and slung
carbines stand out still more fantastically against the misty floods
from the sky. Here, there is a block of ammunition carts of the
artillery. The horses are standing and trampling as we go by. We
hear the creaking of axles, shouts, disputes, commands which
collide, and the roar of the ocean of rain. Over the confused
scuffle we can see steam rising from the buttocks of the teams and
the cloaks of the horsemen.

"Look out!" Something is laid out on the ground on our right--a row
of dead. As we go by, our feet instinctively avoid them and our eyes
search them. We see upright boot-soles, outstretched necks, the
hollows of uncertain faces, hands half clenched in the air over the
dark medley.

We march and march, over fields still ghostly and foot-worn, under a
sky where ragged clouds unfurl themselves upon the blackening
expanse--which seems to have befouled itself by prolonged contact
with so many multitudes of sorry humanity.

Then we go down again into the communication trenches. To reach them
we make a wide circuit, so that the rearguard can see the whole
company, a hundred yards away, deployed in the gloom, little obscure
figures sticking to the slopes and following each other in loose
order, with their tools amid their rifles pricking up on each side
of their heads, a slender trivial line that plunges in and raises
its arms as if in entreaty.

These trenches--still of the second lines--are populous. On the
thresholds of the dug-outs, where cart-cloths and skins of animals
hang and flap, squatting and bearded men watch our passing with
expressionless eyes, as if they were looking at nothing. From
beneath other cloths, drawn down to the ground, feet are projected,
and snores.

"Nom de Dieu! It's a long way!" the trampers begin to grumble. There
is an eddy and recoil in the flow.

"Halt!" The stop is to let others go by. We pile ourselves up,
cursing, on the walls of the trench. It is a company of
machine-gunners with their curious burdens.

There seems to be no end to it, and the long halts are wearying.
Muscles are beginning to stretch. The everlasting march is
overwhelming us. We have hardly got going again when we have to
recoil once more into a traverse to let the relief of the
telephonists go by. We back like awkward cattle, and restart more
heavily.

"Look out for the wire!" The telephone wire undulates above the
trench, and crosses it in places between two posts. When it is too
slack, its curve sags into the trench and catches the rifles of
passing men, and the ensnared ones struggle, and abuse the engineers
who don't know how to fix up their threads.

Then, as the drooping entanglement of precious wires increases, we
shoulder our rifles with the butt in the air, carry the shovels
under our arms, and go forward with lowered heads.

* * * * * *

Our progress now is suddenly checked, and we only advance step by
step, locked in each other. The head of the column must be in
difficult case. We reach a spot where failing ground leads to a
yawning hole--the Covered Trench. The others have disappeared
through the low doorway. "We've got to go into this blackpudding.
then?"

Every man hesitates before ingulfing himself in the narrow
underground darkness, and it is the total of these hesitations and
lingerings that is reflected in the rear sections of the column in
the form of wavering, obstruction, and sometimes abrupt shocks.

From our first steps in the Covered Trench, a heavy darkness settles
on us and divides us from each other. The damp odor of a swamped
cave steals into us. In the ceiling of the earthen corridor that
contains us, we can make out a few streaks and holes of pallor--the
chinks and rents in the overhead planks. Little streams of water
flow freely through them in places, and in spite of tentative
groping we stumble on heaped-up timber. Alongside, our knocks
discover the dim vertical presence of the supporting beams.

The air in this interminable tunnel is vibrating heavily. It is the
searchlight engine that is installed there--we have to pass in front
of it.

After we have felt our deep-drowned way for a quarter of an hour,
some one who is overborne by the darkness and the wet, and tired of
bumping into unknown people, growls, "I don't care--I'm going to
light up."

The brilliant beam of a little electric lamp flashes out, and
instantly the sergeant bellows, "Ye gods! Who's the complete ass
that's making a light? Are you daft? Don't you know it can be seen,
you scab, through the roof?"

The flash-lamp, after revealing some dark and oozing walls in its
cone of light, retires into the night. "Not much you can't see it!"
jeers the man, "and anyway we're not in the first lines." "Ah, that
can't be seen!"

The sergeant, wedged into the file and continuing to advance,
appears to be turning round as he goes and attempting some forceful
observations--"You gallows-bird! You damned dodger!" But suddenly he
starts a new roar--"What! Another man smoking now! Holy hell!" This
time he tries to halt, but in vain he rears himself against the wall
and struggles to stick to it. He is forced precipitately to go with
the stream and is carried away among his own shouts, which return
and swallow him up, while the cigarette, the cause of his rage,
disappears in silence.

* * * * * *

The jerky beat of the engine grows louder, and an increasing heat
surrounds us. The overcharged air of the trench vibrates more and
more as we go forward. The engine's jarring note soon hammers our
ears and shakes us through. Still it gets hotter; it is like some
great animal breathing in our faces. The buried trench seems to be
leading us down and down into the tumult of some infernal workshop,
whose dark-red glow is sketching out our huge and curving shadows in
purple on the walls.

In a diabolical crescendo of din, of hot wind and of lights, we flow
deafened towards the furnace. One would think that the engine itself
was hurling itself through the tunnel to meet us, like a frantic
motor-cyclist drawing dizzily near with his headlight and
destruction.

Scorched and half blinded, we pass in front of the red furnace and
the black engine, whose flywheel roars like a hurricane, and we have
hardly time to make out the movements of men around it. We shut our
eyes, choked by the contact of this glaring white-hot breath.

Now, the noise and the heat are raging behind us and growing
feebler, and my neighbor mutters in his beard, "And that idiot that
said my lamp would be seen!"

And here is the free air! The sky is a very dark blue, of the same
color as the earth and little lighter. The rain becomes worse and
worse, and walking is laborious in the heavy slime. The whole boot
sinks in, and it is a labor of acute pain to withdraw the foot every
time. Hardly anything is left visible in the night, but at the exit
from the hole we see a disorder of beams which flounder in the
widened trench--some demolished dugout.

Just at this moment, a searchlight's unearthly arm that was swinging
through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of
uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with
dead soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs
on its back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with
clotted drops, covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in
its arms that it has only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of
a circle, has been stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are
laid bare. Another, outstretched on the edge of the heap, has thrown
his hand across our path; and in this place where there no traffic
except by night--for the trench is blocked just there by the
earth-fall and inaccessible by day--every one treads on that hand.
By the searchlight's shaft I saw it clearly, fleshless and worn, a
sort of withered fin.

The rain is raging and the sound of its streaming dominates
everything--a horror of desolation. We feel the water on our flesh
as if the deluge had washed our clothes away.

We enter the open trench, and the embrace of night and storm resumes
the sole possession of this confusion of corpses, stranded and
cramped on a square of earth as on a raft.

The wind freezes the drops of sweat on our foreheads. It is near
midnight. For six hours now we have marched in the increasing burden
of the mud. This is the time when the Paris theaters are
constellated with electroliers and blossoming with lamps; when they
are filled with luxurious excitement, with the rustle of skirts,
with merrymaking and warmth; when a fragrant and radiant multitude,
chatting, laughing, smiling, applauding, expanding. feels itself
pleasantly affected by the cleverly graduated emotions which the
comedy evokes, and lolls in contented enjoyment of the rich and
splendid pageants of military glorification that crowd the stage of
the music-hall.

"Aren't we there? Nom de Dieu, shan't we ever get there?" The groan
is breathed by the long procession that tosses about in these
crevices of the earth, carrying rifles and shovels and pickaxes
under the eternal torrent. We march and march. We are drunk with
fatigue, and roll to this side and that. Stupefied and soaked, we
strike with our shoulders a substance as sodden as ourselves.

"Halt!"--"Are we there?"--"Ah, yes, we're there!"

For the moment a heavy recoil presses us back and then a murmur runs
along: "We've lost ourselves." The truth dawns on the confusion of
the wandering horde. We have taken the wrong turn at some fork, and
it will be the deuce of a job to find the right way again.

Then, too, a rumor passes from mouth to mouth that a fighting
company on its way to the lines is coming up behind us. The way by
which we have come is stopped up with men. It is the block absolute.

At all costs we must try to regain the lost trench--which is alleged
to be on our left--by trickling through some sap or other. Utterly
wearied and unnerved, the men break into gesticulations and violent
reproaches. They trudge awhile, then drop their tools and halt. Here
and there are compact groups--you can glimpse them by the light of
the star-shells--who have let themselves fall to the ground.
Scattered afar from south to north, the troop waits in the merciless
rain.

The lieutenant who is in charge and has led us astray, wriggles his
way along the men in quest of some lateral exit. A little trench
appears, shallow and narrow.

"We most go that way, no doubt about it," the officer hastens to
say. "Come, forward, boys."

Each man sulkily picks up his burden. But a chorus of oaths and
curses rises from the first who enter the little sap: "It's a
latrine!"

A disgusting smell escapes from the trench, and those inside halt
butt into each other, and refuse to advance. We are all jammed
against each other and block up the threshold.

"I'd rather climb out and go in the open!" cries a man. But there
are flashes rending the sky above the embankments on all sides, and
the sight is so fearsome of these jets of resounding flame that
overhang our pit and its swarming shadows that no one responds to
the madman's saying.

Willing or unwilling, since we cannot go back, we must even take
that way. "Forward into the filth!" cries the leader of the troop.
We plunge in, tense with repulsion. Bullets are whistling over.
"Lower your heads!" The trench has little depth; one must stoop very
low to avoid being hit, and the stench becomes intolerable. At last
we emerge into the communication trench that we left in error. We
begin again to march. Though we march without end we arrive nowhere.

While we wander on, dumb and vacant, in the dizzy stupefaction of
fatigue, the stream which is running in the bottom of the trench
cleanses our befouled feet.

The roars of the artillery succeed each other faster and faster,
till they make but a single roar upon all the earth. From all sides
the gunfire and the bursting shells hurl their swift shafts of light
and stripe confusedly the black sky over our heads. The bombardment
then becomes so intense that its illumination has no break. In the
continuous chain of thunderbolts we can see each other clearly--our
helmets streaming like the bodies of fishes, our sodden leathers,
the shovel-blades black and glistening; we can even see the pale
drops of the unending rain. Never have I seen the like of it; in
very truth it is moonlight made by gunfire.

Together there mounts from our lines and from the enemy's such a
cloud of rockets that they unite and mingle in constellations; at
one moment, to light us on our hideous way, there was a Great Bear
of star-shells in the valley of the sky that we could see between
the parapets.

* * * * * *

We are lost again, and this time we must be close to the first
lines; but a depression in this part of the plain forms a sort of
basin, overrun by shadows. We have marched along a sap and then back
again. In the phosphorescent vibration of the guns, shimmering like
a cinematograph, we make out above the parapet two stretcher-bearers
trying to cross the trench with their laden stretcher.

The lieutenant, who at least knows the place where he should guide
the team of workers, questions them, "Where is the New
Trench?"--"Don't know." From the ranks another question is put to
them, "How far are we from the Boches?" They make no reply, as they
are talking among themselves.

"I'm stopping," says the man in front; "I'm too tired."

"Come, get on with you, nom de Dieu!" says the other in a surly tone
and floundering heavily, his arms extended by the stretcher. "We
can't step and rust here."

They put the stretcher down on the parapet, the edge of it
overhanging the trench, and as we pass underneath we can see the
prostrate man's feet. The rain which falls on the stretcher drains
from it darkened.

"Wounded?" some one asks down below.

"No, a stiff," growls the bearer this time, "and he weighs twelve
stone at least. Wounded I don't mind--for two days and two nights we
haven't left off carrying 'em--but it's rotten, breaking yourself up
with lugging dead men about." And the bearer, upright on the edge of
the bank, drops a foot to the base of the opposite bank across the
cavity, and with his legs wide apart, laboriously balanced, he grips
the stretcher and begins to draw it across, calling on his companion
to help him.

A little farther we see the stooping form of a hooded officer, and
as he raises his hand to his face we see two gold lines on his
sleeve. He, surely, will tell us the way. But he addresses us, and
asks if we have not seen the battery he is looking for. We shall
never get there!

But we do, all the same. We finish up in a field of blackness where
a few lean posts are bristling. We climb up to it, and spread out in
silence. This is the spot.

The placing of us is an undertaking. Four separate times we go
forward and then retire, before the company is regularly echeloned
along the length of the trench to be dug, before an equal interval
is left between each team of one striker and two shovelers. "Incline
three paces more--too much--one pace to the rear. Come, one pace to
the rear--are you deaf?--Halt! There!"

This adjustment is done by the lieutenant and a noncom. of the
Engineers who has sprung up out of the ground. Together or
separately they run along the file and give their muttered orders
into the men s ears as they take them by the arm, sometimes, to
guide them. Though begun in an orderly way, the arrangement
degenerates, thanks to the ill temper of the exhausted men, who must
continually be uprooting themselves from the spot where the
undulating mob is stranded.

"We're in front of the first lines," they whisper round me. "No."
murmur other voices, "we're just behind."

No one knows. The rain still falls, though less fiercely than at
some moments on the march. But what matters the rain! We have spread
ourselves out on the ground. Now that our backs and limbs rest in
the yielding mud, we are so comfortable that we are unconcerned
about the rain that pricks our faces and drives through to our
flesh, indifferent to the saturation of the bed that contains us.

But we get hardly time enough to draw breath. They are not so
imprudent as to let us bury ourselves in sleep. We must set
ourselves to incessant labor. It is two o'clock of the morning; in
four hours more it will be too light for us to stay here. There is
not a minute to lose.

"Every man," they say to us, "must dig five feet in length, two and
a half feet in width, and two and three-quarter feet in depth. That
makes fifteen feet in length for each team. And I advise you to get
into it; the sooner it's done, the sooner you'll leave."

We know the pious claptrap. It is not recorded in the annals of the
regiment that a trenching fatigue-party ever once got away before
the moment when it became absolutely necessary to quit the
neighborhood if they were not to be seen, marked and destroyed along
with the work of their hands.

We murmur, "Yes, yes--all right; it's not worth saying. Go easy."

But everybody applies himself to the job courageously, except for
some invincible sleepers whose nap will involve them later in
superhuman efforts.

We attack the first layer of the new line--little mounds of earth,
stringy with grass. The ease and speed with which the work
begins--like all entrenching work in free soil--foster the illusion
that it will soon be finished, that we shall be able to sleep in the
cavities we have scooped: and thus a certain eagerness revives.

But whether by reason of the noise of the shovels, or because some
men are chatting almost aloud, in spite of reproofs, our activity
wakes up a rocket, whose flaming vertical line rattles suddenly on
our right.

"Lie down!" Every man flattens himself, and the rocket balances and
parades its huge pallor over a sort of field of the dead.

As soon as it is out one hears the men, in places and then all
along, detach themselves from their secretive stillness, get up, and
resume the task with more discretion.

Soon another star-shell tosses aloft its long golden stalk, and
still more brightly illuminates the flat and motionless line of
trenchmakers. Then another and another.

Bullets rend the air around us, and we hear a cry, "Some one
wounded!" He passes, supported by comrades. We can just see the
group of men who are going away, dragging one of their number.

The place becomes unwholesome. We stoop and crouch, and some are
scratching at the earth on their knees. Others are working full
length; they toil, and turn, and turn again, like men in nightmares.
The earth, whose first layer was light to lift, becomes muddy and
sticky; it is hard to handle, and clings to the tool like glue.
After every shovelful the blade must be scraped.

Already a thin heap of earth is winding along, and each man has the
idea of reinforcing the incipient breastwork with his pouch and his
rolled-up greatcoat, and he hoods himself behind the slender pile of
shadow when a volley comes--

While we work we sweat, and as soon as we stop working we are
pierced through by the cold. A spell seems to be cast on us,
paralyzing our arms. The rockets torment and pursue us, and allow us
but little movement. After every one of them that petrifles us with
its light we have to struggle against a task still more stubborn.
The hole only deepens into the darkness with painful and despairing
tardiness.

The ground gets softer; each shovelful drips and flows, and spreads
from the blade with a flabby sound. At last some one cries, "Water!"
The repeated cry travels all along the row of
diggers--"Water--that's done it!"

"Melusson's team's dug deeper, and there's water. They've
struck a swamp."--"No help for it."

We stop in confusion. In the bosom of the night we hear the sound of
shovels and picks thrown down like empty weapons. The non-coms. go
gropingly after the officer to get instructions. Here and there,
with no desire for anything better, some men are going deliciously
to sleep under the caress of the rain, under the radiant rockets.

* * * * * *

It was very nearly at this minute, as far as I can remember, that
the bombardment began again. The first shell fell with a terrible
splitting of the air, which seemed to tear itself in two; and other
whistles were already converging upon us when its explosion uplifted
the ground at the head of the detachment in the heart of the
magnitude of night and rain, revealing gesticulations upon a sudden
screen of red.

No doubt they had seen us, thanks to the rockets, and had trained
their fire on us.

The men hurled and rolled themselves towards the little flooded
ditch that they had dug, wedging, burying, and immersing themselves
in it, and placed the blades of the shovels over their heads. To
right, to left, in front and behind, shells burst so near that every
one of them shook us in our bed of clay; and it became soon one
continuous quaking that seized the wretched gutter, crowded with men
and scaly with shovels, under the strata of smoke and the falling
fire. The splinters and debris crossed in all directions with a
network of noise over the dazzling field. No second passed but we
all thought what some stammered with their faces in the earth,
"We're done, this time!"

A little in front of the place where I am. a shape has arisen and
cried, "Let's be off!" Prone bodies half rose out of the shroud of
mud that dripped in tails and liquid rags from their limbs, and
these deathful apparitions cried also, "Let's go!" They were on
their knees, on all-fours, crawling towards the way of retreat: "Get
on, allez, get on!"

But the long file stayed motionless, and the frenzied complaints
were in vain. They who were down there at the end would not budge,
and their inactivity immobilized the rest. Some wounded passed over
the others, crawling over them as over debris, and sprinkling the
whole company with their blood.

We discovered at last the cause of the maddening inactivity of the
detachment's tail--"There's a barrage fire beyond."

A weird imprisoned panic seized upon the men with cries inarticulate
and gestures stillborn. They writhed upon the spot. But little
shelter as the incipient trench afforded, no one dared leave the
ditch that saved us from protruding above the level of the ground,
no one dared fly from death towards the traverse that should be down
there. Great were the risks of the wounded who had managed to crawl
over the others, and every moment some were struck and went down
again.

Fire and water fell blended everywhere. Profoundly entangled in the
supernatural din, we shook from neck to heels. The most hideous of
deaths was falling and bounding and plunging all around us in waves
of light, its crashing snatched our fearfulness in all
directions--our flesh prepared itself for the monstrous sacrifice!
In that tense moment of imminent destruction, we could only remember
just then how often we had already experienced it, how often
undergone this outpouring of iron, and the burning roar of it, and
the stench. It is only during a bombardment that one really recalls
those he has already endured.

And still, without ceasing, newly-wounded men crept over us, fleeing
at any price. In the fear that their contact evoked we groaned
again, "We shan't get out of this; nobody will get out of it."

Suddenly a gap appeared in the compressed humanity, and those behind
breathed again, for we were on the move.

We began by crawling, then we ran, bowed low in the mud and water
that mirrored the flashes and the crimson gleams, stumbling and
falling over submerged obstructions, ourselves resembling heavy
splashing projectiles, thunder-hurled along the ground. We arrive at
the starting-place of the trench we had begun to dig.

"There's no trench--there's nothing."

In truth the eye could discern no shelter in the plain where our
work had begun. Even by the stormy flash of the rockets we could
only see the plain, a huge and raging desert. The trench could not
be far away, for it had brought us here. But which way must we steer
to find it?

The rain redoubled. We lingered a moment in mournful disappointment,
gathered on a lightning-smitten and unknown shore--and then the
stampede.

Some bore to the left, some to the right, some went straight
forward--tiny groups that one only saw for a second in the heart of
the thundering rain before they were separated by sable avalanches
and curtains of flaming smoke.

* * * * * *

The bombardment over our heads grew less; it was chiefly over the
place where we had been that it was increasing. But it might any
minute isolate everything and destroy it.

The rain became more and more torrential--a deluge in the night. The
darkness was so deep that the star-shells only lit up slices of
water-seamed obscurity, in the depths of which fleeing phantoms came
and went and ran round in circles.

I cannot say how long I wandered with the group with which I had
remained. We went into morasses. We strained our sight forward in
quest of the embankment and the trench of salvation, towards the
ditch that was somewhere there, as towards a harbor.

A cry of consolation was heard at last through the vapors of war and
the elements--"A trench!" But the embankment of that trench was
moving; it was made of men mingled in confusion, who seemed to be
coming out and abandoning it.

"Don't stay there, mates!" cried the fugitives; "clear off, don't
come near. It's hell--everything's collapsing--the trenches are
legging it and the dug-outs are bunged up--the mud's pouring in
everywhere. There won't be any trenches by the morning--it's all up
with them about here!"

They disappeared. Where? We forgot to ask for some little direction
from these men whose streaming shapes had no sooner appeared than
they were swallowed up in the dark.

Even our little group crumbled away among the devastation, no longer
knowing where they were. Now one, now another, faded into the night,
disappearing towards his chance of escape.

We climbed slopes and descended them. I saw dimly in front of me men
bowed and hunchbacked, mounting a slippery incline where mud held
them back, and the wind and rain repelled them under a dome of
cloudy lights.

Then we flowed back, and plunged into a marsh up to our knees. So
high must we lift our feet that we walked with a sound of swimming.
Each forward stride was an enormous effort which slackened in agony.

It was there that we felt death drawing near. But we beached
ourselves at last on a sort of clay embankment that divided the
swamp. As we followed the slippery back of this slender island
along, I remember that once we had to stoop and steer ourselves by
touching some half-buried corpses, so that we should not be thrown
down from the soft and sinuous ridge. My hand discovered shoulders
and hard backs, a face cold as a helmet, and a pipe still
desperately bitten by dead jaws.

As we emerged and raised our heads at a venture we heard the sound
of voices not far away. "Voices! Ah, voices!" They sounded tranquil
to us, as though they called us by our names, and we all came close
together to approach this fraternal murmuring of men.

The words became distinct. They were quite near--in the hillock that
we could dimly see like an oasis: and yet we could not hear what
they said. The sounds were muddled, and we did not understand them.

"What are they saying?" asked one of us in a curious tone.

Instinctively we stopped trying to find a way in. A doubt, a painful
idea was seizing us. Then, clearly enunciated, there rang out these
words--"Achtung!--Zweites Geschutz--Schuss--"Farther back,
the report of a gun answered the telephonic command.

Horror and stupefaction nailed us to the spot at first--"Where are
we? Oh, Christ, where are we?" Turning right about face, slowly in
spite of all, borne down anew by exhaustion and dismay, we took
flight, as overwhelmed by weariness as if we had many wounds, pulled
back by the mud towards the enemy country, and retaining only just
enough energy to repel the thought of the sweetness it would have
been to let ourselves die.

We came to a sort of great plain. We halted and threw ourselves on
the ground on the side of a mound, and leaned back upon it, unable
to make another step.

And we moved no more, my shadowy comrades nor I. The rain splashed
in our faces, streamed down our backs and chests, ran down from our
knees and filled our boots.

We should perhaps be killed or taken prisoners when day came. But we
thought no more of anything. We could do no more; we knew no more.






24

The Dawn





WE are waiting for daylight in the place where we sank to the
ground. Sinister and slow it comes, chilling and dismal, and expands
upon the livid landscape.

The rain has ceased to fall--there is none left in the sky. The
leaden plain and its mirrors of sullied water seem to issue not only
from the night but from the sea.

Drowsy or half asleep, sometimes opening our eyes only to close them
again, we attend the incredible renewal of light, paralyzed with
cold and broken with fatigue.

Where are the trenches?

We see lakes, and between the lakes there are lines of milky and
motionless water. There is more water even than we had thought. It
has taken everything and spread everywhere, and the prophecy of the
men in the night has come true. There are no more trenches; those
canals are the trenches enshrouded. It is a universal flood. The
battlefield is not sleeping; it is dead. Life may be going on down
yonder perhaps, but we cannot see so far.

Swaying painfully, like a sick man, in the terrible encumbering
clasp of my greatcoat, I half raise myself to look at it all. There
are three monstrously shapeless forms beside me. One of them--it is
Paradis, in an amazing armor of mud, with a swelling at the waist
that stands for his cartridge pouches--gets up also. The others are
asleep, and make no movement.

And what is this silence, too, this prodigious silence? There is no
sound, except when from time to time a lump of earth slips into the
water, in the middle of this fantastic paralysis of the world. No
one is firing. There are no shells, for they would not burst. There
are no bullets, either, for the men--

Ah, the men! Where are the men?

We see them gradually. Not far from us there are some stranded and
sleeping hulks so molded in mud from head to foot that they are
almost transformed into inanimate objects.

Some distance away I can make out others, curled up and clinging
like snails all along a rounded embankment, from which they have
partly slipped back into the water. It is a motionless rank of
clumsy lumps, of bundles placed side by side, dripping water and
mud, and of the same color as the soil with which they are blended.

I make an effort to break the silence. To Paradis, who also is
looking that way, I say, "Are they dead?"

"We'll go and see presently," he says in a low voice; "stop here a
bit yet. We shall have the heart to go there by and by."

We look at each other, and our eyes fall also on the others who came
and fell down here. Their faces spell such weariness that they are
no longer faces so much as something dirty, disfigured and bruised,
with blood-shot eyes. Since the beginning we have seen each other in
all manner of shapes and appearances, and yet--we do not know each
other.

Paradis turns his head and looks elsewhere.

Suddenly I see him seized with trembling. He extends an arm
enormously caked in mud. "There--there--" he says.

On the water which overflows from a stretch particularly
cross-seamed and gullied, some lumps are floating, some round-backed
reefs.

We drag ourselves to the spot. They are drowned men. Their arms and
heads are submerged. On the surface of the plastery liquid appear
their backs and the straps of their accouterments. Their blue cloth
trousers are inflated, with the feet attached askew upon the
ballooning legs, like the black wooden feet on the shapeless legs of
marionettes. From one sunken head the hair stands straight up like
water-weeds. Here is a face which the water only lightly touches;
the head is beached on the marge, and the body disappears in its
turbid tomb. The face is lifted skyward. The eyes are two white
holes; the mouth is a black hole. The mask's yellow and puffed-up
skin appears soft and creased, like dough gone cold.

They are the men who were watching there, and could not extricate
themselves from the mud. All their efforts to escape over the sticky
escarpment of the trench that was slowly and fatally filling with
water only dragged them still more into the depth. They died
clinging to the yielding support of the earth.

There, our first lines are; and there, the first German lines,
equally silent and flooded. On our way to these flaccid ruins we
pass through the middle of what yesterday was the zone of terror,
the awful space on whose threshold the fierce rush of our last
attack was forced to stop, the No Man's Land which bullets and
shells had not ceased to furrow for a year and a half, where their
crossed fire during these latter days had furiously swept the ground
from one horizon to the other.

Now, it is a field of rest. The ground is everywhere dotted with
beings who sleep or who are on the way to die, slowly moving,
lifting an arm, lifting the head.

The enemy trench is completing the process of foundering into
itself, among great marshy undulations and funnel-holes, shaggy with
mud: it forms among them a line of pools and wells. Here and there
we can see the still overhanging banks begin to move, crumble, and
fail down. In one place we can lean against it.

In this bewildering circle of filth there are no bodies. But there,
worse than a body, a solitary arm protrudes, bare and white as a
stone, from a hole which dimly shows on the other side of the water.
The man has been buried in his dug-out and has had only the time to
thrust out his arm.

Quite near, we notice that some mounds of earth aligned along the
ruined ramparts of this deep-drowned ditch are human. Are they
dead--or asleep? We do not know; in any case, they rest.

Are they German or French? We do not know. One of them has opened
his eyes, and looks at us with swaying head. We say to him,
"French?"--and then, "Deutsch?" He makes no reply, but shuts his
eyes again and relapses into oblivion. We never knew what he was.

We cannot decide the identity of these beings, either by their
clothes, thickly covered with filth, or by their head-dress, for
they are bareheaded or swathed in woolens under their liquid and
offensive cowls; or by their weapons, for they either have no rifles
or their hands rest lightly on something they have dragged along, a
shapeless and sticky mass, like to a sort of fish.

All these men of corpse-like faces who are before us and behind us,
at the limit of their strength, void of speech as of will, all these
earth-charged men who you would say were carrying their own
winding-sheets, are as much alike as if they were naked. Out of the
horror of the night apparitions are issuing from this side and that
who are clad in exactly the same uniform of misery and mud.

It is the end of all. For the moment it is the prodigious finish,
the epic cessation of the war.

I once used to think that the worst hell in war was the flame of
shells; and then for long I thought it was the suffocation of the
caverns which eternally confine us. But it is neither of these. Hell
is water.

The wind is rising, and its icy breath goes through our flesh. On
the wrecked and dissolving plain, flecked with bodies between its
worm-shaped chasms of water, among the islands of motionless men
stuck together like reptiles, in this flattening and sinking chaos
there are some slight indications of movement. We see slowly
stirring groups and fragments of groups, composed of beings who bow
under the weight of their coats and aprons of mud, who trail
themselves along, disperse, and crawl about in the depths of the
sky's tarnished light. The dawn is so foul that one would say the
day was already done.

These survivors are migrating across the desolated steppe, pursued
by an unspeakable evil which exhausts and bewilders them. They are
lamentable objects; and some, when they are fully seen, are
dramatically ludicrous, for the whelming mud from which they still
take flight has half unclothed them.

As they pass by their glances go widely around. They look at us, and
discovering men in us they cry through the wind, "It's worse down
yonder than it is here. The chaps are falling into the holes, and
you can't pull them out. All them that trod on the edge of a
shell-hole last night, they're dead. Down there where we're coming
from you can see a head in the ground, working its arms, embedded.
There's a hurdle-path that's given way in places and the hurdles
have sunk into holes, and it's a man-trap. Where there's no more
hurdles there's two yards deep of water. Your rifle? You couldn't
pull it out again when you'd stuck it in. Look at those men, there.
They've cut off all the bottom half of their great-coats--hard lines
on the pockets--to help 'em get clear, and also because they hadn't
strength to drag a weight like that. Dumas' coat, we were able to
pull it off him, and it weighed a good eighty pounds; we could just
lift it, two of us, with both our hands. Look--him with the bare
legs; it's taken everything off him, his trousers, his drawers, his
boots, all dragged off by the mud. One's never seen that, never."

Scattered and straggling, the herd takes flight in a fever of fear,
their feet pulling huge stumps of mud out of the ground. We watch
the human flotsam fade away, and the lumps of them diminish, immured
in enormous clothes.

We get up, and at once the icy wind makes us tremble like trees.
Slowly we veer towards the mass formed by two men curiously joined,
leaning shoulder to shoulder, and each with an arm round the neck of
the other. Is it the hand-to-hand fight of two soldiers who have
overpowered each other in death and still hold their own, who can
never again lose their grip? No; they are two men who recline upon
each other so as to sleep. As they might not spread themselves on
the falling earth that was ready to spread itself on them, they have
supported each other, clasping each other's shoulder; and thus
plunged in the ground up to their knees, they have gone to sleep.

We respect their stillness, and withdraw from the twin statue of
human wretchedness.

Soon we must halt ourselves. We have expected too much of our
strength and can go no farther. It is not yet ended. We collapse
once more in a churned corner, with a noise as if one shot a load of
dung.

From time to time we open our eyes. Some men are steering for us,
reeling. They lean over us and speak in low and weary tones. One of
them says, "Sie sind todt. Wir bleiben hier." (They're dead. We'll
stay here.) The other says, "Ja," like a sigh.

But they see us move, and at once they sink in front of us. The man
with the toneless voice says to us in French, "We surrender," and
they do not move. Then they give way entirely, as if this was the
relief, the end of their torture; and one of them whose face is
patterned in mud like a savage tattooed, smiles slightly.

"Stay there," says Paradis, without moving the head that he leans
backward upon a hillock; "presently you shall go with us if you
want."

"Yes," says the German, "I've had enough." We make no reply, and he
says, "And the others too?"

"Yes," says Paradis, "let them stop too, if they like." There are
four of them outstretched on the ground. The death-rattle has got
one of them. It is like a sobbing song that rises from him. The
others then half straighten themselves, kneeling round him, and roll
great eyes in their muck-mottled faces. We get up and watch the
scene. But the rattle dies out, and the blackened throat which alone
in all the big body pulsed like a little bird, is still.

"Er ist todt!" (He's dead) says one of the men, beginning to cry.
The others settle themselves again to sleep. The weeper goes to
sleep as he weeps.

Other soldiers have come, stumbling, gripped in sudden halts like
tipsy men, or gliding along like worms, to take sanctuary here; and
we sleep all jumbled together in the common grave.

* * * * * *

Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember. We return to
life and daylight as in a nightmare. In front of us the calamitous
plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their
immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines
with lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and
there in the vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe
or rot.

Paradis says to me, "That's war."

"Yes, that's it," he repeats in a far-away voice, "that's war. It's
not anything else."

He means--and I am with him in his meaning--"More than attacks that
are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like
banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting
strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the
belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and
tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses
even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless
monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and
not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer
call to the sun!"

Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and
growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a
bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and
said, 'How beautiful they must be to see!'"

A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a
cloak, raised his bead out of the filthy background in which it was
sunk, and cried, 'Beautiful? Oh, hell! It's just as if an ox were to
say, 'What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle
driven forward to the slaughter-house!'" He spat out mud from his
besmeared mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast's.

"Let them say, 'It must be,'" he sputtered in a strange jerky voice,
grating and ragged; "that's all right. But beautiful! Oh, hell!"

Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, "It's when they say
things like that that they hit us hardest of all!" He spat again,
hut exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and
laid his head in his spittle.

* * * * * *

Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide
unspeakable landscape. and looking steadily on it repeated his
sentence, 'War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we
chaps, and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is
only a speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three
thousand kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse."

"And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not
recognize even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began
again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!"

With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged
his body out of the earth where he had molded a depression like an
oozing coffin, and sat in the hole. He blinked his eyes and tried to
shake the balance of mud from his face, and said, "We shall come out
of it again this time. And who knows, p'raps we shall come out of it
again to-morrow! Who knows?"

Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying
to convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in
terms of time and space. "When one speaks of the whole war," he
said, thinking aloud, "it's as if you said nothing at all--the words
are strangled. We're here, and we look at it all like blind men."

A bass voice rolled to us from a little farther away, "No, one
cannot imagine it."

At these words a burst of harsh laughter tore itself from some one.
"How could you imagine it, to begin with, if you hadn't been there?"

"You'd have to be mad," said the chasseur.

Paradis leaned over a sprawling outspread mass beside him and said,
"Are you asleep?"

"No, but I'm not going to budge." The smothered and terror-struck
mutter issued instantly from the mass that was covered with a thick
and slimy horse-cloth, so indented that it seemed to have been
trampled. "I'll tell you why. I believe my belly's shot through. But
I'm not sure, and I daren't find out."

"Let's see--"

"No, not yet," says the man. "I'd rather stop on a bit like this."

The others, dragging themselves on their elbows, began to make
splashing movements, by way of casting off the clammy infernal
covering that weighed them down. The paralysis of cold was passing
away from the knot of sufferers, though the light no longer made any
progress over the great irregular marsh of the lower plain. The
desolation proceeded, but not the day.

Then he who spoke sorrowfully, like a bell, said. "It'll be no good
telling about it, eh? They wouldn't believe you; not out of malice
or through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn't. When
you say to 'em later, if you live to say it, 'We were on a night job
and we got shelled and we were very nearly drowned in mud,' they'll
say, 'Ah!' And p'raps they'll say. 'You didn't have a very spicy
time on the job.' And that's all. No one can know it. Only us."

"No, not even us, not even us!" some one cried.

"That's what I say, too. We shall forget--we're forgetting already,
my boy!"

"We've seen too much to remember."

"And everything we've seen was too much. We're not made to hold it
all. It takes its damned hook in all directions. We're too little to
hold it."

"You're right, we shall forget! Not only the length of the big
misery, which can't be calculated, as you say, ever since the
beginning, but the marches that turn up the ground and turn it
again, lacerating your feet and wearing out your bones under a load
that seems to grow bigger in the sky, the exhaustion until you don't
know your own name any more, the tramping and the inaction that
grind you, the digging jobs that exceed your strength, the endless
vigils when you fight against sleep and watch for an enemy who is
everywhere in the night, the pillows of dung and lice--we shall
forget not only those, but even the foul wounds of shells and
machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the counter-attacks. At those
moments you're full of the excitement of reality, and you've some
satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don't know
how and you don't know where, and there's only the names left, only
the words of it, like in a dispatch."

"That's true what he says," remarks a man, without moving his head
in its pillory of mud. When I was on leave, I found I'd already
jolly well forgotten what had happened to me before. There were some
letters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I
was opening. And yet in spite of that, I've forgotten also all the
pain I've had in the war. We're forgetting-machines. Men are things
that think a little but chiefly forget. That's what we are."

"Then neither the other side nor us'll remember! So much misery all
wasted!"

This point of view added to the abasement of these beings on the
shore of the flood, like news of a greater disaster, and humiliated
them still more.

"Ah, if one did remember!" cried some one.

"If we remembered," said another, "there wouldn't be any more war."

A third added grandly, "Yes, if we remembered, war would be less
useless than it is."

But suddenly one of the prone survivors rose to his knees, dark as a
great bat ensnared, and as the mud dripped from his waving arms he
cried in a hollow voice, "There must be no more war after this!"

In that miry corner where, still feeble unto impotence, we were
beset by blasts of wind which laid hold on us with such rude
strength that the very ground seemed to sway like sea-drift, the cry
of the man who looked as if he were trying to fly away evoked other
like cries: "There must be no more war after this!"

The sullen or furious exclamations of these men fettered to the
earth, incarnate of earth, arose and slid away on the wind like
beating wings--

"No more war! No more war! Enough of it!"

"It's too stupid--it's too stupid," they mumbled.

"What does it mean, at the bottom of it, all this?--all this that
you can't even give a name to?"

They snarled and growled like wild beasts on that sort of ice-floe
contended for by the elements, in their dismal disguise of ragged
mud. So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it
choked them.

"We're made to live, not to be done in like this!"

"Men are made to be husbands, fathers--men, what the devil!--not
beasts that hunt each other and cut each other's throats and make
themselves stink like all that."

"And yet, everywhere--everywhere--there are beasts, savage beasts or
smashed beasts. Look, look!"

I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the
water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on
all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed
across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising
above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever
forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that
suddenly shook these men like a fit of madness.

I could see them agitated by this idea--that to try to live one's
life on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and
even an ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to
make easy the inner life of every one.

"To live!"--"All of us!"--"You!"--"Me!"

"No more war--ah, no!--it's too stupid--worse than that, it's
too--"

For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to
the mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned
face that I saw arise from the level of the earth--"Two armies
fighting each other--that's like one great army committing suicide!"

* * * * * *

"And likewise, what have we been for two years now? Incredibly
pitiful wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty
devils."

"Worse than that!" mutters he whose only phrase it is.

"Yes, I admit it!"

In their troubled truce of the morning, these men whom fatigue had
tormented, whom rain had scourged, whom night-long lightning had
convulsed, these survivors of volcanoes and flood began not only to
see dimly how war, as hideous morally as physically, outrages common
sense, debases noble ideas and dictates all kind of crime, but they
remembered how it had enlarged in them and about them every evil
instinct save none, mischief developed into lustful cruelty,
selfishness into ferocity, the hunger for enjoyment into a mania.

They are picturing all this before their eyes as just now they
confusedly pictured their misery. They are crammed with a curse
which strives to find a way out and to come to light in words, a
curse which makes them to groan and wail. It is as if they toiled to
emerge from the delusion and ignorance which soil them as the mud
soils them; as if they will at last know why they are scourged.

"Well then?" clamors one.

"Ay, what then?" the other repeats, still more grandly. The wind
sets the flooded flats a-tremble to our eyes, and falling furiously
on the human masses lying or kneeling and fixed like flagstones and
grave-slabs, it wrings new shivering from them.

"There will be no more war," growls a soldier, "when there is no
more Germany."

"That's not the right thing to say!" cries another. "It isn't
enough. There'll be no more war when the spirit of war is defeated."
The roaring of the wind half smothered his words, so he lifted his
head and repeated them.

"Germany and militarism"--some one in his anger precipitately cut
in--"they're the same thing. They wanted the war and they'd planned
it beforehand. They are militarism."

"Militarism--" a soldier began again.

"What is it?" some one asked.

"It's--it's brute force that's ready prepared, and that lets fly
suddenly, any minute."

"Yes. To-day militarism is called Germany."

"Yes, but what will it be called to-morrow?"

"I don't know," said a voice serious as a prophet's.

"If the spirit of war isn't killed, you'll have struggle all through
the ages."

"We must--one's got to--"

"We must fight!" gurgled the hoarse voice of a man who had lain
stiff in the devouring mud ever since our awakening; "we've got to!"
His body turned heavily over. "We've got to give all we have, our
strength and our skins and our hearts, all our life and what
pleasures are left us. The life of prisoners as we are, we've got to
take it in both hands. You've got to endure everything, even
injustice--and that's the king that's reigning now--and the shameful
and disgusting sights we see, so as to come out on top, and win. But
if we've got to make such a sacrifice," adds the shapeless man,
turning over again, "it's because we're fighting for progress, not
for a country; against error, not against a country."

"War must be killed," said the first speaker, "war must be killed in
the belly of Germany!"

"Anyway," said one of those who sat enrooted there like a sort of
shrub, "anyway, we're beginning to understand why we've got to march
away."

"All the same," grumbled the squatting chasseur in his turn, "there
are some that fight with quite another idea than that in their
heads. I've seen some of 'em, young men, who said, 'To hell with
humanitarian ideas'; what mattered to them was nationality and
nothing else, and the war was a question of fatherlands--let every
man make a shine about his own. They were fighting, those chaps, and
they were fighting well."

"They're young, the lads you're talking about; they're young, and we
must excuse 'em."

"You can do a thing well without knowing what you are doing."

"Men are mad, that's true. You'll never say that often enough."

"The Jingoes--they're vermin," growled a shadow.

Several times they repeated, as though feeling their way, "War must
be killed; war itself."

"That's all silly talk. What diff does it make whether you think
this or that? We've got to be winners, that's all."

But the others had begun to cast about. They wanted to know and to
see farther than to-day. They throbbed with the effort to beget in
themselves some light of wisdom and of will. Some sparse convictions
whirled in their minds, and jumbled scraps of creeds issued from
their lips.

"Of course--yes--but we must look at facts--you've got to think
about the object, old chap."

"The object? To be winners in this war," the pillar-man insisted,
"isn't that an object?"

Two there were who replied together, "No!"

* * * * * *

At this moment there was a dull noise; cries broke out around us,
and we shuddered. A length of earth had detached itself from the
hillock on which--after a fashion--we were leaning back, and had
completely exhumed in the middle of us a sitting corpse, with its
legs out full length. The collapse burst a pool that had gathered on
the top of the mound, and the water spread like a cascade over the
body and laved it as we looked.

Some one cried, "His face is all black!"

"What is that face?" gasped a voice.

Those who were able drew near in a circle, like frogs. We could not
gaze upon the head that showed in low relief upon the trench-wall
that the landslide had laid bare. "His face? It isn't his face!" In
place of the face we found the hair, and then we saw that the corpse
which had seemed to be sitting was broken, and folded the wrong way.
In dreadful silence we looked on the vertical back of the dislocated
dead, upon the hanging arms, backward curved, and the two
outstretched legs that rested on the sinking soil by the points of
the toes. Then the discussion began again, revived by this fearful
sleeper. As though the corpse was listening they clamored--"No! To
win isn't the object. It isn't those others we've got to get
at--it's war."

"Can't you see that we've got to finish with war? If we've got to
begin again some day, all that's been done is no good. Look at it
there!--and it would be in vain. It would be two or three years or
more of wasted catastrophe."

* * * * * *

"Ah, my boy, if all we've gone through wasn't the end of this great
calamity! I value my life; I've got my wife, my family, my home
around them; I've got schemes for my life afterwards, mind you.
Well, all the same, if this wasn't the end of it, I'd rather die."

"I'm going to die." The echo came at that moment exactly from
Paradis' neighbor, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly.
"I'm sorry on account of my children."

"It's on account of my children that I'm not sorry," came a murmur
from somewhere else. "I'm dying, so I know what I'm saying, and I
say to myself, 'They'll have peace.'"

"Perhaps I shan't die," said another, with a quiver of hope that he
could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, "but I shall
suffer. Well, I say, 'more's the pity,' and I even say 'that's all
right'; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it's
for something."

"Then we'll have to go on fighting after the war?"

"Yes, p'raps--"

"You want more of it, do you?"

"Yes, because I want no more of it," the voice grunted. "And p'raps
it'll not be foreigners that we've got to fight?"

"P'raps, yes--"

A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When
it had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain,
seizing and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the
long gaping trenches--long as the grave of an army--we began again.

"After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?"

"It's the mass of the people."

"But the people--that's us!"

He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.

"Yes," I said to him, "yes, old boy, that's true! It's with us only
that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is
made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we
who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and
each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our
numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a
wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us
together."

"Yes, that's true. It's the people who are war; without them, there
would be nothing, nothing but some wrangling, a long way off. But it
isn't they who decide on it; it's the masters who steer them."

"The people are struggling to-day to have no more masters that steer
them. This war, it's like the French Revolution continuing."

"Well then, if that's so, we're working for the Prussians too?"

"It's to be hoped so," said one of the wretches of the plain.

"Oh, hell!" said the chasseur, grinding his teeth. But he shook his
head and added no more.

"We want to look after ourselves! You shouldn't meddle in other
people's business," mumbled the obstinate snarler.

"Yes, you should! Because what you call 'other people,' that's just
what they're not--they're the same!"

"Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?"

"That's it!" said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a
moment before. "More's the pity, or so much the better."

"The people--they're nothing, though they ought to be everything,"
then said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did
not know it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but
investing it at last with its great universal significance. Escaped
from torment, on all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he
lifted his leper-like face and looked hungrily before him into
infinity.

He looked and looked. He was trying to open the gates of heaven.

* * * * * *

"The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through
the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or
another. All the masses ought to agree together."

"All men ought to be equal."

The word seems to come to us like a rescue.

"Equal--yes--yes--there are some great meanings for justice and
truth. There are some things one believes in, that one turns to and
clings to as if they were a sort of light. There's equality, above
all."

"There's liberty and fraternity, too."

"But principally equality!"

I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain
sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he
does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him. You can build
nothing on fraternity. Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a
thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by
force.

But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words
while equality is a fact. Equality should be the great human
formula--social equality, for while individuals have varying values,
each must have an equal share in the social life; and that is only
just, because the life of one human being is equal to the life of
another. That formula is of prodigious importance. The principle of
the equal rights of every living being and the sacred will of the
majority is infallible and must be invincible; all progress will be
brought about by it, all, with a force truly divine. It will bring
first the smooth bed-rock of all progress--the settling of quarrels
by that justice which is exactly the same thing as the general
advantage.

And these men of the people, dimly seeing some unknown Revolution
greater than the other, a revolution springing from themselves and
already rising, rising in their throats, repeat "Equality!"

It seems as if they were spelling the word and then reading it
distinctly on all sides--that there is not upon the earth any
privilege, prejudice or injustice that does not collapse in contact
with it. It is an answer to all, a word of sublimity. They revolve
the idea over and over, and find a kind of perfection in it. They
see errors and abuses burning in a brilliant light.

"That would be fine!" said one.

"Too fine to be true!" said another.

But the third said, "It's because it's true that it's fine. It has
no other beauty, mind! And it's not because it's fine that it will
come. Fineness is not in vogue, any more than love is. It's because
it's true that it has to be."

"Then, since justice is wanted by the people, and the people have
the power, let them do it."

"They're beginning already!" said some obscure lips.

"It's the way things are running," declared another.

"When all men have made themselves equal, we shall be forced to
unite."

"And there'll no longer be appalling things done in the face of
heaven by thirty million men who don't wish them."

It is true, and there is nothing to reply to it. What pretended
argument or shadow of an answer dare one oppose to it--"There'll no
longer be the things done in the face of heaven by thirty millions
of men who don't want to do them!"

Such is the logic that I hear and follow of the words, spoken by
these pitiful fellows cast upon the field of affliction, the words
which spring from their bruises and pains, the words which bleed
from them.

Now, the sky is all overcast. Low down it is armored in steely blue
by great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is
crossed by enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening,
and more rain on the way. The end of the tempest and the long
trouble is not yet.

"We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make
war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for.
We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the
fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be
lacerated, it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could
easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in
armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely
names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can
contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and
shops--and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the
divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did
believe in are not divisions."

"Listen!" some one broke in suddenly.

We hold our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns. Yonder, the
growling is agitating the gray strata of the sky, and the distant
violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters
continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.

"It's beginning again."

Then one of us says, "Ah, look what we've got against us!"

Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of
their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are
roughly sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of
the moment, whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity
of circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of
privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken
sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the
tangled lines.

And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in
which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and
stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.

* * * * * *

Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky,
above the crests of the storm that beglooms the world--a cavalcade
of warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and
plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with
weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The
antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the
painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.

And far above the fevered gaze of them who are upon the ground,
whose bodies are layered with the dregs of the earth and the wasted
fields, the phantom cohort flows from the four corners of the
horizon, drives back the sky's infinity and hides its blue deeps.

And they are legion. They are not only the warrior caste who shout
as they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal
slavery has clothed in magic power, the mighty by birth, who tower
here and there above the prostration of the human race and will take
their sudden stand by the scales of justice when they think they see
great profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who
minister consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.

"There are those who say," now cries one of the somber and
compelling talkers, extending his hand as though he could see the
pageant, "there are those who say, 'How fine they are!'"

"And those who say, 'The nations hate each other!'"

"And those who say, 'I get fat on war, and my belly matures on it!'"

"And those who say, 'There has always been war, so there always will
be!'"

"There are those who say, 'I can't see farther than the end of my
nose, and I forbid others to see farther!'"

"There are those who say, 'Babies come into the world with either
red or blue breeches on!'"

"There are those," growled a hoarse voice, "who say, 'Bow your head
and trust in God!'"

* * * * * *

Ah, you are right, poor countless workmen of the battles, you who
have made with your bands all of the Great War, you whose
omnipotence is not yet used for well-doing, you human host whose
every face is a world of sorrows, you who dream bowed under the yoke
of a thought beneath that sky where long black clouds rend
themselves and expand in disheveled lengths like evil angels--yes,
you are right. There are all those things against you. Against you
and your great common interests which as you dimly saw are the same
thing in effect as justice, there are not only the sword-wavers, the
profiteers, and the intriguers.

There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested
parties--financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in
their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during
war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and
their faces shut up like safes.

There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail
like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music
and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with
brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the
savages.

There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are
the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an
injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to
be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the
future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and
nursery-tales.

With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull
you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing
may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the
historians--and how many more?--who befog you with the rigmarole of
theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time
when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the
arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by
an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten
genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder
false certificates of philosophy and imaginary titles of nobility.
The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many
cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the
simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and
trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not
the great ones.

And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they
are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national
vanity and the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say,
each behind his shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and
loyalty, of ability and good taste!" Out of the greatness and
richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease.
Out of patriotism--which can be respected as long as it remains in
the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the
sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred--out of
patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing
the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force,
spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which
culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and
suffocation of armed peace.

They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are
the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them
with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the
truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their
national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they
falsify and twist the truth.

Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously
ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you--"It wasn't me that
began, it was you!"--"No, it wasn't me, it was you!"--"Hit me
then!"--"No, you hit me!"--those puerilities that perpetuate the
world's huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly
concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done
with it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on
earth; all those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient
state of things and find or invent excuses for it--they are your
enemies!

They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day
who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor
dupes hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are
your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their
names, whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the
heaven and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them
once for all, and be mindful for ever!

* * * * * *

"They will say to you," growled a kneeling man who stooped with his
two bands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, 'My
friend, you have been a wonderful hero!' I don't want them to say
it!

"Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We've been
murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We
shall do it again with all our might, because it's of great
importance to follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it.
The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but
always ignoble. Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that's what
we've been. But don't talk to me about military virtue because I've
killed Germans."

"Nor to me," cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have
replied to him even had he dared; "nor to me, because I've saved the
lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the
sake of the excellence of life-saving!"

"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there
were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.

The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of
paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they
haven't done. But military glory--it isn't even true for us common
soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory
is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality,
the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that
make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl
themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap
up their names, their poor little names of nobodies."

"To hell with it all," replies a man, "we've got other things to
think about."

"But all that," hiccupped a face which the mud concealed like a
hideous hand, "may you even say it? You'd be cursed, and 'shot at
dawn'! They've made around a Marshal's plumes a religion as bad and
stupid and malignant as the other!"

The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he
had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he
had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had
given for the healing of the world.

* * * * * *

The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling
more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day
is full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of
men are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of
clouds, round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles,
churches, royal and military palaces and temples. They seem to
multiply there, shutting out the stars that are fewer than mankind;
it seems even as if these apparitions are moving in all directions
in the excavated ground, here, there, among the real beings who are
thrown there at random, half buried in the earth like grains of
corn.

My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with
difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb,
laid out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge
simplicity out of the earth's depths--a profoundity like that of
ignorance--they move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and
their fists extended towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm.
They are struggling against victorious specters, like the Cyranos
and Don Quixotes that they still are.

One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the
plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old
trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and
purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.

But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the
boundless simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with
a dawn of hope, but raises on it a renewal of strength and courage.

"That's enough talk about those others!" one of the men commanded;
"all the worse for them!--Us! Us all!" The understanding between
democracies, the entente among the multitudes, the uplifting of the
people of the world, the bluntly simple faith! All the rest, aye,
all the rest, in the past, the present and the future, matters
nothing at all.

And a soldier ventures to add this sentence, though he begins it
with lowered voice, "If the present war has advanced progress by one
step, its miseries and slaughter will count for little."

And while we get ready to rejoin the others and begin war again, the
dark and storm-choked sky slowly opens above our heads. Between two
masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of
light, so blackedged and beset, brings even so its proof that the
sun is there.



THE END





Project Gutenberg Australia