AT THE WORLD'S END
"We're going to Alsace," said the well-informed. "To the Somme," said
the better-informed, louder.
We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and
paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies.
At long intervals the train would begin to move on again. It has left
an impression with me that it was chiefly motionless.
We got out, one afternoon, under a sky crowded with masses of darkness,
in a station recently bombarded and smashed, and its roof left like a
fish-bone. It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foul
whiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in the
rain.
"'Pears we're in the Aisne country," they said.
A downpour was in progress. Shivering, we busied ourselves with
unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then
ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy
parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see. Each
looked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man. On each
side of the road were deserts without limits, flat and flabby, with
trees like posts, and rusty fields patched with green mud.
"Shoulder packs, and forward!" Adjutant Marcassin ordered.
Where were we going? No one knew. We crossed the rest of the village.
The Germans had occupied it during the August retreat. It was
destroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itself
with fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself. The rain
had ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky,
clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the
detonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road we met Red
Cross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not see
inside them. In the first stages we were interested in everything, and
asked questions, like foreigners. A man who had been wounded and was
rejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, and
invariably added, "That's nothing; you'll see in a bit." Then the
march made men retire into themselves.
My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociously
full; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled and
then wounded my back at each step. The pain quickly became acute,
unbearable. I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite
of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at
the end of the fifty minutes' march. But I did all the same, because I
had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and
because I could thus always _do one step more_. I knew later that this
is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers
completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.
The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through the
softened plains which evening was darkening. At one halt I saw one of
those men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front. He
had sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made him
almost unrecognizable, and he told me that he had had enough of war!
And little Mélusson, whom I once used to see at Viviers, lifted to me
his yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemed
drawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick the
next day.
After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over a
colorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chilly
top of a hill, where a village was beginning. An epidemic of gloom
overspread us. Why were we stopped in that way? No one knew anything.
In the evening we engulfed ourselves in the village. But they halted
us in a street. The sky had heavily darkened. The fronts of the
houses had taken on a greenish hue and reflected and rooted themselves
in the running water of the street. The market-place curved around in
front of us--a black space with shining tracks, like an old mirror to
which the silvering only clings in strips.
At last, night fully come, they bade us march. They made us go forward
and then draw back, with loud words of command, in the tunnels of
streets, in alleys and yards. By lantern light they divided us into
squads. I was assigned to the eleventh, quartered in a village whose
still standing parts appeared quite new. Adjutant Marcassin became my
section chief. I was secretly glad of this; for in the gloomy
confusion we stuck closely to those we knew, as dogs do.
The new comrades of the squad--they lodged in the stable, which was
open as a cage--explained to me that we were a long way from the front,
over six miles; that we should have four days' rest and then go on
yonder to occupy the trenches at the glass works. They said it would
be like that, in shifts of four days, to the end of the war, and that,
moreover, one had not to worry.
These words comforted the newcomers, adrift here and there in the
straw. Their weariness was alleviated. They set about writing and
card-playing. That evening I dated my letter to Marie "at the Front,"
with a flourish of pride. I understood that glory consists in doing
what others have done, in being able to say, "I, too."
* * * * * *
Three days went by in this "rest camp." I got used to an existence
crowded with exercises in which we were living gear-wheels; crowded
also with fatigues; already I was forgetting my previous existence.
On the Friday at three o'clock we were paraded in marching order in the
school yard. Great stones, detached from walls and arches, lay about
the forsaken grass like tombs. Hustled by the wind, we were reviewed
by the captain, who fumbled in our cartridge-pouches and knapsacks with
the intention of giving imprisonment to those who had not the right
quantity of cartridges and iron rations. In the evening we set off,
laughing and singing, along the great curves of the road. At night we
arrived swaying with fatigue and savagely silent, at a slippery and
interminable ascent which stood out against stormy rain-clouds as heavy
as dung-hills. Many dark masses stumbled and fell with a crash of
accoutrements on that huge sloping sewer. As they swarmed up the chaos
of oblique darkness which pushed them back, the men gave signs of
exhaustion and anger. Cries of "Forward! Forward!" surrounded us on
all sides, harsh cries like barks, and I heard, near me, Adjutant
Marcassin's voice, growling, "What about it, then? It's for France's
sake!" Arrived at the top of the hill, we went down the other slope.
The order came to put pipes out and advance in silence. A world of
noises was coming to life in the distance.
A gateway made its sudden appearance in the night. We scattered among
flat buildings, whose walls here and there showed black holes, like
ovens, while the approaches were obstructed with plaster rubbish and
nail-studded beams. In places the recent collapse of stones, cement
and plaster had laid on the bricks a new and vivid whiteness that was
visible in the dark.
"It's the glass works," said a soldier to me.
We halted a moment in a passage whose walls and windows were broken,
where we could not make a step or sit down without breaking glass. We
left the works by sticky footpaths, full of rubbish at first, and then
of mud. Across marshy flats, chilly and sinister, obscurely lighted by
the night, we came to the edge of an immense and pallid crater. The
depths of this abyss were populated with glimmers and murmurs; and all
around a soaked and ink-black expanse of country glistened to infinity.
"It's the quarry," they informed me.
Our endless and bottomless march continued. Sliding and slipping we
descended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropingly
encountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guard
of the regiment we were relieving. We passed heaped-up hutments at the
foot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn among
the black circles of space. The sound of shots drew near and
multiplied on all sides; the vibration of artillery fire outspread
under our feet and over our heads.
I found myself suddenly in front of a narrow and muddy ravine into
which the others were plunging one by one.
"It's the trench," whispered the man who was following me; "you can see
its beginning, but you never see its blinking end. Anyway, on you go!"
We followed the trench along for three hours. For three hours we
continued to immerse ourselves in distance and solitude, to immure
ourselves in night, scraping its walls with our loads, and sometimes
violently pulled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by the
sudden wedging of our pouches. It seemed as if the earth tried
continually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us.
Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space was
shot-riddled. A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections of
the night, revealing the excavations' wet entrails and conjuring up a
file of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a black
and black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies. When great
guns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted and
then fell darkly back.
"Look out! The open crossing!"
A wall of earth rose in tiers before us. There was no outlet. The
trench came to a sudden end--to be resumed farther on, it seemed.
"Why?" I asked, mechanically.
They explained to me: "It's like that." And they added, "You stoop
down and get a move on."
The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one by
one and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was the
dark. The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air here
and there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were. In spite
of the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn with
all my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded and
rattling body which ran in front; and I found myself again in a trench,
breathless. In my passage I had glimpses of a somber field,
bullet-smacked and hole pierced, with silent blots outspread or
doubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic as
tall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and night
immensely fought.
"I believe I saw some corpses," I said to him who marched in front of
me; and there was a break in my voice.
"_You've_ just left your village," he replied; "you bet there's some
stiffs about here!"
I laughed also, in the delight of having got past. We began again to
march one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness of
this furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, panting
under the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushed
forward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight of
bullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated with
light. At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimes
left, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the company
fleeing blindly towards its bourne.
For the last time they halted us in the middle of the night. I was so
weary that I propped my knees against the wet wall and remained
kneeling for some blissful minutes.
My sentry turn began immediately, and the lieutenant posted me at a
loophole. He made me put my face to the hole and explained to me that
there was a wooded slope, right in front of us, of which the bottom was
occupied by the enemy; and to the right of us, three hundred yards
away, the Chauny road--"They're there." I had to watch the black
hollow of the little wood, and at every star-shell the creamy expanse
which divided our refuge from the distant hazy railing of the trees
along the road. He told me what to do in case of alarm and left me
quite alone.
Alone, I shivered. Fatigue had emptied my head and was weighing on my
heart. Going close to the loophole, I opened my eyes wide through the
enemy night, the fathomless, thinking night.
I thought I could see some of the dim shadows of the plain moving, and
some in the chasm of the wood, and everywhere! Affected by terror and
a sense of my huge responsibility, I could hardly stifle a cry of
anguish. But they did not move. The fearful preparations of the
shades vanished before my eyes and the stillness of lifeless things
showed itself to me.
I had neither knapsack nor pouches, and I wrapped myself in my blanket.
I remained at ease, encircled to the horizon by the machinery of war,
surmounted by claps of living thunder. Very gently, my vigil relieved
and calmed me. I remembered nothing more about myself. I applied
myself to watching. I saw nothing, I knew nothing.
After two hours, the sound of the natural and complaisant steps of the
sentry who came to relieve me brought me completely back to myself. I
detached myself from the spot where I had seemed riveted and went to
sleep in the "grotto."
The dug-out was very roomy, but so low that in one place one had to
crawl on hands and knees to slip under its rough and mighty roof. It
was full of heavy damp, and hot with men. Extended in my place on
straw-dust, my neck propped by my knapsack, I closed my eyes in
comfort. When I opened them, I saw a group of soldiers seated in a
circle and eating from the same dish, their heads blotted out in the
darkness of the low roof. Their feet, grouped round the dish, were
shapeless, black, and trickling, like stone disinterred. They ate in
common, without table things, no man using more than his hands.
The man next me was equipping himself to go on sentry duty. He was in
no hurry. He filled his pipe, drew from his pocket a tinder-lighter as
long as a tapeworm, and said to me, "You're not going on again till six
o'clock. Ah, you're very lucky!"
Diligently he mingled his heavy tobacco-clouds with the vapors from all
those bodies which lay around us and rattled in their throats.
Kneeling at my feet to arrange his things, he gave me some advice, "No
need to get a hump, mind. Nothing ever happens here. Getting here's
by far the worst. On that job you get it hot, specially when you've
the bad luck to be sleepy, or it's not raining, but after that you're a
workman, and you forget about it. The most worst, it's the open
crossing. But nobody I know's ever stopped one there. It was other
blokes. It's been like this for two months, old man, and we'll be able
to say we've been through the war without a chilblain, we shall."
At dawn I resumed my lookout at the loophole. Quite near, on the slope
of the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered with
drops of water. In front, under the fatal space where the eternal
passage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the
field resembles a field, the road resembles a road. Ultimately one
makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse
in a field--a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of
grass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it
resembled the past.
Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the front
line, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go,
the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and of
the deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full of
marches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets,
with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the different
occasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harsh
knocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in the
orders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with the
two hundred cartridges and the reserve rations. The regiment had no
losses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes one
or two deaths which were announced like accidents. We only underwent
great weariness, which goes away as fast as it comes. The soldiers
used to say that on the whole they lived in peace.
Marie would write to me, "The Piots have been saying nice things about
you," or "The Trompsons' son is a second lieutenant," or "If you knew
all the contrivances people have been up to, to hide their gold since
it's been asked for so loudly! If you knew what ugly tales there are!"
or "Everything is just the same."
* * * * * *
Once, when we were coming back from the lines and were entering our
usual village, we did not stop there; to the great distress of the men
who were worn out and yielding to the force of the knapsack. We
continued along the road through the evening with lowered heads; and
one hour later we dropped off around dark buildings--mournful tokens of
an unknown place--and they put us away among shadows which had new
shapes. From that time onwards, they changed the village at every
relief, and we never knew what it was until we were there. I was
lodged in barns, into which one wriggled by a ladder; in spongy and
steamy stables; in cellars where undisturbed draughts stirred up the
moldy smells that hung there; in frail and broken hangars which seemed
to brew bad weather; in sick and wounded huts; in villages remade
athwart their phantoms; in trenches and in caves--a world upside down.
We received the wind and the rain in our sleep. Sometimes we were too
brutally rescued from the pressure of the cold by braziers, whose
poisonous heat split one's head. And we forgot it all at each change
of scene. I had begun to note the names of places we were going to,
but I lost myself in the black swarm of words when I tried to recall
them. And the diversity and the crowds of the men around me were such
that I managed only with difficulty to attach fleeting names to their
faces.
My companions did not look unfavorably on me, but I was no more than
another to them. In intervals among the occupations of the rest-camp,
I wandered spiritless, blotted out by the common soldiers' miserable
uniform, familiarly addressed by any one and every one, and stopping no
glance from a woman, by reason of the non-coms.
I should never be an officer, like the Trompsons' son. It was not so
easy in my sector as in his. For that, it would be necessary for
things to happen which never would happen. But I should have liked to
be taken into the office. Others were there who were not so clearly
indicated as I for that work. I regarded myself as a victim of
injustice.
* * * * * *
One morning I found myself face to face with Termite, Brisbille's crony
and accomplice, and he arrived in our company by voluntary enlistment!
He was as skimpy and warped as ever, his body seeming to grimace
through his uniform. His new greatcoat looked worn out and his boots
on the wrong feet. He had the same ugly, blinking face and
black-furred cheeks and rasping voice. I welcomed him warmly, for by
his enlistment he was redeeming his past life. He took advantage of
the occasion to address me with intimacy. I talked with him about
Viviers and even let him share the news that Marie had just written to
me--that Monsieur Joseph Bonéas was taking an examination in order to
become an officer in the police.
But the poacher had not completely sloughed his old self. He looked at
me sideways and shook in the air his grimy wrist and the brass identity
disk that hung from it--a disk as big as a forest ranger's, perhaps a
trophy of bygone days. Hatred of the rich and titled appeared again
upon his hairy, sly face. "Those blasted nationalists," he growled;
"they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks' heads,
and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and their
military tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when their
war does come they say '_Go_ and fight.'"
"There are some of them who have died in the first line. Those have
done more than their duty."
With the revolutionary's unfairness, the little man would not admit it.
"No--they have only done their duty,--no more."
I was going to urge Monsieur Joseph's weak constitution but in presence
of that puny man with his thin, furry face, who might have stayed at
home, I forebore. But I decided to avoid, in his company, those
subjects in which I felt he was full of sour hostility and always ready
to bite.
Continually we saw Marcassin's eye fixed on us, though aloof. His new
bestriped personality had completely covered up the comical picture of
Pétrolus. He even seemed to have become suddenly more educated, and
made no mistakes when he spoke. He multiplied himself, was
attentiveness itself and found ways to expose himself to danger. When
there were night patrols in the great naked cemeteries bounded by the
graves of the living, he was always in them.
But he scowled. We were short of the sacred fire, in his opinion, and
that distressed him. To grumbles against the fatigues which shatter,
the waiting which exhausts, the disillusion which destroys, against
misery and the blows of cold and rain, he answered violently, "Can't
you see it's for France? Why, hell and damnation! As long as it's for
France----!"
One morning when we were returning from the trenches, ghastly in a
ghastly dawn, during the last minutes of a stage, a panting soldier let
the words escape him, "I'm fed up, I am!"
The adjutant sprang towards him, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, hog?
Don't you think that France is worth your dirty skin and all our
skins?"
The other, strained and tortured in his joints, showed fight. "France,
you say? Well, that's the French," he growled.
And his pal, goaded also by weariness, raised his voice from the ranks.
"That's right! After all, it's the men that's there."
"Great God!" the adjutant roared in their faces, "France is France and
nothing else, and you don't count, nor you either!"
But the soldier, all the while hoisting up his knapsack with jerks of
his hips, and lowering his voice before the non-com's aggressive
excitement, clung to his notion, and murmured between his puffings,
"Men--they're humanity. That's not the truth perhaps?"
Marcassin began to hurry through the drizzle along the side of the
marching column, shouting and trembling with emotion, "To hell with
your humanity, and your truth, too; I don't give a damn for them. _I_
know your ideas--universal justice and 1789[1]--to hell with them, too.
There's only one thing that matters in all the earth, and that's the
glory of France--to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraine
back, and money, that's where they're taking you, and that's all about
it. Once that's done, all's over. It's simple enough, even for a
blockhead like you. If you don't understand it, it's because you can't
lift your pig's head to see an ideal, or because you're only a
Socialist and a confiscator!"
[Footnote 1: Outbreak of the French Revolution.--Tr.]
Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he went
away from the now silent ranks. A moment later, as he passed near me,
I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved to
see tears in his eyes!
He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficulty
restrained, and masked by a contraction of the face. He invokes
Déroulède, and says that faith comes at will, like the rest. He lives
in perpetual bewilderment and distress that everybody does not think as
he does. He exerts real influence, for there are, in the multitudes,
whatever they may say, beautiful and profound instincts always near the
surface.
The captain, who was a well-balanced man, although severe and prodigal
of prison when he found the least gap in our loads, considered the
adjutant animated by an excellent spirit, but he himself was not so
fiery. I was getting a better opinion of him; he could judge men. He
had said that I was a good and conscientious soldier, that many like me
were wanted.
Our lieutenant, who was very young, seemed to be an amiable,
good-natured fellow. "He's a good little lad," said the grateful men;
"there's some that frighten you when you speak to them, and they solder
their jaws up. But _him_, he speaks to you even if you're stupid.
When you talk to him about you and your family, which isn't, all the
same, very interesting, well, he listens to you, old man."
* * * * * *
St. Martin's summer greatly warmed us as we tramped into a new village.
I remember that one of those days I took Margat with me and went with
him into a recently shelled house. (Margat was storming against the
local grocer, the only one of his kind, the inevitable and implacable
robber of his customers.) The framework of the house was laid bare, it
was full of light and plaster, and it trembled like a steamboat. We
climbed to the drawing-room of this house which had breathed forth all
its mystery and was worse than empty. The room still showed remains of
luxury and elegance--a disemboweled piano with clusters of protruding
strings; a cupboard, dislodged and rotting, as though disinterred; a
white-powdered floor, sown with golden stripes and rumpled books, and
with fragile débris which cried out when we trod on it. Across the
window, which was framed in broken glass, a curtain hung by one corner
and fluttered like a bat. Over the sundered fireplace, only a mirror
was intact and unsullied, upright in its frame.
Then, become suddenly and profoundly like each other, we were both
fascinated by the virginity of that long glass. Its perfect integrity
lent it something like a body. Each of us picked up a brick and we
broke it with all our might, not knowing why. We ran away down the
shaking spiral stairs whose steps were hidden under deep rubbish. At
the bottom we looked at each other, still excited and already ashamed
of the fit of barbarism which had so suddenly risen in us and urged our
arms.
"What about it? It's a natural thing to do--we're becoming men again,
that's all," said Margat.
Having nothing to do we sat down there, commanding a view of the dale.
The day had been fine.
Margat's looks strayed here and there. He frowned, and disparaged the
village because it was not like his own. What a comical idea to have
built it like that! He did not like the church, the singular shape of
it, the steeple in that position instead of where it should have been.
Orango and Rémus came and sat down by us in the ripening sun of
evening.
Far away we saw the explosion of a shell, like a white shrub. We
chuckled at the harmless shot in the hazy distance and Rémus made a
just observation. "As long as it's not dropped here, you might say as
one doesn't mind, eh, s'long as it's dropped somewhere else, eh?"
At that moment a cloud of dirty smoke took shape five hundred yards
away at the foot of the village, and a heavy detonation rolled up to
where we were.
"They're plugging the bottom of the village," Orango laconically
certified.
Margat, still ruminating his grievance, cried, "'Fraid it's not on the
grocers it's dropped, that crump, seeing he lives right at the other
end. More's the pity. He charges any old price he likes and then he
says to you as well, 'If you're not satisfied, my lad, you can go to
hell.' Ah, more's the pity!"
He sighed, and resumed. "Ah, grocers, they beat all, they do. You can
starve or you can bankrupt, that's their gospel; 'You don't matter to
me, _I've_ got to make money!'"
"What do you want to be pasting the grocers for," Orango asked, "as
long as they've always been like that? They're Messrs. Thief & Sons."
After a silence, Rémus coughed, to encourage his voice, and said, "I'm
a grocer."
Then Margat said to him artlessly, "Well, what about it, old chap? We
know well enough, don't we, that here on earth profit's the strongest
of all."
"Why, yes, to be sure, old man," Rémus replied.
* * * * * *
One day, while we were carrying our straw to our billets, one of my
lowly companions came up and questioned me as he walked. "I'd like you
to explain to me why there isn't any justice. I've been to the captain
to ask for leave that I'd a right to and I shows him a letter to say my
aunt's shortly deceased. 'That's all my eye and Betty Martin,' he
says. And I says to myself, that's the blinking limit, that is. Now,
then, tell me, you. When the war began, why didn't there begin full
justice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no one
wouldn't have raised no objection just then. Why is it all just the
contrary? And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, but
there's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred
francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an'
all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten times
stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven't
sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with
their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells
us!"
I replied that complete justice was impossible, that we had to look at
the great mass of things generally. And then, having said this, I
became embarrassed in face of the stubborn inquisitiveness, clumsily
strict, of this comrade who was seeking the light all by himself!
Following that incident, I often tried, during days of monotony, to
collect my ideas on war. I could not. I am sure of certain points,
points of which I have always been sure. Farther I cannot go. I rely
in the matter on those who guide us, who withhold the policy of the
State. But sometimes I regret that I no longer have a spiritual
director like Joseph Bonéas.
For the rest, the men around me--except when personal interest is in
question and except for a few chatterers who suddenly pour out theories
which contain bits taken bodily from the newspapers--the men around me
are indifferent to every problem too remote and too profound concerning
the succession of inevitable misfortunes which sweep us along. Beyond
immediate things, and especially personal matters, they are prudently
conscious of their ignorance and impotence.
One evening I was coming in to sleep in our stable bedroom. The men
lying along its length and breadth on the bundles of straw had been
talking together and were agreed. Some one had just wound it up--"From
the moment you start marching, that's enough."
But Termite, coiled up like a marmot on the common litter, was on the
watch. He raised his shock of hair, shook himself as though caught in
a snare, waved the brass disk on his wrist like a bell and said, "No,
that's not enough. You must think, but think with your own idea, not
other people's."
Some amused faces were raised while he entered into observations that
they foresaw would be endless.
"Pay attention, you fellows, he's going to talk about militarism,"
announced a wag, called Pinson, whose lively wit I had already noticed.
"There's the question of militarism----" Termite went on.
We laughed to see the hairy mannikin floundering on the dim straw in
the middle of his big public-meeting words, and casting fantastic
shadows on the spider-web curtain of the skylight.
"Are you going to tell us," asked one of us, "that the Boches aren't
militarists?"
"Yes, indeed, and in course they are," Termite consented to admit.
"Ha! That bungs you in the optic!" Pinson hastened to record.
"For my part, old sonny," said a Territorial who was a good soldier,
"I'm not seeking as far as you, and I'm not as spiteful. I know that
they set about us, and that we only wanted to be quiet and friends with
everybody. Why, where I come from, for instance in the Creuse country,
I know that----"
"You know?" bawled Termite, angrily; "you know nothing about nothing!
You're only a poor little tame animal, like all the millions of pals.
They gather us together, but they separate us. They say what they like
to us, or they don't say it, and you believe it. They say to you,
'This is what you've got to believe in!' They----"
I found myself growing privately incensed against Termite, by the same
instinct which had once thrown me upon his accomplice Brisbille. I
interrupted him. "Who are they--your 'they'?"
"Kings," said Termite.
At that moment Marcassin's silhouette appeared in the gray of the alley
which ended among us. "Look out--there's Marc'! Shut your jaw," one
of the audience benevolently advised.
"I'm not afeared not to say what I think!" declared Termite, instantly
lowering his voice and worming his way through the straw that divided
the next stall from ours.
We laughed again. But Margat was serious. "Always," he said,
"there'll be the two sorts of people there's always been--the grousers
and the obeyers."
Some one asked, "What for did you chap 'list?"
"'Cos there was nothing to eat in the house," answered the Territorial,
as interpreter of the general opinion.
Having thus spoken, the old soldier yawned, went on all fours, arranged
the straw of his claim, and added, "We'll not worry, but just let him
be. 'Specially seeing we can't do otherwise."
It was time for slumber. The shed gaped open in front and at the
sides, but the air was not cold.
"We've done with the bad days," said Rémus; "shan't see them no more."
"At last!" said Margat.
We stretched ourselves out, elbow to elbow. The one in the dark corner
blew out his candle.
"May the war look slippy and get finished!" mumbled Orango.
"If only they'll let me transfer to the cyclists," Margat replied.
We said no more, each forming that same great wandering prayer and some
little prayer like Margat's. Gently we wrapped ourselves up on the
straw, one with the falling night, and closed our eyes.
* * * * * *
At the bottom of the village, in the long pink farmhouse, there was a
charming woman, who smiled at us with twinkling eyes. As the days
emerged from the rains and fogs, I looked at her with all my soul, for
she was bathed in the youth of the year. She had a little nose and big
eyes and slight fair down on her lips and neck, like traces of gold.
Her husband was mobilized and we paid attentions to her. She smiled at
the soldiers as she went by, and chattered willingly with the non-coms;
and the passage of officers brought her to a standstill of vague
respect. I used to think about her, and I forgot, through her, to
write to Marie.
There were many who inquired, speaking of the farmer's wife, "Any
chance?" But there were many who replied, "Nothing doing."
One morning that was bright above all others, my companions were busy
holding their sides around a tipsy comrade whom they were catechizing
and ragging, and sprinkling now and then with little doses of wine, to
entertain him, and benefit more by him. These innocent amusements,
like those which Termite provoked when he discoursed on militarism and
the universe, did not detain me, and I gained the street.
I went down the paved slope. In gardens and enclosures, the buds were
holding out a multitude of lilliputian green hands, all still closed,
and the apple-trees had white roses. Spring was hastening everywhere.
I came in sight of the pink house. She was alone in the road and she
took all the sunshine for herself. I hesitated, I went by--my steps
slackened heavily--I stopped, and returned towards the door. Almost in
spite of myself I went in.
At first--light! A square of sunshine glowed on the red tiled floor of
the kitchen. Casseroles and basins were shining brightly.
She was there! Standing by the sink she was making a streak of silver
flow into a gleaming pail, amid the luminous blush of the polished
tiles and the gold of the brass pans. The greenish light from the
window-glass was moistening her skin. She saw me and she smiled.
I knew that she always smiled at us. But we were alone! I felt a mad
longing arise. There was something in me that was stronger than I,
that ravished the picture of her. Every second she became more
beautiful. Her plump dress proffered her figure to my eyes, and her
skirt trembled over her polished sabots. I looked at her neck, at her
throat--that extraordinary beginning. A strong perfume that enveloped
her shoulders was like the truth of her body. Urged forward, I went
towards her, and I could not even speak.
She had lowered her head a little; her eyebrows had come nearer
together under the close cluster of her hair; uneasiness passed into
her eyes. She was used to the boyish mimicry of infatuated men. But
this woman was not for me! She dealt me the blow of an unfeeling
laugh, and disappearing, shut the door in my face.
I opened the door. I followed her into an outhouse. Stammering
something, I found touch again with her presence, I held out my hand.
She slipped away, she was escaping me forever--when a monstrous Terror
stopped her!
The walls and roof drew near in a hissing crash of thunder, a dreadful
hatch opened in the ceiling and all was filled with black fire. And
while I was hurled against the wall by a volcanic blast, with my eyes
scorched, my ears rent, and my brain hammered, while around me the
stones were pierced and crushed, I saw the woman uplifted in a
fantastic shroud of black and red, to fall back in a red and white
affray of clothes and linen; and something huge burst and naked, with
two legs, sprang at my face and forced into my mouth the taste of
blood.
I know that I cried out, hiccoughing. Assaulted by the horrible kiss
and by the vile clasp that bruised the hand I had offered to the
woman's beauty--a hand still outheld--sunk in whirling smoke and ashes
and the dreadful noise now majestically ebbing, I found my way out of
the place, between walls that reeled as I did. Bodily, the house
collapsed behind me. In my flight over the shifting ground I was
brushed by the mass of maddened falling stones and the cry of the
ruins, sinking in vast dust-clouds as in a tumult of beating wings.
A veritable squall of shells was falling in this corner of the village.
A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a little
house which had just been broken in two. They did not go close to it
because of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here and
there all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow.
Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault of
smoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest.
"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted.
Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones and
broken spine, that human house.
It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down. In a
single second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, the
geometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on the
skeleton of a bed. In the upper story an overhanging floor remained,
and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked to
their places round the table where they were lunching when the
lightning fell--a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and a
bottle of champagne.
"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferrière."
One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlarged
that his head was half open, he was smiling. One arm was raised aloft
in the festive gesture which he had begun forever. The other, his fine
fair hair untouched, was seated with his elbows on a cloth now red as a
Turkey carpet, hideously attentive, his face besmeared with shining
blood and full of foul marks. They seemed like two statues of youth
and the joy of life framed in horror.
"There's three!" some one shouted.
This one, whom we had not seen at first, hung in the air with dangling
arms against the sheer wall, hooked on to a beam by the bottom of his
trousers. A pool of blood which lengthened down the flat plaster
looked like a projected shadow. At each fresh explosion splinters were
scattered round him and shook him, as though the dead man was still
marked and chosen by the blind destruction.
There was something hatefully painful in the doll-like attitude of the
hanging corpse.
Then Termite's voice was raised. "Poor lad!" he said.
He went out from the shelter of the wall.
"Are you mad?" we shouted; "he's dead, anyway!"
A ladder was there. Termite seized it and dragged it towards the
disemboweled house, which was lashed every minute by broadsides of
splinters.
"Termite!" cried the lieutenant, "I forbid you to go there! You're
doing no good."
"I'm the owner of my skin, lieutenant," Termite replied, without
stopping or looking round.
He placed the ladder, climbed up and unhooked the dead man. Around
them, against the plaster of the wall, there broke a surge of deafening
shocks and white fire. He descended with the body very skillfully,
laid it on the ground, and remaining doubled up he ran back to us--to
fall on the captain, who had witnessed the scene.
"My friend," the captain said, "I've been told that you were an
anarchist. But I've seen that you're brave, and that's already more
than half of a Frenchman."
He held out his hand. Termite took it, pretending to be little
impressed by the honor.
When he returned to us he said, while his hand rummaged his hedgehog's
beard, "That poor lad--I don't know why--p'raps it's stupid--but I was
thinking of his mother."
We looked at him with a sort of respect. First, because he had gone up
and then because he had passed through the hail of iron and won. There
was no one among us who did not earnestly wish he had tried and
succeeded in what Termite had just done. But assuredly we did not a
bit understand this strange soldier.
A lull had come in the bombardment. "It's over," we concluded.
As we returned we gathered round Termite and one spoke for the rest.
"You're an anarchist, then?"
"No," said Termite, "I'm an internationalist. That's why I enlisted."
"Ah!"
He tried to throw light on his words. "You understand, I'm against all
wars."
"All wars! But there's times when war's good. There's defensive war."
"No," said Termite again, "there's only offensive war; because if there
wasn't the offensive there wouldn't be the defensive."
"Ah!" we replied.
We went on chatting, dispassionately and for the sake of talking,
strolling in the dubious security of the streets which were sometimes
darkened by falls of wreckage, under a sky of formidable surprises.
"All the same, isn't it chaps like you that prevented France from being
prepared?"
"There's not enough chaps like me to prevent anything; and if there'd
been more, there wouldn't have been any war."
"It's not to us, it's to the Boches and the others that you must say
that."
"It's to all the world," said Termite; "that's why I'm an
internationalist."
While Termite was slipping away somewhere else his questioner indicated
by a gesture that he did not understand. "Never mind," he said to us,
"that chap's better than us."
Gradually it came about that we of the squad used to consult Termite on
any sort of subject, with a simplicity which made me smile--and
sometimes even irritated me. That week, for instance, some one asked
him, "All this firing--is it an attack they're getting ready?"
But he knew no more than the rest.