THE RUINS
I fall on my knees, and then full length. I do what so many others
have done.
I am alone on the earth, face to face with the mud, and I can no longer
move. The frightful searching of the shells alights around me. The
hoarse hurricane which does not know me is yet trying to find the place
where I am!
Then the battle goes away, and its departure is heartrending. In spite
of all my efforts, the noise of the firing fades and I am alone; the
wind blows and I am naked.
I shall remain nailed to the ground. By clinging to the earth and
plunging my hands into the depth of the swamp as far as the stones, I
get my neck round a little to see the enormous burden that my back
supports. No--it is only the immensity on me.
My gaze goes crawling. In front of me there are dark things all linked
together, which seem to seize or to embrace one another. I look at
those hills which shut out my horizon and imitate gestures and men.
The multitude downfallen there imprisons me in its ruins. I am walled
in by those who are lying down, as I was walled in before by those who
stood.
I am not in pain. I am extraordinarily calm; I am drunk with
tranquillity. Are they dead, all--those? I do not know. The dead are
specters of the living, but the living are specters of the dead.
Something warm is licking my hand. The black mass which overhangs me
is trembling. It is a foundered horse, whose great body is emptying
itself, whose blood is flowing like poor touches of a tongue on to my
hand. I shut my eyes, bemused, and think of a bygone merry-making; and
I remember that I once saw, at the end of a hunt, against the operatic
background of a forest, a child-animal whose life gushed out amid
general delight.
A voice is speaking beside me.
No doubt the moon has come out--I cannot see as high as the cloud
escarpments, as high as the sky's opening. But that blenching light is
making the corpses shine like tombstones.
I try to find the low voice. There are two bodies, one above the
other. The one underneath must be gigantic--his arms are thrown
backward in a hurricane gesture; his stiff, disheveled hair has crowned
him with a broken crown. His eyes are opaque and glaucous, like two
expectorations, and his stillness is greater than anything one may
dream of. On the other the moon's beams are setting points and lines
a-sparkle and silvering gold. It is he who is talking to me, quietly
and without end. But although his low voice is that of a friend, his
words are incoherent. He is mad--I am abandoned by him! No matter, I
will drag myself up to him to begin with. I look at him again. I
shake myself and blink my eyes, so as to look better. He wears on his
body a uniform accursed! Then with a start, and my hand claw-wise, I
stretch myself towards the glittering prize to secure it. But I cannot
go nearer him; it seems that I no longer have a body. He has looked at
me. He has recognized my uniform, if it is recognizable, and my cap,
if I have it still. Perhaps he has recognized the indelible seal of my
race that I carry printed on my features. Yes, on my face he has
recognized that stamp. Something like hatred has blotted out the face
that I saw dawning so close to me. Our two hearts make a desperate
effort to hurl ourselves on each other. But we can no more strike each
other than we can separate ourselves.
But has he seen me? I cannot say now. He is stirred by fever as by
the wind; he is choked with blood. He writhes, and that shows me the
beaten-down wings of his black cloak.
Close by, some of the wounded have cried out; and farther away one
would say they are singing--beyond the low stakes so twisted and
shriveled that they look as if guillotined.
He does not know what he is saying. He does not even know that he is
speaking, that his thoughts are coming out. The night is torn into
rags by sudden bursts; it fills again at random with clusters of
flashes; and his delirium enters into my head. He murmurs that logic
is a thing of terrible chains, and that all things cling together. He
utters sentences from which distinct words spring, like the scattered
hasty gleams they include in hymns--the Bible, history, majesty, folly.
Then he shouts:--
"There is nothing in the world but the Empire's glory!"
His cry shakes some of the motionless reefs. And I, like an invincible
echo, I cry:--
"There is only the glory of France!"
I do not know if I did really cry out, and if our words did collide in
the night's horror. His head is quite bare. His slender neck and
bird-like profile issue from a fur collar. There are things like owls
shining on his breast. It seems to me as if silence is digging itself
into the brains and lungs of the dark prisoners who imprison us, and
that we are listening to it.
He rambles more loudly now, as if he bore a stifling secret; he calls
up multitudes, and still more multitudes. He is obsessed by
multitudes--"Men, men!" he says. The soil is caressed by some sounds
of sighs, terribly soft, by confidences which are interchanged without
their wishing it. Now and again, the sky collapses into light, and
that flash of instantaneous sunshine changes the shape of the plain
every time, according to its direction. Then does the night take all
back again athwart the rolling echoes.
"Men! Men!"
"What about them, then?" says a sudden jeering voice which falls like a
stone.
"Men _must_ not awake," the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollow
tones.
"Don't worry!" says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifies
me.
Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness--I see them by
their heavy groans--and look around them.
The shadow talks to himself and repeats his insane words:--
"Men _must_ not awake."
The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle,
says again:--
"Don't worry!"
Yonder, in the hemisphere of night, comets glide, blending their cries
of engines and owls with their flaming entrails. Will the sky ever
recover the huge peace of the sun and the stainless blue?
A little order, a little lucidity are coming back into my mind. Then I
begin to think about myself.
Am I going to die, yes or no? Where can I be wounded? I have managed
to look at my hands, one by one; they are not dead, and I saw nothing
in their dark trickling. It is extraordinary to be made motionless
like this, without knowing where or how. I can do no more on earth
than lift my eyes a little to the edge of the world where I have
rolled.
Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying. I
see that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eating
grass. I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment--I
know him by the white in his mane--rearing and whinnying like the true
battle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the truly
unhappy are. Once again, I recall the red deer's little one, mutilated
on its carpet of fresh crimson, and the emotion which I had not on that
bygone day rises into my throat. Animals are innocence incarnate.
This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out
life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little
child, but a horse. My neck gives way, I utter a groan, and my face
gropes upon the ground.
The animal's start has altered my place and shot me on my side, nearer
still to the man who was talking. He has unbent, and is lying on his
back. Thus he offers his face like a mirror to the moon's pallor, and
shows hideously that he is wounded in the neck. I feel that he is
going to die. His words are hardly more now than the rustle of wings.
He has said some unintelligible things about a Spanish painter, and
some motionless portraits in the palaces--the Escurial, Spain, Europe.
Suddenly he is repelling with violence some beings who are in his
past:--
"Begone, you dreamers!" he says, louder than the stormy sky where the
flames are red as blood, louder than the falling flashes and the
harrowing wind, louder than all the night which enshrouds us and yet
continues to stone us.
He is seized with a frenzy which bares his soul as naked as his neck:--
"The truth is revolutionary," gasps the nocturnal voice; "get you gone,
you men of truth, you who cast disorder among ignorance, you who strew
words and sow the wind; you contrivers, begone! You bring in the reign
of men! But the multitude hates you and mocks you!"
He laughs, as if he heard the multitude's laughter.
And around us another burst of convulsive laughter grows hugely bigger
in the plain's black heart:--
"Wot's 'e sayin' now, that chap?"
"Let him be. You can see 'e knows more'n 'e says."
"Ah, la, la!"
I am so near to him that I alone gather the rest of his voice, and he
says to me very quietly:--
"I have confidence in the abyss of the people."
And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes with
horror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understood
what he was saying! A picture comes to life before my eyes--that
prince, whom I saw from below, once upon a time, in the nightmare of
life, he who loved the blood of the chase. Not far away a shell turns
the darkness upside down; and it seems as if that explosion also has
considered and shrieked.
Heavy night is implanted everywhere around us. My hands are bathed in
black blood. On my neck and cheeks, rain, which is also black, bleeds.
The funeral procession of silver-fringed clouds goes by once more, and
again a ray of moonlight besilvers the swamp that has sunk us soldiers;
it lays winding-sheets on the prone.
All at once a swelling lamentation comes to life, one knows not where,
and glides over the plain:--
"Help! Help!"
"Now then! _They're_ not coming to look for us! What about it?"
And I see a stirring and movement, very gentle, as at the bottom of the
sea.
Amid the glut of noises, upon that still tepid and unsubmissive expanse
where cold death sits brooding, that sharp profile has fallen back.
The cloak is quivering. The great and sumptuous bird of prey is in the
act of taking wing.
The horse has not stopped bleeding. Its blood falls on me drop by drop
with the regularity of a clock,--as though all the blood that is
filtering through the strata of the field and all the punishment of the
wounded came to a head in him and through him. Ah, it seems that truth
goes farther in all directions than one thought! We bend over the
wrong that animals suffer, for them we wholly understand.
Men, men! Everywhere the plain has a mangled outline. Below that
horizon, sometimes blue-black and sometimes red-black, the plain is
monumental!