mantle, the violent note of the cannon barked only intermittently,
and the gusts of bullets, wailing in the air, sounded like swarms of
musical insects swiftly regaining their homes. We believed the hour of
repose was near. But we were mistaken: another task awaited us. It was
necessary to take advantage of the night to cross the embankment, gain
the first line and take our position.
In these first weeks of intrenched warfare, movements of this sort were
relatively easy. We were hidden in the darkness: we had only to leap
the embankment and move to our places. The enemy replied only when he
heard a noise, and fired quite at random. His commonest field-piece was
the light seventy-seven, which barked loudly but did little damage,
and the workmen of the two camps matched their skill at only a hundred
metres’ distance, without hurting each other very much.
This evening they placed us behind some trees at a roadside.
“Fire only on order,” said the officers. “One of our companies is
out in front fixing the wire. If you fire, you risk wounding your
comrades.”
They repeated their instructions to the sergeants and thus began
our first night at the front. Each one watched as well as he could,
straining his eyes in the effort to pierce the blackness, hearing the
blows of the mallets on the stakes and thrilling at the fusillade.
A night is long. A night in November is cold. It freezes. We shivered
out there in the dark, but we did not dare to budge. The noise of
shooting was almost constant, and bullets were striking everywhere
about us, ringing on the stones, clipping twigs from the trees or
sinking dully into the soil. Our teeth chattered; we shivered; we tried
to warm our hands by rubbing them. Some rash ones stamped their feet
to restore the circulation, and from time to time we heard a muffled
conversation. We didn’t know where we were nor the distance which
separated us from the enemy. We feared a possible ambush, a surprise
attack maybe, and we pinched ourselves to keep awake. The hours seemed
deadly long.
At last we saw the dirty gray of dawn overspread the sky and slowly
dissipate the thick mist that rose from the earth. Clumps of trees
and underwood, little by little, took form. No sooner were they fully
visible than a terrible fusillade broke out, lashing the air like a
thousand hisses; a crackling shower of bullets that rolled and rattled
like hail. They cut the branches just above us and made the pebbles
fly. We crouched to the ground; buckling our sacks, gripping our
guns, hunching our shoulders and tensing our legs to be ready for the
expected attack.
“Get ready to go back,” whispered the sergeants and the order was
repeated along the line. We crept, we crawled like slugs, profiting by
the smallest tuft of grass, the shallowest recess in the ground that
might serve as a shield, but with little hope of escape.
Some furious discharges of seventy-fives cracked with such rapidity
and precision that they comforted us. We felt sustained and protected
and steadied ourselves. We were annoyingly hampered by our heavy
equipment, our inconvenient cartridge-boxes and all our cumbersome
accoutrement. Suddenly a man was wounded. He cried out, and, losing all
prudence, arose, ran, crossed the embankment and fled to the shelter.
Instinctively we followed his example. On the way another man was
wounded and fell. Two of his companions seized him and, dragging him
between them, struggled to safety, in the shelter of the railroad-bank.
It was finished. We reassembled. We were muddy, bruised, and wounded;
eyes red from loss of sleep, and mouths drawn, but, just the same, we
were content. Thenceforth we were soldiers. We had faced danger. True,
we had not fought, but we were ready.
Our rôle had just commenced. We had occupied this sector to fit it
up as this novel thing, this underground war, demanded. This task
achieved, we were to be its defenders. It was necessary to dig
trenches that we might no longer watch from the scanty shelter of
trees; to improve on these primitive holes that had been dug, to serve
temporarily, at the beginning of the battle. Therefore we dug trenches.
It was necessary to connect them with communication-channels. Therefore
we dug boyaux. We had to install redans, build firing benches or
banquettes[C] and construct dugouts. All these things we did. We dug
in the earth day and night. We gathered up cubic metres of soil and
threw them out in front to heighten our parapet. We used our shovels
and picks; we sweat; we suffered; we froze.
The winter rolled on. December brought intense cold. Ice and snow
covered the land, and while we watched the foe, our rifles froze in
the loopholes. We ate when we were lucky. The kitchens were far in the
rear, and when the soup and coffee arrived they were ice-cold. The
service men started early with their mess-pails, but they stumbled
in the trenches and often spilled more of the soup and wine than
they brought. We ate badly; we slept little: we always dug. We never
rested. There were heavy materials to be carried; the stakes for the
entanglements, the spools of wire, the sheet iron, the posts, and the
timbers. There was nightly patrol duty, the hours on guard, the attack
to repulse, endless holes to be bored in the earth. In the daytime
one slept where he could, curling up in the mud at the bottom of the
trench or seeking to avoid the rain by crawling into some fissure.
At night we stole out into No Man’s Land and stalked the foe or dug
a listening-post. We watched the illuminating rockets. We plunged to
shelter when they threatened to expose us to fire.
We lived there some strenuous hours, some terrible weeks. Some suffered
from trench foot, some froze to death, some were killed. These are
terrible things: these nights on guard, these nights hugging the ground
when on patrol, these nights in the listening-post when the body
chills, becomes numb, and loses all sensation. One goes on detail and
loses one’s way. One falls, dumb with fatigue, and an alarm sounds. One
starts to sleep and an attack rages.
War is a thing of horror. It is more. The very soil is hollowed out
like dens of beasts; and into these creep human beings. The rain
saturates the trench and rots legs and wood alike. The corpse hangs
on the wire and serves as a target. War is cold, war is black, war is
night. It is, in truth, such a horror that those who have lived these
hours may say: “I was there. But to tell about it is to live it over
again. And that is too much.”
[Illustration: Emmanuel Bourcier at the front in the sector of Rheims
in 1915.]
As for us, we suffered. At first we had no dugouts and slept beneath
the open sky. We had no trenches and stalked our foe while waist-deep
in mud. In December’s cold we had no fire. This which we saw, which we
defended, which the foe destroyed, was France. Our land was invaded,
profaned by the German, and we could not retake it. These conquered
forests, these occupied cities, these subjugated plains, these
mountains polluted, were our native soil and we could not regain them.
The sacred homeland was under the boot of the German. Was this the
death-rattle in the throat of the republic?
VI
THE GAS
The severe winter ran its course. We had worked incessantly. We had
a whole sector to ourselves. First, there was the tangled network
of barbed-wire, a piece of work in which we all had a share. Each
evening, as night fell, a company of men went out on No Man’s Land to
work in the thick, treacherous darkness. One gang dug holes and put
in the posts, another stretched the parallel wires, another attached
the transverse wires. As this required great blows of a mallet, it
made considerable noise, which drew down the enemy’s gun-fire. As
they gained experience, the men went out rapidly, worked swiftly,
and returned to our trenches only when their task was accomplished.
At dawn, the Boches tried to destroy our work of the night before,
by firing many volleys into the network. The damage was never
considerable, and they stopped that game when, imitating them, we cut
their barbed-wire to pieces.
Under that efficacious protection we contrived openings for listening
and firing trenches. At the first, two men alternated in a constant
lookout, with ear quick to catch any sound, with eyes strained to
observe the most minute sign. Behind them, on the benches,[D] entire
sections, with guns poised in the loopholes, waited and watched
from twilight to dawn, while the others slept, down in the shelters
underground.
This organization constituted the first lines in the spring of 1915,
when we hoped for an early victory. So temporary did the work appear
to be, we spent no more time and effort on our trench systems than
seemed necessary for immediate purposes. The dugouts were of the
most limited dimensions, really kennels, large enough for two men
to sleep fairly comfortably, but which usually housed six, no one
knows how. One came there overcome by sleep. One threw himself on
the ground without removing his accoutrement, and was asleep almost
before touching the earth. To afford some protection against the
bitter wind, a cloth was stretched in front of the opening. While this
shut out the unwelcome breezes, it also shut in a concentrated, hot
and malodorous steam, composed of the mouldy moisture from the earth
itself, of human perspiration and panting exhalations, of wet leather
and clothing. However, one breathed somehow. When the time was up,
and one went out to resume work or watching, the icy air enveloped
one like a sepuchral winding-sheet, and the night blinded one’s eyes.
One followed the communication-trench, took up gun or shovel, as the
order might happen to be, and became either soldier or laborer; or,
more often, both at once. Everything was done at night. Everything was
dismal, dangerous, frightful. There was no real repose, no relaxation.
The incessant shell-fire added its horror to our other discomforts and
dangers. The shell! that insensate creature of chance, which bursts
over the innocent, scatters its fragments over the plain, and in
stupid indifference crushes a clod of earth or snuffs out the lives of
a hundred human beings. The shell! that monster which comes with a
moaning wail, invisible as a beast of darkness, and dies in a shower of
fire.
One easily becomes familiar with its sound. At first, every shot was
terrifying. Then we learned to know approximately what course a shell
would follow, at what point it would fall. Then we ceased to listen
to or fear any but those coming our way. No others counted. They were
non-existent.
Before we reached this point of familiarity, the salvos of that
plaything, the seventy-five, made us shudder. They came so fast that
we scarcely had time to distinguish the individual shots. Immediately
the deadly whistling object skimmed the ground, and the explosion
resounded. Some men turned pale, others paid little attention.
Berthet and I found much in this life to interest us. We ran about to
see whatever could be seen. As soon as a cannonade began, we went in
that direction for the pleasure of observing it. We volunteered for all
sorts of difficult tasks, tempted by the risk, enticed by the eternal
charm of adventure. He was brave, was Berthet, but knew not how brave
he was. Sometimes I sought to restrain him, at which he was always
astonished. “I wish to know,” he said, “if I will be afraid.” And he
had his way. He went out on the embankment, where he inspected the
horizon regardless of the projectiles which saluted his silhouette as
soon as he appeared.
We had some magnificent spectacles. One evening there was a bombardment
followed by infantry attack. The German uneasiness had been evident in
the morning. It expressed itself by a storm of projectiles which fell
aimlessly and did little damage. The shells cut the grass, exploded
like a sheaf of fireworks, sent the dirt flying high into the air. It
worried us at first, then, as we found ourselves safe in the shelter
of our deep trenches, assurance returned. Each man went about his
business. Some were detailed to dig a tunnel, one must go to the
kitchens to fetch soup and bread, another cleaned the arms, rusted
during the night by the fog, or in the morning by the dew. All the
same, this violent bombardment troubled our officers not a little; they
feared a surprise. We had a visit from our general toward evening. He
gave some orders, took a look at the loopholes of observation, and
went away apparently content. His calm was most reassuring.
Calm is not everything in war. The plans of the enemy must also be
taken into account. The Boche artillery became violent. Over our
trenches streamed a fire of shells of all calibers mingled. They fell
tearing away whole banks of earth at once; they exploded thunderously,
in a cloud of dust and stinking smoke. We looked for the worst; we
suspected a close attack, a hand-to-hand clash. Suddenly a great cry
rang out:
“The gas!”
It was true. Over there, from the enemy’s lines, came great greenish
balls, rolling close to the earth, rolling deliberately yet swiftly,
rolling straight toward us. Gas! That horrible thing, still almost
unknown, which had been used for the first time only recently on the
Yser. It was coming with deadly surety amidst a tornado of artillery.
Orders were shouted back and forth:
“The gas! Put on the masks!”
Each man spread over his face the protecting cloth. The shelters
were closed. The telephone, whose wires ran the length of the
communication-trenches, gave the warning: “Look out! The gas!”
We did not yet know what manner of horror it was. None of us had
experienced an attack of the sort. We ran to and fro like ants whose
hill has been molested. Some fired their guns at random, others awaited
orders. The frightful, livid thing came on, expanded to a cloud, crept
upon us, glided into the trenches. The air was quickly obscured. We
were swimming in an atmosphere stained a venomous color, uncanny,
indescribable. The sky appeared greenish, the earth disappeared. The
men staggered about for a moment, took a gasping breath, and rolled
on the ground, stifled. There were some knots of soldiers who had
been asleep in their beds when overtaken by the gas. They writhed in
convulsions, with vitals burning, with froth on the lips, calling for
their mothers or cursing the German. We gathered them up as best we
could; we took them to the doctors, who, thus confronted by an unknown
condition, found themselves powerless. They tried the application of
oxygen and ether in an effort to save the lives of the victims, only
to see them die, already decomposed, in their hands.
The masks had not yet been perfected and were a poor protection.
Some ran about like madmen, shrieking in terror, the throat choked
with saliva, and fell in heaps, in contortions of agony. Some filled
the mouth with handfuls of grass and struggled against asphyxiation.
Others, down in the shelters, sprinkled face and neck with brackish
water, and awaited a death all too long in coming.[E] Over all this
the artillery shrieked in unchained madness. The sky was of steel,
quivering and molten. There were no longer any distinctly heard shots,
but a storm of fire. It roared, it whistled, it exploded without
respite, as if all the furies of hell were yelping, in a thick,
metallic sky. At the left, little by little, an ever-reddening glow
showed the neighboring city of Rheims, which the Boches were bombarding
in a mad rage of destruction. We saw the flames leap up, the houses
kindle like torches and throw toward the sky clouds of sparks and
streams of black and red smoke. Everything seemed flaming and tottering
and falling in a wild delirium. The earth itself opened to swallow the
last survivors. In the trenches the bodies of the dead were heaped, and
twisted or bleeding corpses choked the passageways.
Fiercely, convulsively, desperately, the comrades who were unhurt
fought at their loopholes. Reinforcements came from the rear in haste,
and took their places. Their eyes were those of madmen, their breath
was panting.
“The assault will be here in a minute, boys,” I said to my nearest
neighbors. “Look out for yourselves. Have your cartridges ready. You,
there, lift your gun higher, or you will fire badly! And you, aim
toward that corner you see over there!”
Berthet helped me, with a tragic manner of responsibility; the
underofficers ran from one man to another crying: “Keep cool! We will
get them! Just let them come on!”
Then the action rushed on even more furiously, more demoniac. In the
midst of the increased cannonade the gun-fire rattled. It commenced at
the left, gained the centre, reached the right. The whole line crackled
like the beginning of a roll of thunder. We could no longer see ahead
of us. We fired as fast as possible, without knowing where, cutting
into space.
“Here they are! Keep cool!”
In the dim light a gray mass was oscillating. As it rapidly advanced,
we could distinguish small objects on the plain, like moving blades
of grass. We fired: cries could be heard. We fired more rapidly. The
gas was dissipating, but the night was becoming thick. Our only light
was the blazing city of Rheims and the glow of shells. The pandemonium
increased. One could distinguish only his immediate neighbor, lifting
his gun, firing, recoiling from the discharge, replacing the spent
cartridge with a full one. The pungent taste of burnt powder penetrated
the throat. We sweat. We no longer feared. We pulled the trigger; we
were fighting, we were defending the soil, the trench, the sector, in a
blind rage. _They should not take it!_ They should give up; they should
fall back. We would kill them all rather than permit their feet to
contaminate the spot we were guarding.
This endured for more than an hour, this insane uproar of shrieking
voices, crashing cannon, cracking rifles; while Rheims, in flames threw
to the wind her streamers of light.
We had no accurate idea of the battle as a whole. Each man acted for
himself, for the little corner of ground in range of his rifle, for
the piece of trench which he was holding. At one side, the Boches
jumped into the trench, cut the throats of the nearest men, then fell,
themselves stabbed by bayonets. At another point they penetrated
the barbed-wire entanglements, remained caught there, struggling to
free themselves, and were cut to pieces by our fire. Farther on, our
shells crushed them. We were scarcely conscious of it. We elbowed our
neighbors, we exchanged encouragement, we shrieked when we would speak.
We were so intense, so full of fury, that many were frothing when
commanded to desist. The underofficers exhausted themselves in crying
halt, and had to shake each man to awaken him, to bring him to himself,
to make him understand. We felt exasperated.
However, the cannonade was decreasing in violence. The gun-fire ceased,
reviving only at intervals. The stretcher-bearers ran up, took away
the wounded, picked up the tortured gas victims, whose lungs creaked
like the bellows of a forge. The battle was over. The Boches were
repulsed. In spite of their gas, in spite of the surprise, in spite
of their cannon, they left on the field before us almost a battalion:
sprawling corpses, dismembered like broken puppets; dead men who gaped
at the stars; wounded who soon were dead. Our losses were considerable,
theirs were much greater. Twenty of their number remained with us as
prisoners. Haggard and stunned, they were led to the rear for the
interrogatory.
* * * * *
“Well, how has it been?” I asked Berthet, as I gripped his hand. “It
was superb!” he responded. There was a hole in his coat. “Not touched?”
“No, a ball just missed taking me off.” He said it with a calm which
I admired. He concealed from me the fact that he had breathed the
abominable vapors.
After all, it was only a local action on our line. It was not, in the
generally accepted sense, a battle. All of us have seen much greater
since then. However, on account of the gas, this first engagement is
vividly present in our memory, a recollection never to be effaced. It
was an encounter so strange! That foul vapor which enveloped the earth,
which ate its way into the fibre of the clothing we wore, corroded and
withered the leaves on the trees, and changed the aspect of God’s sane
creation into a distorted image of hell, will remain forever one of
the deepest infamies of the Germans. After contact with this poisoned
cloud, nothing retained its original appearance. The arms were red
without being rusty, the color of uniforms was changed. There were very
few of our men suffering from gun or bayonet wounds, but whole mounds
of those who died in convulsions: poor, twisted dead, who agonized in
dying; so disfigured their own mothers could not have recognized them.
Some of them were wringing their hands, others were swallowing stones,
others seemed to be rammed into the earth like stakes. This was not
war; it was worse. This was not the rain of bullets which pierce the
flesh, or break a skull in passing. This was not the brutal shell,
which bursts to fragments, scatters in a thousand directions and mows
down a group of men as gayly as a child knocks down a house of cards.
This was another matter. It was the very air turned accomplice of the
enemy; blinded eyes, frothing mouth, rotted lungs, a breast on fire;
every effort exerted redoubling the torture; the rescuer struck down
above the man he attempted to save; the officer suffering like his men;
the telephone-operator seized in his shelter, the courier arrested in
his course, all alike smothered and struggling with death. This was a
breath from the depths of hell, this diabolic invention, which that
monster, the German Junker, forced men to choose: weapon of meanness
and treachery, which sets at naught the valor of both defender and
assailant!
VII
RHEIMS
When the life fantastic becomes the life ordinary, when one is at
the centre of prodigious events which unroll more rapidly than the
picture on the screen, and appear in ever-new guise, the astonishing
thing becomes a natural thing; the unheard-of becomes the expected.
A distortion of sensation is produced; the brain registers only that
which surpasses the climax of what has already been experienced; as on
mountain heights, peaks which have been surmounted appear low, and the
climber feels that only those are high which are still above him.
Thus it became the ordinary thing for Berthet and me, as for our
companions, to live in the extraordinary and the supernatural. We felt
quite at home in it, and moved at our ease in a situation which, for
him at least, would have been untenable a few short months before. We
had become soldiers like the others, eating, when we could, a meagre
and coarse ration; sleeping when it was possible; in constant danger
of death, but avoiding it apparently by instinct. We lived with no
more care than the beasts of the field; with beards long, hands dirty.
We dug in the earth, as did all the rest; we watched at the parapets
with eyes puffed from lack of sleep. Uncouthness grew upon us, and we
appeared, at dawn, in the glacial cold, muffled up in pieces of cloth
and skins of animals; hairy, hideous, and fearsome.
We were on patrol duty one night. Creeping about, we passed the
listening-post and advanced on No Man’s Land. Like savages, we stalked
the enemy for hours, trying to surprise some unknown men: soldiers
like ourselves, who might be lost between the lines; men anxious like
ourselves, and like ourselves afraid of death and suffering. Then we
returned, annoyed to come back without having bagged a foe; regretful
that we had not been able to spill some man’s blood. However----
“However”--thus we reasoned.
Often, in the evening, when we were free between periods of sentry
duty, we would delay our share of heavy sleep wherein one forgot
all; when one lay stretched like a beast in a stable, on a little
straw in the depth of a retreat, poorly protected from the wind and
the shells. We would walk the hundred paces of the length of the
communication-trench, conversing.