We have no lights this evening.... We must learn to do without them....
I grope my way along the passages, where the wind is muttering, to the
great staircase. Here there is a fitful lamp which makes one prefer
the darkness. I see the steps, which are white and smeared with mud,
pictures and tapestries, a sumptuous scheme of decoration flooded at the
bottom by filth and desolation. As I approach the room where the wounded
are lying, I hear the calm sound of their conversation. I go in quietly.
They cease talking; then they begin to chat again, for now they know me.
At first one can only distinguish long forms ranged upon the ground. The
stretchers seem to be holding forth with human voices. One of these is
narrating:
"We were all three sitting side by side... though I had told the
adjutant that corner was not a good place.... They had just brought us a
ration of soup with a little bit of meat that was all covered with white
frost. Then bullets began to arrive by the dozen, and we avoided them
as well as we could, and the earth flew about, and we were laughing,
because we had an idea that among all those bullets there was not one
that would find its billet. And then they stopped firing, and we came
back to sit on the ledge. There were Chagniol and Duc and I, and I had
them both to the right of me. We began to talk about Giromagny, and
about Danjoutin, because that's the district we all came from, and this
went on for about half an hour. And then, all of a sudden, a bullet
came, just a single one, but this time it was a good one. It went
through Chagniol's head, then through Duc's, and as I was a little
taller than they, it only passed through my neck...."
"And then?"
"Then it went off to the devil! Chagniol fell forward on his face. Duc
got up, and ran along on all fours as far as the bend in the trench, and
there he began to scratch out the earth like a rabbit, and then he died.
The blood was pouring down me right and left, and I thought it was time
for me to go. I set off running, holding a finger to each side of my
neck, because of the blood. I was thinking: just a single bullet! It's
too much! It was really a mighty good one! And then I saw the adjutant.
So I said to him: 'I warned you, mon adjutant, that that corner was not
a good place!' But the blood rushed up into my mouth, and I began to run
again."
There was a silence, and I heard a voice murmur with conviction:
"YOU were jolly lucky, weren't you?"
Mulet, too, tells his story:
"They had taken our fire... 'That's not your fire,' I said to him. 'Not
our fire?' he said. Then the other came up and he said: 'Hold your jaw
about the fire...' 'It's not yours,' I said. Then he said: 'You don't
know who you're talking to.' And he turned his cap, which had been
inside out... 'Ah! I beg your pardon,' I said, 'but I could not tell...'
And so they kept our fire...."