I have come to take refuge among my wounded to smoke in peace, and
meditate in the shadow. Here, the moral atmosphere is pure. These men
are so wretched, so utterly humiliated, so absorbed in their relentless
sufferings that they seem to have relinquished the burden of the
passions in order to concentrate their powers on the one endeavour: to
live.
In spite of their solidarity they are for the time isolated by their
individual sufferings. Later on, they will communicate; but this is the
moment when each one contemplates his own anguish, and fights his own
battle, with cries of pain....
They are all my friends. I will stay among them, associating myself with
all my soul in their ordeal.
Perhaps here I shall find peace. Perhaps all ignoble discord will call a
truce on the threshold of this empire.
But a short distance from us the battle-field has thundered unceasingly
for days. Like a noisy, complicated mechanism which turns out the
products of its internal activity, the stupid machine of war throws out,
from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are,
swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye;
and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the
damage.
How silent they are this evening! And how it makes one's heart ache
to look at them! Here is Bourreau, with the brutal name and the gentle
nature, who never utters a complaint, and whom a single bullet has
deprived of sight for ever. Here is Bride, whom we fear to touch, so
covered is he with bandages, but who looks at us with touching, liquid
eyes, his mind already wandering. Here is Lerouet, who will not see next
morning dawn over the pine-trees, and who has a gangrened wound near
his heart. And the others, all of whom I know by their individual
misfortunes.
How difficult it is to realise what they were, all these men who a year
ago, were walking in streets, tilling the land, or writing in an office.
Their present is too poignant. Here they lie on the ground, like some
fair work of art defaced. Behold them! The creature par excellence has
received a great outrage, an outrage it has wrought upon itself.
We are ignorant of their past. But have they a future? I consider these
innocent victims in the tragic majesty of the hour, and I feel ashamed
of living and breathing freely among them.
Poor, poor brothers! What could one do for you which would not be
insufficient, unworthy, mediocre? We can at least give up everything and
devote ourselves heart and soul to our holy and exacting work.
But no! round the beds on which your solitary drama is enacted, men are
still taking part in a sinister comedy. Every kind of folly, the most
ignoble and also the most imbecile passions, pursue their enterprises
and their satisfactions over your heads.
Neither the four corpses we buried this morning, nor your daily agonies
will disarm these appetites, suspend these calculations, and destroy
these ambitions the development and fruition of which even your
martyrdom, may be made to serve.
I will spend the whole evening among my wounded, and we will talk
together, gently, of their misery; it will please them, and they will
make me forget the horrible atmosphere of discussion that reigns here.
Alas! during the outburst of the great catastrophe, seeing the volume of
blood and fire, listening to the uproar, smelling the stench of the
vast gangrene, we thought that all passions would be laid aside, like
cumbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean
hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who
fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders
among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces
and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of
self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure hearts
to meet the ordeal!
But no! The first explosion was tremendous, yet hardly had its echoes
died away when the rag-pickers were already at work among the ruins, in
quest of cutlet-bones and waste paper.
And yet, think of the sacred anguish of those first hours!
Well, so be it! For my part, I will stay here, between these stretchers
with their burdens of anguish.
At this hour one is inclined to distrust everything, man and the
universe, and the future of Right. But we cannot have any doubts as to
the suffering of man. It is the one certain thing at this moment.
So I will stay and drink in this sinister testimony. And each time that
Beal, who has a gaping wound in the stomach, holds out his hands to me
with a little smile, I will get up and hold his hands in mine, for he is
feverish, and he knows that my hands are always icy.
V
Bride is dead. We had been working all day, and in the evening we had to
find time to go and bury Bride.
It is not a very long ceremony. The burial-ground is near. About a dozen
of us follow the lantern, slipping in the mud, and stumbling over the
graves. Here we are at the wall, and here is the long ditch, always
open, which every day is prolonged a little to the right, and filled
in a little to the left. Here is the line of white crosses, and the
flickering shadows on the wall caused by the lantern.
The men arrange the planks, slip the ropes, and lower the body,
disputing in undertones, for it is not so easy as one might think to
be a grave-digger. One must have the knack of it. And the night is very
dark and the mud very sticky.
At last the body is at the bottom of the trench, and the muddy ropes
are withdrawn. The little consumptive priest who stands at the graveside
murmurs the prayer for the dead. The rain beats in our faces. The
familiar demon of Artois, the wind, leaps among the ancient trees. The
little priest murmurs the terrible words: Dies irae, dies illa....
And this present day is surely the day of wrath... I too utter my
prayer: "In the name of the unhappy world, Bride, I remit all thy sins,
I absolve thee from all thy faults! Let this day, at least, be a day of
rest."
The little priest stands bare-headed in the blast. An orderly who is an
ecclesiastic holds the end of an apron over his head. A man raises the
lantern to the level of his eye. And the rain-drops gleam and sparkle
furtively.
Bride is dead....
Now we meet again in the little room where friendship reigns.
Pierre and Jacques, gallant fellows, I shall not forget your beautiful,
painful smile at the moment which brings discouragement to the
experienced man. I shall not forget.
The beef and rice, which one needs to be very hungry to swallow,
is distributed. And a gentle cheerfulness blossoms in the circle of
lamplight, a cheerfulness which tries to catch something of the gaiety
of the past. Man has such a deep-seated need of joy that he improvises
it everywhere, even in the heart of misery.
And suddenly, through the steam of the soup, I see Bride's look
distinctly.
It was no ordinary look. The extremity of suffering, the approach
of death, perhaps, and also the hidden riches of his soul, gave it
extraordinary light, sweetness, and gentleness. When one came to
his bedside, and bent over him, the look was there, a well-spring of
refreshment.
But Bride is dead: we saw his eyes transformed into dull, meaningless
membranes.
Where is that well-spring? Can it be quenched?