THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation reveals
together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the night, and
a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up there--so high and
so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of dreadful birds goes
circling up with strong and palpitating cries to look down upon the
earth.
The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools and
gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the water and
sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the convoys of the
night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that glisten in the
weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken stakes protruding
from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in tangled coils. With
its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be an endless gray sheet
that floats on the sea and has here and there gone under. Though no
rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing, washed out and drowned, and
even the wan light seems to flow.
Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with a
layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.
I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are "us."
We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking wrap us
up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch themselves,
yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden, dirt-disfigured,
pierced by the little lamps of dull and heavy-lidded eyes, matted with
uncut beards and foul with forgotten hair.
Crack! Crack! Boom!--rifle fire and cannonade. Above us and all around,
it crackles and rolls, in long gusts or separate explosions. The
flaming and melancholy storm never, never ends. For more than fifteen
months, for five hundred days in this part of the world where we are,
the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning to night and from
night to morning. We are buried deep in an everlasting battlefield; but
like the ticking of the clocks at home in the days gone by--in the now
almost legendary Past--you only hear the noise when you listen.
A babyish face with puffy eyelids, and cheek-bones as lurid as if
lozenge-shaped bits of crimson paper had been stuck on, comes out of
the ground, opens one eye, then the other. It is Paradis. The skin of
his fat cheeks is scored with the marks of the folds in the tent-cloth
that has served him for night-cap. The glance of his little eye wanders
all round me; he sees me, nods, and says--"Another night gone, old
chap."
"Yes, sonny; how many more like it still?"
He raises his two plump arms skywards. He has managed to scrape out by
the steps of the dug-out and is beside me. After stumbling over the dim
obstacle of a man who sits in the shadows, fervently scratches himself
and sighs hoarsely, Paradis makes off--lamely splashing like a penguin
through the flooded picture.
One by one the men appear from the depths. In the corners, heavy
shadows are seen forming--human clouds that move and break up. One by
one they become recognizable. There is one who comes out hooded with
his blanket--a savage, you would say, or rather, the tent of a savage,
which walks and sways from side to side. Near by, and heavily framed in
knitted wool, a square face is disclosed, yellow-brown as though
iodized, and patterned with blackish patches, the nose broken, the eyes
of Chinese restriction and red-circled, a little coarse and moist
mustache like a greasing-brush.
"There's Volpatte. How goes it, Firmin?"
"It goes, it goes, and it comes," says Volpatte. His heavy and drawling
voice is aggravated by hoarseness. He coughs--"My number's up, this
time. Say, did you hear it last night, the attack? My boy, talk about a
bombardment--something very choice in the way of mixtures!" He sniffles
and passes his sleeve under his concave nose. His hand gropes within
his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds the skin, and scratches.
"I've killed thirty of them in the candle," he growls; "in the big
dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are some like crumbs of metal
bread. You can see them running about in the straw like I'm telling
you."
"Who's been attacking? The Boches?"
"The Boches and us too--out Vimy way--a counterattack--didn't you hear
it?"
"No," the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; "I was
snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."
"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or
rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look, see,
there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the ground
level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just body-room for
one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares, wagging the rough
and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had never been finished.
"I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was woke up by the relief of
the 129th that went by--not by the noise, but the smell. Ah, all those
chaps with their feet on the level with my nose! It woke me up, it gave
me nose-ache so."
I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the trail
of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.
"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.
"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you smell,
the more you have of 'em."
"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I
was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in time
to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those muck-heaps
was going to pinch it off me."
"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came
could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning
had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful, he
squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes blinked
among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of his
toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His hands were
horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the palms plastered
in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight, exhaled the scent
of an ancient stewpan. Though busily scratching, he chatted with big
Barque, who leaned towards him from a little way off.
"I wasn't as mucky as this when I was a civvy," he said.
"Well, my poor friend, it's a dirty change for the worse," said Barque.
"Lucky for you," says Tirette, going one better; "when it comes to
kids, you'll present madame with some little niggers!"
Blaire took offense, and gathering gloom wrinkled his brow. "What have
you got to give me lip about, you? What next? It's war-time. As for
you, bean-face, you think perhaps the war hasn't changed your phizog
and your manners? Look at yourself, monkey-snout, buttock-skin! A man
must be a beast to talk as you do." He passed his hand over the dark
deposit on his face, which the rains of those days had proved finally
indelible, and added, "Besides, if I am as I am, it's my own choosing.
To begin with, I have no teeth. The major said to me a long time ago,
'You haven't a single tooth. It's not enough. At your next rest,' he
says, 'take a turn round to the estomalogical ambulance.'"
"The tomatological ambulance," corrected Barque.
"Stomatological," Bertrand amended.
"You have all the making of an army cook--you ought to have been one,"
said Barque.
"My idea, too," retorted Blaire innocently. Some one laughed. The black
man got up at the insult. "You give me belly-ache," he said with scorn.
"I'm off to the latrines."
When his doubly dark silhouette had vanished, the others scrutinized
once more the great truth that down here in the earth the cooks are the
dirtiest of men.
"If you see a chap with his skin and toggery so smeared and stained
that you wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole, you can say to yourself,
'Probably he's a cook.' And the dirtier he is, the more likely to be a
cook."
"It's true, and true again," said Marthereau.
"Tiens, there's Tirloir! Hey, Tirloir!"
He comes up busily, peering this way and that, on an eager scent. His
insignificant head, pale as chlorine, hops centrally about in the
cushioning collar of a greatcoat that is much too heavy and big for
him. His chin is pointed, and his upper teeth protrude. A wrinkle round
his mouth is so deep with dirt that it looks like a muzzle. As usual,
he is angry, and as usual, he rages aloud.
"Some one cut my pouch in two last night!"
"It was the relief of the 129th. Where had you put it?"
He indicates a bayonet stuck in the wall of the trench close to the
mouth of a funk-hole--"There, hanging on the toothpick there."
"Ass!" comes the chorus. "Within reach of passing soldiers! Not dotty,
are you?"
"It's hard lines all the same," wails Tirloir. Then suddenly a fit of
rage seizes him, his face crumples, his little fists clench in fury, he
tightens them like knots in string and waves them about. "Alors quoi?
Ah, if I had hold of the mongrel that did it! Talk about breaking his
jaw--I'd stave in his bread-pan, I'd--there was a whole Camembert in
there, I'll go and look for it." He massages his stomach with the
little sharp taps of a guitar player, and plunges into the gray of the
morning, grinning yet dignified, with his awkward outlines of an
invalid in a dressing-gown. We hear him grumbling until he disappears.
"Strange man, that," says Pepin; the others chuckle. "He's daft and
crazy," declares Marthereau, who is in the habit of fortifying the
expression of his thought by using two synonyms at once.
* * * * *
"Tiens, old man," says Tulacque, as he comes up. "Look at this."
Tulacque is magnificent. He is wearing a lemon-yellow coat made out of
an oilskin sleeping-sack. He has arranged a hole in the middle to get
his head through, and compelled his shoulder-straps and belt to go over
it. He is tall and bony. He holds his face in advance as he walks, a
forceful face, with eyes that squint. He has something in his hand. "I
found this while digging last night at the end of the new gallery to
change the rotten gratings. It took my fancy off-hand, that
knick-knack. It's an old pattern of hatchet."
It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old
brown bone--quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.
"Very handy," said Tulacque, fingering it. "Yes, not badly thought out.
Better balanced than the regulation ax. That'll be useful to me, you'll
see." As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he would himself
pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking in the bowels of
the earth.
One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand's squad and the half-section, at
an elbow of the trench. Just here it is a little wider than in the
straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you must
throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and your
stomach against the stomach of the other.
Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel. No night
watchman works here. At night we are ready for making earthworks in
front, but as long as the day lasts we have nothing to do. Huddled up
together and linked arm in arm, it only remains to await the evening as
best we can.
Daylight has at last crept into the interminable crevices that furrow
this part of the earth, and now it finds the threshold of our holes. It
is the melancholy light of the North Country, of a restricted and muddy
sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is heavy with the smoke and
smell of factories. In this leaden light, the uncouth array of these
dwellers in the depths reveals the stark reality of the huge and
hopeless misery that brought it into being. But that is like the rattle
of rifles and the verberation of artillery. The drama in which we are
actors has lasted much too long for us to be surprised any more, either
at the stubbornness we have evolved or the garb we have devised against
the rain that comes from above, against the mud that comes from
beneath, and against the cold--that sort of infinity that is
everywhere. The skins of animals, bundles of blankets, Balaklava
helmets, woolen caps, furs, bulging mufflers (sometimes worn
turban-wise), paddings and quiltings, knittings and double-knittings,
coverings and roofings and cowls, tarred or oiled or rubbered, black or
all the colors (once upon a time) of the rainbow--all these things mask
and magnify the men, and wipe out their uniforms almost as effectively
as their skins. One has fastened on his back a square of linoleum, with
a big draught-board pattern in white and red, that he found in the
middle of the dining-room of some temporary refuge. That is Pepin. We
know him afar off by his harlequin placard sooner even than by his pale
Apache face. Here is Barque's bulging chest-protector, carven from an
eiderdown quilt, formerly pink, but now fantastically bleached and
mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises like a ruined
tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass of moleskin,
with the fur inside, adorns little Eudore with the burnished back of a
beetle; while the golden corselet of Tulacque the Big Chief surpasses
all.
The "tin hat" gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the
beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing it--on
the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like Cadilhac, or on a
cotton cap like Barque--produce a complicated diversity of appearance.
And our legs! I went down just now, bent double, into our dug-out, the
little low cave that smells musty and damp, where one stumbles over
empty jam-pots and dirty rags, where two long lumps lay asleep, while
in the corner a kneeling shape rummaged a pouch by candle-light. As I
climbed out, the rectangle of entry afforded me a revelation of our
legs. Flat on the ground, vertically in the air, or aslant; spread
about, doubled up, or mixed together; blocking the fairway and cursed
by passers-by, they present a collection of many colors and many
shapes--gaiters, leggings black or yellow, long or short, in leather,
in tawny cloth, in any sort of waterproof stuff; puttees in dark blue,
light blue, black, sage green, khaki, and beige. Alone of all his kind,
Volpatte has retained the modest gaiters of mobilization. Mesnil Andre
has displayed for a fortnight a pair of thick woolen stockings, ribbed
and green; and Tirette has always been known by his gray cloth puttees
with white stripes, commandeered from a pair of civilian trousers that
was hanging goodness knows where at the beginning of the war. As for
Marthereau's puttees, they are not both of the same hue, for he failed
to find two fag-ends of greatcoat equally worn and equally dirty, to be
cut up into strips.
There are legs wrapped up in rags, too, and even in newspapers, which
are kept in place with spirals of thread or--much more
practical--telephone wire. Pepin fascinated his friends and the
passers-by with a pair of fawn gaiters, borrowed from a corpse. Barque,
who poses as a resourceful man, full of ideas--and Heaven knows what a
bore it makes of him at times!--has white calves, for he wrapped
surgical bandages round his leg-cloths to preserve them, a snowy
souvenir at his latter end of the cotton cap at the other, which
protrudes below his helmet and is left behind in its turn by a saucy
red tassel. Poterloo has been walking about for a month in the boots of
a German soldier, nearly new, and with horseshoes on the heels. Caron
entrusted them to Poterloo when he was sent back on account of his arm.
Caron had taken them himself from a Bavarian machine-gunner, knocked
out near the Pylones road. I can hear Caron telling about it yet--
"Old man, he was there, his buttocks in a hole, doubled up, gaping at
the sky with his legs in the air, and his pumps offered themselves to
me with an air that meant they were worth my while. 'A tight fit,' says
I. But you talk about a job to bring those beetle-crushers of his away!
I worked on top of him, tugging, twisting and shaking, for half an hour
and no lie about it. With his feet gone quite stiff, the patient didn't
help me a bit. Then at last the legs of it--they'd been pulled about
so--came unstuck at the knees, and his breeks tore away, and all the
lot came, flop! There was me, all of a sudden, with a full boot in each
fist. The legs and feet had to be emptied out."
"You're going it a bit strong!"
"Ask Euterpe the cyclist if it isn't true. I tell you he did it along
of me, too. We shoved our arms inside the boots and pulled out of 'em
some bones and bits of sock and bits of feet. But look if they weren't
worth while!"
So, until Caron returns, Poterloo continues on his behalf the wearing
of the Bavarian machine-gunner's boots.
Thus do they exercise their wits, according to their intelligence,
their vivacity, their resources, and their boldness, in the struggle
with the terrible discomfort. Each one seems to make the revealing
declaration, "This is all that I knew, all I was able, all that I dared
to do in the great misery which has befallen me."
* * * * *
Mesnil Joseph drowses; Blaire yawns; Marthereau smokes, "eyes front."
Lamuse scratches himself like a gorilla, and Eudore like a marmoset.
Volpatte coughs, and says, "I'm kicking the bucket." Mesnil Andre has
got out his mirror and comb and is tending his fine chestnut beard as
though it were a rare plant. The monotonous calm is disturbed here and
there by the outbreaks of ferocious resentment provoked by the presence
of parasites--endemic, chronic, and contagious.
Barque, who is an observant man, sends an itinerant glance around,
takes his pipe from his mouth, spits, winks, and says--"I say, we don't
resemble each other much."
"Why should we?" says Lamuse. "It would be a miracle if we did."
* * * * *
Our ages? We are of all ages. Ours is a regiment in reserve which
successive reinforcements have renewed partly with fighting units and
partly with Territorials. In our half-section there are reservists of
the Territorial Army, new recruits, and demi-poils. Fouillade is forty;
Blaire might be the father of Biquet, who is a gosling of Class 1913.
The corporal calls Marthereau "Grandpa" or "Old Rubbish-heap,"
according as in jest or in earnest. Mesnil Joseph would be at the
barracks if there were no war. It is a comical effect when we are in
charge of Sergeant Vigile, a nice little boy, with a dab on his lip by
way of mustache. When we were in quarters the other day, he played at
skipping-rope with the kiddies. In our ill-assorted flock, in this
family without kindred, this home without a hearth at which we gather,
there are three generations side by side, living, waiting, standing
still, like unfinished statues, like posts.
Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere. I look at the
two men beside me. Poterloo, the miner from the Calonne pit, is pink;
his eyebrows are the color of straw, his eyes flax-blue. His great
golden head involved a long search in the stores to find the vast
steel-blue tureen that bonnets him. Fouillade, the boatman from Cette,
rolls his wicked eyes in the long, lean face of a musketeer, with
sunken cheeks and his skin the color of a violin. In good sooth, my two
neighbors are as unlike as day and night.
Cocon, no less, a slight and desiccated person in spectacles, whose
tint tells of corrosion in the chemical vapors of great towns,
contrasts with Biquet, a Breton in the rough, whose skin is gray and
his jaw like a paving-stone; and Mesnil Andre, the comfortable chemist
from a country town in Normandy, who has such a handsome and silky
beard and who talks so much and so well--he has little in common with
Lamuse, the fat peasant of Poitou, whose cheeks and neck are like
underdone beef. The suburban accent of Barque, whose long legs have
scoured the streets of Paris in all directions, alternates with the
semi-Belgian cadence of those Northerners who came from the 8th
Territorial; with the sonorous speech, rolling on the syllables as if
over cobblestone, that the 144th pours out upon us; with the dialect
blown from those ant-like clusters that the Auvergnats so obstinately
form among the rest. I remember the first words of that wag, Tirette,
when he arrived--"I, mes enfants, I am from Clichy-la-Garenne! Can any
one beat that?"--and the first grievance that Paradis brought to me,
"They don't give a damn for me, because I'm from Morvan!"
* * * * *
Our callings? A little of all--in the lump. In those departed days when
we had a social status, before we came to immure our destiny in the
molehills that we must always build up again as fast as rain and
scrap-iron beat them down, what were we? Sons of the soil and artisans
mostly. Lamuse was a farm-servant, Paradis a carter. Cadilhac, whose
helmet rides loosely on his pointed head, though it is a juvenile
size--like a dome on a steeple, says Tirette--owns land. Papa Blaire
was a small farmer in La Brie. Barque, porter and messenger, performed
acrobatic tricks with his carrier-tricycle among the trains and taxis
of Paris, with solemn abuse (so they say) for the pedestrians, fleeing
like bewildered hens across the big streets and squares. Corporal
Bertrand, who keeps himself always a little aloof, correct, erect, and
silent, with a strong and handsome face and forthright gaze, was
foreman in a case-factory. Tirloir daubed carts with paint--and without
grumbling, they say. Tulacque was barman at the Throne Tavern in the
suburbs; and Eudore of the pale and pleasant face kept a roadside cafe
not very far from the front lines. It has been ill-used by the
shells--naturally, for we all know that Eudore has no luck. Mesnil
Andre, who still retains a trace of well-kept distinction, sold
bicarbonate and infallible remedies at his pharmacy in a Grande Place.
His brother Joseph was selling papers and illustrated story-books in a
station on the State Railways at the same time that, in far-off Lyons,
Cocon, the man of spectacles and statistics, dressed in a black smock,
busied himself behind the counters of an ironmongery, his hands
glittering with plumbago; while the lamps of Becuwe Adolphe and
Poterloo, risen with the dawn, trailed about the coalpits of the North
like weakling Will-o'-th'-wisps.
And there are others amongst us whose occupations one can never recall,
whom one confuses with one another; and the rural nondescripts who
peddled ten trades at once in their packs, without counting the dubious
Pepin, who can have had none at all. (While at the depot after sick
leave, three months ago, they say, he got married--to secure the
separation allowance.)
The liberal professions are not represented among those around me. Some
teachers are subalterns in the company or Red Cross men. In the
regiment a Marist Brother is sergeant in the Service de Sante; a
professional tenor is cyclist dispatch-rider to the Major; a "gentleman
of independent means" is mess corporal to the C.H.R. But here there is
nothing of all that. We are fighting men, we others, and we include
hardly any intellectuals, or men of the arts or of wealth, who during
this war will have risked their faces only at the loopholes, unless in
passing by, or under gold-laced caps.
Yes, we are truly and deeply different from each other. But we are
alike all the same. In spite of this diversity of age, of country, of
education, of position, of everything possible, in spite of the former
gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike. Under the same
uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and habits, the
same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state primeval.
The same language, compounded of dialect and the slang of workshop and
barracks, seasoned with the latest inventions, blends us in the sauce
of speech with the massed multitudes of men who (for seasons now) have
emptied France and crowded together in the North-East.
Here, too, linked by a fate from which there is no escape, swept
willy-nilly by the vast adventure into one rank, we have no choice but
to go as the weeks and months go--alike. The terrible narrowness of the
common life binds us close, adapts us, merges us one in the other. It
is a sort of fatal contagion. Nor need you, to see how alike we
soldiers are, be afar off--at that distance, say, when we are only
specks of the dust-clouds that roll across the plain.
We are waiting. Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking like
warping wood or old hinges. Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles; more
slowly, but deeper. And we begin again, but not in the same way, to
wait. In a state of war, one is always waiting. We have become
waiting-machines. For the moment it is food we are waiting for. Then it
will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have done with dinner
we will think about the letters. After that, we shall set ourselves to
wait for something else.
Hunger and thirst are urgent instincts which formidably excite the
temper of my companions. As the meal gets later they become grumblesome
and angry. Their need of food and drink snarls from their lips--"That's
eight o'clock. Now, why the hell doesn't it come?"
"Just so, and me that's been pining since noon yesterday," sulks
Lamuse, whose eyes are moist with longing, while his cheeks seem to
carry great daubs of wine-colored grease-paint.
Discontent grows more acute every minute.
"I'll bet Plumet has poured down his own gullet my wine ration that
he's supposed to have, and others with it, and he's lying drunk over
there somewhere."
"It's sure and certain"--Marthereau seconds the proposition.
"Ah, the rotters, the vermin, these fatigue men!" Tirloir bellows. "An
abominable race--all of 'em--mucky-nosed idlers! They roll over each
other all day long at the rear, and they'll be damned before they'll be
in time. Ah, if I were boss, they should damn quick take our places in
the trenches, and they'd have to work for a change. To begin with, I
should say, 'Every man in the section will carry grease and soup in
turns.' Those who were willing, of course--"
"I'm confident," cries Cocon, "it's that Pepere that's keeping the
others back. He does it on purpose, firstly, and then, too, he can't
finish plucking himself in the morning, poor lad. He wants ten hours
for his flea-hunt, he's so finicking; and if he can't get 'em, monsieur
has the pip all day."
"Be damned to him," growls Lamuse. "I'd shift him out of bed if only I
was there! I'd wake him up with boot-toe, I'd--"
"I was reckoning, the other day," Cocon went on; "it took him seven
hours forty-seven minutes to come from thirty-one dug-out. It should
take him five good hours, but no longer."
Cocon is the Man of Figures. He has a deep affection, amounting to
rapacity, for accuracy in recorded computation. On any subject at all,
he goes burrowing after statistics, gathers them with the industry of
an insect, and serves them up on any one who will listen. Just now,
while he wields his figures like weapons, the sharp ridges and angles
and triangles that make up the paltry face where perch the double discs
of his glasses, are contracted with vexation. He climbs to the
firing-step (made in the days when this was the first line), and raises
his head angrily over the parapet. The light touch of a little shaft of
cold sunlight that lingers on the land sets a-glitter both his glasses
and the diamond that hangs from his nose.
"And that Pepere, too, talk about a drinking-cup with the bottom out!
You'd never believe the weight of stuff he can let drop on a single
journey."
With his pipe in the corner, Papa Blaire fumes in two senses. You can
see his heavy mustache trembling. It is like a comb made of bone,
whitish and drooping.
"Do you want to know what I think? These dinner men, they're the
dirtiest dogs of all. It's 'Blast this' and 'Blast that'--John Blast
and Co., I call 'em."
"They have all the elements of a dunghill about them," says Eudore,
with a sigh of conviction. He is prone on the ground, with his mouth
half-open and the air of a martyr. With one fading eye he follows the
movements of Pepin, who prowls to and fro like a hyaena.
Their spiteful exasperation with the loiterers mounts higher and
higher. Tirloir the Grumbler takes the lead and expands. This is where
he comes in. With his little pointed gesticulations he goads and spurs
the anger all around him.
"Ah, the devils, what? The sort of meat they threw at us yesterday!
Talk about whetstones! Beef from an ox, that? Beef from a bicycle, yes
rather! I said to the boys, 'Look here, you chaps, don't you chew it
too quick, or you'll break your front teeth on the nails!'"
Tirloir's harangue--he was manager of a traveling cinema, it
seems--would have made us laugh at other times, but in the present
temper it is only echoed by a circulating growl.
"Another time, so that you won't grumble about the toughness, they send
you something soft and flabby that passes for meat, something with the
look and the taste of a sponge--or a poultice. When you chew that, it's
the same as a cup of water, no more and no less."
"Tout ca," says Lamuse, "has no substance; it gets no grip on your
guts. You think you're full, but at the bottom of your tank you're
empty. So, bit by bit, you turn your eyes up, poisoned for want of
sustenance."
"The next time," Biquet exclaims in desperation, "I shall ask to see
the old man, and I shall say, 'Mon capitaine'--"
"And I," says Barque, "shall make myself look sick, and I shall say,
'Monsieur le major'--"
"And get nix or the kick-out--they're all alike--all in a band to take
it out of the poor private."
"I tell you, they'd like to get the very skin off us!"
"And the brandy, too! We have a right to get it brought to the
trenches--as long as it's been decided somewhere--I don't know when or
where, but I know it--and in the three days that we've been here,
there's three days that the brandy's been dealt out to us on the end of
a fork!"
"Ah, malheur!"
* * * * *
"There's the grub!" announces a poilu [note 1] who was on the look-out
at the corner.
"Time, too!"
And the storm of revilings ceases as if by magic. Wrath is changed into
sudden contentment.
Three breathless fatigue men, their faces streaming with tears of
sweat, put down on the ground some large tins, a paraffin can, two
canvas buckets, and a file of loaves, skewered on a stick. Leaning
against the wall of the trench, they mop their faces with their
handkerchiefs or sleeves. And I see Cocon go up to Pepere with a smile,
and forgetful of the abuse he had been heaping on the other's
reputation, he stretches out a cordial hand towards one of the cans in
the collection that swells the circumference of Pepere, after the
manner of a life-belt.
"What is there to eat?"
"It's there," is the evasive reply of the second fatigue man, whom
experience has taught that a proclamation of the menu always evokes the
bitterness of disillusion. So they set themselves to panting abuse of
the length and the difficulties of the trip they have just
accomplished: "Some crowds about, everywhere! It's a tough job to get
along--got to disguise yourself as a cigarette paper, sometimes."--"And
there are people who say they're shirkers in the kitchens!" As for him,
he would a hundred thousand times rather be with the company in the
trenches, to mount guard and dig, than earn his keep by such a job,
twice a day during the night!
Paradis, having lifted the lids of the jars, surveys the recipients and
announces, "Kidney beans in oil, bully, pudding, and coffee--that's
all."
"Nom de Dieu!" bawls Tulacque. "And wine?" He summons the crowd: "Come
and look here, all of you! That--that's the limit! We're done out of
our wine!"
Athirst and grimacing, they hurry up; and from the profoundest depths
of their being wells up the chorus of despair and disappointment, "Oh,
Hell!"
"Then what's that in there?" says the fatigue man, still ruddily
sweating, and using his foot to point at a bucket.
"Yes," says Paradis, "my mistake, there is some."
The fatigue man shrugs his shoulders, and hurls at Paradis a look of
unspeakable scorn--"Now you're beginning! Get your gig-lamps on, if
your sight's bad." He adds, "One cup each--rather less perhaps--some
chucklehead bumped against me, coming through the Boyau du Bois, and a
drop got spilled." "Ah!" he hastens to add, raising his voice, "if I
hadn't been loaded up, talk about the boot-toe he'd have got in the
rump! But he hopped it on his top gear, the brute!"
In spite of this confident assurance, the fatigue man makes off
himself, curses overtaking him as he goes, maledictions charged with
offensive reflections on his honesty and temperance, imprecations
inspired by this revelation of a ration reduced.
All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it standing,
squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks pulled out of
the holes where they sleep--or even prone, their backs on the ground,
disturbed by passers-by, cursed at and cursing. Apart from these
fleeting insults and jests, they say nothing, the primary and universal
interest being but to swallow, with their mouths and the circumference
thereof as greasy as a rifle-breech. Contentment is theirs.
At the earliest cessation of their jaw-bones' activity, they serve up
the most ribald of raillery. They knock each other about, and clamor in
riotous rivalry to have their say. One sees even Farfadet smiling, the
frail municipal clerk who in the early days kept himself so decent and
clean amongst us all that he was taken for a foreigner or a
convalescent. One sees the tomato-like mouth of Lamuse dilate and
divide, and his delight ooze out in tears. Poterloo's face, like a pink
peony, opens out wider and wider. Papa Blaire's wrinkles flicker with
frivolity as he stands up, pokes his head forward, and gesticulates
with the abbreviated body that serves as a handle for his huge drooping
mustache. Even the corrugations of Cocon's poor little face are lighted
up.
Becuwe goes in search of firewood to warm the coffee. While we wait for
our drink, we roll cigarettes and fill pipes. Pouches are pulled out.
Some of us have shop-acquired pouches in leather or rubber, but they
are a minority. Biquet extracts his tobacco from a sock, of which the
mouth is drawn tight with string. Most of the others use the bags for
anti-gas pads, made of some waterproof material which is an excellent
preservative of shag, be it coarse or fine; and there are those who
simply fumble for it in the bottom of their greatcoat pockets.
The smokers spit in a circle, just at the mouth of the dug-out which
most of the half-section inhabit, and flood with tobacco-stained saliva
the place where they put their hands and feet when they flatten
themselves to get in or out.
But who notices such a detail?
* * * * *
Now, a propos of a letter to Marthereau from his wife, they discuss
produce.
"La mere Marthereau has written," he says. "That fat pig we've got at
home, a fine specimen, guess how much she's worth now?"
But the subject of domestic economy degenerates suddenly into a fierce
altercation between Pepin and Tulacque. Words of quite unmistakable
significance are exchanged. Then--"I don't care a what you say or what
you don't say! Shut it up!"--"I shall shut it when I want, midden!"--"A
seven-pound thump would shut it up quick enough!"--"Who from? Who'll
give it me?"--"Come and find out!"
They grind their teeth and approach each other in a foaming rage.
Tulacque grasps his prehistoric ax, and his squinting eyes are
flashing. The other is pale and his eyes have a greenish glint; you can
see in his blackguard face that his thoughts are with his knife.
But between the two, as they grip each other in looks and mangle in
words, Lamuse intervenes with his huge pacific head, like a baby's, and
his face of sanguinary hue: "Allons, allons! You're not going to cut
yourselves up! Can't be allowed!"
The others also interpose, and the antagonists are separated, but they
continue to hurl murderous looks at each other across the barrier of
their comrades. Pepin mutters a residue of slander in tones that quiver
with malice--
"The hooligan, the ruffian, the blackguard! But wait a bit! I'll see
him later about this!"
On the other side, Tulacque confides in the poilu who is beside him:
"That crab-louse! Non, but you know what he is! You know--there's no
more to be said. Here, we've got to rub along with a lot of people that
we don't know from Adam. We know 'em and yet we don't know 'em; but
that man, if he thinks he can mess me about, he'll find himself up the
wrong street! You wait a bit. I'll smash him up one of these days,
you'll see!"
Meanwhile the general conversation is resumed, drowning the last twin
echoes of the quarrel.
"It's every day alike, alors!" says Paradis to me; "yesterday it was
Plaisance who wanted to let Fumex have it heavy on the jaw, about God
knows what--a matter of opium pills, I think. First it's one and then
it's another that talks of doing some one in. Are we getting to be a
lot of wild animals because we look like 'em?"
"Mustn't take them too seriously, these men," Lamuse declares; "they're
only kids."
"True enough, seeing that they're men."
* * * * *
The day matures. A little more light has trickled through the mists
that enclose the earth. But the sky has remained overcast, and now it
dissolves in rain; With a slowness which itself disheartens, the wind
brings back its great wet void upon us. The rain-haze makes everything
clammy and dull--even the Turkey red of Lamuse's cheeks, and even the
orange armor that caparisons Tulacque. The water penetrates to the deep
joy with which dinner endowed us, and puts it out. Space itself
shrinks; and the sky, which is a field of melancholy, comes closely
down upon the earth, which is a field of death.
We are still there, implanted and idle. It will be hard to-day to reach
the end of it, to get rid of the afternoon. We shiver in discomfort,
and keep shifting our positions, like cattle enclosed.
Cocon is explaining to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of
our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations. In
the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of French
trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half leveled; the
others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These parallels are
joined up by innumerable galleries which hook and crook themselves like
ancient streets. The system is much more dense than we believe who live
inside it. On the twenty-five kilometers' width that form the army
front, one must count on a thousand kilometers of hollowed
lines--trenches and saps of all sorts. And the French Army consists of
ten such armies. There are then, on the French side, about 10,000
kilometers [note 2] of trenches, and as much again on the German side.
And the French front is only about one-eighth of the whole war-front of
the world.
Thus speaks Cocon, and he ends by saying to his neighbor, "In all that
lot, you see what we are, us chaps?"
Poor Barque's head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child's, is
underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an apostrophe:
"Yes, it's true, when you come to think of it. What's a soldier, or
even several soldiers?--Nothing, and less than nothing, in the whole
crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the few drops of
blood that we are among all this flood of men and things."
Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance
of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: "He
was coming along with two horses--Fs-s-s--a shell; and he's only one
horse left."
"You get fed up with it," says Volpatte.
"But you stick it," growls Barque.
"You've got to," says Paradis.
"Why?" asks Marthereau, without conviction.
"No need for a reason, as long as we've got to."
"There is no reason," Lamuse avers.
"Yes, there is," says Cocon. "It's--or rather, there are several."
"Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we've got to
stick it."
"All the same," comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance
slip of airing his pet phrase--"All the same, they'd like to steal the
very skin off us!"
"At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a heap
of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any more."
"Nor me either."
"Nor me."
"I've never tried to."
"You're not such a fool as you look, flea-face," says the shrill and
jeering voice of Mesnil Andre. Obscurely flattered, the other develops
his theme--
"To begin with, you can't know anything about anything."
Says Corporal Bertrand, "There's only one thing you need know, and it's
this; that the Boches are here in front of us, deep dug in, and we've
got to see that they don't get through, and we've got to put 'em out,
one day or another--as soon as possible."
"Oui, oui, they've got to leg it, and no mistake about it. What else is
there? Not worth while to worry your head thinking about anything else.
But it's a long job."
An explosion of profane assent comes from Fouillade, and he adds,
"That's what it is!"
"I've given up grousing," says Barque. "At the beginning of it, I
played hell with everybody--with the people at the rear, with the
civilians, with the natives, with the shirkers. Yes, I played hell; but
that was at the beginning of the war--I was young. Now, I take things
better."
"There's only one way of taking 'em--as they come!"
"Of course! Otherwise, you'd go crazy. We're dotty enough already, eh,
Firmin?"
Volpatte assents with a nod of profound conviction. He spits, and then
contemplates his missile with a fixed and unseeing eye.
"You were saying?" insists Barque.
"Here, you haven't got to look too far in front. You must live from day
to day and from hour to hour, as well as you can."
"Certain sure, monkey-face. We've got to do what they tell us to do,
until they tell us to go away."
"That's all," yawns Mesnil Joseph.
Silence follows the recorded opinions that proceed from these dried and
tanned faces, inlaid with dust. This, evidently, is the credo of the
men who, a year and a half ago, left all the corners of the land to
mass themselves on the frontier: Give up trying to understand, and give
up trying to be yourself. Hope that you will not die, and fight for
life as well as you can.
"Do what you've got to do, oui, but get out of your own messes
yourself," says Barque, as he slowly stirs the mud to and fro.
"No choice"--Tulacque backs him up. "If you don't get out of 'em
yourself, no one'll do it for you."
"He's not yet quite extinct, the man that bothers about the other
fellow."
"Every man for himself, in war!"
"That's so, that's so."
Silence. Then from the depth of their destitution, these men summon
sweet souvenirs--"All that," Barque goes on, "isn't worth much,
compared with the good times we had at Soissons."
"Ah, the Devil!"
A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to redden
their cold faces.
"Talk about a festival!" sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching
himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland.
"Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be
ours! The houses and the beds--"
"And the cupboards!"
"And the cellars!"
Lamuse's eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full.
"Were you there long?" asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the
drafts from Auvergne.
"Several months."
The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again fiercely
at this vision of the days of plenty.
"We used to see," said Paradis dreamily, "the poilus pouring along and
behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round their
middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good fellow or
woman that they hadn't seen and won't ever see again."
We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. "There were
things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We
held all the aces in those days."
"A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops."
"Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you've no idea of,
a sort of devil's delight."
"Believe me or not," said Blaire to Cadilhac, "but in the middle of it
all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and everywhere
else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to it. Ah, mon
vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!"
"Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the great
Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!"
"Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted without
twisting himself."
"Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks chasing
and gabbling about the streets in all directions, blubbering because
they had no coal or wood. But he'd got a fire. When he hadn't any, he
said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you through.' And he wasn't long about it,
either."
"He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his kitchen,
you'd never guess what he'd got the stew going with! With a violin that
he'd found in the house!"
"Rotten, all the same," says Mesnil Andre. "One knows well enough that
a violin isn't worth much when it comes to utility, but all the same--"
"Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching
one for a cane, but the rest--into the fire! Then the arm-chairs in the
drawing-room went by degrees--mahogany, they were. He did 'em in and
cut them up by night, case some N.C.O. had something to say about it."
"He knew his way about," said Pepin. "As for us, we got busy with an
old suite of furniture that lasted us a fortnight."
"And what for should we be without? You've got to make dinner, and
there's no wood or coal. After the grub's served out, there you are
with your jaws empty, with a pile of meat in front of you, and in the
middle of a lot of pals that chaff and bullyrag you!"
"It's the War Office's doing, it isn't ours."
"Hadn't the officers a lot to say about the pinching?"
"They damn well did it themselves, I give you my word! Desmaisons, do
you remember Lieutenant Virvin's trick, breaking down a cellar door
with an ax? And when a poilu saw him at it, he gave him the door for
firewood, so that he wouldn't spread it about."
"And poor old Saladin, the transport officer. He was found coming out
of a basement in the dusk with two bottles of white wine in each arm,
the sport, like a nurse with two pairs of twins. When he was spotted,
they made him go back down to the wine-cellar, and serve out bottles
for everybody. But Corporal Bertrand, who is a man of scruples,
wouldn't have any. Ah, you remember that, do you, sausage-foot!"
"Where's that cook now that always found wood?" asks Cadilhac.
"He's dead. A bomb fell in his stove. He didn't get it, but he's dead
all the same--died of shock when he saw his macaroni with its legs in
the air. Heart seizure, so the doc' said. His heart was weak--he was
only strong on wood. They gave him a proper funeral--made him a coffin
out of the bedroom floor, and got the picture nails out of the walls to
fasten 'em together, and used bricks to drive 'em in. While they were
carrying him off, I thought to myself, 'Good thing for him he's dead.
If he saw that, he'd never be able to forgive himself for not having
thought of the bedroom floor for his fire.'--Ah, what the devil are you
doing, son of a pig?"
Volpatte offers philosophy on the rude intrusion of a passing fatigue
party: "The private gets along on the back of his pals. When you spin
your yarns in front of a fatigue gang, or when you take the best bit or
the best place, it's the others that suffer."
"I've often," says Lamuse, "put up dodges so as not to go into the
trenches, and it's come off no end of times. I own up to that. But when
my pals are in danger, I'm not a dodger any more. I forget discipline
and everything else. I see men, and I go. But otherwise, my boy, I look
after my little self."
Lamuse's claims are not idle words. He is an admitted expert at
loafing, but all the same he has brought wounded in under fire and
saved their lives. Without any brag, he relates the deed--
"We were all lying on the grass, and having a hot time. Crack, crack!
Whizz, whizz! When I saw them downed, I got up, though they yelled at
me, 'Get down!' Couldn't leave 'em like that. Nothing to make a song
about, seeing I couldn't do anything else."
Nearly all the boys of the squad have some high deed of arms to their
credit, and the Croix de Guerre has been successively set upon their
breasts.
"I haven't saved any Frenchmen," says Biquet, "but I've given some
Boches the bitter pill." In the May attacks, he ran off in advance and
was seen to disappear in the distance, but came back with four fine
fellows in helmets.
"I, too," says Tulacque, "I've killed some." Two months ago, with
quaint vanity, he laid out nine in a straight row, in front of the
taken trench. "But," he adds, "it's always the Boche officer that I'm
after."
"Ah, the beasts!" The curse comes from several men at once and from the
bottom of their hearts.
"Ah, mon vieux," says Tirloir, "we talk about the dirty Boche race; but
as for the common soldier, I don't know if it's true or whether we're
codded about that as well, and if at bottom they're not men pretty much
like us."
"Probably they're men like us," says Eudore.
"Perhaps!" cries Cocon, "and perhaps not."
"Anyway," Tirloir goes on, "we've not got a dead set on the men, but on
the German officers; non, non, non, they're not men, they're monsters.
I tell you, they're really a specially filthy sort o' vermin. One might
say that they're the microbes of the war. You ought to see them close
to--the infernal great stiff-backs, thin as nails, though they've got
calf-heads."
"And snouts like snakes."
Tirloir continues: "I saw one once, a prisoner, as I came back from
liaison. The beastly bastard! A Prussian colonel, that wore a prince's
crown, so they told me, and a gold coat-of-arms. He was mad because we
took leave to graze against him when they were bringing him back along
the communication trench, and he looked down on everybody--like that. I
said to myself, 'Wait a bit, old cock, I'll make you rattle directly!'
I took my time and squared up behind him, and kicked into his tailpiece
with all my might. I tell you, he fell down half-strangled."
"Strangled?"
"Yes, with rage, when it dawned on him that the rump of an officer and
nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor private! He
went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an epileptic--"
"I'm not spiteful myself," says Blaire, "I've got kiddies. And it
worries me, too, at home, when I've got to kill a pig that I know--but
those, I shall run 'em through--Bing!--full in the linen-cupboard."
"I, too."
"Not to mention," says Pepin, "that they've got silver hats, and
pistols that you can get four quid for whenever you like, and
field-glasses that simply haven't got a price. Ah, bad luck, what a lot
of chances I let slip in the early part of the campaign! I was too much
of a beginner then, and it serves me right. But don't worry, I shall
get a silver hat. Mark my words, I swear I'll have one. I must have not
only the skin of one of Wilhelm's red-tabs, but his togs as well. Don't
fret yourself; I'll fasten on to that before the war ends."
"You think it'll have an end, then?" asks some one.
"Don't worry!" replies the other.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, a hubbub has arisen to the right of us, and suddenly a
moving and buzzing group appears, in which dark and bright forms mingle.
"What's all that?"
Biquet has ventured on a reconnaissance, and returns contemptuously
pointing with his thumb towards the motley mass: "Eh, boys! Come and
have a squint at them! Some people!"
"Some people?"
"Oui, some gentlemen, look you. Civvies, with Staff officers."
"Civilians! Let's hope they'll stick it!" [note 3]
It is the sacramental saying and evokes laughter, although we have
heard it a hundred times, and although the soldier has rightly or
wrongly perverted the original meaning and regards it as an ironical
reflection on his life of privations and peril.
Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes.
Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and
binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or
patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.
With an arm where a brassard glitters in gold-edged silk and golden
ornament, a captain indicates the firing-step in front of an old
emplacement and invites the visitors to get up and try it. The
gentleman in the touring suit clambers up with the aid of his umbrella.
Says Barque, "You've seen the station-master at the Gare du Nord, all
in his Sunday best, and opening the door of a first-class compartment
for a rich sportsman on the first day of the shooting? With his
'Montez, monsieur le Propritaire!'--you know, when the toffs are all
togged up in brand-new outfits and leathers and ironmongery, and
showing off with all their paraphernalia for killing poor little
animals!"
Three or four poilus who were quite without their accouterments have
disappeared underground. The others sit as though paralyzed. Even the
pipes go out, and nothing is heard but the babble of talk exchanged by
the officers and their guests.
"Trench tourists," says Barque in an undertone, and then louder--"This
way, mesdames et messieurs"--in the manner of the moment.
"Chuck it!" whispers Farfadet, fearing that Barque's malicious tongue
will draw the attention of the potent personages.
Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who
detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He has
a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another follows him,
wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black beard, a white
tie and an eyeglass.
"Ah, ah! There are some poilus," says the first gentleman. "These are
real poilus, indeed."
He comes up to our party a little timidly, as though in the Zoological
Gardens, and offers his hand to the one who is nearest to him--not
without awkwardness, as one offers a piece of bread to the elephant.
"He, he! They are drinking coffee," he remarks.
"They call it 'the juice,'" corrects the magpie-man.
"Is it good, my friends?" The soldier, abashed in his turn by this
alien and unusual visitation, grunts, giggles, and reddens, and the
gentleman says, "He, he!" Then, with a slight motion of the head, he
withdraws backwards.
The assemblage, with its neutral shades of civilian cloth and its
sprinkling of bright military hues--like geraniums and hortensias in
the dark soil of a flowerbed--oscillates, then passes, and moves off
the opposite way it came. One of the officers was heard to say, "We
have yet much to see, messieurs les journalistes."
When the radiant spectacle has faded away, we look at each other. Those
who had fled into the funk-holes now gradually and head first disinter
themselves. The group recovers itself and shrugs its shoulders.
"They're journalists," says Tirette.
"Journalists?"
"Why, yes, the individuals that lay the newspapers. You don't seem to
catch on, fathead. Newspapers must have chaps to write 'em."
"Then it's those that stuff up our craniums?" says Marthereau.
Barque assumes a shrill treble, and pretending that he has a newspaper
in front of his nose, recites--"'The Crown Prince is mad, after having
been killed at the beginning of the campaign, and meanwhile he has all
the diseases you can name. William will die this evening, and again
to-morrow. The Germans have no more munitions and are chewing wood.
They cannot hold out, according to the most authoritative calculations,
beyond the end of the week. We can have them when we like, with their
rifles slung. If one can wait a few days longer, there will be no
desire to forsake the life of the trenches. One is so comfortable
there, with water and gas laid on, and shower-baths at every step. The
only drawback is that it is rather too hot in winter. As for the
Austrians, they gave in a long time since and are only pretending.' For
fifteen months now it's been like that, and you can hear the editor
saying to his scribes, 'Now, boys, get into it! Find some way of
brushing that up again for me in five secs, and make it spin out all
over those four damned white sheets that we've got to mucky.'"
"Ah, yes!" says Fouillade.
"Look here, corporal; you're making fun of it--isn't it true what I
said?"
"There's a little truth in it, but you're too slashing on the poor
boys, and you'd be the first to make a song about it if you had to go
without papers. Oui, when the paper-man's going by, why do you all
shout, 'Here, here'?"
"And what good can you get out of them all?" cries Papa Blaire. "Read
'em by the tubful if you like, but do the same as me--don't believe
'em!"
"Oui, oui, that's enough about them. Turn the page over, donkey-nose."
The conversation is breaking up; interest in it follows suit and is
scattered. Four poilus join in a game of manille, that will last until
night blacks out the cards. Volpatte is trying to catch a leaf of
cigarette paper that has escaped his fingers and goes hopping and
dodging in the wind along the wall of the trench like a fragile
butterfly.
Cocon and Tirette are recalling their memories of barrack-life. The
impressions left upon their minds by those years of military training
are ineffaceable. Into that fund of abundant souvenirs, of abiding
color and instant service, they have been wont to dip for their
subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. So that
they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual war in
all its forms.
I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it. For it is
everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their military
past;--the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with words of
extreme appropriateness and daring. He wasn't afraid, he spoke out loud
and strong! Some scraps of it reach my ears--
"Alors, d'you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me? Not a bit,
my boy. All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up, 'Mon
adjudant,' I says, 'it's possible, but--'" A sentence follows that I
cannot secure--"Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it. He didn't get
shirty; 'Good, that's good,' he says as he hops it, and afterwards he
was as good as all that, with me."
"Just like me, with Dodore, 'jutant of the 13th, when I was on leave--a
mongrel. Now he's at the Pantheon, as caretaker. He'd got it in for me,
so--"
So each unpacks his own little load of historical anecdote. They are
all alike, and not one of them but says, "As for me, I am not like the
others."
* * * * *
The post-orderly! He is a tall and broad man with fat calves;
comfortable looking, and as neat and tidy as a policeman. He is in a
bad temper. There are new orders, and now he has to go every day as far
as Battalion Headquarters. He abuses the order as if it had been
directed exclusively against himself; and he continues to complain even
while he calls up the corporals for the post and maintains his
customary chat en passant with this man and that. And in spite of his
spleen he does not keep to himself all the information with which he
comes provided. While removing the string from the letter-packets he
dispenses his verbal news, and announces first, that according to
rumor, there is a very explicit ban on the wearing of hoods.
"Hear that?" says Tirette to Tirloir. "Got to chuck your fine hood
away!"
"Not likely! I'm not on. That's nothing to do with me," replies the
hooded one, whose pride no less than his comfort is at stake.
"Order of the General Commanding the Army."
"Then let the General give an order that it's not to rain any more. I
want to know nothing about it."
The majority of Orders, even when less peculiar than this one, are
always received in this way--and then carried out.
"There's a reported order as well," says the man of letters, "that
beards have got to be trimmed and hair got to be clipped close."
"Talk on, my lad," says Barque, on whose head the threatened order
directly falls; "you didn't see me! You can draw the curtains!"
"I'm telling you. Do it or don't do it--doesn't matter a damn to me."
Besides what is real and written, there is bigger news, but still more
dubious and imaginative--the division is going to be relieved, and sent
either to rest--real rest, for six weeks--or to Morocco, or perhaps to
Egypt.
Divers exclamations. They listen, and let themselves be tempted by the
fascination of the new, the wonderful.