"The adjutant commanding the Territorial detachment that fatigues for
the H.Q. of the A.C."
"For the what?"
"For Headquarters of the Army Corps, and he's not the only one that
says it. There's--you know him--I've forgotten his name--he's like
Galle, but he isn't Galle--there's some one in his family who is Some
One. Anyway, he knows all about it."
"Then what?" With hungry eyes they form a circle around the
story-teller.
"Egypt, you say, we shall go to? Don't know it. I know there were
Pharaohs there at the time when I was a kid and went to school, but
since--"
"To Egypt!" The idea finds unconscious anchorage in their minds.
"Ah, non," says Blaire, "for I get sea-sick. Still, it doesn't last,
sea-sickness. Oui, but what would my good lady say?"
"What about it? She'll get used to it. You see niggers, and streets
full of big birds, like we see sparrows here."
"But haven't we to go to Alsace?"
"Yes," says the post-orderly, "there are some who think so at the
Pay-office."
"That'd do me well enough."
But common sense and acquired experience regain the upper hand and put
the visions to flight. We have been told so often that we were going a
long way off, so often have we believed it, so often been undeceived!
So, as if at a moment arranged, we wake up.
"It's all my eye--they've done it on us too often. Wait before
believing--and don't count a crumb's worth on it."
We reoccupy our corner. Here and there a man bears in his hand the
light momentous burden of a letter.
"Ah," says Tirloir, "I must be writing. Can't go eight days without
writing."
"Me too," says Eudore, "I must write to my p'tit' femme."
"Is she all right, Mariette?"
"Oui, oui, don't fret about Mariette."
A few have already settled themselves for correspondence. Barque is
standing up. He stoops over a sheet of paper flattened on a note-book
upon a jutting crag in the trench wall. Apparently in the grip of an
inspiration, he writes on and on, with his eyes in bondage and the
concentrated expression of a horseman at full gallop.
When once Lamuse--who lacks imagination--has sat down, placed his
little writing-block on the padded summit of his knees, and moistened
his copying-ink pencil, he passes the time in reading again the last
letters received, in wondering what he can say that he has not already
said, and in fostering a grim determination to say something else.
A sentimental gentleness seems to have overspread little Eudore, who is
curled up in a sort of niche in the ground. He is lost in meditation,
pencil in hand, eyes on paper. Dreaming, he looks and stares and sees.
It is another sky that lends him light, another to which his vision
reaches. He has gone home.
In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best
that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its
first expression is to talk once more of fleshly comforts.
Through their outer crust of coarseness and concealment, other hearts
venture upon murmured memories, and the rekindling of bygone
brightness: the summer morning, when the green freshness of the garden
steals in upon the purity of the country bedroom; or when the wind in
the wheat of the level lands sets it slowly stirring or deeply waving,
and shakes the square of oats hard by into quick little feminine
tremors; or the winter evening, with women and their gentleness around
the shaded luster of the lamp.
But Papa Blaire resumes work upon the ring he has begun. He has
threaded the still formless disc of aluminium over a bit of rounded
wood, and rubs it with the file. As he applies himself to the job, two
wrinkles of mighty meditation deepen upon his forehead. Anon he stops,
straightens himself, and looks tenderly at the trifle, as though she
also were looking at it.
"You know," he said to me once, speaking of another ring, "it's not a
question of doing it well or not well. The point is that I've done it
for my wife, d'you see? When I had nothing to do but scratch myself, I
used to have a look at this photo"--he showed me a photograph of a big,
chubby-faced woman--"and then it was quite easy to set about this
damned ring. You might say that we've made it together, see? The proof
of that is that it was company for me, and that I said Adieu to it when
I sent it off to Mother Blaire."
He is making another just now, and this one will have copper in it,
too. He works eagerly. His heart would fain express itself to the best
advantage in this the sort of penmanship upon which he is so
tenaciously bent.
As they stoop reverently, in their naked earth-holes, over the slender
rudimentary trinkets--so tiny that the great hide-bound hands hold them
with difficulty or let them fall--these men seem still more wild, more
primitive, and more human, than at all other times.
You are set thinking of the first inventor, the father of all
craftsmen, who sought to invest enduring materials with the shapes of
what he saw and the spirit of what he felt.
* * * * *
"People coming along," announces Biquet the mobile, who acts as
hall-porter to our section of the trench--"buckets of 'em." Immediately
an adjutant appears, with straps round his belly and his chin, and
brandishing his sword-scabbard.
"Out of the way, you! Out of the way, I tell you! You loafers there,
out of it! Let me see you quit, hey!" We make way indolently. Those at
the sides push back into the earth by slow degrees.
It is a company of Territorials, deputed to our sector for the
fortification of the second line and the upkeep of its communication
trenches. They come into view--miserable bundles of implements, and
dragging their feet.
We watch them, one by one, as they come up, pass, and disappear. They
are stunted and elderly, with dusty faces, or big and broken-winded,
tightly enfolded in greatcoats stained and over-worn, that yawn at the
toothless gaps where the buttons are missing.
Tirette and Barque, the twin wags, leaning close together against the
wall, stare at them, at first in silence. Then they begin to smile.
"March past of the Broom Brigade," says Tirette.
"We'll have a bit of fun for three minutes," announces Barque.
Some of the old toilers are comical. This one whom the file brings up
has bottle-shaped shoulders. Although extremely narrow-chested and
spindle-shanked, he is big-bellied. He is too much for Barque. "Hullo,
Sir Canteen!" he says.
When a more outrageously patched-up greatcoat appears than all the
others can show, Tirette questions the veteran recruit. "Hey, Father
Samples! Hey, you there!" he insists.
The other turns and looks at him, open-mouthed.
"Say there, papa, if you will be so kind as to give me the address of
your tailor in London!"
A chuckle comes from the antiquated and wrinkle-scrawled face, and then
the poilu, checked for an instant by Barque's command, is jostled by
the following flood and swept away.
When some less striking figures have gone past, a new victim is
provided for the jokers. On his red and wrinkled neck luxuriates some
dirty sheep's-wool. With knees bent, his body forward, his back bowed,
this Territorial's carriage is the worst.
"Tiens!" bawls Tirette, with pointed finger, "the famous
concertina-man! It would cost you something to see him at the
fair--here, he's free gratis!"
The victim stammers responsive insults amid the scattered laughter that
arises.
No more than that laughter is required to excite the two comrades. It
is the ambition to have their jests voted funny by their easy audience
that stimulates them to mock the peculiarities of their old
comrades-in-arms, of those who toil night and day on the brink of the
great war to make ready and make good the fields of battle.
And even the other watchers join in. Miserable themselves, they scoff
at the still more miserable.
"Look at that one! And that, look!"
"Non, but take me a snapshot of that little rump-end! Hey, earth-worm!"
"And that one that has no ending! Talk about a sky-scratcher! Tiens,
la, he takes the biscuit. Yes, you take it, old chap!"
This man goes with little steps, and holds his pickax up in front like
a candle; his face is withered, and his body borne down by the blows of
lumbago.
"Like a penny, gran'pa?" Barque asks him, as he passes within reach of
a tap on the shoulder.
The broken-down poilu replies with a great oath of annoyance, and
provokes the harsh rejoinder of Barque: "Come now, you might be polite,
filthy-face, old muck-mill!"
Turning right round in fury, the old one defies his tormentor.
"Hullo!" cries Barque, laughing, "He's showing fight; the ruin! He's
warlike, look you, and he might be mischievous if only he were sixty
years younger!"
"And if he wasn't alone," wantonly adds Pepin, whose eye is in quest of
other targets among the flow of new arrivals.
The hollow chest of the last straggler appears, and then his distorted
back disappears.
The march past of the worn-out and trench-foul veterans comes to an end
among the ironical and almost malevolent faces of these sinister
troglodytes, whom their caverns of mud but half reveal.
Meanwhile, the hours slip away, and evening begins to veil the sky and
darken the things of earth. It comes to blend itself at once with the
blind fate and the ignorant dark minds of the multitude there
enshrouded.
Through the twilight comes the rolling hum of tramping men, and another
throng rubs its way through.
"Africans!"
They march past with faces red-brown, yellow or chestnut, their beards
scanty and fine or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats
yellowish-green, and their muddy helmets sporting the crescent in place
of our grenade. Their eyes are like balls of ivory or onyx, that shine
from faces like new pennies, flattened or angular. Now and again comes
swaying along above the line the coal-black mask of a Senegalese
sharpshooter. Behind the company goes a red flag with a green hand in
the center.
We watch them in silence. These are asked no questions. They command
respect, and even a little fear.
All the same, these Africans seem jolly and in high spirits. They are
going, of course, to the first line. That is their place, and their
passing is the sign of an imminent attack. They are made for the
offensive.
"Those and the 75 gun we can take our hats off to. They're everywhere
sent ahead at big moments, the Moroccan Division."
"They can't quite fit in with us. They go too fast--and there's no way
of stopping them."
Some of these diabolical images in yellow wood or bronze or ebony are
serious of mien, uneasy, and taciturn. Their faces have the disquieting
and secret look of the snare suddenly discovered. The others laugh with
a laugh that jangles like fantastic foreign instruments of music, a
laugh that bares the teeth.
We talk over the characteristics of these Africans; their ferocity in
attack, their devouring passion to be in with the bayonet, their
predilection for "no quarter." We recall those tales that they
themselves willingly tell, all in much the same words and with the same
gestures. They raise their arms over their heads--"Kam'rad, Kam'rad!"
"Non, pas Kam'rad!" And in pantomime they drive a bayonet forward, at
belly-height, drawing it back then with the help of a foot.
One of the sharpshooters overhears our talk as he passes. He looks upon
us, laughs abundantly in his helmeted turban, and repeats our words
with significant shakes of his head: "Pas Kam'rad, non pas Kam'rad,
never! Cut head off!"
"No doubt they're a different race from us, with their tent-cloth
skin," Barque confesses, though he does not know himself what "cold
feet" are. "It worries them to rest, you know; they only live for the
minute when the officer puts his watch back in his pocket and says,
'Off you go!'"
"In fact, they're real soldiers."
"We are not soldiers," says big Lamuse, "we're men." Though the evening
has grown darker now, that plain true saying sheds something like a
glimmering light on the men who are waiting here, waiting since the
morning, waiting since months ago.
They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the joy
of life. Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are
ignorant and of narrow outlook, full of a sound common sense--which
some-times gets off the rails--disposed to be led and to do as they are
bid, enduring under hardships, long-suffering.
They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive
instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances--the
instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living through,
the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals they are
cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the silence and the
shadows of their great human hearts.
When we can no longer see clearly, we hear down there the murmur of a
command, which comes nearer and rings loud--"Second half-section!
Muster!" We fall in; it is the call.
"Gee up!" says the corporal. We are set in motion. In front of the
tool-depot there is a halt and trampling. To each is given a spade or
pickax. An N.C.O. presents the handles in the gloom: "You, a spade;
there, hop it! You a spade, too; you a pick. Allons, hurry up and get
off."
We leave by the communication trench at right angles to our own, and
straight ahead towards the changeful frontier, now alive and terrible.
Up in the somber sky, the strong staccato panting of an invisible
aeroplane circles in wide descending coils and fills infinity. In
front, to right and left, everywhere, thunderclaps roll with great
glimpses of short-lived light in the dark-blue sky.
------------
[note 1:] The popular and international name for a French soldier. Its
literal meaning is "hairy, shaggy," but the word has conveyed for over
a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose strength lay in
his locks.--Tr.
[note 2:] 6250 miles.
[note 3:] Pourvu que les civils tiennent. In the early days of the war
it was a common French saying that victory was certain--"if the
civilians hold out."--Tr.