"IT's foggy. Would you like to go?"
It is Poterloo who asks, as he turns towards me and shows eyes so blue
that they make his fine, fair head seem transparent.
Poterloo comes from Souchez, and now that the Chasseurs have at last
retaken it, he wants to see again the village where he lived happily in
the days when he was only a man.
It is a pilgrimage of peril; not that we should have far to go--Souchez
is just there. For six months we have lived and worked in the trenches
almost within hail of the village. We have only to climb straight from
here on to the Bethune road along which the trench creeps, the road
honeycombed underneath by our shelters, and descend it for four or five
hundred yards as it dips down towards Souchez. But all that ground is
under regular and terrible attention. Since their recoil, the Germans
have constantly sent huge shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in
our caverns from time to time, and we see, high above the scarps, now
here now there, the great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the
piled columns of smoke, as high as churches. Why do they bombard
Souchez? One cannot say why, for there is no longer anybody or anything
in the village so often taken and retaken, that we have so fiercely
wrested from each other.
But this morning a dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great
curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are
sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the
perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there,
enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of partition
between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and Angres,
whence the enemy spies upon us.
"Right you are!" I say to Poterloo.
Adjutant Barthe, informed of our project, wags his head up and down,
and lowers his eyelids in token that he does not see.
We hoist ourselves out of the trench, and behold us both, upright, on
the Bethune road!
It is the first time I have walked there during the day. I have never
seen it, except from afar, the terrible road that we have so often
traveled or crossed in leaps, bowed down in the darkness, and under the
whistling of missiles.
"Well, are you coming, old man?"
After some paces, Poterloo has stopped in the middle of the road, where
the fog like cotton-wool unravels itself into pendent fragments, and
there he dilates his sky-blue eyes and half opens his scarlet mouth.
"Ah, la, la! Ah, la, la!" he murmurs. When I turn to him he points to
the road, shakes his head and says, "This is it, Bon Dieu, to think
this is it! This bit where we are, I know it so well that if I shut my
eyes I can see it as it was, exactly. Old chap, it's awful to see it
again like that. It was a beautiful road, planted all the way along
with big trees.
"And now, what is it? Look at it--a sort of long thing without a
soul--sad, sad. Look at these two trenches on each side, alive; this
ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these trees uprooted, split,
scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by
bullets--look, this pock-marked pestilence, here! Ah, my boy, my boy,
you can't imagine how it is disfigured, this road!" And he goes
forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.
It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are
crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year and
a half. It is a great disheveled highway, traveled only by bullets and
by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and upheaved it,
covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and laid bare its
bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no color, burned and
old, sinister and awful to see.
"If you'd only known it--how clean and smooth it was!" says Poterloo.
"All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and colors--like
butterflies; and there was always some one passing on it to give
good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets, or people
shouting [note 1] to each other in a chaise, with the good wind
ballooning their smocks. Ah, how happy life was once on a time!"
He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the roadway
towards the land of parapets. Stooping, he stops by some faint
swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed--tombs, recessed at
intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the Cross in a
church.