We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo
lagging behind, his head confused and heavy with thought as he tries in
vain to exchange with inanimate things his glances of recognition. Just
there the road is lower, a fold secretes it from the side towards the
north. On this sheltered ground there is a little traffic.
Along the hazy, filthy, and unwholesome space, where withered grass is
embedded in black mud, there are rows of dead. They are carried there
when the trenches or the plain are cleared during the night. They are
waiting--some of them have waited long--to be taken back to the
cemeteries after dark.
We approach them slowly. They are close against each other, and each
one indicates with arms or legs some different posture of stiffened
agony. There are some with half-moldy faces, the skin rusted, or yellow
with dark spots. Of several the faces are black as tar, the lips hugely
distended--the heads of negroes blown out in goldbeaters' skin. Between
two bodies, protruding uncertainly from one or the other, is a severed
wrist, ending with a cluster of strings.
Others are shapeless larvae of pollution, with dubious items of
equipment pricking up, or bits of bone. Farther on, a corpse has been
brought in in such a state that they have been obliged--so as not to
lose it on the way--to pile it on a lattice of wire which was then
fastened to the two ends of a stake. Thus was it carried in the hollow
of its metal hammock, and laid there. You cannot make out either end of
the body; alone, in the heap that it makes, one recognizes the gape of
a trouser-pocket. An insect goes in and out of it.
Around the dead flutter letters that have escaped from pockets or
cartridge pouches while they were being placed on the ground. Over one
of these bits of white paper, whose wings still beat though the mud
ensnares them, I stoop slightly and read a sentence--"My dear Henry,
what a fine day it is for your birthday!" The man is on his belly; his
loins are rent from hip to hip by a deep furrow; his head is half
turned round; we see a sunken eye; and on temples, cheek and neck a
kind of green moss is growing.
A sickening atmosphere roams with the wind around these dead and the
heaped-up debris, that lies about them--tent-cloth or clothing in
stained tatters, stiff with dried blood, charred by the scorch of the
shell, hardened, earthy and already rotting, quick with swarming and
questing things. It troubles us. We look at each other and shake our
heads, nor dare admit aloud that the place smells bad. All the same, we
go away slowly.
Now come breaking out of the fog the bowed backs of men who are joined
together by something they are carrying. They are Territorial
stretcher-bearers with a new corpse. They come up with their old wan
faces, toiling, sweating, and grimacing with the effort. To carry a
dead man in the lateral trenches when they are muddy is a work almost
beyond human power. They put down the body, which is dressed in new
clothes.
"It's not long since, now, that he was standing," says one of the
bearers. "It's two hours since he got his bullet in the head for going
to look for a Boche rifle in the plain. He was going on leave on
Wednesday and wanted to take a rifle home with him. He is a sergeant of
the 405th, Class 1914. A nice lad, too."
He takes away the handkerchief that is over the face. It is quite
young, and seems to sleep, except that an eyeball has gone, the cheek
looks waxen, and a rosy liquid has run over the nostrils, mouth, and
eyes.
The body strikes a note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this still
pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if to lie
better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than the
others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic, nearer to
one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything in the
presence of all that heap of beings destroyed, it would have been "Poor
boy!"
We take the road again, which at this point begins to slope down to the
depth where Souchez lies. Under our feet in the whiteness of the fog it
appears like a valley of frightful misery. The piles of rubbish, of
remains and of filthiness accumulate on the shattered spine of the
road's paving and on its miry borders in final confusion. The trees
bestrew the ground or have disappeared, torn away, their stumps
mangled. The banks of the road are overturned and overthrown by
shell-fire. All the way along, on both sides of this highway where only
the crosses remain standing, are trenches twenty times blown in and
re-hollowed, cavities--some with passages into them--hurdles on
quagmires.
The more we go forward, the more is everything turned terribly inside
out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic. We walk on a surface of shell
fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step. We go among them
as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or
bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets,
sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and
German accouterments all mutilated and encrusted in dried mud, and
among the sinister piles of clothing, stuck together with a
reddish-brown cement. And one must look out, too, for the unexploded
shells, which everywhere protrude their noses or reveal their flanks or
their bases, painted red, blue, and tawny brown.
"That's the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end." It
is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes. The
sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled, emptied,
scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams arc splintered, and
point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim with earth and
with--no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed of a river,
smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned. In
one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the guns. The wide
fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of new-turned earth,
made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in length and in
breadth.
I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to
have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very
vitals in the metamorphosis of the country's face.
He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a stupefied
air, as though he came out of a dream--"The Red Tavern!" It is a flat
field, carpeted with broken bricks.
And what is that, there? A milestone? No, it is not a milestone. It is
a head, a black head, tanned and polished. The mouth is all askew, and
you can see something of the mustache bristling on each side--the great
head of a carbonized cat. The corpse--it is German--is underneath,
buried upright.
"And that?" It is a ghastly collection containing an entirely white
skull, and then, six feet away, a pair of boots, and between the two a
heap of frayed leather and of rags, cemented by brown mud.
"Come on, there's less fog already. We must hurry."
A hundred yards in front of us, among the more transparent waves of fog
that are changing places with us and hide us less and less, a shell
whistles and bursts. It has fallen in the spot we are just nearing. We
are descending, and the gradient is less steep. We go side by side. My
companion says nothing, but looks to right and to left. Then he stops
again, as he did at the top of the road. I hear his faltering voice,
almost inaudible--"What's this! We're there--this is it--"
In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and
barren--but we are in Souchez!
The village has disappeared, nor have I seen a village go so
completely. Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency, these still retained
some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses, their
yards heaped high with plaster and tiles. Here, within the framework of
slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the
fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not even an end of wall,
fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover
that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, stones, and
scrap-iron. This--here--was a street.
It might have been a dirty and boggy waste near a big town, whose
rubbish of demolished buildings and its domestic refuse had been shot
here for years, till no spot was empty. We plunge into a uniform layer
of dung and debris, and make but slow and difficult progress. The
bombardment has so changed the face of things that it has diverted the
course of the millstream, which now runs haphazard and forms a pond on
the remains of the little place where the cross stood.
Here are several shell-holes where swollen horses are rotting; in
others the remains of what were once human beings are scattered,
distorted by the monstrous injury of shells.
Here, athwart the track we are following, that we ascend as through an
avalanche or inundation of ruin, under the unbroken melancholy of the
sky, here is a man stretched out as if he slept, but he has that close
flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man from a
sleeper. He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves threaded
over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades' water-bottles slung on his
shoulder by a skein of straps. It must have been only last night that
the fragment of a shell caught him in the back. No doubt we are the
first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly dead. Perhaps he will
be scattered before others find him, so we look for his identity
disc--it is stuck in the clotted blood where his right hand stagnates.
I copy down the name that is written in letters of blood.
Poterloo lets me do it by myself--he is like a sleepwalker. He looks,
and looks in despair, everywhere. He seeks endlessly among those
evanished and eviscerated things; through the void he gazes to the haze
of the horizon. Then he sits down on a beam, having first sent flying
with a kick a saucepan that lay on it, and I sit by his side. A light
drizzle is falling. The fog's moisture is resolving in little drops
that cover everything with a slight gloss. He murmurs, "Ah, la, la!"
He wipes his forehead and raises imploring eyes to me. He is trying to
make out and take in the destruction of all this corner of the earth,
and the mournfulness of it. He stammers disjointed remarks and
interjections. He takes off his great helmet and his head is smoking.
Then he says to me with difficulty, "Old man, you cannot imagine, you
cannot, you cannot--"
He whispers: "The Red Tavern, where that--where that Boche's head is,
and litters of beastliness all around, that sort of cesspool--it was on
the edge of the road, a brick house and two out-buildings
alongside--how many times, old man, on the very spot where we stood,
how many times, there, the good woman who joked with me on her
doorstep, I've given her good-day as I wiped my mouth and looked
towards Souchez that I was going back to! And then, after a few steps,
I've turned round to shout some nonsense to her! Oh, you cannot
imagine! But that, now, that!" He makes an inclusive gesture to
indicate all the emptiness that surrounds him.
"We mustn't stay here too long, old chap. The fog's lifting, you know."