WE are in the flat country, a vast mistiness, but above it is dark
blue. The end of the night is marked by a little falling snow which
powders our shoulders and the folds in our sleeves. We are marching in
fours, hooded. We seem in the turbid twilight to be the wandering
survivors of one Northern district who are trekking to another.
We have followed a road and have crossed the ruins of
Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. We have had confused glimpses of its whitish
heaps of houses and the dim spider-webs of its suspended roofs. The
village is so long that although full night buried us in it we saw its
last buildings beginning to pale in the frost of dawn. Through the
grating of a cellar on the edge of this petrified ocean's waves, we
made out the fire kept going by the custodians of the dead town. We
have paddled in swampy fields, lost ourselves in silent places where
the mud seized us by the feet, we have dubiously regained our balance
and our bearings again on another road, the one which leads from
Carency to Souchez. The tall bordering poplars are shivered and their
trunks mangled; in one place the road is an enormous colonnade of trees
destroyed. Then, marching with us on both sides, we see through the
shadows ghostly dwarfs of trees, wide-cloven like spreading palms;
botched and jumbled into round blocks or long strips; doubled upon
themselves, as if they knelt. From time to time our march is disordered
and bustled by the yielding of a swamp. The road becomes a marsh which
we cross on our heels, while our feet make the sound of sculling.
Planks have been laid in it here and there. Where they have so far sunk
in the mud as to proffer their edges to us we slip on them. Sometimes
there is enough water to float them, and then under the weight of a man
they splash and go under, and the man stumbles or falls, with frenzied
imprecations.
It must be five o'clock. The stark and affrighting scene unfolds itself
to our eyes, but it is still encircled by a great fantastic ring of
mist and of darkness. We go on and on without pause, and come to a
place where we can make out a dark hillock, at the foot of which there
seems to be some lively movement of human beings.
"Advance by twos," says the leader of the detachment. "Let each team of
two take alternately a plank and a hurdle." We load ourselves up. One
of the two in each couple assumes the rifle of his partner as well as
his own. The other with difficulty shifts and pulls out from the pile a
long plank, muddy and slippery, which weighs full eighty pounds, or a
hurdle of leafy branches as big as a door, which he can only just keep
on his back as he bends forward with his hands aloft and grips its
edges.
We resume our march, very slowly and very ponderously, scattered over
the now graying road, with complaints and heavy curses which the effort
strangles in our throats. After about a hundred yards, the two men of
each team exchange loads, so that after two hundred yards, in spite of
the bitter blenching breeze of early morning, all but the non-coms. are
running with sweat.
Suddenly a vivid star expands down yonder in the uncertain direction
that we are taking--a rocket. Widely it lights a part of the sky with
its milky nimbus, blots out the stars, and then falls gracefully,
fairy-like.
There is a swift light opposite us over there; a flash and a
detonation. It is a shell! By the flat reflection that the explosion
instantaneously spreads over the lower sky we see a ridge clearly
outlined in front of us from east to west, perhaps half a mile away.
That ridge is ours--so much of it as we can see from here and up to the
top of it, where our troops are. On the other slope, a hundred yards
from our first line, is the first German line. The shell fell on the
summit, in our lines; it is the others who are firing. Another shell
another and yet another plant trees of faintly violet light on the top
of the rise, and each of them dully illumines the whole of the horizon.
Soon there is a sparkling of brilliant stars and a sudden jungle of
fiery plumes on the hill; and a fairy mirage of blue and white hangs
lightly before our eyes in the full gulf of night.
Those among us who must devote the whole buttressed power of their arms
and legs to prevent their greasy loads from sliding off their backs and
to prevent themselves from sliding to the ground, these neither see nor
hear anything. The others, sniffing and shivering with cold, wiping
their noses with limp and sodden handkerchiefs, watch and remark,
cursing the obstacles in the way with fragments of profanity. "It's
like watching fireworks," they say.
And to complete the illusion of a great operatic scene, fairy-like but
sinister, before which our bent and black party crawls and splashes,
behold a red star, and then a green; then a sheaf of red fire, very
much tardier. In our ranks, as the available half of our pairs of eyes
watch the display, we cannot help murmuring in idle tones of popular
admiration, "Ah, a red one!"--"Look, a green one!" It is the Germans
who are sending up signals, and our men as well who are asking for
artillery support.
Our road turns and climbs again as the day at last decides to appear.
Everything looks dirty. A layer of stickiness, pearl-gray and white,
covers the road, and around it the real world makes a mournful
appearance. Behind us we leave ruined Souchez, whose houses are only
flat heaps of rubbish and her trees but humps of bramble-like slivers.
We plunge into a hole on our left, the entrance to the communication
trench. We let our loads fall in a circular enclosure prepared for
them, and both hot and frozen we settled in the trench and wait our
hands abraded, wet, and stiff with cramp.
Buried in our holes up to the chin, our chests heaving against the
solid bulk of the ground that protects us, we watch the dazzling and
deepening drama develop. The bombardment is redoubled. The trees of
light on the ridge have melted into hazy parachutes in the pallor of
dawn, sickly heads of Medusae with points of fire; then, more sharply
defined as the day expands, they become bunches of smoke-feathers,
ostrich feathers white and gray, which come suddenly to life on the
jumbled and melancholy soil of Hill 119, five or six hundred yards in
front of us, and then slowly fade away. They are truly the pillar of
fire and the pillar of cloud, circling as one and thundering together.
On the flank of the hill we see a party of men running to earth. One by
one they disappear, swallowed up in the adjoining anthills.
Now, one can better make out the form of our "guests." At each shot a
tuft of sulphurous white underlined in black forms sixty yards up in
the air, unfolds and mottles itself, and we catch in the explosion the
whistling of the charge of bullets that the yellow cloud hurls angrily
to the ground. It bursts in sixfold squalls, one after another--bang,
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It is the 77 mm. gun.
We disdain the 77 mm. shrapnel, in spite of the fact that Blesbois was
killed by one of them three days ago. They nearly always burst too
high. Barque explains it to us, although we know it well: "One's
chamber-pot protects one's nut well enough against the bullets. So they
can destroy your shoulder and damn well knock you down, but they don't
spread you about. Naturally, you've got to be fly, all the same. Got to
be careful you don't lift your neb in the air as long as they're
buzzing about, nor put your hand out to see if it's raining. Now, our
75 mm.--"
"There aren't only the 77's," Mesnil Andre broke in, "there's all
damned sorts. Spell those out for me--" Those are shrill and cutting
whistles, trembling or rattling; and clouds of all shapes gather on the
slopes yonder whose vastness shows through them, slopes where our men
are in the depths of the dug-outs. Gigantic plumes of faint fire mingle
with huge tassels of steam, tufts that throw out straight filaments,
smoky feathers that expand as they fall--quite white or greenish-gray,
black or copper with gleams of gold, or as if blotched with ink.
The two last explosions are quite near. Above the battered ground they
take shape like vast balls of black and tawny dust; and as they deploy
and leisurely depart at the wind's will, having finished their task,
they have the outline of fabled dragons.
Our line of faces on the level of the ground turns that way, and we
follow them with our eyes from the bottom of the trench in the middle
of this country peopled by blazing and ferocious apparitions, these
fields that the sky has crushed.
"Those, they're the 150 mm. howitzers."--"They're the 210's,
calf-head."--"There go the regular guns, too; the hogs! Look at that
one!" It was a shell that burst on the ground and threw up earth and
debris in a fan-shaped cloud of darkness. Across the cloven land it
looked like the frightful spitting of some volcano, piled up in the
bowels of the earth.
A diabolical uproar surrounds us. We are conscious of a sustained
crescendo, an incessant multiplication of the universal frenzy. A
hurricane of hoarse and hollow banging, of raging clamor, of piercing
and beast-like screams, fastens furiously with tatters of smoke upon
the earth where we are buried up to our necks, and the wind of the
shells seems to set it heaving and pitching.
"Look at that," bawls Barque, "and me that said they were short of
munitions!"
"Oh, la, la! We know all about that! That and the other fudge the
newspapers squirt all over us!"
A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That
slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens the
heart.
"The coffee-mill! [note 1] One of ours, listen. The shots come
regularly, while the Boches' haven't got the same length of time
between the shots; they go
crack--crack-crack-crack--crack-crack--crack--"
"Don't cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn't an unsewing-machine at all;
it's a motor-cycle on the road to 31 dugout, away yonder."
"Well, I think it's a chap up aloft there, having a look round from his
broomstick," chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and sweeps the
firmament in search of an aeroplane.
A discussion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and that's
all. One tries in vain to become familiar with all those diverse
disturbances. It even happened the other day in the wood that a whole
section mistook for the hoarse howl of a shell the first notes of a
neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray.
"I say, there's a good show of sausages in the air this morning," says
Lamuse. Lifting our eyes, we count them.
"There are eight sausages on our side and eight on the Boches'," says
Cocon, who has already counted them.
There are, in fact, at regular intervals along the horizon, opposite
the distance-dwindled group of captive enemy balloons, the eight long
hovering eyes of the army, buoyant and sensitive, and joined to the
various headquarters by living threads.
"They see us as we see them. How the devil can one escape from that row
of God Almighties up there?"
There's our reply!
Suddenly, behind our backs, there bursts the sharp and deafening
stridor of the 75's. Their increasing crackling thunder arouses and
elates us. We shout with our guns, and look at each other without
hearing our shouts--except for the curiously piercing voice that comes
from Barque's great mouth--amid the rolling of that fantastic drum
whose every note is the report of a cannon.
Then we turn our eyes ahead and outstretch our necks, and on the top of
the hill we see the still higher silhouette of a row of black infernal
trees whose terrible roots are striking down into the invisible slope
where the enemy cowers.
While the "75" battery continues its barking a hundred yards behind
us--the sharp anvil-blows of a huge hammer, followed by a dizzy scream
of force and fury--a gigantic gurgling dominates the devilish oratorio;
that, also, is coming from our side. "It's a gran'pa, that one!"
The shell cleaves the air at perhaps a thousand yards above us; the
voice of its gun covers all as with a pavilion of resonance. The sound
of its travel is sluggish, and one divines a projectile bigger-boweled,
more enormous than the others. We can hear it passing and declining in
front with the ponderous and increasing vibration of a train that
enters a station under brakes; then, its heavy whine sounds fainter. We
watch the hill opposite, and after several seconds it is covered by a
salmon-pink cloud that the wind spreads over one-half of the horizon.
"It's a 220 mm."
"One can see them," declares Volpatte, "those shells, when they come
out of the gun. If you're in the right line, you can even see them a
good long away from the gun."
Another follows: "There! Look, look! Did you see that one? You didn't
look quick enough, you missed it. Get a move on! Look, another! Did you
see it?"
"I did not see it."--"Ass! Got to be a bedstead for you to see it!
Look, quick, that one, there! Did you see it, unlucky
good-for-nothing?"--"I saw it; is that all?"
Some have made out a small black object, slender and pointed as a
blackbird with folded wings, pricking a wide curve down from the zenith.
"That weighs 240 lb., that one, my old bug," says Volpatte proudly,
"and when that drops on a funk-hole it kills everybody inside it. Those
that aren't picked off by the explosion are struck dead by the wind of
it, or they're gas-poisoned before they can say 'ouf!'"
"The 270 mm. shell can be seen very well, too--talk about a bit of
iron--when the howitzer sends it up--allez, off you go!"
"And the 155 Rimailho, too; but you can't see that one because it goes
too straight and too far; the more you look for it the more it vanishes
before your eyes."
In a stench of sulphur amid black powder, of burned stuffs and calcined
earth which roams in sheets about the country, all the menagerie is let
loose and gives battle. Bellowings, roarings, growlings, strange and
savage; feline caterwaulings that fiercely rend your ears and search
your belly, or the long-drawn piercing hoot like the siren of a ship in
distress. At times, even, something like shouts cross each other in the
air-currents, with curious variation of tone that make the sound human.
The country is bodily lifted in places and falls back again. From one
end of the horizon to the other it seems to us that the earth itself is
raging with storm and tempest.
And the greatest guns, far away and still farther, diffuse growls much
subdued and smothered, but you know the strength of them by the
displacement of air which comes and raps you on the ear.
Now, behold a heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers over
the bombarded region and draws out in every direction. This touch of
strangely incongruous color in the picture summons attention, and all
we encaged prisoners turn our faces towards the hideous outcrop.
"Gas, probably. Let's have our masks ready."--"The hogs!"
"They're unfair tricks, those," says Farfadet.
"They're what?" asks Barque jeeringly.
"Why, yes, they're dirty dodges, those gases--"
"You make me tired," retorts Barque, "with your fair ways and your
unfair ways. When you've seen men squashed, cut in two, or divided from
top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned
inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as
if by a blow with a club, and in place of the head a bit of neck,
oozing currant jam of brains all over the chest and back--you've seen
that and yet you can say 'There are clean ways!'"
"Doesn't alter the fact that the shell is allowed, it's recognized--"
"Ah, la, la! I'll tell you what--you make me blubber just as much as
you make me laugh!" And he turns his back.
"Hey, look out, boys!"
We strain our eyes, and one of us has thrown himself flat on the
ground; others look instinctively and frowning towards the shelter that
we have not time to reach, and during these two seconds each one bends
his head. It is a grating noise as of huge scissors which comes near
and nearer to us, and ends at last with a ringing crash of unloaded
iron.
That ore fell not far from us--two hundred yards away, perhaps. We
crouch in the bottom of the trench and remain doubled up while the
place where we are is lashed by a shower of little fragments.
"Don't want this in my tummy, even from that distance," says Paradis,
extracting from the earth of the trench wall a morsel that has just
lodged there. It is like a bit of coke, bristling with edged and
pointed facets, and he dances it in his hand so as not to burn himself.
There is a hissing noise. Paradis sharply bows his head and we follow
suit. "The fuse!--it has gone over." The shrapnel fuse goes up and then
comes down vertically; but that of the percussion shell detaches itself
from the broken mass after the explosion and usually abides buried at
the point of contact, but at other times it flies off at random like a
big red-hot pebble. One must beware of it. It may hurl itself on you a
very long time after the detonation and by incredible paths, passing
over the embankment and plunging into the cavities.
"Nothing so piggish as a fuse. It happened to me once--"
"There's worse things," broke in Bags of the 11th, "The Austrian
shells, the 130's and the 74's. I'm afraid of them. They're
nickel-plated, they say, but what I do know, seeing I've been there, is
they come so quick you can't do anything to dodge them. You no sooner
hear em snoring than they burst on you.
"The German 105's, neither, you haven't hardly the time to flatten
yourself. I once got the gunners to tell me all about them."
"I tell you, the shells from the naval guns, you haven't the time to
hear 'em. Got to pack yourself up before they come."
"And there's that new shell, a dirty devil, that breaks wind after it's
dodged into the earth and out of it again two or three times in the
space of six yards. When I know there's one of them about, I want to go
round the corner. I remember one time--"
"That's all nothing, my lads," said the new sergeant, stopping on his
way past, "you ought to see what they chucked us at Verdun, where I've
come from. Nothing but whoppers, 380's and 420's and 244's. When you've
been shelled down there you know all about it--the woods are sliced
down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when
they've three thicknesses of beams, all the road-crossings sprinkled,
the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed
convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shoveled
up. You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the cross-roads;
you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about
fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the
trees that were left. You could see one of these 380's go into a house
at Verdun by the roof, bore through two or three floors, and burst at
the bottom, and all the damn lot's got to go aloft; and in the fields
whole battalions would scatter and lie flat under the shower like poor
little defenseless rabbits. At every step on the ground in the fields
you'd got lumps as thick as your arm and as wide as that, and it'd take
four poilus to lift the lump of iron. The fields looked as if they were
full of rocks. And that went on without a halt for months on end,
months on end!" the sergeant repeated as he passed on, no doubt to tell
again the story of his souvenirs somewhere else.
"Look, look, corporal, those chaps over there--are they soft in the
head?" On the bombarded position we saw dots of human beings emerge
hurriedly and run towards the explosions.
"They're gunners," said Bertrand; "as soon as a shell's burst they
sprint and rummage for the fuse in the hole, for the position of the
fuse gives the direction of its battery, you see, by the way it's dug
itself in; and as for the distance, you've only got to read it--it's
shown on the range-figures cut on the time-fuse which is set just
before firing."
"No matter--they're off their onions to go out under such shelling."
"Gunners, my boy," says a man of another company who was strolling in
the trench, "are either quite good or quite bad. Either they're trumps
or they're trash. I tell you--"
"That's true of all privates, what you're saying."
"Possibly; but I'm not talking to you about all privates; I'm talking
to you about gunners, and I tell you too that--"
"Hey, my lads! Better find a hole to dump yourselves in, before you get
one on the snitch!"
The strolling stranger carried his story away, and Cocon, who was in a
perverse mood, declared: "We can be doing our hair in the dug-out,
seeing it's rather boring outside."
"Look, they're sending torpedoes over there!" said Paradis, pointing.
Torpedoes go straight up, or very nearly so, like larks, fluttering and
rustling; then they stop, hesitate, and come straight down again,
heralding their fall in its last seconds by a "baby-cry" that we know
well. From here, the inhabitants of the ridge seem like invisible
players, lined up for a game with a ball.
"In the Argonne," says Lamuse, "my brother says in a letter that they
get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They're big heavy things, fired off
very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says, and when they
break wind they don't half make a shindy, he says."
"There's nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase after
you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very trench,
just scraping over the bank."
"Tiens, tiens, did you hear it?" A whistling was approaching us when
suddenly it ceased. The contrivance has not burst. "It's a shell that
cried off," Paradis asserts. And we strain our ears for the
satisfaction of hearing--or of not hearing--others.
Lamuse says: "All the fields and the roads and the villages about here,
they're covered with dud shells of all sizes--ours as well, to say
truth. The ground must be full of 'em, that you can't see. I wonder how
they'll go on, later, when the time comes to say, 'That's enough of it,
let's start work again.'"
And all the time, in a monotony of madness, the avalanche of fire and
iron goes on; shrapnel with its whistling explosion and its overcharged
heart of furious metal and the great percussion shells, whose thunder
is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly into a wall, the
thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling down a declivity. The
air is now glutted and viewless, it is crossed and recrossed by heavy
blasts, and the murder of the earth continues all around, deeply and
more deeply, to the limit of completion.
There are even other guns which now join in--they are ours. Their
report is like that of the 75's, but louder, and it has a prolonged and
resounding echo, like thunder reverberating among mountains.
"They're the long 120's. They're on the edge of the wood half a mile
away. Fine guns, old man, like gray-hounds. They're slender and
fine-nosed, those guns--you want to call them 'Madame.' They're not
like the 220's--they're all snout, like coal-scuttles, and spit their
shells out from the bottom upwards. The 120's get there just the same,
but among the teams of artillery they look like kids in bassinettes."
Conversation languishes; here and there are yawns. The dimensions and
weight of this outbreak of the guns fatigue the mind. Our voices
flounder in it and are drowned.
"I've never seen anything like this for a bombardment," shouts Barque.
"We always say that," replies Paradis.
"Just so," bawls Volpatte. "There's been talk of an attack lately; I
should say this is the beginning of something."