Volpatte displays an intention of snatching a wink of sleep. He settles
himself on the ground with his back against one wall of the trench and
his feet buttressed against the other wall.
We converse together on divers subjects. Biquet tells the story of a
rat he has seen: "He was cheeky and comical, you know. I'd taken off my
trotter-cases, and that rat, he chewed all the edge of the uppers into
embroidery. Of course, I'd greased 'em."
Volpatte, who is now definitely out of action, moves and says, "I can't
get to sleep for your gabbling."
"You can't make me believe, old fraud," says Marthereau, "that you can
raise a single snore with a shindy like this all round you."
Volpatte replies with one.
* * * * *
Fall in! March!
We are changing our spot. Where are they taking us to? We have no idea.
The most we know is that we are in reserve, and that they may take us
round to strengthen certain points in succession, or to clear the
communication trenches, in which the regulation of passing troops is as
complicated a job, if blocks and collisions are to be avoided, as it is
of the trains in a busy station. It is impossible to make out the
meaning of the immense maneuver in which the rolling of our regiment is
only that of a little wheel, nor what is going on in all the huge area
of the sector. But, lost in the network of deeps where we go and come
without end, weary, harassed and stiff-jointed by prolonged halts,
stupefied by noise and delay, poisoned by smoke, we make out that our
artillery is becoming more and more active; the offensive seems to have
changed places.
* * * * *
Halt! A fire of intense and incredible fury was threshing the parapets
of the trench where we were halted at the moment: "Fritz is going it
strong; he's afraid of an attack, he's going dotty. Ah, isn't he
letting fly!"
A heavy hail was pouring over us, hacking terribly at atmosphere and
sky, scraping and skimming all the plain.
I looked through a loophole and saw a swift and strange vision. In
front of us, a dozen yards away at most, there were motionless forms
outstretched side by side--a row of mown-down soldiers--and the
countless projectiles that hurtled from all sides were riddling this
rank of the dead!
The bullets that flayed the soil in straight streaks amid raised
slender stems of cloud were perforating and ripping the bodies so
rigidly close to the ground, breaking the stiffened limbs, plunging
into the wan and vacant faces, bursting and bespattering the liquefied
eyes; and even did that file of corpses stir and budge out of line
under the avalanche.
We could hear the blunt sound of the dizzy copper points as they
pierced cloth and flesh, the sound of a furious stroke with a knife,
the harsh blow of a stick upon clothing. Above us rushed jets of shrill
whistling, with the declining and far more serious hum of ricochets.
And we bent our heads under the enormous flight of noises and voices.
"Trench must be cleared--Gee up!" We leave this most infamous corner of
the battlefield where even the dead are torn, wounded, and slain anew.
We turn towards the right and towards the rear. The communication
trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a
telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners. Here
there is a further halt. We mark time, and hear the artillery observer
shout his commands, which the telephonist buried beside him picks up
and repeats: "First gun, same sight; two-tenths to left; three a
minute!"
Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have
glimpsed for the space of the lightning's flash all the field of battle
round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning. I
saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be
driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more
pointed billow of smoke.
Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white, the
immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our batteries
are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with short-lived
flashes. Another minute, part of the field grew dark under a steamy and
whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.
Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like
cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of torn
paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim rows of
vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the straight
strokes of a written page--these are the roads and their trees.
Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and forward and
rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with men.
We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points
who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plain
in the horrible face of the flying firmament. It is difficult to
believe that each of those tiny spots is a living thing with fragile
and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full of deep
thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. One is fascinated
by this scattered dust of men as small as the stars in the sky.
Poor unknowns, poor fellow-men, it is your turn to give battle. Another
time it will be ours. Perhaps to-morrow it will be ours to feel the
heavens burst over our heads or the earth open under our feet, to be
assailed by the prodigious plague of projectiles, to be swept away by
the blasts of a tornado a hundred thousand times stronger than the
tornado.
They urge us into the rearward shelters. For our eyes the field of
death vanishes. To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great anvil
of the clouds. The sound of universal destruction is still. The squad
surrounds itself with the familiar noises of life, and sinks into the
fondling littleness of the dug-outs.
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[note 1] Military slang for machine-gun--Tr.