"Your turn on guard--it's two o'clock in the morning," says Corporal
Bertrand at the opening into the hole where I am prostrate on the
floor. I hear him without seeing him.
"I'm coming," I growl, and shake myself, and yawn in the little
sepulchral shelter. I stretch my arms, and my hands touch the soft and
cold clay. Then I cleave the heavy odor that fills the dug-out and
crawl out in the middle of the dense gloom between the collapsed bodies
of the sleepers. After several stumbles and entanglements among
accouterments, knapsacks and limbs stretched out in all directions, I
put my hand on my rifle and find myself upright in the open air, half
awake and dubiously balanced, assailed by the black and bitter breeze.
Shivering, I follow the corporal; he plunges in between the dark
embankments whose lower ends press strangely and closely on our march.
He stops; the place is here. I make out a heavy mass half-way up the
ghostly wall which comes loose and descends from it with a whinnying
yawn, and I hoist myself into the niche which it had occupied.
The moon is hidden by mist, but a very weak and uncertain light
overspreads the scene, and one's sight gropes its way. Then a wide
strip of darkness, hovering and gliding up aloft, puts it out. Even
after touching the breastwork and the loophole in front of my face I
can hardly make them out, and my inquiring hand discovers, among an
ordered deposit of things, a mass of grenade handles.
"Keep your eye skinned, old chap," says Bertrand in a low voice. "Don't
forget that our listening-post is in front there on the left. Allons,
so long." His steps die away, followed by those of the sleepy sentry
whom I am relieving.
Rifle-shots crackle all round. Abruptly a bullet smacks the earth of
the wall against which I am leaning. I peer through the loophole. Our
line runs along the top of the ravine, and the land slopes downward in
front of me, plunging into an abyss of darkness where one can see
nothing. One's sight ends always by picking out the regular lines of
the stakes of our wire entanglements, planted on the shore of the waves
of night, and here and there the circular funnel-like wounds of shells,
little, larger, or enormous, and some of the nearest occupied by
mysterious lumber. The wind blows in my face, and nothing else is
stirring save the vast moisture that drain from it. It is cold enough
to set one shivering in perpetual motion. I look upwards, this way and
that; everything is borne down by dreadful gloom. I might be derelict
and alone in the middle of a world destroyed by a cataclysm.
There is a swift illumination up above--a rocket. The scene in which I
am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The crest of
our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to
the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows
of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots
of light. The trench is shored with sandbags. It is widened everywhere,
and in many places ripped up by landslides. The sandbags, piled up and
dislodged, appear in the starlike light of the rocket like the great
dismantled stones of ancient ruined buildings. I look through the
loophole, and discern in the misty and pallid atmosphere expanded by
the meteor the rows of stakes and even the thin lines of barbed wire
which cross and recross between the posts. To my seeing they are like
strokes of a pen scratched upon the pale and perforated ground. Lower
down, the ravine is filled with the motionless silence of the ocean of
night.
I come down from my look-out and steer at a guess towards my neighbor
in vigil, and come upon him with outstretched hand. "Is that you?" I
say to him in a subdued voice, though I don't know him.
"Yes," he replies, equally ignorant who I am, blind like myself. "It's
quiet at this time," he adds "A bit since I thought they were going to
attack, and they may have tried it on, on the right, where they chucked
over a lot of bombs. There's been a barrage of 75's--vrrrran,
vrrrran--Old man, I said to myself, 'Those 75's, p'raps they've good
reason for firing. If they did come out, the Boches, they must have
found something.' Tiens, listen, down there, the bullets buffing
themselves!"
He opens his flask and takes a draught, and his last words, still
subdued, smell of wine: "Ah, la, la! Talk about a filthy war! Don't you
think we should be a lot better at home!--Hullo! What's the matter with
the ass?" A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief and sudden
flash of phosphorescence. Others go off here and there along our line.
Rifle-shots are catching after dark.
We go to inquire of one of the shooters, guessing our way through the
solid blackness that has fallen again upon us like a roof. Stumbling,
and thrown anon on each other, we reach the man and touch him--"Well,
what's up?"
He thought he saw something moving, but there is nothing more. We
return through the density, my unknown neighbor and I, unsteady, and
laboring along the narrow way of slippery mud, doubled up as if we each
carried a crushing burden. At one point of the horizon and then at
another all around, a gun sounds, and its heavy din blends with the
volleys of rifle-fire, redoubled one minute and dying out the next, and
with the clusters of grenade-reports, of deeper sound than the crack of
Lebel or Mauser, and nearly like the voice of the old classical rifles.
The wind has again increased; it is so strong that one must protect
himself against it in the darkness; masses of huge cloud are passing in
front of the moon.
So there we are, this man and I, jostling without knowing each other,
revealed and then hidden from each other in sudden jerks by the flashes
of the guns, oppressed by the opacity, the center of a huge circle of
fires that appear and disappear in the devilish landscape.
"We're under a curse," says the man.
We separate, and go each to his own loophole, to weary our eyes upon
invisibility. Is some frightful and dismal storm about to break? But
that night it did not. At the end of my long wait, with the first
streaks of day, there was even a lull.
Again I saw, when the dawn came down on us like a stormy evening, the
steep banks of our crumbling trench as they came to life again under
the sooty scarf of the low-hanging clouds, a trench dismal and dirty,
infinitely dirty, humped with debris and filthiness. Under the livid
sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their vaguely shining and
rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera of giants, nakedly
exposed upon the earth.
In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap of
horizontal things like logs. Tree-trunks? No, they are corpses.
* * * * *
As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the shadowy
fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each blade of
grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening field and its
high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the bristling of
stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and in front of the
opposite slope a wall of night still stands.
Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is
gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms. There
are four of them. They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque, Biquet, and
little Eudore. They rot there quite near us, blocking one half of the
wide, twisting, and muddy furrow that the living must still defend.
They have been laid there as well as may be, supporting and crushing
each other. The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth. Handkerchiefs had
been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against them in
the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without noticing
them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face to face
with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.
* * * * *
It was four nights ago that they were all killed together. I remember
the night myself indistinctly--it is like a dream. We were on
patrol--they, I, Mesnil Andre, and Corporal Bertrand; and our business
was to identify a new German listening-post marked by the artillery
observers. We left the trench towards midnight and crept down the slope
in line, three or four paces from each other. Thus we descended far
into the ravine, and saw, lying before our eyes, the embankment of
their International Trench. After we had verified that there was no
listening-post in this slice of the ground we climbed back, with
infinite care. Dimly I saw my neighbors to right and left, like sacks
of shadow, crawling, slowly sliding, undulating and rocking in the mud
and the murk, with the projecting needle in front of a rifle. Some
bullets whistled above us, but they did not know we were there, they
were not looking for us. When we got within sight of the mound of our
line, we took a breather for a moment; one of us let a sigh go, another
spoke. Another turned round bodily, and the sheath of his bayonet rang
out against a stone. Instantly a rocket shot redly up from the
International Trench. We threw ourselves flat on the ground, closely,
desperately, and waited there motionless, with the terrible star
hanging over us and flooding us with daylight, twenty-five or thirty
yards from our trench. Then a machine-gun on the other side of the
ravine swept the zone where we were. Corporal Bertrand and I had had
the luck to find in front of us, just as the red rocket went up and
before it burst into light, a shell-hole, where a broken trestle was
steeped in the mud. We flattened ourselves against the edge of the
hole, buried ourselves in the mud as much as possible, and the poor
skeleton of rotten wood concealed us. The jet of the machine-gun
crossed several times. We heard a piercing whistle in the middle of
each report, the sharp and violent sound of bullets that went into the
earth, and dull and soft blows as well, followed by groans, by a little
cry, and suddenly by a sound like the heavy snoring of a sleeper, a
sound which slowly ebbed. Bertrand and I waited, grazed by the
horizontal hail of bullets that traced a network of death an inch or so
above us and sometimes scraped our clothes, driving us still deeper
into the mud, nor dared we risk a movement which might have lifted a
little some part of our bodies. The machine-gun at last held its peace
in an enormous silence. A quarter of an hour later we two slid out of
the shell-hole, and crawling on our elbows we fell at last like bundles
into our listening-post. It was high time, too, for at that moment the
moon shone out. We were obliged to stay in the bottom of the trench
till morning, and then till evening, for the machine-gun swept the
approaches without pause. We could not see the prostrate bodies through
the loop-holes of the post, by reason of the steepness of the
ground--except, just on the level of our field of vision, a lump which
appeared to be the back of one of them. In the evening, a sap was dug
to reach the place where they had fallen. The work could not be
finished in one night and was resumed by the pioneers the following
night, for, overwhelmed with fatigue, we could no longer keep from
falling asleep.
Awaking from a leaden sleep, I saw the four corpses that the sappers
had reached from underneath, hooking and then hauling them into the sap
with ropes. Each of them had several adjoining wounds, bullet-holes an
inch or so apart--the mitrailleuse had fired fast. The body of Mesnil
Andre was not found, and his brother Joseph did some mad escapades in
search of it. He went out quite alone into No Man's Land, where the
crossed fire of machine-guns swept it three ways at once and
constantly. In the morning, dragging himself along like a slug, he
showed over the bank a face black with mud and horribly wasted. They
pulled him in again, with his face scratched by barbed wire, his hands
bleeding, with heavy clods of mud in the folds of his clothes, and
stinking of death. Like an idiot be kept on saying, "He's nowhere." He
buried himself in a corner with his rifle, which he set himself to
clean without hearing what was said to him, and only repeating "He's
nowhere."
It is four nights ago since that night, and as the dawn comes once
again to cleanse the earthly Gehenna, the bodies are becoming
definitely distinct.
Barque in his rigidity seems immoderately long, his arms lie closely to
the body, his chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin. With his
head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at those who
come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the clammy stains
of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are heavily encrusted
with blackened blood. Eudore seems very small by contrast, and his
little face is completely white, so white as to remind you of the
be-flowered face of a pierrot, and it is touching to see that little
circle of white paper among the gray and bluish tints of the corpses.
The Breton Biquet, squat and square as a flagstone, appears to be under
the stress of a huge effort; he might be trying to uplift the misty
darkness; and the extreme exertion overflows upon the protruding
cheek-bones and forehead of his grimacing face, contorts it hideously,
sets the dried and dusty hair bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral
cry, and spreads wide the eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his
flinty eyes; and his hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.
Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat. In the
dragging and carrying they were further injured. Big Lamuse, at last
bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were gradually
sinking in their sockets, one more than the other. They have wrapped
him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where the neck is. His
right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets, and the arm is held
on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads that they have put in
since. The first night he was placed there, this arm hung outside the
heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled up on a lump of earth,
touched passers-by in the face; so they pinned the arm to the greatcoat.
A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these beings
with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.
When we see them we say, "They are dead, all four"; but they are too
far disfigured for us to say truly, "It is they," and one must turn
away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left among
us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.
Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by
day--by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of the
hand, dead or alive-give a start when faced by these corpses flattened
one on the other in the open trench. Sometimes they are angry--"What
are they thinking about to leave those stiffs there?"--"It's shameful."
Then they add, "It's true they can't be taken away from there." And
they were only buried in the night.
Morning has come. Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine,
Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped, and scratched, veined with
shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal
the clay and the chalky soil. Nothing is stirring there; and our shells
that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge billows seem to
deliver their resounding blows upon a great breakwater, ruined and
abandoned.
My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in
damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of mud
and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein they
are molded, bestir themselves, and come down. For us, it is rest until
evening.
We yawn and stroll. We see a comrade pass and then another. Officers go
to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes. We feel our feet
again, and begin once more to live. The customary remarks cross and
clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken lines of
the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on our voices,
we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines. But lassitude weighs upon
all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the eyelids reddened; through
long watching we look as if we had been weeping. For several days now
we have all of us been sagging and growing old.
One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a curve
in the trench. They pile themselves where the soil is only chalky, and
where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots, the
excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain in the
darkness for over a hundred thousand years.
There in the widened fairway, Bertrand's squad beaches itself. It is
much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we no
longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac, wounded in the
leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirioir nor
Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the other
for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn--as he says in the
postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital where
he is vegetating.
Once more I see gathered and grouped, soiled by contact with the earth
and dirty smoke, the familiar faces and poses of those who have not
been separated since the beginning, chained and riveted together in
fraternity. But there is less dissimilarity than at the beginning in
the appearance of the cave-men.
Papa Blaire displays in his well-worn mouth a set of new teeth, so
resplendent that one can see nothing in all his poor face except those
gayly-dight jaws. The great event of these foreign teeth's
establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for
eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners. He is
rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly. Now that he has
become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant. For the moment
he is dejected, because--a miracle--he cannot wash himself. Deeply sunk
in a corner, he half opens a lack-luster eye, bites and masticates his
old soldier's mustache--not long ago the only ornament on his face--and
from time to time spits out a hair.
Fouillade is shivering, cold-smitten, or yawns, depressed and shabby.
Marthereau has not changed at all. He is still as always well-bearded,
his eye round and blue, and his legs so short that his trousers seem to
be slipping continually from his waist and dropping to his feet. Cocon
is always Cocon by the dried and parchment-like head wherein sums are
working; but a recurrence of lice, the ravages of which we see
overflowing on to his neck and wrists, has isolated him for a week now
in protracted tussles which leave him surly when he returns among us.
Paradis retains unimpaired the same quantum of good color and good
temper; he is unchanging, perennial. We smile when he appears in the
distance, placarded on the background of sandbags like a new poster.
Nothing has changed in Pepin either, whom we can just see taking a
stroll--we can tell him behind by his red-and-white squares of an
oilcloth draught-board, and in front by his blade-like face and the
gleam of a knife in his cold gray look. Nor has Volpatte changed, with
his leggings, his shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian
tatooed with dirt; nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some
time by blood-red streaks in his eyes--for some unknown and mysterious
reason. Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the
post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and
then retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and
careful postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie's end. Lamuse said no
more to any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped
her body. He regretted--I knew it--his whispered confidence to me that
evening, and up to his death he kept the horrible affair sacred to
himself, with tenacious bashfulness. So we see Farfadet continuing to
live his airy existence with the living likeness of that fair hair,
which he only leaves for the scarce monosyllables of his contact with
us. Corporal Bertrand has still the same soldierly and serious mien
among us; he is always ready with his tranquil smile to answer all
questions with lucid explanations, to help each of us to do his duty.
We are chatting as of yore, as not long since. But the necessity of
speaking in low tones distinguishes our remarks and imposes on them a
lugubrious tranquillity.
* * * * *
Something unusual has happened. For the last three months the sojourn
of each unit in the first-line trenches has been four days. Yet we have
now been five days here and there is no mention of relief. Some rumors
of early attack are going about, brought by the liaison men and those
of the fatigue-party that renews our rations every other night--without
regularity or guarantee. Other portents are adding themselves to the
whispers of offensive--the stopping of leave, the failure of the post,
the obvious change in the officers, who are serious and closer to us.
But talk on this subject always ends with a shrug of the shoulders; the
soldier is never warned what is to be done with him; they put a bandage
on his eyes, and only remove it at the last minute. So, "We shall
see."--"We can only wait."
We detach ourselves from the tragic event foreboded. Is this because of
the impossibility of a complete understanding, or a despondent
unwillingness to decipher those orders that are sealed letters to us,
or a lively faith that one will pass through the peril once more?
Always, in spite of the premonitory signs and the prophecies that seem
to be coming true, we fall back automatically upon the cares of the
moment and absorb ourselves in them--hunger, thirst, the lice whose
crushing ensanguines all our nails, the great weariness that saps us
all.
"Seen Joseph this morning?" says Volpatte. "He doesn't look very grand,
poor lad."
"He'll do something daft, certain sure. He's as good as a goner, that
lad, mind you. First chance he has he'll jump in front of a bullet. I
can see he will."
"It'd give any one the pip for the rest of his natural. There were six
brothers of 'em, you know; four of 'em killed; two in Alsace, one in
Champagne, one in Argonne. If Andre's killed he's the fifth."
"If he'd been killed they'd have found his body--they'd have seen it
from the observation-post; you can't lose the rump and the thighs. My
idea is that the night they went on patrol he went astray coming
back--crawled right round, poor devil, and fell right into the Boche
lines."
"Perhaps he got sewn up in their wire."
"I tell you they'd have found him if he'd been done in; you know jolly
well the Boches wouldn't have brought the body in. And we looked
everywhere. As long as he's not been found you can take it from me that
he's got away somewhere on his feet, wounded or unwounded."
This so logical theory finds favor, and now it is known that Mesnil
Andre is a prisoner there is less interest in him. But his brother
continues to be a pitiable object--"Poor old chap, he's so young!" And
the men of the squad look at him secretly.
"I've got a twist!" says Cocon suddenly. The hour of dinner has gone
past and we are demanding it. There appears to be only the remains of
what was brought the night before.
"What's the corporal thinking of to starve us? There he is--I'll go and
get hold of him. Hey, corporal! Why can't you get us something to
eat?"--"Yes, yes--something to eat!" re-echoes the destiny of these
eternally hungry men.
"I'm coming," says bustling Bertrand, who keeps going both day and
night.
"What then?" says Pepin, always hot-headed. "I don't feel like chewing
macaroni again; I shall open a tin of meat in less than two secs?" The
daily comedy of dinner steps to the front again in this drama.
"Don't touch your reserve rations!" says Bertrand; "as soon as I'm back
from seeing the captain I'll get you something."
When he returns he brings and distributes a salad of potatoes and
onions, and as mastication proceeds our features relax and our eyes
become composed.
For the ceremony of eating, Paradis has hoisted a policeman's hat. It
is hardly the right place or time for it, but the hat is quite new, and
the tailor, who promised it for three months ago, only delivered it the
day we came up. The pliant two-cornered hat of bright blue cloth on his
flourishing round head gives him the look of a pasteboard gendarme with
red-painted cheeks. Nevertheless, all the while he is eating, Paradis
looks at me steadily. I go up to him. "You've a funny old face."
"Don't worry about it," he replies. "I want a chat with you. Come with
me and see something."
His hand goes out to his half-full cup placed beside his dinner things;
he hesitates, and then decides to put his wine in a safe place down his
gullet, and the cup in his pocket. He moves off and I follow him.
In passing he picks up his helmet that gapes on the earthen bench.
After a dozen paces he comes close to me and says in a low voice and
with a queer air, without looking at me--as he does when he is
upset--"I know where Mesnil Andre is. Would you like to see him? Come,
then."
So saying, he takes off his police hat, folds and pockets it. and puts
on his helmet. He sets off again and I follow him without a word.
He leads me fifty yards farther, towards the place where our common
dug-out is, and the footbridge of sandbags under which one always
slides with the impression that the muddy arch will collapse on one's
back. After the footbridge, a hollow appears in the wall of the trench,
with a step made of a hurdle stuck fast in the clay. Paradis climbs
there, and motions to me to follow him on to the narrow and slippery
platform. There was recently a sentry's loophole here, and it has been
destroyed and made again lower down with a couple of bullet-screens.
One is obliged to stoop low lest his head rise above the contrivance.
Paradis says to me, still in the same low voice, "It's me that fixed up
those two shields, so as to see--for I'd got an idea, and I wanted to
see. Put your eye to this--"
"I don't see anything; the hole's stopped up. What's that lump of
cloth?"
"It's him," says Paradis.