"Don't know; in the belly, I think; I thought there was something dark
underneath him. Or perhaps in the face--did you notice the little stain
on the cheek?"
I recall the hairy and greenish face of the dead man. "Yes, there was
something on the cheek. Yes, perhaps it went in there--"
"Look out!" says Paradis hurriedly, "there he is! We ought not to have
stayed here."
But we stay all the same, irresolutely wavering, as Mesnil Joseph comes
straight up to us. Never did he seem so frail to us. We can see his
pallor afar off, his oppressed and unnatural expression; he is bowed as
he walks, and goes slowly, borne down by endless fatigue and his
immovable notion.
"What's the matter with your face?" he asks me--he has seen me point
out to Paradis the possible entry of the bullet. I pretend not to
understand and then make some kind of evasive reply. All at once I have
a torturing idea--the smell! It is there, and there is no mistaking it.
It reveals a corpse; and perhaps he will guess rightly.
It seems to me that he has suddenly smelt the sign--the pathetic,
lamentable appeal of the dead. But he says nothing, continues his
solitary walk, and disappears round the corner.
"Yesterday," says Paradis to me, "he came just here, with his mess-tin
full of rice that he didn't want to eat. Just as if he knew what he was
doing, the fool stops here and talks of pitching the rest of his food
over the bank, just on the spot where--where the other was. I couldn't
stick that, old chap. I grabbed his arm just as he chucked the rice
into the air, and it flopped down here in the trench. Old man, he
turned round on me in a rage and all red in the face, 'What the hell's
up with you now?' he says. I looked as fat-headed as I could, and
mumbled some rot about not doing it on purpose. He shrugs his
shoulders, and looks at me same as if I was dirt. He goes off, saying
to himself, 'Did you see him, the blockhead?' He's bad-tempered, you
know, the poor chap, and I couldn't complain. 'All right, all right,'
he kept saying; and I didn't like it, you know, because I did wrong all
the time, although I was right."
We go back together in silence and re-enter the dugout where the others
are gathered. It is an old headquarters post, and spacious. Just as we
slide in, Paradis listens. "Our batteries have been playing extra hell
for the last hour, don't you think?"
I know what he means, and reply with an empty gesture, "We shall see,
old man, we shall see all right!"
In the dug-out, to an audience of three, Tirette is again pouring out
his barrack-life tales. Marthereau is snoring in a corner; he is close
to the entry, and to get down we have to stride over his short legs,
which seem to have gone back into his trunk. A group of kneeling men
around a folded blanket are playing with cards--
"My turn!"--"40, 42--48--49!--Good!"
"Isn't he lucky, that game-bird; it's imposs', I've got stumped three
times I want nothing more to do with you. You're skinning me this
evening, and you robbed me the other day, too, you infernal
fritter!"--"What did you revoke for, mugwump?"--"I'd only the king,
nothing else."
"All the same," murmurs some one who is eating in a corner, "this
Camembert, it cost twenty-five sous, but you talk about muck! Outside
there's a layer of sticky glue, and inside it's plaster that breaks."
Meanwhile Tirette relates the outrages inflicted on him during his
twenty-one days of training owing to the quarrelsome temper of a
certain major: "A great hog he was, my boy, everything rotten on this
earth. All the lot of us looked foul when he went by or when we saw him
in the officers' room spread out on a chair that you couldn't see
underneath him, with his vast belly and huge cap, and circled round
with stripes from top to bottom, like a barrel--he was hard on the
private! They called him Loeb--a Boche, you see!"
"I knew him!" cried Paradis; "when war started he was declared unfit
for active service, naturally. While I was doing my term he was a
dodger already--but he dodged round all the street corners to pinch
you--you got a day's clink for an unbuttoned button, and he gave it you
over and above if there was some bit of a thing about you that wasn't
quite O.K.--and everybody laughed. He thought they were laughing at
you, and you knew they were laughing at him, but you knew it in vain,
you were in it up to your head for the clink."
"He had a wife," Tirette goes on, "the old--"
"I remember her, too," Paradis exclaimed. "You talk about a bitch!"
"Some of 'em drag a little pug-dog about with 'em, but him, he trailed
that yellow minx about everywhere, with her broom-handle hips and her
wicked look. It was her that worked the old sod up against us. He was
more stupid than wicked, but as soon as she was there he got more
wicked than stupid. So you bet they were some nuisance--"
Just then, Marthereau wakes up from his sleep by the entry with a
half-groan. He straightens himself up, sitting on his straw like a
gaol-bird, and we see his bearded silhouette take the vague outline of
a Chinese, while his round eye rolls and turns in the shadows. He is
looking at his dreams of a moment ago. Then he passes his hand over his
eyes and--as if it had some connection with his dream--recalls the
scene that night when we came up to the trenches--"For all that," he
says, in a voice weighty with slumber and reflection, "there were some
half-seas-over that night! Ah, what a night! All those troops,
companies and whole regiments, yelling and surging all the way up the
road! In the thinnest of the dark you could see the jumble of poilus
that went on and up--like the sea itself, you'd say--and carrying on
across all the convoys of artillery and ambulance wagons that we met
that night. I've never seen so many, so many convoys in the night,
never!" Then he deals himself a thump on the chest, settles down again
in self-possession, groans, and says no more.
Blaire's voice rises, giving expression to the haunting thought that
wakes in the depths of the men: "It's four o'clock. It's too late for
there to be anything from our side."
One of the gamesters in the other corner yelps a question at another:
"Now then? Are you going to play or aren't you, worm-face?"
Tirette continues the story of his major: "Behold one day they'd served
us at the barracks with some suetty soup. Old man, a disease, it was!
So a chap asks to speak to the captain, and holds his mess-tin up to
his nose."
"Numskull!" some one shouts in the other corner. "Why didn't you trump,
then?"
"'Ah, damn it,' said the captain, 'take it away from my nose, it
positively stinks.'"
"It wasn't my game," quavers a discontented but unconvinced voice.
"And the captain, he makes a report to the major. But behold the major,
mad as the devil, he butts in shaking the paper in his paw: 'What's
this?' he says. 'Where's the soup that has caused this rebellion, that
I may taste it?' They bring him some in a clean mess-tin and he sniffs
it. 'What now!' he says, 'it smells good. They damned well shan't have
it then, rich soup like this!'"
"Not your game! And he was leading, too! Bungler! It's unlucky, you
know."
"Then at five o'clock as we were coming out of barracks, our two
marvels butt in again and plank themselves in front of the swaddies
coming out, trying to spot some little thing not quite so, and he said,
'Ah, my bucks, you thought you'd score off me by complaining of this
excellent soup that I have consumed myself along with my partner here;
just wait and see if I don't get even with you. Hey, you with the long
hair, the tall artist, come here a minute!' And all the time the beast
was jawing, his bag-o'-bones--as straight and thin as a post--went
'oui, oui' with her head."
"That depends; if he hadn't a trump, it's another matter."
"But all of a sudden we see her go white as a sheet, she puts her fist
on her tummy and she shakes like all that, and then suddenly, in front
of all the fellows that filled the square, she drops her umbrella and
starts spewing!"
"Hey, listen!" says Paradis, sharply, "they're shouting in the trench.
Don't you hear? Isn't it 'alarm!' they're shouting?"
"Alarm? Are you mad?"
The words were hardly said when a shadow comes in through the low
doorway of our dug-out and cries--"Alarm, 22nd! Stand to arms!"
A moment of silence and then several exclamations. "I knew it," murmurs
Paradis between his teeth, and he goes on his knees towards the opening
into the molehill that shelters us. Speech then ceases and we seem to
be struck dumb. Stooping or kneeling we bestir ourselves; we buckle on
our waist-belts; shadowy arms dart from one side to another; pockets
are rummaged. And we issue forth pell-mell, dragging our knapsacks
behind us by the straps, our blankets and pouches.
Outside we are deafened. The roar of gunfire has increased a
hundredfold, to left, to right, and in front of us. Our batteries give
voice without ceasing.
"Do you think they're attacking?" ventures a man. "How should I know?"
replies another voice with irritated brevity.
Our jaws are set and we swallow our thoughts, hurrying, bustling,
colliding, and grumbling without words.
A command goes forth--"Shoulder your packs."--"There's a
counter-command--" shouts an officer who runs down the trench with
great strides, working his elbows, and the rest of his sentence
disappears with him. A counter-command! A visible tremor has run
through the files, a start which uplifts our heads and holds us all in
extreme expectation.
But no; the counter-order only concerns the knapsacks. No pack; but the
blanket rolled round the body, and the trenching-tool at the waist. We
unbuckle our blankets, tear them open and roll them up. Still no word
is spoken; each has a steadfast eye and the mouth forcefully shut. The
corporals and sergeants go here and there, feverishly spurring the
silent haste in which the men are bowed: "Now then, hurry up! Come,
come, what the hell are you doing? Will you hurry, yes or no?"
A detachment of soldiers with a badge of crossed axes on their sleeves
clear themselves a fairway and swiftly delve holes in the wall of the
trench. We watch them sideways as we don our equipment.
"What are they doing, those chaps?"--"It's to climb up by."
We are ready. The men marshal themselves, still silently, their
blankets crosswise, the helmet-strap on the chin, leaning on their
rifles. I look at their pale, contracted, and reflective faces. They
are not soldiers, they are men. They are not adventurers, or warriors,
or made for human slaughter, neither butchers nor cattle. They are
laborers and artisans whom one recognizes in their uniforms. They are
civilians uprooted, and they are ready. They await the signal for death
or murder; but you may see, looking at their faces between the vertical
gleams of their bayonets, that they are simply men.
Each one knows that he is going to take his head, his chest, his belly,
his whole body, and all naked, up to the rifles pointed forward, to the
shells, to the bombs piled and ready, and above all to the methodical
and almost infallible machine-guns--to all that is waiting for him
yonder and is now so frightfully silent--before he reaches the other
soldiers that he must kill. They are not careless of their lives, like
brigands, nor blinded by passion like savages. In spite of the
doctrines with which they have been cultivated they are not inflamed.
They are above instinctive excesses. They are not drunk, either
physically or morally. It is in full consciousness, as in full health
and full strength, that they are massed there to hurl themselves once
more into that sort of madman's part imposed on all men by the madness
of the human race. One sees the thought and the fear and the farewell
that there is in their silence, their stillness, in the mask of
tranquillity which unnaturally grips their faces. They are not the kind
of hero one thinks of, but their sacrifice has greater worth than they
who have not seen them will ever be able to understand.
They are waiting; a waiting that extends and seems eternal. Now and
then one or another starts a little when a bullet, fired from the other
side, skims the forward embankment that shields us and plunges into the
flabby flesh of the rear wall.
The end of the day is spreading a sublime but melancholy light on that
strong unbroken mass of beings of whom some only will live to see the
night. It is raining--there is always rain in my memories of all the
tragedies of the great war. The evening is making ready, along with a
vague and chilling menace; it is about to set for men that snare that
is as wide as the world.
* * * * *
New orders are peddled from mouth to mouth. Bombs strung on wire hoops
are distributed--"Let each man take two bombs!"
The major goes by. He is restrained in his gestures, in undress,
girded, undecorated. We hear him say, "There's something good, mes
enfants, the Boches are clearing out. You'll get along all right, eh?"
News passes among us like a breeze. "The Moroccans and the 21st Company
are in front of us. The attack is launched on our right."
The corporals are summoned to the captain, and return with armsful of
steel things. Bertrand is fingering me; he hooks something on to a
button of my greatcoat. It is a kitchen knife. "I'm putting this on to
your coat," he says.
"Me too!" says Pepin.
"No," says Bertrand, "it's forbidden to take volunteers for these
things."
"Be damned to you!" growls Pepin.
We wait, in the great rainy and shot-hammered space that has no other
boundary than the distant and tremendous cannonade. Bertrand has
finished his distribution and returns. Several soldiers have sat down,
and some of them are yawning.
The cyclist Billette slips through in front of us, carrying an
officer's waterproof on his arm and obviously averting his face.
"Hullo, aren't you going too?" Cocon cries to him.
"No, I'm not going," says the other. "I'm in the 17th. The Fifth
Battalion's not attacking!"
"Ah, they've always got the luck, the Fifth. They've never got to fight
like we have!" Billette is already in the distance, and a few grimaces
follow his disappearance.
A man arrives running, and speaks to Bertrand, and then Bertrand turns
to us--
"Up you go," he says, "it's our turn."
All move at once. We put our feet on the steps made by the sappers,
raise ourselves, elbow to elbow, beyond the shelter of the trench, and
climb on to the parapet.
* * * * *
Bertrand is out on the sloping ground. He covers us with a quick
glance, and when we are all there he says, "Allons, forward!"
Our voices have a curious resonance. The start has been made very
quickly, unexpectedly almost, as in a dream. There is no whistling
sound in the air. Among the vast uproar of the guns we discern very
clearly this surprising silence of bullets around us--
We descend over the rough and slippery ground with involuntary
gestures, helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle. Mechanically the
eye fastens on some detail of the declivity, of the ruined ground, on
the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up, at the wreckage in the
holes. It is unbelievable that we are upright in full daylight on this
slope where several survivors remember sliding along in the darkness
with such care, and where the others have only hazarded furtive glances
through the loopholes. No, there is no firing against us. The wide
exodus of the battalion out of the ground seems to have passed
unnoticed! This truce is full of an increasing menace, increasing. The
pale light confuses us.
On all sides the slope is covered by men who, like us, are bent on the
descent. On the right the outline is defined of a company that is
reaching the ravine by Trench 97--an old German work in ruins. We cross
our wire by openings. Still no one fires on us. Some awkward ones who
have made false steps are getting up again. We form up on the farther
side of the entanglements and then set ourselves to topple down the
slope rather faster--there is an instinctive acceleration in the
movement. Several bullets arrive at last among us. Bertrand shouts to
us to reserve our bombs and wait till the last moment.
But the sound of his voice is carried away. Abruptly, across all the
width of the opposite slope, lurid flames burst forth that strike the
air with terrible detonations. In line from left to right fires emerge
from the sky and explosions from the ground. It is a frightful curtain
which divides us from the world, which divides us from the past and
from the future. We stop, fixed to the ground, stupefied by the sudden
host that thunders from every side; then a simultaneous effort uplifts
our mass again and throws it swiftly forward. We stumble and impede
each other in the great waves of smoke. With harsh crashes and
whirlwinds of pulverized earth, towards the profundity into which we
hurl ourselves pell-mell, we see craters opened here and there, side by
side, and merging in each other. Then one knows no longer where the
discharges fall. Volleys are let loose so monstrously resounding that
one feels himself annihilated by the mere sound of the downpoured
thunder of these great constellations of destruction that form in the
sky. One sees and one feels the fragments passing close to one's head
with their hiss of red-hot iron plunged in water. The blast of one
explosion so burns my hands that I let my rifle fall. I pick it up
again, reeling, and set off in the tawny-gleaming tempest with lowered
head, lashed by spirits of dust and soot in a crushing downpour like
volcanic lava. The stridor of the bursting shells hurts your ears,
beats you on the neck, goes through your temples, and you cannot endure
it without a cry. The gusts of death drive us on, lift us up, rock us
to and fro. We leap, and do not know whither we go. Our eyes are
blinking and weeping and obscured. The view before us is blocked by a
flashing avalanche that fills space.
It is the barrage fire. We have to go through that whirlwind of fire
and those fearful showers that vertically fall. We are passing through.
We are through it, by chance. Here and there I have seen forms that
spun round and were lifted up and laid down, illumined by a brief
reflection from over yonder. I have glimpsed strange faces that uttered
some sort of cry--you could see them without hearing them in the roar
of annihilation. A brasier full of red and black masses huge and
furious fell about me, excavating the ground, tearing it from under my
feet, throwing me aside like a bouncing toy. I remember that I strode
over a smoldering corpse, quite black, with a tissue of rosy blood
shriveling on him; and I remember, too, that the skirts of the
greatcoat flying next to me had caught fire, and left a trail of smoke
behind. On our right, all along Trench 97, our glances were drawn and
dazzled by a rank of frightful flames, closely crowded against each
other like men.
Forward!
Now, we are nearly running. I see some who fall solidly flat, face
forward, and others who founder meekly, as though they would sit down
on the ground. We step aside abruptly to avoid the prostrate dead,
quiet and rigid, or else offensive, and also--more perilous
snares!--the wounded that hook on to you, struggling.
The International Trench! We are there. The wire entanglements have
been torn up into long roots and creepers, thrown afar and coiled up,
swept away and piled in great drifts by the guns. Between these big
bushes of rain-damped steel the ground is open and free.
The trench is not defended. The Germans have abandoned it, or else a
first wave has already passed over it. Its interior bristles with
rifles placed against the bank. In the bottom are scattered corpses.
From the jumbled litter of the long trench, hands emerge that protrude
from gray sleeves with red facings, and booted legs. In places the
embankment is destroyed and its woodwork splintered--all the flank of
the trench collapsed and fallen into an indescribable mixture. In other
places, round pits are yawning. And of all that moment I have best
retained the vision of a whimsical trench covered with many-colored
rags and tatters. For the making of their sandbags the Germans had used
cotton and woolen stuffs of motley design pillaged from some
house-furnisher's shop; and all this hotch-potch of colored remnants,
mangled and frayed, floats and flaps and dances in our faces.
We have spread out in the trench. The lieutenant, who has jumped to the
other side, is stooping and summoning us with signs and shouts--"Don't
stay there; forward, forward!"
We climb the wall of the trench with the help of the sacks, of weapons,
and of the backs that are piled up there. In the bottom of the ravine
the soil is shot-churned, crowded with jetsam, swarming with prostrate
bodies. Some are motionless as blocks of wood; others move slowly or
convulsively. The barrage fire continues to increase its infernal
discharge behind us on the ground that we have crossed. But where we
are at the foot of the rise it is a dead point for the artillery.
A short and uncertain calm follows. We are less deafened and look at
each other. There is fever in the eyes, and the cheek-bones are
blood-red. Our breathing snores and our hearts drum in our bodies.
In haste and confusion we recognize each other, as if we had met again
face to face in a nightmare on the uttermost shores of death. Some
hurried words are cast upon this glade in hell--"It's you! "--"Where's
Cocon?"--"Don't know."--"Have you seen the captain? "--"No."--"Going
strong?"--"Yes."
The bottom of the ravine is crossed and the other slope rises opposite.
We climb in Indian file by a stairway rough-hewn in the ground: "Look
out!" The shout means that a soldier half-way up the steps has been
struck in the loins by a shell-fragment; he falls with his arms
forward, bareheaded, like the diving swimmer. We can see the shapeless
silhouette of the mass as it plunges into the gulf. I can almost see
the detail of his blown hair over the black profile of his face.
We debouch upon the height. A great colorless emptiness is outspread
before us. At first one can see nothing but a chalky and stony plain,
yellow and gray to the limit of sight. No human wave is preceding ours;
in front of us there is no living soul, but the ground is peopled with
dead--recent corpses that still mimic agony or sleep, and old remains
already bleached and scattered to the wind, half assimilated by the
earth.
As soon as our pushing and jolted file emerges, two men close to me are
hit, two shadows are hurled to the ground and roll under our feet, one
with a sharp cry, and the other silently, as a felled ox. Another
disappears with the caper of a lunatic, as if he had been snatched
away. Instinctively we close up as we hustle forward--always
forward--and the wound in our line closes of its own accord. The
adjutant stops, raises his sword, lets it fall, and drops to his knees.
His kneeling body slopes backward in jerks, his helmet drops on his
heels, and he remains there, bareheaded, face to the sky. Hurriedly the
rush of the rank has split open to respect his immobility.
But we cannot see the lieutenant. No more leaders then--Hesitation
checks the wave of humanity that begins to beat on the plateau. Above
the trampling one hears the hoarse effort of our lungs. "Forward!"
cries some soldier, and then all resume the onward race to perdition
with increasing speed.
* * * * *
"Where's Bertrand?" comes the laborious complaint of one of the
foremost runners. "There! Here!" He had stooped in passing over a
wounded man, but he leaves him quickly, and the man extends his arms
towards him and seems to sob.
It is just at the moment when he rejoins us that we hear in front of
us, coming from a sort of ground swelling, the crackle of a
machine-gun. It is a moment of agony--more serious even than when we
were passing through the flaming earthquake of the barrage. That
familiar voice speaks to us across the plain, sharp and horrible. But
we no longer stop. "Go on, go on!"
Our panting becomes hoarse groaning, yet still we hurl ourselves toward
the horizon.
"The Boches! I see them!" a man says suddenly. "Yes--their heads,
there--above the trench--it's there, the trench, that line. It's close,
Ah, the hogs!"
We can indeed make out little round gray caps which rise and then drop
on the ground level, fifty yards away, beyond a belt of dark earth,
furrowed and humped. Encouraged they spring forward, they who now form
the group where I am. So near the goal, so far unscathed, shall we not
reach it? Yes, we will reach it! We make great strides and no longer
hear anything. Each man plunges straight ahead, fascinated by the
terrible trench, bent rigidly forward, almost incapable of turning his
head to right or to left. I have a notion that many of us missed their
footing and fell to the ground. I jump sideways to miss the suddenly
erect bayonet of a toppling rifle. Quite close to me, Farfadet jostles
me with his face bleeding, throws himself on Volpatte who is beside me
and clings to him. Volpatte doubles up without slackening his rush and
drags him along some paces, then shakes him off without looking at him
and without knowing who he is, and shouts at him in a breaking voice
almost choked with exertion: "Let me go, let me go, nom de Dieu!
They'll pick you up directly--don't worry."
The other man sinks to the ground, and his face, plastered with a
scarlet mask and void of all expression, turns in every direction;
while Volpatte, already in the distance, automatically repeats between
his teeth, "Don't worry," with a steady forward gaze on the line.
A shower of bullets spirts around me, increasing the number of those
who suddenly halt, who collapse slowly, defiant and gesticulating, of
those who dive forward solidly with all the body's burden, of the
shouts, deep, furious, and desperate, and even of that hollow and
terrible gasp when a man's life goes bodily forth in a breath. And we
who are not yet stricken, we look ahead, we walk and we run, among the
frolics of the death that strikes at random into our flesh.
The wire entanglements--and there is one stretch of them intact. We go
along to where it has been gutted into a wide and deep opening. This is
a colossal funnel-hole, formed of smaller funnels placed together, a
fantastic volcanic crater, scooped there by the guns.
The sight of this convulsion is stupefying; truly it seems that it must
have come from the center of the earth. Such a rending of virgin strata
puts new edge on our attacking fury, and none of us can keep from
shouting with a solemn shake of the head--even just now when words are
but painfully torn from our throats--"Ah, Christ! Look what hell we've
given 'em there! Ah, look!"
Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the
hollows and the earthy mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and blackened
and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet and we tear
them out angrily. The accouterments and stuffs that cover the soft
soil, the linen that is scattered about from sundered knapsacks,
prevent us from sticking fast in it, and we are careful to plant our
feet in this debris when we jump into the holes or climb the hillocks.