"All the regiment is behind us!" they cry. We do not turn round to see,
but the assurance electrifies our rush once more.
No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are
nearing. Some German dead are crumbling in front of it, in pinnacled
heaps or extended lines. We are there. The parapet takes definite and
sinister shape and detail; the loopholes--we are prodigiously,
incredibly close!
Something falls in front of us. It is a bomb. With a kick Corporal
Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the
trench.
With that fortunate deed the squad reaches the trench.
Pepin has hurled himself flat on the ground and is involved with a
corpse. He reaches the edge and plunges in--the first to enter.
Fouillade, with great gestures and shouts, jumps into the pit almost at
the same moment that Pepin rolls down it. Indistinctly I see--in the
time of the lightning's flash--a whole row of black demons stooping and
squatting for the descent, on the ridge of the embankment, on the edge
of the dark ambush.
A terrible volley bursts point-blank in our faces, flinging in front of
us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earthen verge. After
the stunning shock we shake ourselves and burst into devilish
laughter--the discharge has passed too high. And at once, with shouts
and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into the belly
of the trench!
* * * * *
We are submerged in a mysterious smoke, and at first I can only see
blue uniforms in the stifling gulf. We go one way and then another,
driven by each other, snarling and searching. We turn about, and with
our hands encumbered by knife, bombs, and rifle, we do not know at
first what to do.
"They're in their funk-holes, the swine!" is the cry. Heavy explosions
are shaking the earth--underground, in the dug-outs. We are all at once
divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see
nothing more. We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness
of a fallen fragment of night. One stumbles against barriers of
cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom. Hardly can
one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made of white
sandbags, which are everywhere torn like paper. At one time the heavy
adhesive reek sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of
the attackers. Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a
hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and sinks
to the bottom. I hear several shrill cries of "Kamarad!" proceeding
from a pale-faced and gray-clad group in the huge corner made by a
rending shell. Under the inky cloud the tempest of men flows back,
climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling, along the dark
and ruined mole.
* * * * *
And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and understand
that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has not
encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our approach.
The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender curtain of
defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are caught like rats
or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void, a great void. We
advance in crowds like a terrible array of spectators.
And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled white
walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a vanished river
that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the flat round hole of
a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the sloping banks and in
the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of corpses--a dead river
that is filled again to overflowing by the new tide and the breaking
wave of our company. In the smoke vomited by dug-outs and the shaking
wind of subterranean explosions, I come upon a compact mass of men
hooked onto each other who are describing a wide circle. Just as we
reach them the entire mass breaks up to make a residue of furious
battle. I see Blaire break away, his helmet hanging on his neck by the
chin-strap and his face flayed, and uttering a savage yell. I stumble
upon a man who is crouching at the entry to a dug-out. Drawing back
from the black hatchway, yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself
with his left hand on a beam. In his right hand and for several seconds
he holds a bomb which is on the point of exploding. It disappears in
the hole, bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him
from the bowels of the earth. The man seizes another bomb.
Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another
dug-out with a pickax he has found there, causing a landslide, and the
entry is blocked. I see several shadows trampling and gesticulating
over the tomb.
Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this
long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible shells
and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognize those whom I
know, just as though all that had gone before of our lives had suddenly
become very distant. There is some change working in them. A frenzied
excitement is driving them all out of themselves.
"What are we stopping here for?" says one, grinding his teeth.
"Why don't we go on to the next?" a second asks me in fury. "Now we're
here, we'd be there in a few jumps!'
"I, too, I want to go on."--"Me, too. Ah, the hogs!" They shake
themselves like banners. They carry the luck of their survival as it
were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with
themselves.
We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange demolished
way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown to the unknown.
Advance to the right!
We begin to flow again in one direction. No doubt it is a movement
planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs. We trample soft bodies
underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their position;
rivulets and cries come from them. Like posts and heaps of rubbish,
corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them down, suffocate
them, strangle them. So that I can get by, I must push at a slaughtered
trunk of which the neck is a spring of gurgling blood.
In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown
out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together, athwart
the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in all its
environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed, blood-red
with sweat, eyes flashing. Some groups seem to be dancing as they
brandish their knives. They are elated, immensely confident, ferocious.
The battle dies down imperceptibly. A soldier says, "Well, what's to be
done now?" it flares up again suddenly at one point. Twenty yards away
in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the gray embankment
makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its scattered
missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits intermittently and
seems to be in difficulties.
Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see men
encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it. Near to me I make
out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight and with
no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking explosions
come in jerky sequence.
A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two. Joseph
halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee. I run to him and he
watches me coming. "It's nothing--my thigh. I can crawl along by
myself." He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways
slowly towards the trench.
I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit
him, and I slip round there by the left, making a detour. No one there.
I only meet another of our squad on the same errand--Paradis.
We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of
iron of all shapes. They block up the trench and separate us. "The
machine-gun's taken by the 7th," they shout, "it won't bark any more.
It was a mad devil--filthy beast! Filthy beast!"
"What's there to do now?"--"Nothing."
We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down. The living have ceased
to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last, surrounded by
smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to all the ends of
the earth. We no longer know where we are. There is neither earth nor
sky--nothing but a sort of cloud. The first period of inaction is
forming in the chaotic drama, and there is a general slackening in the
movement and the uproar. The cannonade grows less; it still shakes the
sky as a cough shakes a man, but it is farther off now. Enthusiasm is
allayed, and there remains only the infinite fatigue that rises and
overwhelms us, and the infinite waiting that begins over again.
* * * * *
Where is the enemy? He has left his dead everywhere, and we have seen
rows of prisoners. Yonder again there is one, drab, ill-defined and
smoky, outlined against the dirty sky. But the bulk seem to have
dispersed afar. A few shells come to us here and there blunderingly,
and we ridicule them. We are saved, we are quiet, we are alone, in this
desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins a line of the living.
Night has come. The dust has flown away, but has yielded place to
shadow and darkness over the long-drawn multitude's disorder. Men
approach each other, sit down, get up again and walk about, leaning on
each other or hooked together. Between the dug-outs, which are blocked
by the mingled dead, we gather in groups and squat. Some have laid
their rifles on the ground and wander on the rim of the trench with
their arms balancing; and when they come near we can see that they are
blackened and scorched, their eyes are red and slashed with mud. We
speak seldom, but are beginning to think.
We see the stretcher-bearers, whose sharp silhouettes stoop and grope;
they advance linked two and two together by their long burdens. Yonder
on our right one hears the blows of pick and shovel.
I wander into the middle of this gloomy turmoil. In a place where the
bombardment has crushed the embankment of the trench into a gentle
slope, some one is seated. A faint light still prevails. The tranquil
attitude of this man as he looks reflectively in front of him is
sculptural and striking. Stooping, I recognize him as Corporal
Bertrand. He turns his face towards me, and I feel that he is looking
at me through the shadows with his thoughtful smile.
"I was coming to look for you," he says; "they're organizing a guard
for the trench until we've got news of what the others have done and
what's going on in front. I'm going to put you on double sentry with
Paradis, in a listening-post that the sappers have just dug."
We watch the shadows of the passers-by and of those who are seated,
outlined in inky blots, bowed and bent in diverse attitudes under the
gray sky, all along the ruined parapet. Dwarfed to the size of insects
and worms, they make a strange and secret stirring among these
shadow-hidden lands where for two years war has caused cities of
soldiers to wander or stagnate over deep and boundless cemeteries.
Two obscure forms pass in the dark, several paces from us; they are
talking together in low voices--"You bet, old chap, instead of
listening to him, I shoved my bayonet into his belly so that I couldn't
haul it out."
"There were four in the bottom of the hole. I called to 'em to come
out, and as soon as one came out I stuck him. Blood ran down me up to
the elbow and stuck up my sleeves."
"Ah!" the first speaker went on, "when we are telling all about it
later, if we get back, to the other people at home, by the stove and
the candle, who's going to believe it? It's a pity, isn't it?"
"I don't care a damn about that, as long as we do get back," said the
other; "I want the end quickly, and only that."
Bertrand was used to speak very little ordinarily, and never of
himself. But he said, "I've got three of them on my hands. I struck
like a madman. Ah, we were all like beasts when we got here!"
He raised his voice and there was a restrained tremor in it: "it was
necessary," he said, "it was necessary, for the future's sake."
He crossed his arms and tossed his head: "The future!" he cried all at
once as a prophet might. "How will they regard this slaughter, they
who'll live after us, to whom progress--which comes as sure as
fate--will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will they
regard these exploits which even we who perform them don't know whether
one should compare them with those of Plutarch's and Corneille's heroes
or with those of hooligans and apaches?
"And for all that, mind you," Bertrand went on, "there is one figure
that has risen above the war and will blaze with the beauty and
strength of his courage--"
I listened, leaning on a stick and towards him, drinking in the voice
that came in the twilight silence from the lips that so rarely spoke.
He cried with a clear voice--"Liebknecht!"
He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly
serious as a statue's, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once
again from his marble muteness to repeat, "The future, the future! The
work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more
than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and
shameful. And yet--this present--it had to be, it had to be! Shame on
military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's calling, that
changes men by turns into stupid victims or ignoble brutes. Yes, shame.
That's the true word, but it's too true; it's true in eternity, but
it's not yet true for us. It will be true when there is a Bible that is
entirely true, when it is found written among the other truths that a
purified mind will at the same time let us understand. We are still
lost, still exiled far from that time. In our time of to-day, in these
moments, this truth is hardly more than a fallacy, this sacred saying
is only blasphemy!"
A kind of laugh came from him, full of echoing dreams--"To think I once
told them I believed in prophecies, just to kid them!"
I sat down by Bertrand's side. This soldier who had always done more
than was required of him and survived notwithstanding, stood at that
moment in my eyes for those who incarnate a lofty moral conception, who
have the strength to detach themselves from the hustle of
circumstances, and who are destined, however little their path may run
through a splendor of events, to dominate their time.
"I have always thought all those things," I murmured.
"Ah!" said Bertrand. We looked at each other without a word, with a
little surprised self-communion. After this full silence he spoke
again. "It's time to start duty; take your rifle and come."
* * * * *
From our listening-post we see towards the east a light spreading like
a conflagration, but bluer and sadder than buildings on fire. It
streaks the sky above a long black cloud which extends suspended like
the smoke of an extinguished fire, like an immense stain on the world.
It is the returning morning.
It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering
fatigue. We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth chatter.
Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes from the sky
into the slender framework of the black clouds. All is frozen,
colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere. There is rime
and snow under a burden of mist. Everything is white. Paradis moves--a
heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white. I had placed my
shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and it looks as if
wrapped in paper. In the bottom of the hole a little snow floats,
fretted and gray in the black foot-bath. Outside the hole, on the
piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded dead, snow rests
like muslin.
Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow
darker as they approach and hail us. They are the men who come to
relieve us. Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their
cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not
snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.
Paradis hoists himself out. Over the plain I follow his Father
Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up
white-felted soles. Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the
footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty
whiteness that covers the ground.
Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which tarpaulins
are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white velvet or
mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and between the
watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to fight against the
cold, to exclude it from the meager fireside of their own chests, or
who are simply frozen. A dead man has slid down, upright and hardly
askew, with his feet in the trench and his chest and arms resting on
the bank. He was clasping the earth when life left him. His face is
turned skyward and is covered with a leprosy of ice, the eyelids are
white as the eyes, the mustache caked with hard slime. Other bodies are
sleeping, less white than that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on
lifeless things.
"We must sleep." Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where we
may hide ourselves and shut our eyes. "It can't be helped if there are
stiffs in the dugouts," mutters Paradis; "in a cold like this they'll
keep, they won't be too bad." We go forward, so weary that we can only
see the ground.
I am alone. Where is Paradis? He must have lain down in some hole, and
perhaps I did not hear his call. I meet Marthereau. "I'm looking where
I can sleep, I've been on guard," he says.
"I, too; let's look together."
"What's all the row and to-do?" says Marthereau. A mingled hubbub of
trampling and voices overflows from the communication trench that goes
off here. "The communication trenches are full of men. Who are you?"
One of those with whom we are suddenly mixed up replies, "We're the
Fifth Battalion." The newcomers stop. They are in marching order. The
one that spoke sits down for a breathing space on the curves of a
sand-bag that protrudes from the line. He wipes his nose with the back
of his sleeve.
"What are you doing here? Have they told you to come?"
"Not half they haven't told us. We're coming to attack. We're going
yonder, right up." With his head he indicates the north. The curiosity
with which we look at them fastens on to a detail. "You've carried
everything with you?"--"We chose to keep it, that's all."
"Forward!" they are ordered. They rise and proceed, incompletely awake,
their eyes puffy, their wrinkles underlined. There are young men among
them with thin necks and vacuous eyes, and old men; and in the middle,
ordinary ones. They march with a commonplace and pacific step. What
they are going to do seems to us, who did it last night, beyond human
strength. But still they go away towards the north.
"The revally of the damned," says Marthereau.
We make way for them with a sort of admiration and a sort of terror.
When they have passed, Marthereau wags his head and murmurs, "There are
some getting ready, too, on the other side, with their gray uniforms.
Do you think those chaps are feeling it about the attack? Then why have
they come? It's not their doing, I know, but it's theirs all the same,
seeing they're here.--I know, I know, but it's odd, all of it."
The sight of a passer-by alters the course of his ideas: "Tiens,
there's Truc, the big one, d'you know him? Isn't he immense and
pointed, that chap! As for me, I know I'm not quite hardly big enough;
but him, he goes too far. He always knows what's going on, that
two-yarder! For savvying everything, there's nobody going to give him
the go-by! I'll go and chivvy him about a funk-hole."
"If there's a rabbit-hole anywhere?" replies the elongated passer-by,
leaning on Marthereau like a poplar tree, "for sure, my old Caparthe,
certainly. Tiens, there"--and unbending his elbow he makes an
indicative gesture like a flag-signaler--"'Villa von Hindenburg.' and
there, 'Villa Glucks auf.' If that doesn't satisfy you, you gentlemen
are hard to please. P'raps there's a few lodgers in the basement, but
not noisy lodgers, and you can talk out aloud in front of them, you
know!"
"Ah, nom de Dieu!" cried Marthereau a quarter of an hour after we had
established ourselves in one of these square-cut graves, "there's
lodgers he didn't tell us about, that frightful great lightning-rod,
that infinity!" His eyelids were just closing, but they opened again
and he scratched his arms and thighs: "I want a snooze! It appears it's
out of the question. Can't resist these things."
We settled ourselves to yawning and sighing, and finally we lighted a
stump of candle, wet enough to resist us although covered with our
hands; and we watched each other yawn.
The German dug-out consisted of several rooms. We were against a
partition of ill-fitting planks; and on the other side, in Cave No. 2,
some men were also awake. We saw light trickle through the crannies
between the planks and heard rumbling voices. "It's the other section,"
said Marthereau.
Then we listened, mechanically. "When I was off on leave," boomed an
invisible talker, "we had the hump at first, because we were thinking
of my poor brother who was missing in March--dead, no doubt--and of my
poor little Julien, of Class 1915, killed in the October attacks. And
then bit by bit, her and me, we settled down to be happy at being
together again, you see. Our little kid, the last, a five-year-old,
entertained us a treat. He wanted to play soldiers with me, and I made
a little gun for him. I explained the trenches to him; and he, all
fluttering with delight like a bird, he was shooting at me and yelling.
Ah, the damned young gentleman, he did it properly! He'll make a famous
poilu later! I tell you, he's quite got the military spirit!"
A silence; then an obscure murmur of talk, in the midst of which we
catch the name of Napoleon; then another voice, or the same, saying,
"Wilhelm, he's a stinking beast to have brought this war on. But
Napoleon, he was a great man!"
Marthereau is kneeling in front of me in the feeble and scanty rays of
our candle, in the bottom of this dark ill-enclosed hole where the cold
shudders through at intervals, where vermin swarm and where the sorry
crowd of living men endures the faint but musty savor of a tomb; and
Marthereau looks at me. He still hears, as I do, the unknown soldier
who said, "Wilhelm is a stinking beast, but Napoleon was a great man,"
and who extolled the martial ardor of the little boy still left to him.
Marthereau droops his arms and wags his weary head--and the shadow of
the double gesture is thrown on the partition by the lean light in a
sudden caricature.
"Ah!" says my humble companion, "we're all of us not bad sorts, and
we're unlucky, and we're poor devils as well. But we're too stupid,
we're too stupid!"
Again he turns his eyes on me. In his bewhiskered and poodle-like face
I see his fine eyes shining in wondering and still confused
contemplation of things which he is setting himself to understand in
the innocence of his obscurity.
We come out of the uninhabitable shelter; the weather has bettered a
little; the snow has melted, and all is soiled anew. "The wind's licked
up the sugar," says Marthereau.
* * * * *
I am deputed to accompany Mesnil Joseph to the refuge on the Pylones
road. Sergeant Henriot gives me charge of the wounded man and hands me
his clearing order. "If you meet Bertrand on the way," says Henriot,
"tell him to look sharp and get busy, will you?" Bertrand went away on
liaison duty last night and they have been waiting for him for an hour;
the captain is getting impatient and threatens to lose his temper.
I get under way with Joseph, who walks very slowly, a little paler than
usual, and still taciturn. Now and again he halts, and his face
twitches. We follow the communication trenches, and a comrade appears
suddenly. It is Volpatte, and he says, "I'm going with you to the foot
of the hill." As he is off duty, he is wielding a magnificent twisted
walking-stick, and he shakes in his hand like castanets the precious
pair of scissors that never leaves him.
All three of us come out of the communication trench when the slope of
the land allows us to do it without danger of bullets--the guns are not
firing. As soon as we are outside we stumble upon a gathering of men.
It is raining. Between the heavy legs planted there like little trees
on the gray plain in the mist we see a dead man. Volpatte edges his way
in to the horizontal form upon which these upright ones are waiting;
then he turns round violently and shouts to us, "It's Pepin!"
"Ah!" says Joseph, who is already almost fainting. He leans on me and
we draw near. Pepin is full length, his feet and hands bent and
shriveled, and his rain-washed face is swollen and horribly gray.
A man who holds a pickax and whose sweating face is full of little
black trenches, recounts to us the death of Pepin: "He'd gone into a
funk-hole where the Boches had planked themselves, and behold no one
knew he was there and they smoked the hole to make sure of cleaning it
out, and the poor lad, they found him after the operation, corpsed, and
all pulled out like a cat's innards in the middle of the Boche cold
meat that he'd stuck--and very nicely stuck too, I may say, seeing I
was in business as a butcher in the suburbs of Paris."
"One less to the squad!" says Volpatte as we go away.
We are now on the edge of the ravine at the spot where the plateau
begins that our desperate charge traversed last evening, and we cannot
recognize it. This plain, which had then seemed to me quite level,
though it really slopes, is an amazing charnel-house. It swarms with
corpses, and might be a cemetery of which the top has been taken away.
Groups of men are moving about it, identifying the dead of last evening
and last night, turning the remains over, recognizing them by some
detail in spite of their faces. One of these searchers, kneeling, draws
from a dead hand an effaced and mangled photograph--a portrait killed.
In the distance, black shell-smoke goes up in scrolls, then detonates
over the horizon. The wide and stippled flight of an army of crows
sweeps the sky.
Down below among the motionless multitude, and identifiable by their
wasting and disfigurement, there are zouaves, tirailleurs, and Foreign
Legionaries from the May attack. The extreme end of our lines was then
on Berthonval Wood, five or six kilometers from here. In that attack,
which was one of the most terrible of the war or of any war, those men
got here in a single rush. They thus formed a point too far advanced in
the wave of attack, and were caught on the flanks between the
machine-guns posted to right and to left on the lines they had
overshot. It is some months now since death hollowed their eyes and
consumed their cheeks, but even in those storm-scattered and dissolving
remains one can identify the havoc of the machine-guns that destroyed
them, piercing their backs and loins and severing them in the middle.
By the side of heads black and waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with
grubs and the wreckage of insects, where white teeth still gleam in
some cavities, by the side of poor darkening stumps that abound like a
field of old roots laid bare, one discovers naked yellow skulls wearing
the red cloth fez, whose gray cover has crumbled like paper. Some
thigh-bones protrude from the heaps of rags stuck together with reddish
mud; and from the holes filled with clothes shredded and daubed with a
sort of tar, a spinal fragment emerges. Some ribs are scattered on the
soil like old cages broken; and close by, blackened leathers are
afloat, with water-bottles and drinking-cups pierced and flattened.
About a cloven knapsack, on the top of some bones and a cluster of bits
of cloth and accouterments, some white points are evenly scattered; by
stooping one can see that they are the finger and toe constructions of
what was once a corpse.
Sometimes only a rag emerges from long mounds to indicate that some
human being was there destroyed, for all these unburied dead end by
entering the soil.
The Germans, who were here yesterday, abandoned their soldiers by the
side of ours without interring them--as witness these three putrefied
corpses on the top of each other, in each other, with their round gray
caps whose red edge is hidden with a gray band, their yellow-gray
jackets, and their green faces. I look for the features of one of them.
From the depth of his neck up to the tufts of hair that stick to the
brim of his cap is just an earthy mass, the face become an anthill, and
two rotten berries in place of the eyes. Another is a dried emptiness
flat on its belly, the back in tatters that almost flutter, the hands,
feet, and face enrooted in the soil.
"Look! It's a new one, this--"
In the middle of the plateau and in the depth of the rainy and bitter
air, on the ghastly morrow of this debauch of slaughter, there is a
head planted in the ground, a wet and bloodless head, with a heavy
beard.
It is one of ours, and the helmet is beside it. The distended eyelids
permit a little to be seen of the dull porcelain of his eyes, and one
lip shines like a slug in the shapeless beard. No doubt he fell into a
shell-hole, which was filled up by another shell, burying him up to the
neck like the cat's-head German of the Red Tavern at Souchez.
"I don't know him," says Joseph, who has come up very slowly and speaks
with difficulty.
"I recognize him," replies Volpatte.
"That bearded man?" says Joseph.
"He has no beard. Look--" Stooping, Volpatte passes the end of his
stick under the chin of the corpse and breaks off a sort of slab of mud
in which the head was set, a slab that looked like a beard. Then he
picks up the dead man's helmet and puts it on his head, and for a
moment holds before the eyes the round handles of his famous scissors
so as to imitate spectacles.
"Ah!" we all cried together, "it's Cocon!"
When you hear of or see the death of one of those who fought by your
side and lived exactly the same life, you receive a direct blow in the
flesh before even understanding. It is truly as if one heard of his own
destruction. It is only later that one begins to mourn.
We look at the hideous head that is murder's jest, the murdered head
already and cruelly effacing our memories of Cocon. Another comrade
less. We remain there around him, afraid.
"He was--"
We should like to speak a little, but do not know what to say that
would be sufficiently serious or telling or true.
"Come," says Joseph, with an effort, wholly engrossed by his severe
suffering, "I haven't strength enough to be stopping all the time."
We leave poor Cocon, the ex-statistician, with a last look, a look too
short and almost vacant.
"One cannot imagine--" says Volpatte.
No, one cannot imagine. All these disappearances at once surpass the
imagination. There are not enough survivors now. But we have vague idea
of the grandeur of these dead. They have given all; by degrees they
have given all their strength, and finally they have given themselves,
en bloc. They have outpaced life, and their effort has something of
superhuman perfection.
* * * * *
"Tiens, he's just been wounded, that one, and yet--" A fresh wound is
moistening the neck of a body that is almost a skeleton.
"It's a rat," says Volpatte. "The stiffs are old ones, but the rats
talk to 'em. You see some rats laid out--poisoned, p'raps--near every
body or under it. Tiens, this poor old chap shall show us his." He
lifts up the foot of the collapsed remains and reveals two dead rats.
"I should like to find Farfadet again," says Volpatte. "I told him to
wait just when we started running and he clipped hold of me. Poor lad,
let's hope he waited!"
So he goes to and fro, attracted towards the dead by a strange
curiosity; and these, indifferent, bandy him about from one to another,
and at each step he looks on the ground. Suddenly he utters a cry of
distress. With his hand he beckons us as he kneels to a dead man.
Bertrand!
Acute emotion grips us. He has been killed; he, too, like the rest, he
who most towered over us by his energy and intelligence. By virtue of
always doing his duty, he has at last got killed. He has at last found
death where indeed it was.
We look at him, and then turn away from the sight and look upon each
other.
The shock of his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his remains
present, for they are abominable to see. Death has bestowed a grotesque
look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so tranquil. With
his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache trailing in his mouth,
and his face swollen--he is laughing. One eye is widely open, the other
shut, and the tongue lolls out. His arms are outstretched in the form
of a cross: the hands open, the fingers separated. The right leg is
straight. The left, whence flowed the hemorrhage that made him die, has
been broken by a shell; it is twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack,
invertebrate. A mournful irony has invested the last writhe of his
agony with the appearance of a clown's antic.
We arrange him, and lay him straight, and tranquillize the horrible
masks. Volpatte has taken a pocket-book from him and places it
reverently among his own papers, by the side of the portrait of his own
wife and children. That done, he shakes his head: "He--he was truly a
good sort, old man. When he said anything, that was the proof that it
was true. Ah, we needed him badly!"
"Yes," I said, "we had need of him always."
"Ah, la, la!" murmurs Volpatte, and he trembles. Joseph repeats in a
weak voice, "Ah, nom de Dieu! Ah, nom de Dieu!"
The plateau is as covered with people as a public square;
fatigue-parties in detachments, and isolated men. Here and there, the
stretcher-bearers are beginning (patiently and in a small way) their
huge and endless task.
Volpatte leaves us, to return to the trench and announce our new
losses, and above all the great gap left by Bertrand. He says to
Joseph, "We shan't lose sight of you, eh? Write us a line now and
again--just, 'All goes well; signed, Camembert,' eh?" He disappears
among the people who cross each other's path in the expanse now
completely possessed by a mournful and endless rain.
Joseph leans on me and we go down into the ravine. The slope by which
we descend is known as the Zouaves' Cells. In the May attack, the
Zouaves had all begun to dig themselves individual shelters, and round
these they were exterminated. Some are still seen, prone on the brim of
an incipient hole, with their trenching-tools in their fleshless hands
or looking at them with the cavernous hollows where shrivel the
entrails of eyes. The ground is so full of dead that the earth-falls
uncover places that bristle with feet, with half-clothed skeletons, and
with ossuaries of skulls placed side by side on the steep slope like
porcelain globe-jars.
In the ground here there are several strata of dead and in many places
the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set them out
in display on the top of the new ones. The bottom of the ravine is
completely carpeted with debris of weapons, clothing, and implements.
One tramples shell fragments, old iron, loaves and even biscuits that
have fallen from knapsacks and are not yet dissolved by the rain.
Mess-tins, pots of jam, and helmets are pierced and riddled by
bullets--the scrapings and scum of a hell-broth; and the dislocated
posts that survive are stippled with holes.
The trenches that run in this valley have a look of earthquake
crevasses, and as if whole tombs of uncouth things had been emptied on
the ruins of the earth's convulsion. And there, where no dead are, the
very earth is cadaverous.
We follow the International Trench, still fluttering with rainbow
rags--a shapeless trench which the confusion of torn stuffs invests
with an air of a trench assassinated--to a place where the irregular
and winding ditch forms an elbow. All the way along, as far as an
earthwork barricade that blocks the way, German corpses are entangled
and knotted as in a torrent of the damned, some of them emerging from
muddy caves in the middle of a bewildering conglomerate of beams,
ropes, creepers of iron, trench-rollers, hurdles, and bullet-screens.
At the barrier itself, one corpse stands upright, fixed in the other
dead, while another, planted in the same spot, stands obliquely in the
dismal place, the whole arrangement looking like part of a big wheel
embedded in the mud, or the shattered sail of a windmill. And over all
this, this catastrophe of flesh and filthiness, religious images are
broadcast, post-cards, pious pamphlets, leaflets on which prayers are
written in Gothic lettering--they have scattered themselves in waves
from gutted clothing. The paper words seem to bedeck with blossom these
shores of pestilence, this Valley of Death, with their countless
pallors of barren lies.
I seek a solid footway to guide Joseph in--his wound is paralyzing him
by degrees, and he feels it extending throughout his body. While I
support him, and he is looking at nothing, I look upon the ghastly
upheaval through which we are escaping.
A German sergeant is seated, here where we tread, supported by the
riven timbers that once formed the shelter of a sentry. There is a
little hole under his eye; the thrust of a bayonet has nailed him to
the planks through his face. In front of him, also sitting, with his
elbows on his knees and his fists on his chin, there is a man who has
all the top of his skull taken off like a boiled egg. Beside them--an
awful watchman!--the half of a man is standing, a man sliced in two
from scalp to stomach, upright against the earthen wall. I do not know
where the other half of this human post may be, whose eye hangs down
above and whose bluish viscera curl spirally round his leg.
Down below, one's foot detaches itself from a matrix of blood,
stiffened with French bayonets that have been bent, doubled, and
twisted by the force of the blow. Through a gap in the mutilated wall
one espies a recess where the bodies of soldiers of the Prussian Guard
seem to kneel in the pose of suppliants, run through from behind, with
blood-stained gaps, impaled. Out of this group they have pulled to its
edge a huge Senegalese tirailleur, who, petrified in the contorted
position where death seized him, leans upon empty air and holds fast by
his feet, staring at his two severed wrists. No doubt a bomb had
exploded in his hands; and since all his face is alive, he seems to be
gnawing maggots.
"It was here," says a passing soldier of an Alpine regiment, "that they
did the white flag trick; and as they'd got Africans to deal with, you
bet they got it hot!--Tiens, there's the white flag itself that these
dunghills used."
He seizes and shakes a long handle that lies there. A square of white
stuff is nailed to it, and unfolds itself innocently.
A procession of shovel-bearers advances along the battered trench. They
have an order to shovel the earth into the relics of the trenches, to
stop everything up, so that the bodies may be buried on the spot. Thus
these helmeted warriors will here perform the work of the redresser of
wrongs as they restore their full shape to the fields and make level
the cavities already half filled by cargoes of invaders.
* * * * *
Some one calls me from the other side of the trench, a man sitting on
the ground and leaning against a stake. It is Papa Ramure. Through his
unbuttoned greatcoat and jacket I see bandages around his chest. "The
ambulance men have been to tuck me up," he says, in a weak and
stertorous voice, "but they can't take me away from here before
evening. But I know all right that I'm petering out every minute."
He jerks his head. "Stay a bit," he asks me. He is much moved, and the
tears are flowing. He offers his hand and holds mine. He wants to say a
lot of things to me and almost to make confession. "I was a straight
man before the war," he says, with trickling tears; "I worked from
morning to night to feed my little lot. And then I came here to kill
Boches. And now, I've got killed. Listen, listen, listen, don't go
away, listen to me--"
"I must take Joseph back--he's at the end of his strength. I'll come
back afterwards."
Ramure lifted his streaming eyes to the wounded man. "Not only living,
but wounded! Escaped from death! Ah, some women and children are lucky!
All right, take him, take him, and come back--I hope I shall be waiting
for you--"
Now we must climb the other slope of the ravine, and we enter the
deformed and maltreated ditch of the old Trench 97.
Suddenly a frantic whistling tears the air and there is a shower of
shrapnel above us. Meteorites flash and scatter in fearful flight in
the heart of the yellow clouds. Revolving missiles rush through the
heavens to break and burn upon the bill, to ransack it and exhume the
old bones of men; and the thundering flames multiply themselves along
an even line.
It is the barrage fire beginning again. Like children we cry, "Enough,
enough!"
In this fury of fatal engines, this mechanical cataclysm that pursues
us through space, there is something that surpasses human strength and
will, something supernatural. Joseph, standing with his hand in mine,
looks over his shoulder at the storm of rending explosions. He bows his
head like an imprisoned beast, distracted: "What, again! Always, then!"
he growls; "after all we've done and all we've seen--and now it begins
again! Ah, non, non!"
He falls on his knees, gasps for breath, and throws a futile look of
full hatred before him and behind him. He repeats, "It's never
finished, never!"