We must dally there awhile before climbing, so I will go and bring back
Ramure in extremis, who is waiting for me. But Joseph clings to me, and
then I notice a movement of men about the spot where I left the dying
man. I can guess what it means; it is no longer worth while to go there.
The ground of the ravine where we two are closely clustered to abide
the tempest is quivering, and at each shot we feel the deep simoom of
the shells. But in the hole where we are there is scarcely any risk of
being hit. At the first lull, some of the men who were also waiting
detach themselves and begin to go up; stretcher-bearers redouble their
huge efforts to carry a body and climb, making one think of stubborn
ants pushed back by successive grains of sand; wounded men and liaison
men move again.
"Let's go on," says Joseph, with sagging shoulders, as he measures the
hill with his eye--the last stage of his Gethsemane.
There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of wide
countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on end. The
scene through which we are struggling is rent and convulsed, with hills
and chasms, and with such somber swellings as if all the clouds of
storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured earth, this stampeded
file of trunks stands forth against a striped brown sky, milky in
places and obscurely sparkling--a sky of agate.
Across the entry to Trench 97 a felled oak twists his great body, and a
corpse stops up the trench. Its head and legs are buried in the ground.
The dirty water that trickles in the trench has covered it with a sandy
glaze, and through the moist deposit the chest and belly bulge forth,
clad in a shirt. We stride over the frigid remains, slimy and pale,
that suggest the belly of a stranded crocodile; and it is difficult to
do so, by reason of the soft and slippery ground. We have to plunge our
hands up to the wrists in the mud of the wall.
At this moment an infernal whistle falls on us and we bend like bushes.
The shell bursts in the air in front of us, deafening and blinding, and
buries us under a horribly sibilant mountain of dark smoke. A climbing
soldier has churned the air with his arms and disappeared, hurled into
some hole. Shouts have gone up and fallen again like rubbish. While we
are looking, through the great black veil that the wind tears from the
ground and dismisses into the sky, at the bearers who are putting down
a stretcher, running to the place of the explosion and picking up
something inert--I recall the unforgettable scene when my
brother-in-arms, Poterloo, whose heart was so full of hope, vanished
with his arms outstretched in the flame of a shell.
We arrive at last on the summit, which is marked as with a signal by a
wounded and frightful man. He is upright in the wind, shaken but
upright, enrooted there. In his uplifted and wind-tossed cape we see a
yelling and convulsive face. We pass by him, and he is like a sort of
screaming tree.
* * * * *
We have arrived at our old first line, the one from which we set off
for the attack. We sit down on a firing-step with our backs to the
holes cut for our exodus at the last minute by the sappers. Euterpe,
the cyclist, passes and gives us good-day. Then he turns in his tracks
and draws from the cuff of his coat-sleeve an envelope, whose
protruding edge had conferred a white stripe on him.
"It's you, isn't it," he says to me, "that takes Biquet's letters
that's dead?"--"Yes."--"Here's a returned one; the address has hopped
it."
The envelope was exposed, no doubt, to rain on the top of a packet, and
the address is no longer legible among the violet mottlings on the
dried and frayed paper. Alone there survives in a corner the address of
the sender. I pull the letter out gently--"My dear mother"--Ah, I
remember! Biquet, now lying in the open air in the very trench where we
are halted, wrote that letter not long ago in our quarters at
Gauchin-l'Abbe, one flaming and splendid afternoon, in reply to a
letter from his mother, whose fears for him had proved groundless and
made him laugh--"You think I'm in the cold and rain and danger. Not at
all; on the contrary, all that's finished. It's hot, we're sweating,
and we've nothing to do only to stroll about in the sunshine. I laughed
to read your letter--"
I return to the frail and damaged envelope the letter which, if chance
had not averted this new irony, would have been read by the old peasant
woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet nothing in the
cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows like a dark
spring on the wall of the trench.
Joseph has leaned his head backwards. His eyes close for a moment, his
mouth half opens, and his breathing is fitful.
"Courage!" I say to him, and he opens his eyes again.
"Ah!" he replies, "it isn't to me you should say that. Look at those
chaps, there, they're going back yonder, and you too, you're going
back. It all has to go on for you others. Ah, one must be really strong
to go on, to go on!"