FROM this point onwards we are in sight of the enemy observation-posts,
and must no longer leave the communication trenches. First we follow
that of the Pylones road. The trench is cut along the side of the road,
and the road itself is wiped out; so are its trees. Half of it, all the
way along, has been chewed and swallowed by the trench; and what is
left of it has been invaded by the earth and the grass, and mingled
with the fields in the fullness of time. At some places in the
trench--there, where a sandbag has burst and left only a muddy
cell--you may see again on the level of your eyes the stony ballast of
the ex-road, cut to the quick, or even the roots of the bordering trees
that have been cut down to embody in the trench wall. The latter is as
slashed and uneven as if it were a wave of earth and rubbish and dark
scum that the immense plain has spat out and pushed against the edge of
the trench.
We arrive at a junction of trenches, and on the top of the maltreated
hillock which is outlined on the cloudy grayness, a mournful signboard
stands crookedly in the wind. The trench system becomes still more
cramped and close, and the men who are flowing towards the
clearing-station from all parts of the sector multiply and throng in
the deep-dug ways.
These lamentable lanes are staked out with corpses. At uneven intervals
their walls are broken into by quite recent gaps, extending to their
full depth, by funnelholes of fresh earth which trespass upon the
unwholesome land beyond, where earthy bodies are squatting with their
chins on their knees or leaning against the wall as straight and silent
as the rifles which wait beside them. Some of these standing dead turn
their blood-bespattered faces towards the survivors; others exchange
their looks with the sky's emptiness.
Joseph halts to take breath. I say to him as to a child, "We're nearly
there, we're nearly there."
The sinister ramparts of this way of desolation contract still more.
They impel a feeling of suffocation, of a nightmare of falling which
oppresses and strangles: and in these depths where the walls seem to be
coming nearer and closing in, you are forced to halt, to wriggle a path
for yourself, to vex and disturb the dead, to be pushed about by the
endless disorder of the files that flow along these hinder trenches,
files made up of messengers, of the maimed, of men who groan and who
cry aloud, who hurry frantically, crimsoned by fever or pallid and
visibly shaken by pain.
* * * * *
All this throng at last pulls up and gathers and groans at the
crossways where the burrows of the Refuge open out.
A doctor is trying with shouts and gesticulations to keep a little
space clear from the rising tide that beats upon the threshold of the
shelter, where he applies summary bandages in the open air; they say he
has not ceased to do it, nor his helpers either, all the night and all
the day, that he is accomplishing a superhuman task.
When they leave his hands, some of the wounded are swallowed up by the
black hole of the Refuge; others are sent back to the bigger
clearing-station contrived in the trench on the Bethune road.
In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in the
bottom of a sort of robbers' den, we waited two hours, buffeted,
squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle, in
an odor of blood and butchery. There are faces that become more
distorted and emaciated from minute to minute. One of the patients can
no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods, and as he shakes
his head he sprinkles his neighbors. Another, bleeding like a fountain,
shouts, "Hey, there! have a look at me!" A young man with burning eyes
yells like a soul in hell, "I'm on fire!" and he roars and blows like a
furnace.
* * * * *
Joseph is bandaged. He thrusts a way through to me and holds out his
hand: "It isn't serious, it seems; good-by," he says.
At once we are separated in the mob. With my last glance I see his
wasted face and the vacant absorption in his trouble as he is meekly
led away by a Divisional stretcher-bearer whose hand is on his
shoulder; and suddenly I see him no more. In war, life separates us
just as death does, without our having even the time to think about it.
They tell me not to stay there, but to go down into the Refuge to rest
before returning. There are two entries, very low and very narrow, on
the level of the ground. This one is flush with the mouth of a sloping
gallery, narrow as the conduit of a sewer. In order to penetrate the
Refuge, one must first turn round and work backwards with bent body
into the shrunken pipe, and here the feet discover steps. Every three
paces there is a deep step.
Once inside you have a first impression of being trapped--that there is
not room enough either to descend or climb out. As you go on burying
yourself in the gulf, the nightmare of suffocation continues that you
progressively endured as you advanced along the bowels of the trenches
before foundering in here. On all sides you bump and scrape yourself,
you are clutched by the tightness of the passage, you are wedged and
stuck. I have to change the position of my cartridge pouches by sliding
them round the belt and to take my bags in my arms against my chest. At
the fourth step the suffocation increases still more and one has a
moment of agony; little as one may lift his knee for the rearward step,
his back strikes the roof. In this spot it is necessary to go on all
fours, still backwards. As you go down into the depth, a pestilent
atmosphere and heavy as earth buries you. Your hands touch only the
cold, sticky and sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on
all sides and enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy
breath touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor,
one is assailed by a hot, unearthly clamor that rises from the hole as
from a sort of kitchen.
When you reach at last the bottom of this laddered sap that elbows and
compresses you at every step, the evil dream is not ended, for you find
yourself in a lone but very narrow cavern where gloom reigns, a mere
corridor not more than five feet high. If you cease to stoop and to
walk with bended knees, your head violently strikes the planks that
roof the Refuge, and the newcomers are heard to growl--more or less
forcefully, according to their temper and condition--"Ah, lucky I've
got my tin hat on:"
One makes out the gesture of some one who is squatting in an angle. It
is an ambulance man on guard, whose monotone says to each arrival,
"Take the mud off your boots before going in." So you stumble into an
accumulating pile of mud; it entangles you at the foot of the steps on
this threshold of hell.
In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a
countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of confused
and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings. Some weak
candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only relieve the
darkness in the spots where they pierce it. At the farthest end faint
daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon prisoner at the bottom of an
oubliette. This obscure vent-hole allows one to make out some big
objects ranged along the corridor; they are low stretchers, like
coffins. Around and above them one then dimly discerns the movement of
broken and drooping shadows, and the stirring of ranks and groups of
specters against the walls.
I turn round. At the end opposite that where the faraway light leaks
through, a mob is gathered in front of a tent-cloth which reaches from
the ceiling to the ground, and thus forms an apartment, whose
illumination shines through the oily yellow material. In this retreat,
anti-tetanus injections are going on by the light of an acetylene lamp.
When the cloth is lifted to allow some one to enter or leave, the glare
brutally besplashes the disordered rags of the wounded stationed in
front to await their treatment. Bowed by the ceiling, seated, kneeling
or groveling, they push each other in the desire not to lose their turn
or to steal some other's, and they bark like dogs, "My
turn!"--"Me!"--"Me!" In this corner of modified conflict the tepid
stinks of acetylene and bleeding men are horrible to swallow.
I turn away from it and seek elsewhere to find a place where I may sit
down. I go forward a little, groping, still stooping and curled up, and
my hands in front.
By grace of the flame which a smoker holds over his pipe I see a bench
before me, full of beings. My eyes are growing accustomed to the gloom
that stagnates in the cave, and I can make out pretty well this row of
people whose bandages and swathings dimly whiten their heads and limbs.
Crippled, gashed, deformed, motionless or restless, fast fixed in this
kind of barge, they present an incongruous collection of suffering and
misery.
One of them cries out suddenly, half rises, and then sits down again.
His neighbor, whose greatcoat is torn and his head bare, looks at him
and says to him--"What's the use of worrying?"
And he repeats the sentence several times at random, gazing straight in
front of him, his hands on his knees. A young man in the middle of the
seat is talking to himself. He says that he is an aviator. There are
burns down one side of his body and on his face. In his fever he is
still burning; it seems to him that he is still gnawed by the pointed
flames that leaped from his engine. He is muttering, "Gott mit uns!"
and then, "God is with us!"
A zouave with his arm in a sling, who sits awry and seems to carry his
shoulder like a torturing burden, speaks to him: "You're the aviator
that fell, aren't you?"
"I've seen--things," replies the flying-man laboriously.
"I too, I've seen some!" the soldier interrupts; "some people couldn't
stick it, to see what I've seen."
"Come and sit here," says one of the men on the seat to me, making room
as he speaks. "Are you wounded?"
"No; I brought a wounded man here, and I'm going back."
"You're worse than wounded then; come and sit down."
"I was mayor in my place," explains one of the sufferers, "but when I
go back no one will know me again, it's so long now that I've been in
misery."
"Four hours now have I been stuck on this bench," groans a sort of
mendicant, whose shaking hand holds his helmet on his knees like an
alms-bowl, whose head is lowered and his back rounded.
"We're waiting to be cleared, you know," I am informed by a big man who
pants and sweats--all the bulk of him seems to be boiling. His mustache
hangs as if it had come half unstuck through the moisture of his face.
He turns two big and lightless eyes on me, and his wound is not visible.
"That's so," says another; "all the wounded of the Brigade come and
pile themselves up here one after another, without counting them from
other places. Yes, look at it now; this hole here, it's the midden for
the whole Brigade."
"I'm gangrened, I'm smashed, I'm all in bits inside," droned one who
sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; "yet up
to last week I was young and I was clean. They've changed me. Now, I've
got nothing but a dirty old decomposed body to drag along."
"Yesterday," says another, "I was twenty-six years old. And now how old
am I?" He tries to get up, so as to show us his shaking and faded face,
worn out in a night, to show us the emaciation, the depression of
cheeks and eye-sockets, and the dying flicker of light in his greasy
eye.
"It hurts!" humbly says some one invisible.
"What's the use of worrying?" repeats the other mechanically.
There was a silence, and then the aviator cried, "The padres were
trying on both sides to hide their voices."
"What's that mean?" said the astonished zouave.
"Are you taking leave of 'em, old chap?" asked a chasseur wounded in
the hand and with one arm bound to his body, as his eyes left the
mummified limb for a moment to glance at the flying-man.
The latter's looks were distraught; he was trying to interpret a
mysterious picture which everywhere he saw before his eyes--"Up there,
from the sky, you don't see much, you know. Among the squares of the
fields and the little heaps of the villages the roads run like white
cotton. You can make out, too, some hollow threads that look as if
they'd been traced with a pin-point and scratched through fine sand.
These nets that festoon the plain with regularly wavy marks, they're
the trenches. Last Sunday morning I was flying over the firing-line.
Between our first lines and their first lines, between their extreme
edges, between the fringes of the two huge armies that are up against
each other, looking at each other and not seeing, and waiting--it's not
very far; sometimes forty yards, sometimes sixty. To me it looked about
a stride, at the great height where I was planing. And behold I could
make out two crowds, one among the Boches, and one of ours, in these
parallel lines that seemed to touch each other; each was a solid,
lively lump, and all around 'em were dots like grains of black sand
scattered on gray sand, and these hardly budged--it didn't look like an
alarm! So I went down several turns to investigate.
"Then I understood. It was Sunday, and there were two religious
services being held under my eyes--the altar, the padre, and all the
crowd of chaps. The more I went down the more I could see that the two
things were alike--so exactly alike that it looked silly. One of the
services--whichever you like--was a reflection of the other, and I
wondered if I was seeing double. I went down lower; they didn't fire at
me. Why? I don't know at all. Then I could hear. I heard one murmur,
one only. I could only gather a single prayer that came up to me en
bloc, the sound of a single chant that passed by me on its way to
heaven. I went to and fro in space to listen to this faint mixture of
hymns that blended together just the same although they were one
against the other; and the more they tried to get on top of each other,
the more they were blended together up in the heights of the sky where
I was floating.
"I got some shrapnel just at the moment when, very low down, I made out
the two voices from the earth that made up the one--'Gott mit uns!' and
'God is with us!'--and I flew away."
The young man shook his bandage-covered head; he seemed deranged by the
recollection. "I said to myself at the moment, 'I must be mad!'"
"It's the truth of things that's mad," said the zouave.
With his eyes shining in delirium, the narrator sought to express and
convey the deep disturbing idea that was besieging him, that he was
struggling against.
"Now think of it!" he said. "Fancy those two identical crowds yelling
things that are identical and yet opposite, these identical enemy
cries! What must the good God think about it all? I know well enough
that He knows everything, but even if He knows everything, He won't
know what to make of it."
"Rot!" cried the zouave.
"He doesn't care a damn for us, don't fret yourself."
"Anyway, what is there funny about it? That doesn't prevent people from
quarreling with each other--and don't they! And rifle-shots speak jolly
well the same language, don't they?"
"Yes," said the aviator, "but there's only one God. It isn't the
departure of prayers that I don't understand; it's their arrival."
The conversation dropped.
"There's a crowd of wounded laid out in there," the man with the dull
eyes said to me, "and I'm wondering all ways how they got 'em down
here. It must have been a terrible job, tumbling them in here."
Two Colonials, hard and lean, supporting each other like tipsy men,
butted into us and recoiled, looking on the ground for some place to
fall on.
"Old chap, in that trench I'm telling you of," the hoarse voice of one
was relating, "we were three days without rations, three full days
without anything--anything. Willy-nilly, we had to drink our own water,
and no help for it."
The other explained that once on a time he had cholera. "Ah, that's a
dirty business--fever, vomiting, colics; old man, I was ill with that
lot!"
"And then, too," suddenly growled the flying-man, still fierce to
pursue the answer to the gigantic conundrum, "what is this God thinking
of to let everybody believe like that that He's with them? Why does He
let us all--all of us--shout out side by side, like idiots and brutes,
'God is with us!'--'No, not at all, you're wrong; God is with us'?"
A groan arose from a stretcher, and for a moment fluttered lonely in
the silence as if it were an answer.
* * * * *
Then, "I don't believe in God," said a pain-racked voice; "I know He
doesn't exist--because of the suffering there is. They can tell us all
the clap-trap they like, and trim up all the words they can find and
all they can make up, but to say that all this innocent suffering could
come from a perfect God, it's damned skull-stuffing."
"For my part," another of the men on the seat goes on, "I don't believe
in God because of the cold. I've seen men become corpses bit by bit,
just simply with cold. If there was a God of goodness, there wouldn't
be any cold. You can't get away from that."
"Before you can believe in God, you've got to do away with everything
there is. So we've got a long way to go!"
Several mutilated men, without seeing each other, combine in
head-shakes of dissent "You're right," says another, "you're right."
These men in ruins, vanquished in victory, isolated and scattered, have
the beginnings of a revelation. There come moments in the tragedy of
these events when men are not only sincere, but truth-telling, moments
when you see that they and the truth are face to face.
"As for me," said a new speaker, "if I don't believe in God, it's--" A
fit of coughing terribly continued his sentence.
When the fit passed and his cheeks were purple and wet with tears, some
one asked him, "Where are you wounded?"
"I'm not wounded; I'm ill."
"Oh, I see!" they said, in a tone which meant "You're not interesting."
He understood, and pleaded the cause of his illness:
"I'm done in, I spit blood. I've no strength left, and it doesn't come
back, you know, when it goes away like that."
"Ah, ah!" murmured the comrades--wavering, but secretly convinced all
the same of the inferiority of civilian ailments to wounds.
In resignation he lowered his head and repeated to himself very
quietly, "I can't walk any more; where would you have me go?"
* * * * *
A commotion is arising for some unknown reason in the horizontal gulf
which lengthens as it contracts from stretcher to stretcher as far as
the eye can see, as far as the pallid peep of daylight, in this
confused corridor where the poor winking flames of candles redden and
seem feverish, and winged shadows cast themselves. The odds and ends of
heads and limbs are agitated, appeals and cries arouse each other and
increase in number like invisible ghosts. The prostrate bodies
undulate, double up, and turn over.
In the heart of this den of captives, debased and punished by pain, I
make out the big mass of a hospital attendant whose heavy shoulders
rise and fall like a knapsack carried crosswise, and whose stentorian
voice reverberates at speed through the cave. "You've been meddling
with your bandage again, you son of a lubber, you varmint!" he
thunders. "I'll do it up again for you, as long as it's you, my chick,
but if you touch it again, you'll see what I'll do to you!"
Behold him then in the obscurity, twisting a bandage round the cranium
of a very little man who is almost upright, who has bristling hair and
a beard which puffs out in front. With dangling arms, he submits in
silence. But the attendant abandons him, looks on the ground and
exclaims sonorously, "What the--? Eh, come now, my friend, are you
cracked? There's manners for you, to lie down on the top of a patient!"
And his capacious hand disengages a second limp body on which the first
had extended himself as on a mattress; while the mannikin with the
bandaged head alongside, as soon as he is let alone, puts his hands to
his head without saying a word and tries once more to remove the
encircling lint.
There is an uproar, too, among some shadows that are visible against a
luminous background; they seem to be wildly agitated in the gloom of
the crypt. The light of a candle shows us several men shaken with their
efforts to hold a wounded soldier down on his stretcher. It is a man
whose feet are gone. At the end of his legs are terrible bandages, with
tourniquets to restrain the hemorrhage. His stumps have bled into the
linen wrappings, and he seems to wear red breeches. His face is
devilish, shining and sullen, and he is raving. They are pressing down
on his shoulders and knees, for this man without feet would fain jump
from the stretcher and go away.
"Let me go!" he rattles in breathless, quavering rage. His voice is
low, with sudden sonorities, like a trumpet that one tries to blow too
softly. "By God, let me go, I tell you! Do you think I'm going to stop
here? Allons, let me be, or I'll jump over you on my hands!"
So violently he contracts and extends himself that he pulls to and fro
those who are trying to restrain him by their gripping weight, and I
can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose other
arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely that he
wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the rest. On all
sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen to the incoherent
lamentations which end by dying in the dark. At the same moment, in
another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified on the ground, so
curse each other that one of them has to be removed before the frantic
dialogue is broken up.
I go farther away, towards the point where the light from outside comes
through among the tangled beams as through a broken grating, and stride
over the interminable stretchers that take up all the width of the
underground alley whose oppressive confinement chokes me. The human
forms prone on the stretchers are now hardly stirring under the
Jack-o'-lanterns of the candles; they stagnate in their rattling breath
and heavy groans.
On the edge of a stretcher a man is sitting, leaning against the wall.
His clothes are torn apart, and in the middle of their darkness appears
the white, emaciated breast of a martyr. His head is bent quite back
and veiled in shadow, but I can see the beating of his heart.
The daylight that is trickling through at the end, drop by drop, comes
in by an earth-fall. Several shells, falling on the same spot, have
broken through the heavy earthen roof of the Refuge.
Here, some pale reflections are cast on the blue of the greatcoats, on
the shoulders and along the folds. Almost paralyzed by the darkness and
their own weakness, a group of men is pressing towards the gap, like
dead men half awaking, to taste a little of the pallid air and detach
themselves from the sepulcher. This corner at the extremity of the
gloom offers itself as a way of escape, an oasis where one may stand
upright, where one is lightly, angelically touched by the light of
heaven.
"There were some chaps there that were blown to bits when the shells
burst," said some one to me who was waiting there in the sickly ray of
entombed light. "You talk about a mess! Look, there's the padre hooking
down what was blown up."
The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter's chestnut waistcoat which
gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails
twisted among the beams of the shattered woodwork. For the purpose he
is using a rifle with fixed bayonet, since he could not find a stick
long enough; and the heavy giant, bald, bearded and asthmatic, wields
the weapon awkwardly. He has a mild face, meek and unhappy, and while
he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the corners, he mutters
a string of "Oh's!" like sighs. His eyes are masked by blue glasses;
his breathing is noisy. The top of his head is of puny dimensions, and
the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape. To see him thus
pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of
flesh, you could take him for a butcher at some fiendish task.
But I let myself fall in a corner with my eyes half closed, seeing
hardly anything of the spectacle that lies and palpitates and falls
around me. Indistinctly I gather some fragments of sentences--still the
horrible monotony of the story of wounds: "Nom de Dieu! In that place I
should think the bullets were touching each other."--"His head was
bored through from one temple to the other. You could have passed a
thread through."
"Those beggars were an hour before they lifted their fire and stopped
peppering us." Nearer to me some one gabbles at the end of his story,
"When I'm sleeping I dream that I'm killing him over again!"
Other memories are called up and buzz about among the buried wounded;
it is like the purring of countless gear-wheels in a machine that turns
and turns. And I hear afar him who repeats from his seat, "What's the
use of worrying?" in all possible tones, commanding a pitiful,
sometimes like a prophet and anon like one shipwrecked; he metrifies
with his cry the chorus of choking and plaintive voices that try so
terribly to extol their suffering.
Some one comes forward, blindly feeling the wall with his stick, and
reaches me. It is Farfadet! I call him, and he turns nearly towards me
to tell me that one eye is gone, and the other is bandaged as well. I
give him my place, take him by the shoulders and make him sit down. He
submits, and seated at the base of the wall waits patiently, with the
resignation of his clerkly calling, as if in a waiting-room.
I come to anchor a little farther away, in an empty space where two
prostrate men are talking to each other in low voices; they are so near
to me that I hear them without listening. They are two soldiers of the
Foreign Legion; their helmets and greatcoats are dark yellow.
"It's not worth while to make-believe about it," says one of them
banteringly. "I'm staying here this time. It's finished--my bowels are
shot through. If I were in a hospital, in a town, they'd operate on me
in time, and it might stick up again. But here! It was yesterday I got
it. We're two or three hours from the Bethune road, aren't we? And how
many hours, think you, from the road to an ambulance where they can
operate? And then, when are they going to pick us up? It's nobody's
fault, I dare say; but you've got to look facts in the face. Oh, I know
it isn't going to be any worse from now than it is, but it can't be
long, seeing I've a hole all the way through my parcel of guts. You,
your foot'll get all right, or they'll put you another one on. But I'm
going to die."
"Ah!" said the other, convinced by the reasoning of his neighbor. The
latter goes on--"Listen, Dominique. You've led a bad life. You cribbed
things, and you were quarrelsome when drunk. You've dirtied your ticket
in the police register, properly."
"I can't say it isn't true, because it is," says the other; "but what
have you got to do with it?"
"You'll lead a bad life again after the war, inevitably; and then
you'll have bother about that affair of the cooper."
The other becomes fierce and aggressive. "What the hell's it to do with
you? Shut your jaw!"
"As for me, I've no more family than you have. I've nobody, except
Louise--and she isn't a relation of mine, seeing we're not married. And
there are no convictions against me, beyond a few little military jobs.
There's nothing on my name."
"Well, what about it? I don't care a damn."
"I'm going to tell you. Take my name. Take it--I give it you; as long
as neither of us has any family."
"Your name?"
"Yes; you'll call yourself Leonard Carlotti, that's all. 'Tisn't a big
job. What harm can it do you? Straight off, you've no more convictions.
They won't hunt you out, and you can be as happy as I should have been
if this bullet hadn't gone through my magazine."
"Oh Christ!" said the other, "you'd do that? You'd--that--well, old
chap, that beats all!"
"Take it. It's there in my pocket-book in my greatcoat. Go on, take it,
and hand yours over to me--so that I can carry it all away with me.
You'll be able to live where you like, except where I come from, where
I'm known a bit, at Longueville in Tunis. You'll remember that? And
anyway, it's written down. You must read it, the pocket-book. I shan't
blab to anybody. To bring the trick off properly, mum's the word,
absolutely."
He ponders a moment, and then says with a shiver "I'll p'raps tell
Louise, so's she'll find I've done the right thing, and think the
better of me, when I write to her to say good-by."
But he thinks better of it, and shakes his head with an heroic effort.
"No--I shan't let on, even to her. She's her, of course, but women are
such chatterers!"