EVENING is falling upon the trench. All through the day it has been
drawing near, invisible as fate, and now it encroaches on the banks of
the long ditches like the lips of a wound infinitely great.
We have talked, eaten, slept, and written in the bottom of the trench
since the morning. Now that evening is here, an eddying springs up in
the boundless crevice; it stirs and unifies the torpid disorder of the
scattered men. It is the hour when we arise and work.
Volpatte and Tirette approach each other. "Another day gone by, another
like the rest of 'em," says Volpatte, looking at the darkening sky.
"You're off it; our day isn't finished," replies Tirette, whose long
experience of calamity has taught him that one must not jump to
conclusions, where we are, even in regard to the modest future of a
commonplace evening that has already begun.
"Allons! Muster!" We join up with the laggard inattention of custom.
With himself each man brings his rifle, his pouches of cartridges, his
water-bottle, and a pouch that contains a lump of bread. Volpatte is
still eating, with protruding and palpitating cheek. Paradis, with
purple nose and chattering teeth, growls. Fouillade trails his rifle
along like a broom. Marthereau looks at a mournful handkerchief,
rumpled and stiff, and puts it back in his pocket. A cold drizzle is
falling, and everybody shivers.
Down yonder we hear a droning chant--"Two shovels, one pick, two
shovels, one pick----" The file trickles along to the tool-store,
stagnates at the door, and departs, bristling with implements.
"Everybody here? Gee up!" says the sergeant. Downward and rolling, we
go forward. We know not where we go. We know nothing, except that the
night and the earth are blending in the same abyss.
As we emerge into the nude twilight from the trench, we see it already
black as the crater of a dead volcano. Great gray clouds,
storm-charged, hang from the sky. The plain, too, is gray in the pallid
light; the grass is muddy, and all slashed with water. The things which
here and there seem only distorted limbs are denuded trees. We cannot
see far around us in the damp reek; besides, we only look downwards at
the mud in which we slide--"Porridge!"
Going across country we knead and pound a sticky paste which spreads
out and flows back from every step--"Chocolate cream--coffee creams!"
On the stony parts, the wiped-out ruins of roads that have become
barren as the fields, the marching troop breaks through a layer of
slime into a flinty conglomerate that grates and gives way under our
iron-shod soles--"Seems as if we were walking on buttered toast!"
On the slope of a knoll sometimes, the mud is black and thick and
deep-rutted, like that which forms around the horse-ponds in villages,
and in these ruts there are lakes and puddles and ponds, whose edges
seem to be in rags.
The pleasantries of the wags, who in the early freshness of the journey
had cried, "Quack, quack," when they went through the water, are now
becoming rare and gloomy; gradually the jokers are damped down. The
rain begins to fall heavily. The daylight dwindles, and the confusion
that is space contracts. The last lingering light welters on the ground
and in the water.
A steaming silhouette of men like monks appears through the rain in the
west. It is a company of the 204th, wrapped in tent-cloths. As we go by
we see the pale and shrunken faces and the dark noses of these dripping
prowlers before they disappear. The track we are following through the
faint grass of the fields is itself a sticky field streaked with
countless parallel ruts, all plowed in the same line by the feet and
the wheels of those who go to the front and those who go to the rear.
We have to jump over gaping trenches, and this is not always easy, for
the edges have become soft and slippery, and earth-falls have widened
them. Fatigue, too, begins to bear upon our shoulders. Vehicles cross
our path with a great noise and splashing. Artillery limbers prance by
and spray us heavily. The motor lorries are borne on whirling circles
of water around the wheels, with spirting tumultuous spokes.
As the darkness increases, the jolted vehicles and the horses' necks
and the profiles of the riders with their floating cloaks and slung
carbines stand out still more fantastically against the misty floods
from the sky. Here, there is a block of ammunition carts of the
artillery. The horses are standing and trampling as we go by. We hear
the creaking of axles, shouts, disputes, commands which collide, and
the roar of the ocean of rain. Over the confused scuffle we can see
steam rising from the buttocks of the teams and the cloaks of the
horsemen.
"Look out!" Something is laid out on the ground on our right--a row of
dead. As we go by, our feet instinctively avoid them and our eyes
search them. We see upright boot-soles, outstretched necks, the hollows
of uncertain faces, hands half clenched in the air over the dark medley.
We march and march, over fields still ghostly and foot-worn, under a
sky where ragged clouds unfurl themselves upon the blackening
expanse--which seems to have befouled itself by prolonged contact with
so many multitudes of sorry humanity.
Then we go down again into the communication trenches. To reach them we
make a wide circuit, so that the rearguard can see the whole company, a
hundred yards away, deployed in the gloom, little obscure figures
sticking to the slopes and following each other in loose order, with
their tools amid their rifles pricking up on each side of their heads,
a slender trivial line that plunges in and raises its arms as if in
entreaty.
These trenches--still of the second lines--are populous. On the
thresholds of the dug-outs, where cart-cloths and skins of animals hang
and flap, squatting and bearded men watch our passing with
expressionless eyes, as if they were looking at nothing. From beneath
other cloths, drawn down to the ground, feet are projected, and snores.
"Nom de Dieu! It's a long way!" the trampers begin to grumble. There is
an eddy and recoil in the flow.
"Halt!" The stop is to let others go by. We pile ourselves up, cursing,
on the walls of the trench. It is a company of machine-gunners with
their curious burdens.
There seems to be no end to it, and the long halts are wearying.
Muscles are beginning to stretch. The everlasting march is overwhelming
us. We have hardly got going again when we have to recoil once more
into a traverse to let the relief of the telephonists go by. We back
like awkward cattle, and restart more heavily.
"Look out for the wire!" The telephone wire undulates above the trench,
and crosses it in places between two posts. When it is too slack, its
curve sags into the trench and catches the rifles of passing men, and
the ensnared ones struggle, and abuse the engineers who don't know how
to fix up their threads.
Then, as the drooping entanglement of precious wires increases, we
shoulder our rifles with the butt in the air, carry the shovels under
our arms, and go forward with lowered heads.
* * * * *
Our progress now is suddenly checked, and we only advance step by step,
locked in each other. The head of the column must be in difficult case.
We reach a spot where failing ground leads to a yawning hole--the
Covered Trench. The others have disappeared through the low doorway.
"We've got to go into this blackpudding, then?"
Every man hesitates before ingulfing himself in the narrow underground
darkness, and it is the total of these hesitations and lingerings that
is reflected in the rear sections of the column in the form of
wavering, obstruction, and sometimes abrupt shocks.
From our first steps in the Covered Trench, a heavy darkness settles on
us and divides us from each other. The damp odor of a swamped cave
steals into us. In the ceiling of the earthen corridor that contains
us, we can make out a few streaks and holes of pallor--the chinks and
rents in the overhead planks. Little streams of water flow freely
through them in places, and in spite of tentative groping we stumble on
heaped-up timber. Alongside, our knocks discover the dim vertical
presence of the supporting beams.
The air in this interminable tunnel is vibrating heavily. It is the
searchlight engine that is installed there--we have to pass in front of
it.
After we have felt our deep-drowned way for a quarter of an hour, some
one who is overborne by the darkness and the wet, and tired of bumping
into unknown people, growls, "I don't care--I'm going to light up."
The brilliant beam of a little electric lamp flashes out, and instantly
the sergeant bellows, "Ye gods! Who's the complete ass that's making a
light? Are you daft? Don't you know it can be seen, you scab, through
the roof?"
The flash-lamp, after revealing some dark and oozing walls in its cone
of light, retires into the night. "Not much you can't see it!" jeers
the man, "and anyway we're not in the first lines." "Ah, that can't be
seen!"
The sergeant, wedged into the file and continuing to advance, appears
to be turning round as he goes and attempting some forceful
observations--"You gallows-bird! You damned dodger!" But suddenly he
starts a new roar--"What! Another man smoking now! Holy hell!" This
time he tries to halt, but in vain he rears himself against the wall
and struggles to stick to it. He is forced precipitately to go with the
stream and is carried away among his own shouts, which return and
swallow him up, while the cigarette, the cause of his rage, disappears
in silence.
* * * * *
The jerky beat of the engine grows louder, and an increasing heat
surrounds us. The overcharged air of the trench vibrates more and more
as we go forward. The engine's jarring note soon hammers our ears and
shakes us through. Still it gets hotter; it is like some great animal
breathing in our faces. The buried trench seems to be leading us down
and down into the tumult of some infernal workshop, whose dark-red glow
is sketching out our huge and curving shadows in purple on the walls.
In a diabolical crescendo of din, of hot wind and of lights, we flow
deafened towards the furnace. One would think that the engine itself
was hurling itself through the tunnel to meet us, like a frantic
motor-cyclist drawing dizzily near with his headlight and destruction.
Scorched and half blinded, we pass in front of the red furnace and the
black engine, whose flywheel roars like a hurricane, and we have hardly
time to make out the movements of men around it. We shut our eyes,
choked by the contact of this glaring white-hot breath.
Now, the noise and the heat are raging behind us and growing feebler,
and my neighbor mutters in his beard, "And that idiot that said my lamp
would be seen!"
And here is the free air! The sky is a very dark blue, of the same
color as the earth and little lighter. The rain becomes worse and
worse, and walking is laborious in the heavy slime. The whole boot
sinks in, and it is a labor of acute pain to withdraw the foot every
time. Hardly anything is left visible in the night, but at the exit
from the hole we see a disorder of beams which flounder in the widened
trench--some demolished dugout.
Just at this moment, a searchlight's unearthly arm that was swinging
through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of
uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with dead
soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs on its
back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with clotted drops,
covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in its arms that it has
only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of a circle, has been
stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are laid bare. Another,
outstretched on the edge of the heap, has thrown his hand across our
path; and in this place where there no traffic except by night--for the
trench is blocked just there by the earth-fall and inaccessible by
day--every one treads on that hand. By the searchlight's shaft I saw it
clearly, fleshless and worn, a sort of withered fin.
The rain is raging and the sound of its streaming dominates
everything--a horror of desolation. We feel the water on our flesh as
if the deluge had washed our clothes away.
We enter the open trench, and the embrace of night and storm resumes
the sole possession of this confusion of corpses, stranded and cramped
on a square of earth as on a raft.
The wind freezes the drops of sweat on our foreheads. It is near
midnight. For six hours now we have marched in the increasing burden of
the mud. This is the time when the Paris theaters are constellated with
electroliers and blossoming with lamps; when they are filled with
luxurious excitement, with the rustle of skirts, with merrymaking and
warmth; when a fragrant and radiant multitude, chatting, laughing,
smiling, applauding, expanding, feels itself pleasantly affected by the
cleverly graduated emotions which the comedy evokes, and lolls in
contented enjoyment of the rich and splendid pageants of military
glorification that crowd the stage of the music-hall.
"Aren't we there? Nom de Dieu, shan't we ever get there?" The groan is
breathed by the long procession that tosses about in these crevices of
the earth, carrying rifles and shovels and pickaxes under the eternal
torrent. We march and march. We are drunk with fatigue, and roll to
this side and that. Stupefied and soaked, we strike with our shoulders
a substance as sodden as ourselves.
"Halt!"--"Are we there?"--"Ah, yes, we're there!"
For the moment a heavy recoil presses us back and then a murmur runs
along: "We've lost ourselves." The truth dawns on the confusion of the
wandering horde. We have taken the wrong turn at some fork, and it will
be the deuce of a job to find the right way again.
Then, too, a rumor passes from mouth to mouth that a fighting company
on its way to the lines is coming up behind us. The way by which we
have come is stopped up with men. It is the block absolute.
At all costs we must try to regain the lost trench--which is alleged to
be on our left--by trickling through some sap or other. Utterly wearied
and unnerved, the men break into gesticulations and violent reproaches.
They trudge awhile, then drop their tools and halt. Here and there are
compact groups--you can glimpse them by the light of the
star-shells--who have let themselves fall to the ground. Scattered afar
from south to north, the troop waits in the merciless rain.
The lieutenant who is in charge and has led us astray, wriggles his way
along the men in quest of some lateral exit. A little trench appears,
shallow and narrow.
"We must go that way, no doubt about it," the officer hastens to say.
"Come, forward, boys."
Each man sulkily picks up his burden. But a chorus of oaths and curses
rises from the first who enter the little sap: "It's a latrine!"
A disgusting smell escapes from the trench, and those inside halt butt
into each other, and refuse to advance. We are all jammed against each
other and block up the threshold.
"I'd rather climb out and go in the open!" cries a man. But there are
flashes rending the sky above the embankments on all sides, and the
sight is so fearsome of these jets of resounding flame that overhang
our pit and its swarming shadows that no one responds to the madman's
saying.
Willing or unwilling, since we cannot go back, we must even take that
way. "Forward into the filth!" cries the leader of the troop. We plunge
in, tense with repulsion. Bullets are whistling over. "Lower your
heads!" The trench has little depth; one must stoop very low to avoid
being hit, and the stench becomes intolerable. At last we emerge into
the communication trench that we left in error. We begin again to
march. Though we march without end we arrive nowhere.
While we wander on, dumb and vacant, in the dizzy stupefaction of
fatigue, the stream which is running in the bottom of the trench
cleanses our befouled feet.
The roars of the artillery succeed each other faster and faster, till
they make but a single roar upon all the earth. From all sides the
gunfire and the bursting shells hurl their swift shafts of light and
stripe confusedly the black sky over our heads. The bombardment then
becomes so intense that its illumination has no break. In the
continuous chain of thunderbolts we can see each other clearly--our
helmets streaming like the bodies of fishes, our sodden leathers, the
shovel-blades black and glistening; we can even see the pale drops of
the unending rain. Never have I seen the like of it; in very truth it
is moonlight made by gunfire.
Together there mounts from our lines and from the enemy's such a cloud
of rockets that they unite and mingle in constellations; at one moment,
to light us on our hideous way, there was a Great Bear of star-shells
in the valley of the sky that we could see between the parapets.
* * * * *
We are lost again, and this time we must be close to the first lines;
but a depression in this part of the plain forms a sort of basin,
overrun by shadows. We have marched along a sap and then back again. In
the phosphorescent vibration of the guns, shimmering like a
cinematograph, we make out above the parapet two stretcher-bearers
trying to cross the trench with their laden stretcher.
The lieutenant, who at least knows the place where he should guide the
team of workers, questions them, "Where is the New Trench?"--"Don't
know." From the ranks another question is put to them, "How far are we
from the Boches?" They make no reply, as they are talking among
themselves.
"I'm stopping," says the man in front; "I'm too tired."
"Come, get on with you, nom de Dieu!" says the other in a surly tone
and floundering heavily, his arms extended by the stretcher. "We can't
stop and rust here."
They put the stretcher down on the parapet, the edge of it overhanging
the trench, and as we pass underneath we can see the prostrate man's
feet. The rain which falls on the stretcher drains from it darkened.
"Wounded?" some one asks down below.
"No, a stiff," growls the bearer this time, "and he weighs twelve stone
at least. Wounded I don't mind--for two days and two nights we haven't
left off carrying 'em--but it's rotten, breaking yourself up with
lugging dead men about." And the bearer, upright on the edge of the
bank, drops a foot to the base of the opposite bank across the cavity,
and with his legs wide apart, laboriously balanced, he grips the
stretcher and begins to draw it across, calling on his companion to
help him.
A little farther we see the stooping form of a hooded officer, and as
he raises his hand to his face we see two gold lines on his sleeve. He,
surely, will tell us the way. But he addresses us, and asks if we have
not seen the battery he is looking for. We shall never get there!
But we do, all the same. We finish up in a field of blackness where a
few lean posts are bristling. We climb up to it, and spread out in
silence. This is the spot.
The placing of us is an undertaking. Four separate times we go forward
and then retire, before the company is regularly echeloned along the
length of the trench to be dug, before an equal interval is left
between each team of one striker and two shovelers. "Incline three
paces more--too much--one pace to the rear. Come, one pace to the
rear--are you deaf?--Halt! There!"
This adjustment is done by the lieutenant and a noncom. of the
Engineers who has sprung up out of the ground. Together or separately
they run along the file and give their muttered orders into the men's
ears as they take them by the arm, sometimes, to guide them. Though
begun in an orderly way, the arrangement degenerates, thanks to the ill
temper of the exhausted men, who must continually be uprooting
themselves from the spot where the undulating mob is stranded.
"We're in front of the first lines," they whisper round me. "No."
murmur other voices, "we're just behind."
No one knows. The rain still falls, though less fiercely than at some
moments on the march. But what matters the rain! We have spread
ourselves out on the ground. Now that our backs and limbs rest in the
yielding mud, we are so comfortable that we are unconcerned about the
rain that pricks our faces and drives through to our flesh, indifferent
to the saturation of the bed that contains us.
But we get hardly time enough to draw breath. They are not so imprudent
as to let us bury ourselves in sleep. We must set ourselves to
incessant labor. It is two o'clock of the morning; in four hours more
it will be too light for us to stay here. There is not a minute to lose.
"Every man," they say to us, "must dig five feet in length, two and a
half feet in width, and two and three-quarter feet in depth. That makes
fifteen feet in length for each team. And I advise you to get into it;
the sooner it's done, the sooner you'll leave."
We know the pious claptrap. It is not recorded in the annals of the
regiment that a trenching fatigue-party ever once got away before the
moment when it became absolutely necessary to quit the neighborhood if
they were not to be seen, marked and destroyed along with the work of
their hands.