WE are waiting for daylight in the place where we sank to the ground.
Sinister and slow it comes, chilling and dismal, and expands upon the
livid landscape.
The rain has ceased to fall--there is none left in the sky. The leaden
plain and its mirrors of sullied water seem to issue not only from the
night but from the sea.
Drowsy or half asleep, sometimes opening our eyes only to close them
again, we attend the incredible renewal of light, paralyzed with cold
and broken with fatigue.
Where are the trenches?
We see lakes, and between the lakes there are lines of milky and
motionless water. There is more water even than we had thought. It has
taken everything and spread everywhere, and the prophecy of the men in
the night has come true. There are no more trenches; those canals are
the trenches enshrouded. It is a universal flood. The battlefield is
not sleeping; it is dead. Life may be going on down yonder perhaps, but
we cannot see so far.
Swaying painfully, like a sick man, in the terrible encumbering clasp
of my greatcoat, I half raise myself to look at it all. There are three
monstrously shapeless forms beside me. One of them--it is Paradis, in
an amazing armor of mud, with a swelling at the waist that stands for
his cartridge pouches--gets up also. The others are asleep, and make no
movement.
And what is this silence, too, this prodigious silence? There is no
sound, except when from time to time a lump of earth slips into the
water, in the middle of this fantastic paralysis of the world. No one
is firing. There are no shells, for they would not burst. There are no
bullets, either, for the men--
Ah, the men! Where are the men?
We see them gradually. Not far from us there are some stranded and
sleeping hulks so molded in mud from head to foot that they are almost
transformed into inanimate objects.
Some distance away I can make out others, curled up and clinging like
snails all along a rounded embankment, from which they have partly
slipped back into the water. It is a motionless rank of clumsy lumps,
of bundles placed side by side, dripping water and mud, and of the same
color as the soil with which they are blended.
I make an effort to break the silence. To Paradis, who also is looking
that way, I say, "Are they dead?"
"We'll go and see presently," he says in a low voice; "stop here a bit
yet. We shall have the heart to go there by and by."
We look at each other, and our eyes fall also on the others who came
and fell down here. Their faces spell such weariness that they are no
longer faces so much as something dirty, disfigured and bruised, with
blood-shot eyes. Since the beginning we have seen each other in all
manner of shapes and appearances, and yet--we do not know each other.
Paradis turns his head and looks elsewhere.
Suddenly I see him seized with trembling. He extends an arm enormously
caked in mud. "There--there--" he says.
On the water which overflows from a stretch particularly cross-seamed
and gullied, some lumps are floating, some round-backed reefs.
We drag ourselves to the spot. They are drowned men. Their arms and
heads are submerged. On the surface of the plastery liquid appear their
backs and the straps of their accouterments. Their blue cloth trousers
are inflated, with the feet attached askew upon the ballooning legs,
like the black wooden feet on the shapeless legs of marionettes. From
one sunken head the hair stands straight up like water-weeds. Here is a
face which the water only lightly touches; the head is beached on the
marge, and the body disappears in its turbid tomb. The face is lifted
skyward. The eyes are two white holes; the mouth is a black hole. The
mask's yellow and puffed-up skin appears soft and creased, like dough
gone cold.
They are the men who were watching there, and could not extricate
themselves from the mud. All their efforts to escape over the sticky
escarpment of the trench that was slowly and fatally filling with water
only dragged them still more into the depth. They died clinging to the
yielding support of the earth.
There, our first lines are; and there, the first German lines, equally
silent and flooded. On our way to these flaccid ruins we pass through
the middle of what yesterday was the zone of terror, the awful space on
whose threshold the fierce rush of our last attack was forced to stop,
the No Man's Land which bullets and shells had not ceased to furrow for
a year and a half, where their crossed fire during these latter days
had furiously swept the ground from one horizon to the other.
Now, it is a field of rest. The ground is everywhere dotted with beings
who sleep or who are on the way to die, slowly moving, lifting an arm,
lifting the head.
The enemy trench is completing the process of foundering into itself,
among great marshy undulations and funnel-holes, shaggy with mud: it
forms among them a line of pools and wells. Here and there we can see
the still overhanging banks begin to move, crumble, and fall down. In
one place we can lean against it.
In this bewildering circle of filth there are no bodies. But there,
worse than a body, a solitary arm protrudes, bare and white as a stone,
from a hole which dimly shows on the other side of the water. The man
has been buried in his dug-out and has had only the time to thrust out
his arm.
Quite near, we notice that some mounds of earth aligned along the
ruined ramparts of this deep-drowned ditch are human. Are they dead--or
asleep? We do not know; in any case, they rest.
Are they German or French? We do not know. One of them has opened his
eyes, and looks at us with swaying head. We say to him, "French?"--and
then, "Deutsch?" He makes no reply, but shuts his eyes again and
relapses into oblivion. We never knew what he was.
We cannot decide the identity of these beings, either by their clothes,
thickly covered with filth, or by their head-dress, for they are
bareheaded or swathed in woolens under their liquid and offensive
cowls; or by their weapons, for they either have no rifles or their
hands rest lightly on something they have dragged along, a shapeless
and sticky mass, like to a sort of fish.
All these men of corpse-like faces who are before us and behind us, at
the limit of their strength, void of speech as of will, all these
earth-charged men who you would say were carrying their own
winding-sheets, are as much alike as if they were naked. Out of the
horror of the night apparitions are issuing from this side and that who
are clad in exactly the same uniform of misery and mud.
It is the end of all. For the moment it is the prodigious finish, the
epic cessation of the war.
I once used to think that the worst hell in war was the flame of
shells; and then for long I thought it was the suffocation of the
caverns which eternally confine us. But it is neither of these. Hell is
water.
The wind is rising, and its icy breath goes through our flesh. On the
wrecked and dissolving plain, flecked with bodies between its
worm-shaped chasms of water, among the islands of motionless men stuck
together like reptiles, in this flattening and sinking chaos there are
some slight indications of movement. We see slowly stirring groups and
fragments of groups, composed of beings who bow under the weight of
their coats and aprons of mud, who trail themselves along, disperse,
and crawl about in the depths of the sky's tarnished light. The dawn is
so foul that one would say the day was already done.
These survivors are migrating across the desolated steppe, pursued by
an unspeakable evil which exhausts and bewilders them. They are
lamentable objects; and some, when they are fully seen, are
dramatically ludicrous, for the whelming mud from which they still take
flight has half unclothed them.
As they pass by their glances go widely around. They look at us, and
discovering men in us they cry through the wind, "It's worse down
yonder than it is here. The chaps are falling into the holes, and you
can't pull them out. All them that trod on the edge of a shell-hole
last night, they're dead. Down there where we're coming from you can
see a head in the ground, working its arms, embedded. There's a
hurdle-path that's given way in places and the hurdles have sunk into
holes, and it's a man-trap. Where there's no more hurdles there's two
yards deep of water. Your rifle? You couldn't pull it out again when
you'd stuck it in. Look at those men, there. They've cut off all the
bottom half of their great-coats--hard lines on the pockets--to help
'em get clear, and also because they hadn't strength to drag a weight
like that. Dumas' coat, we were able to pull it off him, and it weighed
a good eighty pounds; we could just lift it, two of us, with both our
hands. Look--him with the bare legs; it's taken everything off him, his
trousers, his drawers, his boots, all dragged off by the mud. One's
never seen that, never."
Scattered and straggling, the herd takes flight in a fever of fear,
their feet pulling huge stumps of mud out of the ground. We watch the
human flotsam fade away, and the lumps of them diminish, immured in
enormous clothes.
We get up, and at once the icy wind makes us tremble like trees. Slowly
we veer towards the mass formed by two men curiously joined, leaning
shoulder to shoulder, and each with an arm round the neck of the other.
Is it the hand-to-hand fight of two soldiers who have overpowered each
other in death and still hold their own, who can never again lose their
grip? No; they are two men who recline upon each other so as to sleep.
As they might not spread themselves on the falling earth that was ready
to spread itself on them, they have supported each other, clasping each
other's shoulder; and thus plunged in the ground up to their knees,
they have gone to sleep.
We respect their stillness, and withdraw from the twin statue of human
wretchedness.
Soon we must halt ourselves. We have expected too much of our strength
and can go no farther. It is not yet ended. We collapse once more in a
churned corner, with a noise as if one shot a load of dung.
From time to time we open our eyes. Some men are steering for us,
reeling. They lean over us and speak in low and weary tones. One of
them says, "Sie sind todt. Wir bleiben hier." (They're dead. We'll stay
here.) The other says, "Ja," like a sigh.
But they see us move, and at once they sink in front of us. The man
with the toneless voice says to us in French, "We surrender," and they
do not move. Then they give way entirely, as if this was the relief,
the end of their torture; and one of them whose face is patterned in
mud like a savage tattooed, smiles slightly.
"Stay there," says Paradis, without moving the head that he leans
backward upon a hillock; "presently you shall go with us if you want."
"Yes," says the German, "I've had enough." We make no reply, and he
says, "And the others too?"
"Yes," says Paradis, "let them stop too, if they like." There are four
of them outstretched on the ground. The death-rattle has got one of
them. It is like a sobbing song that rises from him. The others then
half straighten themselves, kneeling round him, and roll great eyes in
their muck-mottled faces. We get up and watch the scene. But the rattle
dies out, and the blackened throat which alone in all the big body
pulsed like a little bird, is still.
"Er ist todt!" (He's dead) says one of the men, beginning to cry. The
others settle themselves again to sleep. The weeper goes to sleep as he
weeps.
Other soldiers have come, stumbling, gripped in sudden halts like tipsy
men, or gliding along like worms, to take sanctuary here; and we sleep
all jumbled together in the common grave.
* * * * *
Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember. We return to
life and daylight as in a nightmare. In front of us the calamitous
plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their
immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines with
lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and there in the
vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe or rot.