"Yes, that's it," he repeats in a far-away voice, "that's war. It's not
anything else."
He means--and I am with him in his meaning--"More than attacks that are
like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like
banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife,
War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud
and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh,
it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the
ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by
poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like
silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer call to the sun!"
Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and
growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a
bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and
said, 'How beautiful they must be to see!'"
A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a
cloak, raised his head out of the filthy background in which it was
sunk, and cried, "Beautiful? Oh, hell! It's just as if an ox were to
say, 'What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle driven
forward to the slaughter-house!'" He spat out mud from his besmeared
mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast's.
"Let them say, 'It must be,'" he sputtered in a strange jerky voice,
grating and ragged; "that's all right. But beautiful! Oh, hell!"
Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, "It's when they say
things like that that they hit us hardest of all!" He spat again, but
exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and laid his
head in his spittle.
* * * * *
Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide
unspeakable landscape, and looking steadily on it repeated his
sentence, "War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps,
and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a
speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three thousand
kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse."
"And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize
even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day
before yesterday, and all the days before that!"
With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged
his body out of the earth where he had molded a depression like an
oozing coffin, and sat in the hole. He blinked his eyes and tried to
shake the balance of mud from his face, and said, "We shall come out of
it again this time. And who knows, p'raps we shall come out of it again
to-morrow! Who knows?"
Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying to
convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in terms of
time and space. "When one speaks of the whole war," he said, thinking
aloud, "it's as if you said nothing at all--the words are strangled.
We're here, and we look at it all like blind men."
A bass voice rolled to us from a little farther away, "No, one cannot
imagine it."
At these words a burst of harsh laughter tore itself from some one.
"How could you imagine it, to begin with, if you hadn't been there?"
"You'd have to be mad," said the chasseur.
Paradis leaned over a sprawling outspread mass beside him and said,
"Are you asleep?"
"No, but I'm not going to budge." The smothered and terror-struck
mutter issued instantly from the mass that was covered with a thick and
slimy horse-cloth, so indented that it seemed to have been trampled.
"I'll tell you why. I believe my belly's shot through. But I'm not
sure, and I daren't find out."
"Let's see--"
"No, not yet," says the man. "I'd rather stop on a bit like this."
The others, dragging themselves on their elbows, began to make
splashing movements, by way of casting off the clammy infernal covering
that weighed them down. The paralysis of cold was passing away from the
knot of sufferers, though the light no longer made any progress over
the great irregular marsh of the lower plain. The desolation proceeded,
but not the day.
Then he who spoke sorrowfully, like a bell, said. "It'll be no good
telling about it, eh? They wouldn't believe you; not out of malice or
through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn't. When you
say to 'em later, if you live to say it, 'We were on a night job and we
got shelled and we were very nearly drowned in mud,' they'll say, 'Ah!'
And p'raps they'll say. 'You didn't have a very spicy time on the job.'
And that's all. No one can know it. Only us."
"No, not even us, not even us!" some one cried.
"That's what I say, too. We shall forget--we're forgetting already, my
boy!"
"We've seen too much to remember."
"And everything we've seen was too much. We're not made to hold it all.
It takes its damned hook in all directions. We're too little to hold
it."
"You're right, we shall forget! Not only the length of the big misery,
which can't be calculated, as you say, ever since the beginning, but
the marches that turn up the ground and turn it again, lacerating your
feet and wearing out your bones under a load that seems to grow bigger
in the sky, the exhaustion until you don't know your own name any more,
the tramping and the inaction that grind you, the digging jobs that
exceed your strength, the endless vigils when you fight against sleep
and watch for an enemy who is everywhere in the night, the pillows of
dung and lice--we shall forget not only those, but even the foul wounds
of shells and machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the
counter-attacks. At those moments you're full of the excitement of
reality, and you've some satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes
away, you don't know how and you don't know where, and there's only the
names left, only the words of it, like in a dispatch."
"That's true what he says," remarks a man, without moving his head in
its pillory of mud. "When I was on leave, I found I'd already jolly
well forgotten what had happened to me before. There were some letters
from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I was
opening. And yet in spite of that, I've forgotten also all the pain
I've had in the war. We're forgetting-machines. Men are things that
think a little but chiefly forget. That's what we are."
"Then neither the other side nor us'll remember! So much misery all
wasted!"
This point of view added to the abasement of these beings on the shore
of the flood, like news of a greater disaster, and humiliated them
still more.
"Ah, if one did remember!" cried some one.
"If we remembered," said another, "there wouldn't be any more war."
A third added grandly, "Yes, if we remembered, war would be less
useless than it is."
But suddenly one of the prone survivors rose to his knees, dark as a
great bat ensnared, and as the mud dripped from his waving arms he
cried in a hollow voice, "There must be no more war after this!"
In that miry corner where, still feeble unto impotence, we were beset
by blasts of wind which laid hold on us with such rude strength that
the very ground seemed to sway like sea-drift, the cry of the man who
looked as if he were trying to fly away evoked other like cries: "There
must be no more war after this!"
The sullen or furious exclamations of these men fettered to the earth,
incarnate of earth, arose and slid away on the wind like beating wings--
"No more war! No more war! Enough of it!"
"It's too stupid--it's too stupid," they mumbled.
"What does it mean, at the bottom of it, all this?--all this that you
can't even give a name to?"
They snarled and growled like wild beasts on that sort of ice-floe
contended for by the elements, in their dismal disguise of ragged mud.
So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it choked them.
"We're made to live, not to be done in like this!"
"Men are made to be husbands, fathers--men, what the devil!--not beasts
that hunt each other and cut each other's throats and make themselves
stink like all that."
"And yet, everywhere--everywhere--there are beasts, savage beasts or
smashed beasts. Look, look!"
I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the
water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all
sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across
the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above
those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the
vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly
shook these men like a fit of madness.
I could see them agitated by this idea--that to try to live one's life
on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an
ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy
the inner life of every one.
"To live!"--"All of us!"--"You!"--"Me!"
"No more war--ah, no!--it's too stupid--worse than that, it's too--"
For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to the
mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned face that
I saw arise from the level of the earth--"Two armies fighting each
other--that's like one great army committing suicide!"
* * * * *
"And likewise, what have we been for two years now? Incredibly pitiful
wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty devils."
"Worse than that!" mutters he whose only phrase it is.
"Yes, I admit it!"
In their troubled truce of the morning, these men whom fatigue had
tormented, whom rain had scourged, whom night-long lightning had
convulsed, these survivors of volcanoes and flood began not only to see
dimly how war, as hideous morally as physically, outrages common sense,
debases noble ideas and dictates all kind of crime, but they remembered
how it had enlarged in them and about them every evil instinct save
none, mischief developed into lustful cruelty, selfishness into
ferocity, the hunger for enjoyment into a mania.
They are picturing all this before their eyes as just now they
confusedly pictured their misery. They are crammed with a curse which
strives to find a way out and to come to light in words, a curse which
makes them to groan and wail. It is as if they toiled to emerge from
the delusion and ignorance which soil them as the mud soils them; as if
they will at last know why they are scourged.
"Well then?" clamors one.
"Ay, what then?" the other repeats, still more grandly. The wind sets
the flooded flats a-tremble to our eyes, and falling furiously on the
human masses lying or kneeling and fixed like flagstones and
grave-slabs, it wrings new shivering from them.
"There will be no more war," growls a soldier, "when there is no more
Germany."
"That's not the right thing to say!" cries another. "It isn't enough.
There'll be no more war when the spirit of war is defeated." The
roaring of the wind half smothered his words, so he lifted his head and
repeated them.
"Germany and militarism"--some one in his anger precipitately cut
in--"they're the same thing. They wanted the war and they'd planned it
beforehand. They are militarism."
"Militarism--" a soldier began again.
"What is it?" some one asked.
"It's--it's brute force that's ready prepared, and that lets fly
suddenly, any minute."
"Yes. To-day militarism is called Germany."
"Yes, but what will it be called to-morrow?"
"I don't know," said a voice serious as a prophet's.
"If the spirit of war isn't killed, you'll have struggle all through
the ages."
"We must--one's got to--"
"We must fight!" gurgled the hoarse voice of a man who had lain stiff
in the devouring mud ever since our awakening; "we've got to!" His body
turned heavily over. "We've got to give all we have, our strength and
our skins and our hearts, all our life and what pleasures are left us.
The life of prisoners as we are, we've got to take it in both hands.
You've got to endure everything, even injustice--and that's the king
that's reigning now--and the shameful and disgusting sights we see, so
as to come out on top, and win. But if we've got to make such a
sacrifice," adds the shapeless man, turning over again, "it's because
we're fighting for progress, not for a country; against error, not
against a country."
"War must be killed," said the first speaker, "war must be killed in
the belly of Germany!"
"Anyway," said one of those who sat enrooted there like a sort of
shrub, "anyway, we're beginning to understand why we've got to march
away."
"All the same," grumbled the squatting chasseur in his turn, "there are
some that fight with quite another idea than that in their heads. I've
seen some of 'em, young men, who said, 'To hell with humanitarian
ideas'; what mattered to them was nationality and nothing else, and the
war was a question of fatherlands--let every man make a shine about his
own. They were fighting, those chaps, and they were fighting well."
"They're young, the lads you're talking about; they're young, and we
must excuse 'em."
"You can do a thing well without knowing what you are doing."
"Men are mad, that's true. You'll never say that often enough."
"The Jingoes--they're vermin," growled a shadow.
Several times they repeated, as though feeling their way, "War must be
killed; war itself."
"That's all silly talk. What diff does it make whether you think this
or that? We've got to be winners, that's all."
But the others had begun to cast about. They wanted to know and to see
farther than to-day. They throbbed with the effort to beget in
themselves some light of wisdom and of will. Some sparse convictions
whirled in their minds, and jumbled scraps of creeds issued from their
lips.
"Of course--yes--but we must look at facts--you've got to think about
the object, old chap."
"The object? To be winners in this war," the pillar-man insisted,
"isn't that an object?"