(Another Story Told by Pierre Loti)
The blood of the masters is drenching the soil of France. The great
academicians are willing to die that their beloved France may live.
Here we stand on the battleground with this great French novelist,
whose impressions are told in _Current History_.
This is the first time that I have found myself so absolutely and
infinitely alone, in the midst of this stage setting of immense
desolation, which to-day, as it chances, is sparkling with light, and
is only the more mournful for that. Until I reach the little wood to
which an errand of duty calls me I need think of nothing; I need not
occupy myself with anything; I need not avoid the shells, which would
not give me time to avoid them, nor even choose the spot to set my foot
down, since it sinks in everywhere equally. And so it comes that I
drift back again to the mood of former days, to my mood of mind before
the war, and all these things to which I have grown used I see and
judge as though they were new.
Only a score of months ago who would have imagined such a face of
things? Thus, these countless excavations--white, because the soil of
this region is white--excavations that stretch on all sides and which
mark across the wilderness multitudes of zebra-tracings--is it possible
that they mark out the only paths along which our soldiers of France
can move to-day with a sort of half security?... Little sunken ways,
some of them full of curves, some of them straight, which have been
named "guts," and which we have had to multiply, to multiply to such a
point that the earth is furrowed by them to infinity! What an enormous
sum of toil they represent, these mole paths, lying in a network over
hundreds of leagues! If we add the trenches, the shelter caves, all
these catacombs that plunge down into the hearts of the hills, one's
mind stops dead before such a total of excavation, that might seem the
work of centuries.
And these things that look like fishing nets stretched on all sides.
If one were not informed in advance and accustomed to them, could one
divine what they can possibly be? You might think that gigantic spiders
had been spinning their webs among these myriads of posts, sometimes
planted in straight lines, sometimes forming circles or half moons,
tracing across the wide expanse designs that must be cabalistic in
order better to ensnare and envelop the Barbarians. And besides they
have terribly reinforced them, multiplying them twice, nay, ten times,
since my last passage, these stake nets, and our web-spinning soldiers
have had to make among them turnings and passages, with the enormous
reels of barbed wire which they carry under their arms.
But there is one thing that you can understand at the first glance,
and which adds to the grim horror of the whole scene, and that is the
inclosures sprinkled here and there, the wooden fences that shut in
closely packed groups of poor little burial crosses, made of two pieces
of wood. That you can tell at once, alas! and see exactly what it is!
Here they lie, therefore, under the thunder of the big guns, as though
the battle was not yet finished for them, our dear departed ones, our
unknown, magnificent heroes--whom even those who weep for them cannot
now come nigh, because death is passing ceaselessly in the air above
their silent little gatherings.
Ah! To complete the unreality of it all, here comes a black bird of
gigantic wing-stretch, a monster of the apocalypse, that flits past
noisily high above me. He flies on toward France, seeking doubtless the
more sheltered region where women and children begin to be found, with
the hope of slaughtering some of them.