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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under Fire
+       The Story of a Squad
+
+Author: Henri Barbusse
+
+Translator: Fitzwater Wray
+
+Posting Date: August 1, 2009 [EBook #4380]
+Release Date: August, 2003
+First Posted: January 20, 2002
+[Last updated: January 25, 2016]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER FIRE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Under Fire
+
+The Story of a Squad
+
+
+By
+
+Henri Barbusse
+
+(1874-1935)
+
+
+
+Translated by Fitzwater Wray
+
+
+
+  To
+  the memory of
+  the comrades who fell by my side
+  at Crouy and on Hill 119
+
+  January, May, and September 1915
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+     I.  The Vision
+    II.  In the Earth
+   III.  The Return
+    IV.  Volpatte and Fouillade
+     V.  Sanctuary
+    VI.  Habits
+   VII.  Entraining
+  VIII.  On Leave
+    IX.  The Anger of Volpatte
+     X.  Argoval
+    XI.  The Dog
+   XII.  The Doorway
+  XIII.  The Big Words
+   XIV.  Of Burdens
+    XV.  The Egg
+   XVI.  An Idyll
+  XVII.  The Sap
+ XVIII.  A Box of Matches
+   XIX.  Bombardment
+    XX.  Under Fire
+   XXI.  The Refuge
+  XXII.  Going About
+ XXIII.  The Fatigue-Party
+  XXIV.  The Dawn
+
+
+
+
+UNDER FIRE
+
+
+
+I
+
+The Vision
+
+
+MONT BLANC, the Dent du Midi, and the Aiguille Verte look across at the
+bloodless faces that show above the blankets along the gallery of the
+sanatorium. This roofed-in gallery of rustic wood-work on the first
+floor of the palatial hospital is isolated in Space and overlooks the
+world. The blankets of fine wool--red, green, brown, or white--from
+which those wasted cheeks and shining eyes protrude are quite still. No
+sound comes from the long couches except when some one coughs, or that
+of the pages of a book turned over at long and regular intervals, or
+the undertone of question and quiet answer between neighbors, or now
+and again the crescendo disturbance of a daring crow, escaped to the
+balcony from those flocks that seem threaded across the immense
+transparency like chaplets of black pearls.
+
+Silence is obligatory. Besides, the rich and high-placed who have come
+here from all the ends of the earth, smitten by the same evil, have
+lost the habit of talking. They have withdrawn into themselves, to
+think of their life and of their death.
+
+A servant appears in the balcony, dressed in white and walking softly.
+She brings newspapers and hands them about.
+
+"It's decided," says the first to unfold his paper. "War is declared."
+
+Expected as the news is, its effect is almost dazing, for this audience
+feels that its portent is without measure or limit. These men of
+culture and intelligence, detached from the affairs of the world and
+almost from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened by suffering
+and meditation, as far remote from their fellow men as if they were
+already of the Future--these men look deeply into the distance, towards
+the unknowable land of the living and the insane.
+
+"Austria's act is a crime," says the Austrian.
+
+"France must win," says the Englishman.
+
+"I hope Germany will be beaten," says the German.
+
+They settle down again under the blankets and on the pillows, looking
+to heaven and the high peaks. But in spite of that vast purity, the
+silence is filled with the dire disclosure of a moment before.
+
+War!
+
+Some of the invalids break the silence, and say the word again under
+their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the
+age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which they
+gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage.
+
+The tranquil expanses of the valley, adorned with soft and smooth
+pastures and hamlets rosy as the rose, with the sable shadow-stains of
+the majestic mountains and the black lace and white of pines and
+eternal snow, become alive with the movements of men, whose multitudes
+swarm in distinct masses. Attacks develop, wave by wave, across the
+fields and then stand still. Houses are eviscerated like human beings
+and towns like houses. Villages appear in crumpled whiteness as though
+fallen from heaven to earth. The very shape of the plain is changed by
+the frightful heaps of wounded and slain.
+
+Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing
+from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force. One's eyes
+follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of Death. To
+north and south and west afar there are battles on every side. Turn
+where you will, there is war in every corner of that vastness.
+
+One of the pale-faced clairvoyants lifts himself on his elbow, reckons
+and numbers the fighters present and to come--thirty millions of
+soldiers. Another stammers, his eyes full of slaughter, "Two armies at
+death-grips--that is one great army committing suicide."
+
+"It should not have been," says the deep and hollow voice of the first
+in the line. But another says, "It is the French Revolution beginning
+again." "Let thrones beware!" says another's undertone.
+
+The third adds, "Perhaps it is the last war of all." A silence follows,
+then some heads are shaken in dissent whose faces have been blanched
+anew by the stale tragedy of sleepless night--"Stop war? Stop war?
+Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease."
+
+Some one coughs, and then the Vision is swallowed up in the huge sunlit
+peace of the lush meadows. In the rich colors of the glowing kine, the
+black forests, the green fields and the blue distance, dies the
+reflection of the fire where the old world burns and breaks. Infinite
+silence engulfs the uproar of hate and pain from the dark swarmings of
+mankind. They who have spoken retire one by one within themselves,
+absorbed once more in their own mysterious malady.
+
+But when evening is ready to descend within the valley, a storm breaks
+over the mass of Mont Blanc. One may not go forth in such peril, for
+the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great veranda, to
+that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these victims of a great
+internal wound encompass with their gaze the elemental convulsion.
+
+They watch how the explosions of thunder on the mountain upheave the
+level clouds like a stormy sea, how each one hurls a shaft of fire and
+a column of cloud together into the twilight; and they turn their wan
+and sunken faces to follow the flight of the eagles that wheel in the
+sky and look from their supreme height down through the wreathing
+mists, down to earth.
+
+"Put an end to war?" say the watchers.--"Forbid the Storm!"
+
+Cleansed from the passions of party and faction, liberated from
+prejudice and infatuation and the tyranny of tradition, these watchers
+on the threshold of another world are vaguely conscious of the
+simplicity of the present and the yawning possibilities of the future.
+
+The man at the end of the rank cries, "I can see crawling things down
+there"--"Yes, as though they were alive"--"Some sort of plant,
+perhaps"--"Some kind of men"--
+
+And there amid the baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark
+disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like evil
+spirits, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which to their
+seeing is made of mud and water, while figures appear and fast fix
+themselves to the surface of it, all blinded and borne down with filth,
+like the dreadful castaways of shipwreck. And it seems to them that
+these are soldiers.
+
+The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and
+scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who
+strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty million
+slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt and error,
+uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning Will. The
+future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly certain that
+the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose number and whose
+misery alike are infinite will transform the old world.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+In the Earth
+
+
+THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation reveals
+together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the night, and
+a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up there--so high and
+so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of dreadful birds goes
+circling up with strong and palpitating cries to look down upon the
+earth.
+
+The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
+shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools and
+gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the water and
+sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the convoys of the
+night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that glisten in the
+weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken stakes protruding
+from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in tangled coils. With
+its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be an endless gray sheet
+that floats on the sea and has here and there gone under. Though no
+rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing, washed out and drowned, and
+even the wan light seems to flow.
+
+Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
+night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with a
+layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
+sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
+holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.
+
+I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
+and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are "us."
+We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking wrap us
+up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch themselves,
+yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden, dirt-disfigured,
+pierced by the little lamps of dull and heavy-lidded eyes, matted with
+uncut beards and foul with forgotten hair.
+
+Crack! Crack! Boom!--rifle fire and cannonade. Above us and all around,
+it crackles and rolls, in long gusts or separate explosions. The
+flaming and melancholy storm never, never ends. For more than fifteen
+months, for five hundred days in this part of the world where we are,
+the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning to night and from
+night to morning. We are buried deep in an everlasting battlefield; but
+like the ticking of the clocks at home in the days gone by--in the now
+almost legendary Past--you only hear the noise when you listen.
+
+A babyish face with puffy eyelids, and cheek-bones as lurid as if
+lozenge-shaped bits of crimson paper had been stuck on, comes out of
+the ground, opens one eye, then the other. It is Paradis. The skin of
+his fat cheeks is scored with the marks of the folds in the tent-cloth
+that has served him for night-cap. The glance of his little eye wanders
+all round me; he sees me, nods, and says--"Another night gone, old
+chap."
+
+"Yes, sonny; how many more like it still?"
+
+He raises his two plump arms skywards. He has managed to scrape out by
+the steps of the dug-out and is beside me. After stumbling over the dim
+obstacle of a man who sits in the shadows, fervently scratches himself
+and sighs hoarsely, Paradis makes off--lamely splashing like a penguin
+through the flooded picture.
+
+One by one the men appear from the depths. In the corners, heavy
+shadows are seen forming--human clouds that move and break up. One by
+one they become recognizable. There is one who comes out hooded with
+his blanket--a savage, you would say, or rather, the tent of a savage,
+which walks and sways from side to side. Near by, and heavily framed in
+knitted wool, a square face is disclosed, yellow-brown as though
+iodized, and patterned with blackish patches, the nose broken, the eyes
+of Chinese restriction and red-circled, a little coarse and moist
+mustache like a greasing-brush.
+
+"There's Volpatte. How goes it, Firmin?"
+
+"It goes, it goes, and it comes," says Volpatte. His heavy and drawling
+voice is aggravated by hoarseness. He coughs--"My number's up, this
+time. Say, did you hear it last night, the attack? My boy, talk about a
+bombardment--something very choice in the way of mixtures!" He sniffles
+and passes his sleeve under his concave nose. His hand gropes within
+his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds the skin, and scratches.
+"I've killed thirty of them in the candle," he growls; "in the big
+dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are some like crumbs of metal
+bread. You can see them running about in the straw like I'm telling
+you."
+
+"Who's been attacking? The Boches?"
+
+"The Boches and us too--out Vimy way--a counterattack--didn't you hear
+it?"
+
+"No," the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; "I was
+snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."
+
+"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or
+rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look, see,
+there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the ground
+level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just body-room for
+one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares, wagging the rough
+and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had never been finished.
+"I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was woke up by the relief of
+the 129th that went by--not by the noise, but the smell. Ah, all those
+chaps with their feet on the level with my nose! It woke me up, it gave
+me nose-ache so."
+
+I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the trail
+of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.
+
+"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.
+
+"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you smell,
+the more you have of 'em."
+
+"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I
+was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in time
+to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those muck-heaps
+was going to pinch it off me."
+
+"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came
+could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning
+had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful, he
+squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes blinked
+among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of his
+toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His hands were
+horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the palms plastered
+in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight, exhaled the scent
+of an ancient stewpan. Though busily scratching, he chatted with big
+Barque, who leaned towards him from a little way off.
+
+"I wasn't as mucky as this when I was a civvy," he said.
+
+"Well, my poor friend, it's a dirty change for the worse," said Barque.
+
+"Lucky for you," says Tirette, going one better; "when it comes to
+kids, you'll present madame with some little niggers!"
+
+Blaire took offense, and gathering gloom wrinkled his brow. "What have
+you got to give me lip about, you? What next? It's war-time. As for
+you, bean-face, you think perhaps the war hasn't changed your phizog
+and your manners? Look at yourself, monkey-snout, buttock-skin! A man
+must be a beast to talk as you do." He passed his hand over the dark
+deposit on his face, which the rains of those days had proved finally
+indelible, and added, "Besides, if I am as I am, it's my own choosing.
+To begin with, I have no teeth. The major said to me a long time ago,
+'You haven't a single tooth. It's not enough. At your next rest,' he
+says, 'take a turn round to the estomalogical ambulance.'"
+
+"The tomatological ambulance," corrected Barque.
+
+"Stomatological," Bertrand amended.
+
+"You have all the making of an army cook--you ought to have been one,"
+said Barque.
+
+"My idea, too," retorted Blaire innocently. Some one laughed. The black
+man got up at the insult. "You give me belly-ache," he said with scorn.
+"I'm off to the latrines."
+
+When his doubly dark silhouette had vanished, the others scrutinized
+once more the great truth that down here in the earth the cooks are the
+dirtiest of men.
+
+"If you see a chap with his skin and toggery so smeared and stained
+that you wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole, you can say to yourself,
+'Probably he's a cook.' And the dirtier he is, the more likely to be a
+cook."
+
+"It's true, and true again," said Marthereau.
+
+"Tiens, there's Tirloir! Hey, Tirloir!"
+
+He comes up busily, peering this way and that, on an eager scent. His
+insignificant head, pale as chlorine, hops centrally about in the
+cushioning collar of a greatcoat that is much too heavy and big for
+him. His chin is pointed, and his upper teeth protrude. A wrinkle round
+his mouth is so deep with dirt that it looks like a muzzle. As usual,
+he is angry, and as usual, he rages aloud.
+
+"Some one cut my pouch in two last night!"
+
+"It was the relief of the 129th. Where had you put it?"
+
+He indicates a bayonet stuck in the wall of the trench close to the
+mouth of a funk-hole--"There, hanging on the toothpick there."
+
+"Ass!" comes the chorus. "Within reach of passing soldiers! Not dotty,
+are you?"
+
+"It's hard lines all the same," wails Tirloir. Then suddenly a fit of
+rage seizes him, his face crumples, his little fists clench in fury, he
+tightens them like knots in string and waves them about. "Alors quoi?
+Ah, if I had hold of the mongrel that did it! Talk about breaking his
+jaw--I'd stave in his bread-pan, I'd--there was a whole Camembert in
+there, I'll go and look for it." He massages his stomach with the
+little sharp taps of a guitar player, and plunges into the gray of the
+morning, grinning yet dignified, with his awkward outlines of an
+invalid in a dressing-gown. We hear him grumbling until he disappears.
+
+"Strange man, that," says Pepin; the others chuckle. "He's daft and
+crazy," declares Marthereau, who is in the habit of fortifying the
+expression of his thought by using two synonyms at once.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Tiens, old man," says Tulacque, as he comes up. "Look at this."
+
+Tulacque is magnificent. He is wearing a lemon-yellow coat made out of
+an oilskin sleeping-sack. He has arranged a hole in the middle to get
+his head through, and compelled his shoulder-straps and belt to go over
+it. He is tall and bony. He holds his face in advance as he walks, a
+forceful face, with eyes that squint. He has something in his hand. "I
+found this while digging last night at the end of the new gallery to
+change the rotten gratings. It took my fancy off-hand, that
+knick-knack. It's an old pattern of hatchet."
+
+It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old
+brown bone--quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.
+
+"Very handy," said Tulacque, fingering it. "Yes, not badly thought out.
+Better balanced than the regulation ax. That'll be useful to me, you'll
+see." As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he would himself
+pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking in the bowels of
+the earth.
+
+One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand's squad and the half-section, at
+an elbow of the trench. Just here it is a little wider than in the
+straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you must
+throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and your
+stomach against the stomach of the other.
+
+Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel. No night
+watchman works here. At night we are ready for making earthworks in
+front, but as long as the day lasts we have nothing to do. Huddled up
+together and linked arm in arm, it only remains to await the evening as
+best we can.
+
+Daylight has at last crept into the interminable crevices that furrow
+this part of the earth, and now it finds the threshold of our holes. It
+is the melancholy light of the North Country, of a restricted and muddy
+sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is heavy with the smoke and
+smell of factories. In this leaden light, the uncouth array of these
+dwellers in the depths reveals the stark reality of the huge and
+hopeless misery that brought it into being. But that is like the rattle
+of rifles and the verberation of artillery. The drama in which we are
+actors has lasted much too long for us to be surprised any more, either
+at the stubbornness we have evolved or the garb we have devised against
+the rain that comes from above, against the mud that comes from
+beneath, and against the cold--that sort of infinity that is
+everywhere. The skins of animals, bundles of blankets, Balaklava
+helmets, woolen caps, furs, bulging mufflers (sometimes worn
+turban-wise), paddings and quiltings, knittings and double-knittings,
+coverings and roofings and cowls, tarred or oiled or rubbered, black or
+all the colors (once upon a time) of the rainbow--all these things mask
+and magnify the men, and wipe out their uniforms almost as effectively
+as their skins. One has fastened on his back a square of linoleum, with
+a big draught-board pattern in white and red, that he found in the
+middle of the dining-room of some temporary refuge. That is Pepin. We
+know him afar off by his harlequin placard sooner even than by his pale
+Apache face. Here is Barque's bulging chest-protector, carven from an
+eiderdown quilt, formerly pink, but now fantastically bleached and
+mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises like a ruined
+tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass of moleskin,
+with the fur inside, adorns little Eudore with the burnished back of a
+beetle; while the golden corselet of Tulacque the Big Chief surpasses
+all.
+
+The "tin hat" gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the
+beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing it--on
+the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like Cadilhac, or on a
+cotton cap like Barque--produce a complicated diversity of appearance.
+
+And our legs! I went down just now, bent double, into our dug-out, the
+little low cave that smells musty and damp, where one stumbles over
+empty jam-pots and dirty rags, where two long lumps lay asleep, while
+in the corner a kneeling shape rummaged a pouch by candle-light. As I
+climbed out, the rectangle of entry afforded me a revelation of our
+legs. Flat on the ground, vertically in the air, or aslant; spread
+about, doubled up, or mixed together; blocking the fairway and cursed
+by passers-by, they present a collection of many colors and many
+shapes--gaiters, leggings black or yellow, long or short, in leather,
+in tawny cloth, in any sort of waterproof stuff; puttees in dark blue,
+light blue, black, sage green, khaki, and beige. Alone of all his kind,
+Volpatte has retained the modest gaiters of mobilization. Mesnil Andre
+has displayed for a fortnight a pair of thick woolen stockings, ribbed
+and green; and Tirette has always been known by his gray cloth puttees
+with white stripes, commandeered from a pair of civilian trousers that
+was hanging goodness knows where at the beginning of the war. As for
+Marthereau's puttees, they are not both of the same hue, for he failed
+to find two fag-ends of greatcoat equally worn and equally dirty, to be
+cut up into strips.
+
+There are legs wrapped up in rags, too, and even in newspapers, which
+are kept in place with spirals of thread or--much more
+practical--telephone wire. Pepin fascinated his friends and the
+passers-by with a pair of fawn gaiters, borrowed from a corpse. Barque,
+who poses as a resourceful man, full of ideas--and Heaven knows what a
+bore it makes of him at times!--has white calves, for he wrapped
+surgical bandages round his leg-cloths to preserve them, a snowy
+souvenir at his latter end of the cotton cap at the other, which
+protrudes below his helmet and is left behind in its turn by a saucy
+red tassel. Poterloo has been walking about for a month in the boots of
+a German soldier, nearly new, and with horseshoes on the heels. Caron
+entrusted them to Poterloo when he was sent back on account of his arm.
+Caron had taken them himself from a Bavarian machine-gunner, knocked
+out near the Pylones road. I can hear Caron telling about it yet--
+
+"Old man, he was there, his buttocks in a hole, doubled up, gaping at
+the sky with his legs in the air, and his pumps offered themselves to
+me with an air that meant they were worth my while. 'A tight fit,' says
+I. But you talk about a job to bring those beetle-crushers of his away!
+I worked on top of him, tugging, twisting and shaking, for half an hour
+and no lie about it. With his feet gone quite stiff, the patient didn't
+help me a bit. Then at last the legs of it--they'd been pulled about
+so--came unstuck at the knees, and his breeks tore away, and all the
+lot came, flop! There was me, all of a sudden, with a full boot in each
+fist. The legs and feet had to be emptied out."
+
+"You're going it a bit strong!"
+
+"Ask Euterpe the cyclist if it isn't true. I tell you he did it along
+of me, too. We shoved our arms inside the boots and pulled out of 'em
+some bones and bits of sock and bits of feet. But look if they weren't
+worth while!"
+
+So, until Caron returns, Poterloo continues on his behalf the wearing
+of the Bavarian machine-gunner's boots.
+
+Thus do they exercise their wits, according to their intelligence,
+their vivacity, their resources, and their boldness, in the struggle
+with the terrible discomfort. Each one seems to make the revealing
+declaration, "This is all that I knew, all I was able, all that I dared
+to do in the great misery which has befallen me."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Mesnil Joseph drowses; Blaire yawns; Marthereau smokes, "eyes front."
+Lamuse scratches himself like a gorilla, and Eudore like a marmoset.
+Volpatte coughs, and says, "I'm kicking the bucket." Mesnil Andre has
+got out his mirror and comb and is tending his fine chestnut beard as
+though it were a rare plant. The monotonous calm is disturbed here and
+there by the outbreaks of ferocious resentment provoked by the presence
+of parasites--endemic, chronic, and contagious.
+
+Barque, who is an observant man, sends an itinerant glance around,
+takes his pipe from his mouth, spits, winks, and says--"I say, we don't
+resemble each other much."
+
+"Why should we?" says Lamuse. "It would be a miracle if we did."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Our ages? We are of all ages. Ours is a regiment in reserve which
+successive reinforcements have renewed partly with fighting units and
+partly with Territorials. In our half-section there are reservists of
+the Territorial Army, new recruits, and demi-poils. Fouillade is forty;
+Blaire might be the father of Biquet, who is a gosling of Class 1913.
+The corporal calls Marthereau "Grandpa" or "Old Rubbish-heap,"
+according as in jest or in earnest. Mesnil Joseph would be at the
+barracks if there were no war. It is a comical effect when we are in
+charge of Sergeant Vigile, a nice little boy, with a dab on his lip by
+way of mustache. When we were in quarters the other day, he played at
+skipping-rope with the kiddies. In our ill-assorted flock, in this
+family without kindred, this home without a hearth at which we gather,
+there are three generations side by side, living, waiting, standing
+still, like unfinished statues, like posts.
+
+Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere. I look at the
+two men beside me. Poterloo, the miner from the Calonne pit, is pink;
+his eyebrows are the color of straw, his eyes flax-blue. His great
+golden head involved a long search in the stores to find the vast
+steel-blue tureen that bonnets him. Fouillade, the boatman from Cette,
+rolls his wicked eyes in the long, lean face of a musketeer, with
+sunken cheeks and his skin the color of a violin. In good sooth, my two
+neighbors are as unlike as day and night.
+
+Cocon, no less, a slight and desiccated person in spectacles, whose
+tint tells of corrosion in the chemical vapors of great towns,
+contrasts with Biquet, a Breton in the rough, whose skin is gray and
+his jaw like a paving-stone; and Mesnil Andre, the comfortable chemist
+from a country town in Normandy, who has such a handsome and silky
+beard and who talks so much and so well--he has little in common with
+Lamuse, the fat peasant of Poitou, whose cheeks and neck are like
+underdone beef. The suburban accent of Barque, whose long legs have
+scoured the streets of Paris in all directions, alternates with the
+semi-Belgian cadence of those Northerners who came from the 8th
+Territorial; with the sonorous speech, rolling on the syllables as if
+over cobblestone, that the 144th pours out upon us; with the dialect
+blown from those ant-like clusters that the Auvergnats so obstinately
+form among the rest. I remember the first words of that wag, Tirette,
+when he arrived--"I, mes enfants, I am from Clichy-la-Garenne! Can any
+one beat that?"--and the first grievance that Paradis brought to me,
+"They don't give a damn for me, because I'm from Morvan!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Our callings? A little of all--in the lump. In those departed days when
+we had a social status, before we came to immure our destiny in the
+molehills that we must always build up again as fast as rain and
+scrap-iron beat them down, what were we? Sons of the soil and artisans
+mostly. Lamuse was a farm-servant, Paradis a carter. Cadilhac, whose
+helmet rides loosely on his pointed head, though it is a juvenile
+size--like a dome on a steeple, says Tirette--owns land. Papa Blaire
+was a small farmer in La Brie. Barque, porter and messenger, performed
+acrobatic tricks with his carrier-tricycle among the trains and taxis
+of Paris, with solemn abuse (so they say) for the pedestrians, fleeing
+like bewildered hens across the big streets and squares. Corporal
+Bertrand, who keeps himself always a little aloof, correct, erect, and
+silent, with a strong and handsome face and forthright gaze, was
+foreman in a case-factory. Tirloir daubed carts with paint--and without
+grumbling, they say. Tulacque was barman at the Throne Tavern in the
+suburbs; and Eudore of the pale and pleasant face kept a roadside cafe
+not very far from the front lines. It has been ill-used by the
+shells--naturally, for we all know that Eudore has no luck. Mesnil
+Andre, who still retains a trace of well-kept distinction, sold
+bicarbonate and infallible remedies at his pharmacy in a Grande Place.
+His brother Joseph was selling papers and illustrated story-books in a
+station on the State Railways at the same time that, in far-off Lyons,
+Cocon, the man of spectacles and statistics, dressed in a black smock,
+busied himself behind the counters of an ironmongery, his hands
+glittering with plumbago; while the lamps of Becuwe Adolphe and
+Poterloo, risen with the dawn, trailed about the coalpits of the North
+like weakling Will-o'-th'-wisps.
+
+And there are others amongst us whose occupations one can never recall,
+whom one confuses with one another; and the rural nondescripts who
+peddled ten trades at once in their packs, without counting the dubious
+Pepin, who can have had none at all. (While at the depot after sick
+leave, three months ago, they say, he got married--to secure the
+separation allowance.)
+
+The liberal professions are not represented among those around me. Some
+teachers are subalterns in the company or Red Cross men. In the
+regiment a Marist Brother is sergeant in the Service de Sante; a
+professional tenor is cyclist dispatch-rider to the Major; a "gentleman
+of independent means" is mess corporal to the C.H.R. But here there is
+nothing of all that. We are fighting men, we others, and we include
+hardly any intellectuals, or men of the arts or of wealth, who during
+this war will have risked their faces only at the loopholes, unless in
+passing by, or under gold-laced caps.
+
+Yes, we are truly and deeply different from each other. But we are
+alike all the same. In spite of this diversity of age, of country, of
+education, of position, of everything possible, in spite of the former
+gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike. Under the same
+uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and habits, the
+same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state primeval.
+
+The same language, compounded of dialect and the slang of workshop and
+barracks, seasoned with the latest inventions, blends us in the sauce
+of speech with the massed multitudes of men who (for seasons now) have
+emptied France and crowded together in the North-East.
+
+Here, too, linked by a fate from which there is no escape, swept
+willy-nilly by the vast adventure into one rank, we have no choice but
+to go as the weeks and months go--alike. The terrible narrowness of the
+common life binds us close, adapts us, merges us one in the other. It
+is a sort of fatal contagion. Nor need you, to see how alike we
+soldiers are, be afar off--at that distance, say, when we are only
+specks of the dust-clouds that roll across the plain.
+
+We are waiting. Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking like
+warping wood or old hinges. Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles; more
+slowly, but deeper. And we begin again, but not in the same way, to
+wait. In a state of war, one is always waiting. We have become
+waiting-machines. For the moment it is food we are waiting for. Then it
+will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have done with dinner
+we will think about the letters. After that, we shall set ourselves to
+wait for something else.
+
+Hunger and thirst are urgent instincts which formidably excite the
+temper of my companions. As the meal gets later they become grumblesome
+and angry. Their need of food and drink snarls from their lips--"That's
+eight o'clock. Now, why the hell doesn't it come?"
+
+"Just so, and me that's been pining since noon yesterday," sulks
+Lamuse, whose eyes are moist with longing, while his cheeks seem to
+carry great daubs of wine-colored grease-paint.
+
+Discontent grows more acute every minute.
+
+"I'll bet Plumet has poured down his own gullet my wine ration that
+he's supposed to have, and others with it, and he's lying drunk over
+there somewhere."
+
+"It's sure and certain"--Marthereau seconds the proposition.
+
+"Ah, the rotters, the vermin, these fatigue men!" Tirloir bellows. "An
+abominable race--all of 'em--mucky-nosed idlers! They roll over each
+other all day long at the rear, and they'll be damned before they'll be
+in time. Ah, if I were boss, they should damn quick take our places in
+the trenches, and they'd have to work for a change. To begin with, I
+should say, 'Every man in the section will carry grease and soup in
+turns.' Those who were willing, of course--"
+
+"I'm confident," cries Cocon, "it's that Pepere that's keeping the
+others back. He does it on purpose, firstly, and then, too, he can't
+finish plucking himself in the morning, poor lad. He wants ten hours
+for his flea-hunt, he's so finicking; and if he can't get 'em, monsieur
+has the pip all day."
+
+"Be damned to him," growls Lamuse. "I'd shift him out of bed if only I
+was there! I'd wake him up with boot-toe, I'd--"
+
+"I was reckoning, the other day," Cocon went on; "it took him seven
+hours forty-seven minutes to come from thirty-one dug-out. It should
+take him five good hours, but no longer."
+
+Cocon is the Man of Figures. He has a deep affection, amounting to
+rapacity, for accuracy in recorded computation. On any subject at all,
+he goes burrowing after statistics, gathers them with the industry of
+an insect, and serves them up on any one who will listen. Just now,
+while he wields his figures like weapons, the sharp ridges and angles
+and triangles that make up the paltry face where perch the double discs
+of his glasses, are contracted with vexation. He climbs to the
+firing-step (made in the days when this was the first line), and raises
+his head angrily over the parapet. The light touch of a little shaft of
+cold sunlight that lingers on the land sets a-glitter both his glasses
+and the diamond that hangs from his nose.
+
+"And that Pepere, too, talk about a drinking-cup with the bottom out!
+You'd never believe the weight of stuff he can let drop on a single
+journey."
+
+With his pipe in the corner, Papa Blaire fumes in two senses. You can
+see his heavy mustache trembling. It is like a comb made of bone,
+whitish and drooping.
+
+"Do you want to know what I think? These dinner men, they're the
+dirtiest dogs of all. It's 'Blast this' and 'Blast that'--John Blast
+and Co., I call 'em."
+
+"They have all the elements of a dunghill about them," says Eudore,
+with a sigh of conviction. He is prone on the ground, with his mouth
+half-open and the air of a martyr. With one fading eye he follows the
+movements of Pepin, who prowls to and fro like a hyaena.
+
+Their spiteful exasperation with the loiterers mounts higher and
+higher. Tirloir the Grumbler takes the lead and expands. This is where
+he comes in. With his little pointed gesticulations he goads and spurs
+the anger all around him.
+
+"Ah, the devils, what? The sort of meat they threw at us yesterday!
+Talk about whetstones! Beef from an ox, that? Beef from a bicycle, yes
+rather! I said to the boys, 'Look here, you chaps, don't you chew it
+too quick, or you'll break your front teeth on the nails!'"
+
+Tirloir's harangue--he was manager of a traveling cinema, it
+seems--would have made us laugh at other times, but in the present
+temper it is only echoed by a circulating growl.
+
+"Another time, so that you won't grumble about the toughness, they send
+you something soft and flabby that passes for meat, something with the
+look and the taste of a sponge--or a poultice. When you chew that, it's
+the same as a cup of water, no more and no less."
+
+"Tout ca," says Lamuse, "has no substance; it gets no grip on your
+guts. You think you're full, but at the bottom of your tank you're
+empty. So, bit by bit, you turn your eyes up, poisoned for want of
+sustenance."
+
+"The next time," Biquet exclaims in desperation, "I shall ask to see
+the old man, and I shall say, 'Mon capitaine'--"
+
+"And I," says Barque, "shall make myself look sick, and I shall say,
+'Monsieur le major'--"
+
+"And get nix or the kick-out--they're all alike--all in a band to take
+it out of the poor private."
+
+"I tell you, they'd like to get the very skin off us!"
+
+"And the brandy, too! We have a right to get it brought to the
+trenches--as long as it's been decided somewhere--I don't know when or
+where, but I know it--and in the three days that we've been here,
+there's three days that the brandy's been dealt out to us on the end of
+a fork!"
+
+"Ah, malheur!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"There's the grub!" announces a poilu [note 1] who was on the look-out
+at the corner.
+
+"Time, too!"
+
+And the storm of revilings ceases as if by magic. Wrath is changed into
+sudden contentment.
+
+Three breathless fatigue men, their faces streaming with tears of
+sweat, put down on the ground some large tins, a paraffin can, two
+canvas buckets, and a file of loaves, skewered on a stick. Leaning
+against the wall of the trench, they mop their faces with their
+handkerchiefs or sleeves. And I see Cocon go up to Pepere with a smile,
+and forgetful of the abuse he had been heaping on the other's
+reputation, he stretches out a cordial hand towards one of the cans in
+the collection that swells the circumference of Pepere, after the
+manner of a life-belt.
+
+"What is there to eat?"
+
+"It's there," is the evasive reply of the second fatigue man, whom
+experience has taught that a proclamation of the menu always evokes the
+bitterness of disillusion. So they set themselves to panting abuse of
+the length and the difficulties of the trip they have just
+accomplished: "Some crowds about, everywhere! It's a tough job to get
+along--got to disguise yourself as a cigarette paper, sometimes."--"And
+there are people who say they're shirkers in the kitchens!" As for him,
+he would a hundred thousand times rather be with the company in the
+trenches, to mount guard and dig, than earn his keep by such a job,
+twice a day during the night!
+
+Paradis, having lifted the lids of the jars, surveys the recipients and
+announces, "Kidney beans in oil, bully, pudding, and coffee--that's
+all."
+
+"Nom de Dieu!" bawls Tulacque. "And wine?" He summons the crowd: "Come
+and look here, all of you! That--that's the limit! We're done out of
+our wine!"
+
+Athirst and grimacing, they hurry up; and from the profoundest depths
+of their being wells up the chorus of despair and disappointment, "Oh,
+Hell!"
+
+"Then what's that in there?" says the fatigue man, still ruddily
+sweating, and using his foot to point at a bucket.
+
+"Yes," says Paradis, "my mistake, there is some."
+
+The fatigue man shrugs his shoulders, and hurls at Paradis a look of
+unspeakable scorn--"Now you're beginning! Get your gig-lamps on, if
+your sight's bad." He adds, "One cup each--rather less perhaps--some
+chucklehead bumped against me, coming through the Boyau du Bois, and a
+drop got spilled." "Ah!" he hastens to add, raising his voice, "if I
+hadn't been loaded up, talk about the boot-toe he'd have got in the
+rump! But he hopped it on his top gear, the brute!"
+
+In spite of this confident assurance, the fatigue man makes off
+himself, curses overtaking him as he goes, maledictions charged with
+offensive reflections on his honesty and temperance, imprecations
+inspired by this revelation of a ration reduced.
+
+All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it standing,
+squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks pulled out of
+the holes where they sleep--or even prone, their backs on the ground,
+disturbed by passers-by, cursed at and cursing. Apart from these
+fleeting insults and jests, they say nothing, the primary and universal
+interest being but to swallow, with their mouths and the circumference
+thereof as greasy as a rifle-breech. Contentment is theirs.
+
+At the earliest cessation of their jaw-bones' activity, they serve up
+the most ribald of raillery. They knock each other about, and clamor in
+riotous rivalry to have their say. One sees even Farfadet smiling, the
+frail municipal clerk who in the early days kept himself so decent and
+clean amongst us all that he was taken for a foreigner or a
+convalescent. One sees the tomato-like mouth of Lamuse dilate and
+divide, and his delight ooze out in tears. Poterloo's face, like a pink
+peony, opens out wider and wider. Papa Blaire's wrinkles flicker with
+frivolity as he stands up, pokes his head forward, and gesticulates
+with the abbreviated body that serves as a handle for his huge drooping
+mustache. Even the corrugations of Cocon's poor little face are lighted
+up.
+
+Becuwe goes in search of firewood to warm the coffee. While we wait for
+our drink, we roll cigarettes and fill pipes. Pouches are pulled out.
+Some of us have shop-acquired pouches in leather or rubber, but they
+are a minority. Biquet extracts his tobacco from a sock, of which the
+mouth is drawn tight with string. Most of the others use the bags for
+anti-gas pads, made of some waterproof material which is an excellent
+preservative of shag, be it coarse or fine; and there are those who
+simply fumble for it in the bottom of their greatcoat pockets.
+
+The smokers spit in a circle, just at the mouth of the dug-out which
+most of the half-section inhabit, and flood with tobacco-stained saliva
+the place where they put their hands and feet when they flatten
+themselves to get in or out.
+
+But who notices such a detail?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Now, a propos of a letter to Marthereau from his wife, they discuss
+produce.
+
+"La mere Marthereau has written," he says. "That fat pig we've got at
+home, a fine specimen, guess how much she's worth now?"
+
+But the subject of domestic economy degenerates suddenly into a fierce
+altercation between Pepin and Tulacque. Words of quite unmistakable
+significance are exchanged. Then--"I don't care a what you say or what
+you don't say! Shut it up!"--"I shall shut it when I want, midden!"--"A
+seven-pound thump would shut it up quick enough!"--"Who from? Who'll
+give it me?"--"Come and find out!"
+
+They grind their teeth and approach each other in a foaming rage.
+Tulacque grasps his prehistoric ax, and his squinting eyes are
+flashing. The other is pale and his eyes have a greenish glint; you can
+see in his blackguard face that his thoughts are with his knife.
+
+But between the two, as they grip each other in looks and mangle in
+words, Lamuse intervenes with his huge pacific head, like a baby's, and
+his face of sanguinary hue: "Allons, allons! You're not going to cut
+yourselves up! Can't be allowed!"
+
+The others also interpose, and the antagonists are separated, but they
+continue to hurl murderous looks at each other across the barrier of
+their comrades. Pepin mutters a residue of slander in tones that quiver
+with malice--
+
+"The hooligan, the ruffian, the blackguard! But wait a bit! I'll see
+him later about this!"
+
+On the other side, Tulacque confides in the poilu who is beside him:
+"That crab-louse! Non, but you know what he is! You know--there's no
+more to be said. Here, we've got to rub along with a lot of people that
+we don't know from Adam. We know 'em and yet we don't know 'em; but
+that man, if he thinks he can mess me about, he'll find himself up the
+wrong street! You wait a bit. I'll smash him up one of these days,
+you'll see!"
+
+Meanwhile the general conversation is resumed, drowning the last twin
+echoes of the quarrel.
+
+"It's every day alike, alors!" says Paradis to me; "yesterday it was
+Plaisance who wanted to let Fumex have it heavy on the jaw, about God
+knows what--a matter of opium pills, I think. First it's one and then
+it's another that talks of doing some one in. Are we getting to be a
+lot of wild animals because we look like 'em?"
+
+"Mustn't take them too seriously, these men," Lamuse declares; "they're
+only kids."
+
+"True enough, seeing that they're men."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The day matures. A little more light has trickled through the mists
+that enclose the earth. But the sky has remained overcast, and now it
+dissolves in rain; With a slowness which itself disheartens, the wind
+brings back its great wet void upon us. The rain-haze makes everything
+clammy and dull--even the Turkey red of Lamuse's cheeks, and even the
+orange armor that caparisons Tulacque. The water penetrates to the deep
+joy with which dinner endowed us, and puts it out. Space itself
+shrinks; and the sky, which is a field of melancholy, comes closely
+down upon the earth, which is a field of death.
+
+We are still there, implanted and idle. It will be hard to-day to reach
+the end of it, to get rid of the afternoon. We shiver in discomfort,
+and keep shifting our positions, like cattle enclosed.
+
+Cocon is explaining to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of
+our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations. In
+the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of French
+trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half leveled; the
+others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These parallels are
+joined up by innumerable galleries which hook and crook themselves like
+ancient streets. The system is much more dense than we believe who live
+inside it. On the twenty-five kilometers' width that form the army
+front, one must count on a thousand kilometers of hollowed
+lines--trenches and saps of all sorts. And the French Army consists of
+ten such armies. There are then, on the French side, about 10,000
+kilometers [note 2] of trenches, and as much again on the German side.
+And the French front is only about one-eighth of the whole war-front of
+the world.
+
+Thus speaks Cocon, and he ends by saying to his neighbor, "In all that
+lot, you see what we are, us chaps?"
+
+Poor Barque's head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child's, is
+underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an apostrophe:
+"Yes, it's true, when you come to think of it. What's a soldier, or
+even several soldiers?--Nothing, and less than nothing, in the whole
+crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the few drops of
+blood that we are among all this flood of men and things."
+
+Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance
+of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: "He
+was coming along with two horses--Fs-s-s--a shell; and he's only one
+horse left."
+
+"You get fed up with it," says Volpatte.
+
+"But you stick it," growls Barque.
+
+"You've got to," says Paradis.
+
+"Why?" asks Marthereau, without conviction.
+
+"No need for a reason, as long as we've got to."
+
+"There is no reason," Lamuse avers.
+
+"Yes, there is," says Cocon. "It's--or rather, there are several."
+
+"Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we've got to
+stick it."
+
+"All the same," comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance
+slip of airing his pet phrase--"All the same, they'd like to steal the
+very skin off us!"
+
+"At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a heap
+of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any more."
+
+"Nor me either."
+
+"Nor me."
+
+"I've never tried to."
+
+"You're not such a fool as you look, flea-face," says the shrill and
+jeering voice of Mesnil Andre. Obscurely flattered, the other develops
+his theme--
+
+"To begin with, you can't know anything about anything."
+
+Says Corporal Bertrand, "There's only one thing you need know, and it's
+this; that the Boches are here in front of us, deep dug in, and we've
+got to see that they don't get through, and we've got to put 'em out,
+one day or another--as soon as possible."
+
+"Oui, oui, they've got to leg it, and no mistake about it. What else is
+there? Not worth while to worry your head thinking about anything else.
+But it's a long job."
+
+An explosion of profane assent comes from Fouillade, and he adds,
+"That's what it is!"
+
+"I've given up grousing," says Barque. "At the beginning of it, I
+played hell with everybody--with the people at the rear, with the
+civilians, with the natives, with the shirkers. Yes, I played hell; but
+that was at the beginning of the war--I was young. Now, I take things
+better."
+
+"There's only one way of taking 'em--as they come!"
+
+"Of course! Otherwise, you'd go crazy. We're dotty enough already, eh,
+Firmin?"
+
+Volpatte assents with a nod of profound conviction. He spits, and then
+contemplates his missile with a fixed and unseeing eye.
+
+"You were saying?" insists Barque.
+
+"Here, you haven't got to look too far in front. You must live from day
+to day and from hour to hour, as well as you can."
+
+"Certain sure, monkey-face. We've got to do what they tell us to do,
+until they tell us to go away."
+
+"That's all," yawns Mesnil Joseph.
+
+Silence follows the recorded opinions that proceed from these dried and
+tanned faces, inlaid with dust. This, evidently, is the credo of the
+men who, a year and a half ago, left all the corners of the land to
+mass themselves on the frontier: Give up trying to understand, and give
+up trying to be yourself. Hope that you will not die, and fight for
+life as well as you can.
+
+"Do what you've got to do, oui, but get out of your own messes
+yourself," says Barque, as he slowly stirs the mud to and fro.
+
+"No choice"--Tulacque backs him up. "If you don't get out of 'em
+yourself, no one'll do it for you."
+
+"He's not yet quite extinct, the man that bothers about the other
+fellow."
+
+"Every man for himself, in war!"
+
+"That's so, that's so."
+
+Silence. Then from the depth of their destitution, these men summon
+sweet souvenirs--"All that," Barque goes on, "isn't worth much,
+compared with the good times we had at Soissons."
+
+"Ah, the Devil!"
+
+A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to redden
+their cold faces.
+
+"Talk about a festival!" sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching
+himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland.
+
+"Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be
+ours! The houses and the beds--"
+
+"And the cupboards!"
+
+"And the cellars!"
+
+Lamuse's eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full.
+
+"Were you there long?" asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the
+drafts from Auvergne.
+
+"Several months."
+
+The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again fiercely
+at this vision of the days of plenty.
+
+"We used to see," said Paradis dreamily, "the poilus pouring along and
+behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round their
+middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good fellow or
+woman that they hadn't seen and won't ever see again."
+
+We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. "There were
+things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We
+held all the aces in those days."
+
+"A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops."
+
+"Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you've no idea of,
+a sort of devil's delight."
+
+"Believe me or not," said Blaire to Cadilhac, "but in the middle of it
+all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and everywhere
+else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to it. Ah, mon
+vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!"
+
+"Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the great
+Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!"
+
+"Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted without
+twisting himself."
+
+"Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks chasing
+and gabbling about the streets in all directions, blubbering because
+they had no coal or wood. But he'd got a fire. When he hadn't any, he
+said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you through.' And he wasn't long about it,
+either."
+
+"He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his kitchen,
+you'd never guess what he'd got the stew going with! With a violin that
+he'd found in the house!"
+
+"Rotten, all the same," says Mesnil Andre. "One knows well enough that
+a violin isn't worth much when it comes to utility, but all the same--"
+
+"Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching
+one for a cane, but the rest--into the fire! Then the arm-chairs in the
+drawing-room went by degrees--mahogany, they were. He did 'em in and
+cut them up by night, case some N.C.O. had something to say about it."
+
+"He knew his way about," said Pepin. "As for us, we got busy with an
+old suite of furniture that lasted us a fortnight."
+
+"And what for should we be without? You've got to make dinner, and
+there's no wood or coal. After the grub's served out, there you are
+with your jaws empty, with a pile of meat in front of you, and in the
+middle of a lot of pals that chaff and bullyrag you!"
+
+"It's the War Office's doing, it isn't ours."
+
+"Hadn't the officers a lot to say about the pinching?"
+
+"They damn well did it themselves, I give you my word! Desmaisons, do
+you remember Lieutenant Virvin's trick, breaking down a cellar door
+with an ax? And when a poilu saw him at it, he gave him the door for
+firewood, so that he wouldn't spread it about."
+
+"And poor old Saladin, the transport officer. He was found coming out
+of a basement in the dusk with two bottles of white wine in each arm,
+the sport, like a nurse with two pairs of twins. When he was spotted,
+they made him go back down to the wine-cellar, and serve out bottles
+for everybody. But Corporal Bertrand, who is a man of scruples,
+wouldn't have any. Ah, you remember that, do you, sausage-foot!"
+
+"Where's that cook now that always found wood?" asks Cadilhac.
+
+"He's dead. A bomb fell in his stove. He didn't get it, but he's dead
+all the same--died of shock when he saw his macaroni with its legs in
+the air. Heart seizure, so the doc' said. His heart was weak--he was
+only strong on wood. They gave him a proper funeral--made him a coffin
+out of the bedroom floor, and got the picture nails out of the walls to
+fasten 'em together, and used bricks to drive 'em in. While they were
+carrying him off, I thought to myself, 'Good thing for him he's dead.
+If he saw that, he'd never be able to forgive himself for not having
+thought of the bedroom floor for his fire.'--Ah, what the devil are you
+doing, son of a pig?"
+
+Volpatte offers philosophy on the rude intrusion of a passing fatigue
+party: "The private gets along on the back of his pals. When you spin
+your yarns in front of a fatigue gang, or when you take the best bit or
+the best place, it's the others that suffer."
+
+"I've often," says Lamuse, "put up dodges so as not to go into the
+trenches, and it's come off no end of times. I own up to that. But when
+my pals are in danger, I'm not a dodger any more. I forget discipline
+and everything else. I see men, and I go. But otherwise, my boy, I look
+after my little self."
+
+Lamuse's claims are not idle words. He is an admitted expert at
+loafing, but all the same he has brought wounded in under fire and
+saved their lives. Without any brag, he relates the deed--
+
+"We were all lying on the grass, and having a hot time. Crack, crack!
+Whizz, whizz! When I saw them downed, I got up, though they yelled at
+me, 'Get down!' Couldn't leave 'em like that. Nothing to make a song
+about, seeing I couldn't do anything else."
+
+Nearly all the boys of the squad have some high deed of arms to their
+credit, and the Croix de Guerre has been successively set upon their
+breasts.
+
+"I haven't saved any Frenchmen," says Biquet, "but I've given some
+Boches the bitter pill." In the May attacks, he ran off in advance and
+was seen to disappear in the distance, but came back with four fine
+fellows in helmets.
+
+"I, too," says Tulacque, "I've killed some." Two months ago, with
+quaint vanity, he laid out nine in a straight row, in front of the
+taken trench. "But," he adds, "it's always the Boche officer that I'm
+after."
+
+"Ah, the beasts!" The curse comes from several men at once and from the
+bottom of their hearts.
+
+"Ah, mon vieux," says Tirloir, "we talk about the dirty Boche race; but
+as for the common soldier, I don't know if it's true or whether we're
+codded about that as well, and if at bottom they're not men pretty much
+like us."
+
+"Probably they're men like us," says Eudore.
+
+"Perhaps!" cries Cocon, "and perhaps not."
+
+"Anyway," Tirloir goes on, "we've not got a dead set on the men, but on
+the German officers; non, non, non, they're not men, they're monsters.
+I tell you, they're really a specially filthy sort o' vermin. One might
+say that they're the microbes of the war. You ought to see them close
+to--the infernal great stiff-backs, thin as nails, though they've got
+calf-heads."
+
+"And snouts like snakes."
+
+Tirloir continues: "I saw one once, a prisoner, as I came back from
+liaison. The beastly bastard! A Prussian colonel, that wore a prince's
+crown, so they told me, and a gold coat-of-arms. He was mad because we
+took leave to graze against him when they were bringing him back along
+the communication trench, and he looked down on everybody--like that. I
+said to myself, 'Wait a bit, old cock, I'll make you rattle directly!'
+I took my time and squared up behind him, and kicked into his tailpiece
+with all my might. I tell you, he fell down half-strangled."
+
+"Strangled?"
+
+"Yes, with rage, when it dawned on him that the rump of an officer and
+nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor private! He
+went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an epileptic--"
+
+"I'm not spiteful myself," says Blaire, "I've got kiddies. And it
+worries me, too, at home, when I've got to kill a pig that I know--but
+those, I shall run 'em through--Bing!--full in the linen-cupboard."
+
+"I, too."
+
+"Not to mention," says Pepin, "that they've got silver hats, and
+pistols that you can get four quid for whenever you like, and
+field-glasses that simply haven't got a price. Ah, bad luck, what a lot
+of chances I let slip in the early part of the campaign! I was too much
+of a beginner then, and it serves me right. But don't worry, I shall
+get a silver hat. Mark my words, I swear I'll have one. I must have not
+only the skin of one of Wilhelm's red-tabs, but his togs as well. Don't
+fret yourself; I'll fasten on to that before the war ends."
+
+"You think it'll have an end, then?" asks some one.
+
+"Don't worry!" replies the other.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Meanwhile, a hubbub has arisen to the right of us, and suddenly a
+moving and buzzing group appears, in which dark and bright forms mingle.
+
+"What's all that?"
+
+Biquet has ventured on a reconnaissance, and returns contemptuously
+pointing with his thumb towards the motley mass: "Eh, boys! Come and
+have a squint at them! Some people!"
+
+"Some people?"
+
+"Oui, some gentlemen, look you. Civvies, with Staff officers."
+
+"Civilians! Let's hope they'll stick it!" [note 3]
+
+It is the sacramental saying and evokes laughter, although we have
+heard it a hundred times, and although the soldier has rightly or
+wrongly perverted the original meaning and regards it as an ironical
+reflection on his life of privations and peril.
+
+Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes.
+Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and
+binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or
+patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.
+
+With an arm where a brassard glitters in gold-edged silk and golden
+ornament, a captain indicates the firing-step in front of an old
+emplacement and invites the visitors to get up and try it. The
+gentleman in the touring suit clambers up with the aid of his umbrella.
+
+Says Barque, "You've seen the station-master at the Gare du Nord, all
+in his Sunday best, and opening the door of a first-class compartment
+for a rich sportsman on the first day of the shooting? With his
+'Montez, monsieur le Propritaire!'--you know, when the toffs are all
+togged up in brand-new outfits and leathers and ironmongery, and
+showing off with all their paraphernalia for killing poor little
+animals!"
+
+Three or four poilus who were quite without their accouterments have
+disappeared underground. The others sit as though paralyzed. Even the
+pipes go out, and nothing is heard but the babble of talk exchanged by
+the officers and their guests.
+
+"Trench tourists," says Barque in an undertone, and then louder--"This
+way, mesdames et messieurs"--in the manner of the moment.
+
+"Chuck it!" whispers Farfadet, fearing that Barque's malicious tongue
+will draw the attention of the potent personages.
+
+Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who
+detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He has
+a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another follows him,
+wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black beard, a white
+tie and an eyeglass.
+
+"Ah, ah! There are some poilus," says the first gentleman. "These are
+real poilus, indeed."
+
+He comes up to our party a little timidly, as though in the Zoological
+Gardens, and offers his hand to the one who is nearest to him--not
+without awkwardness, as one offers a piece of bread to the elephant.
+
+"He, he! They are drinking coffee," he remarks.
+
+"They call it 'the juice,'" corrects the magpie-man.
+
+"Is it good, my friends?" The soldier, abashed in his turn by this
+alien and unusual visitation, grunts, giggles, and reddens, and the
+gentleman says, "He, he!" Then, with a slight motion of the head, he
+withdraws backwards.
+
+The assemblage, with its neutral shades of civilian cloth and its
+sprinkling of bright military hues--like geraniums and hortensias in
+the dark soil of a flowerbed--oscillates, then passes, and moves off
+the opposite way it came. One of the officers was heard to say, "We
+have yet much to see, messieurs les journalistes."
+
+When the radiant spectacle has faded away, we look at each other. Those
+who had fled into the funk-holes now gradually and head first disinter
+themselves. The group recovers itself and shrugs its shoulders.
+
+"They're journalists," says Tirette.
+
+"Journalists?"
+
+"Why, yes, the individuals that lay the newspapers. You don't seem to
+catch on, fathead. Newspapers must have chaps to write 'em."
+
+"Then it's those that stuff up our craniums?" says Marthereau.
+
+Barque assumes a shrill treble, and pretending that he has a newspaper
+in front of his nose, recites--"'The Crown Prince is mad, after having
+been killed at the beginning of the campaign, and meanwhile he has all
+the diseases you can name. William will die this evening, and again
+to-morrow. The Germans have no more munitions and are chewing wood.
+They cannot hold out, according to the most authoritative calculations,
+beyond the end of the week. We can have them when we like, with their
+rifles slung. If one can wait a few days longer, there will be no
+desire to forsake the life of the trenches. One is so comfortable
+there, with water and gas laid on, and shower-baths at every step. The
+only drawback is that it is rather too hot in winter. As for the
+Austrians, they gave in a long time since and are only pretending.' For
+fifteen months now it's been like that, and you can hear the editor
+saying to his scribes, 'Now, boys, get into it! Find some way of
+brushing that up again for me in five secs, and make it spin out all
+over those four damned white sheets that we've got to mucky.'"
+
+"Ah, yes!" says Fouillade.
+
+"Look here, corporal; you're making fun of it--isn't it true what I
+said?"
+
+"There's a little truth in it, but you're too slashing on the poor
+boys, and you'd be the first to make a song about it if you had to go
+without papers. Oui, when the paper-man's going by, why do you all
+shout, 'Here, here'?"
+
+"And what good can you get out of them all?" cries Papa Blaire. "Read
+'em by the tubful if you like, but do the same as me--don't believe
+'em!"
+
+"Oui, oui, that's enough about them. Turn the page over, donkey-nose."
+
+The conversation is breaking up; interest in it follows suit and is
+scattered. Four poilus join in a game of manille, that will last until
+night blacks out the cards. Volpatte is trying to catch a leaf of
+cigarette paper that has escaped his fingers and goes hopping and
+dodging in the wind along the wall of the trench like a fragile
+butterfly.
+
+Cocon and Tirette are recalling their memories of barrack-life. The
+impressions left upon their minds by those years of military training
+are ineffaceable. Into that fund of abundant souvenirs, of abiding
+color and instant service, they have been wont to dip for their
+subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. So that
+they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual war in
+all its forms.
+
+I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it. For it is
+everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their military
+past;--the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with words of
+extreme appropriateness and daring. He wasn't afraid, he spoke out loud
+and strong! Some scraps of it reach my ears--
+
+"Alors, d'you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me? Not a bit,
+my boy. All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up, 'Mon
+adjudant,' I says, 'it's possible, but--'" A sentence follows that I
+cannot secure--"Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it. He didn't get
+shirty; 'Good, that's good,' he says as he hops it, and afterwards he
+was as good as all that, with me."
+
+"Just like me, with Dodore, 'jutant of the 13th, when I was on leave--a
+mongrel. Now he's at the Pantheon, as caretaker. He'd got it in for me,
+so--"
+
+So each unpacks his own little load of historical anecdote. They are
+all alike, and not one of them but says, "As for me, I am not like the
+others."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The post-orderly! He is a tall and broad man with fat calves;
+comfortable looking, and as neat and tidy as a policeman. He is in a
+bad temper. There are new orders, and now he has to go every day as far
+as Battalion Headquarters. He abuses the order as if it had been
+directed exclusively against himself; and he continues to complain even
+while he calls up the corporals for the post and maintains his
+customary chat en passant with this man and that. And in spite of his
+spleen he does not keep to himself all the information with which he
+comes provided. While removing the string from the letter-packets he
+dispenses his verbal news, and announces first, that according to
+rumor, there is a very explicit ban on the wearing of hoods.
+
+"Hear that?" says Tirette to Tirloir. "Got to chuck your fine hood
+away!"
+
+"Not likely! I'm not on. That's nothing to do with me," replies the
+hooded one, whose pride no less than his comfort is at stake.
+
+"Order of the General Commanding the Army."
+
+"Then let the General give an order that it's not to rain any more. I
+want to know nothing about it."
+
+The majority of Orders, even when less peculiar than this one, are
+always received in this way--and then carried out.
+
+"There's a reported order as well," says the man of letters, "that
+beards have got to be trimmed and hair got to be clipped close."
+
+"Talk on, my lad," says Barque, on whose head the threatened order
+directly falls; "you didn't see me! You can draw the curtains!"
+
+"I'm telling you. Do it or don't do it--doesn't matter a damn to me."
+
+Besides what is real and written, there is bigger news, but still more
+dubious and imaginative--the division is going to be relieved, and sent
+either to rest--real rest, for six weeks--or to Morocco, or perhaps to
+Egypt.
+
+Divers exclamations. They listen, and let themselves be tempted by the
+fascination of the new, the wonderful.
+
+But some one questions the post-orderly: "Who told you that?"
+
+"The adjutant commanding the Territorial detachment that fatigues for
+the H.Q. of the A.C."
+
+"For the what?"
+
+"For Headquarters of the Army Corps, and he's not the only one that
+says it. There's--you know him--I've forgotten his name--he's like
+Galle, but he isn't Galle--there's some one in his family who is Some
+One. Anyway, he knows all about it."
+
+"Then what?" With hungry eyes they form a circle around the
+story-teller.
+
+"Egypt, you say, we shall go to? Don't know it. I know there were
+Pharaohs there at the time when I was a kid and went to school, but
+since--"
+
+"To Egypt!" The idea finds unconscious anchorage in their minds.
+
+"Ah, non," says Blaire, "for I get sea-sick. Still, it doesn't last,
+sea-sickness. Oui, but what would my good lady say?"
+
+"What about it? She'll get used to it. You see niggers, and streets
+full of big birds, like we see sparrows here."
+
+"But haven't we to go to Alsace?"
+
+"Yes," says the post-orderly, "there are some who think so at the
+Pay-office."
+
+"That'd do me well enough."
+
+But common sense and acquired experience regain the upper hand and put
+the visions to flight. We have been told so often that we were going a
+long way off, so often have we believed it, so often been undeceived!
+So, as if at a moment arranged, we wake up.
+
+"It's all my eye--they've done it on us too often. Wait before
+believing--and don't count a crumb's worth on it."
+
+We reoccupy our corner. Here and there a man bears in his hand the
+light momentous burden of a letter.
+
+"Ah," says Tirloir, "I must be writing. Can't go eight days without
+writing."
+
+"Me too," says Eudore, "I must write to my p'tit' femme."
+
+"Is she all right, Mariette?"
+
+"Oui, oui, don't fret about Mariette."
+
+A few have already settled themselves for correspondence. Barque is
+standing up. He stoops over a sheet of paper flattened on a note-book
+upon a jutting crag in the trench wall. Apparently in the grip of an
+inspiration, he writes on and on, with his eyes in bondage and the
+concentrated expression of a horseman at full gallop.
+
+When once Lamuse--who lacks imagination--has sat down, placed his
+little writing-block on the padded summit of his knees, and moistened
+his copying-ink pencil, he passes the time in reading again the last
+letters received, in wondering what he can say that he has not already
+said, and in fostering a grim determination to say something else.
+
+A sentimental gentleness seems to have overspread little Eudore, who is
+curled up in a sort of niche in the ground. He is lost in meditation,
+pencil in hand, eyes on paper. Dreaming, he looks and stares and sees.
+It is another sky that lends him light, another to which his vision
+reaches. He has gone home.
+
+In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best
+that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its
+first expression is to talk once more of fleshly comforts.
+
+Through their outer crust of coarseness and concealment, other hearts
+venture upon murmured memories, and the rekindling of bygone
+brightness: the summer morning, when the green freshness of the garden
+steals in upon the purity of the country bedroom; or when the wind in
+the wheat of the level lands sets it slowly stirring or deeply waving,
+and shakes the square of oats hard by into quick little feminine
+tremors; or the winter evening, with women and their gentleness around
+the shaded luster of the lamp.
+
+But Papa Blaire resumes work upon the ring he has begun. He has
+threaded the still formless disc of aluminium over a bit of rounded
+wood, and rubs it with the file. As he applies himself to the job, two
+wrinkles of mighty meditation deepen upon his forehead. Anon he stops,
+straightens himself, and looks tenderly at the trifle, as though she
+also were looking at it.
+
+"You know," he said to me once, speaking of another ring, "it's not a
+question of doing it well or not well. The point is that I've done it
+for my wife, d'you see? When I had nothing to do but scratch myself, I
+used to have a look at this photo"--he showed me a photograph of a big,
+chubby-faced woman--"and then it was quite easy to set about this
+damned ring. You might say that we've made it together, see? The proof
+of that is that it was company for me, and that I said Adieu to it when
+I sent it off to Mother Blaire."
+
+He is making another just now, and this one will have copper in it,
+too. He works eagerly. His heart would fain express itself to the best
+advantage in this the sort of penmanship upon which he is so
+tenaciously bent.
+
+As they stoop reverently, in their naked earth-holes, over the slender
+rudimentary trinkets--so tiny that the great hide-bound hands hold them
+with difficulty or let them fall--these men seem still more wild, more
+primitive, and more human, than at all other times.
+
+You are set thinking of the first inventor, the father of all
+craftsmen, who sought to invest enduring materials with the shapes of
+what he saw and the spirit of what he felt.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"People coming along," announces Biquet the mobile, who acts as
+hall-porter to our section of the trench--"buckets of 'em." Immediately
+an adjutant appears, with straps round his belly and his chin, and
+brandishing his sword-scabbard.
+
+"Out of the way, you! Out of the way, I tell you! You loafers there,
+out of it! Let me see you quit, hey!" We make way indolently. Those at
+the sides push back into the earth by slow degrees.
+
+It is a company of Territorials, deputed to our sector for the
+fortification of the second line and the upkeep of its communication
+trenches. They come into view--miserable bundles of implements, and
+dragging their feet.
+
+We watch them, one by one, as they come up, pass, and disappear. They
+are stunted and elderly, with dusty faces, or big and broken-winded,
+tightly enfolded in greatcoats stained and over-worn, that yawn at the
+toothless gaps where the buttons are missing.
+
+Tirette and Barque, the twin wags, leaning close together against the
+wall, stare at them, at first in silence. Then they begin to smile.
+
+"March past of the Broom Brigade," says Tirette.
+
+"We'll have a bit of fun for three minutes," announces Barque.
+
+Some of the old toilers are comical. This one whom the file brings up
+has bottle-shaped shoulders. Although extremely narrow-chested and
+spindle-shanked, he is big-bellied. He is too much for Barque. "Hullo,
+Sir Canteen!" he says.
+
+When a more outrageously patched-up greatcoat appears than all the
+others can show, Tirette questions the veteran recruit. "Hey, Father
+Samples! Hey, you there!" he insists.
+
+The other turns and looks at him, open-mouthed.
+
+"Say there, papa, if you will be so kind as to give me the address of
+your tailor in London!"
+
+A chuckle comes from the antiquated and wrinkle-scrawled face, and then
+the poilu, checked for an instant by Barque's command, is jostled by
+the following flood and swept away.
+
+When some less striking figures have gone past, a new victim is
+provided for the jokers. On his red and wrinkled neck luxuriates some
+dirty sheep's-wool. With knees bent, his body forward, his back bowed,
+this Territorial's carriage is the worst.
+
+"Tiens!" bawls Tirette, with pointed finger, "the famous
+concertina-man! It would cost you something to see him at the
+fair--here, he's free gratis!"
+
+The victim stammers responsive insults amid the scattered laughter that
+arises.
+
+No more than that laughter is required to excite the two comrades. It
+is the ambition to have their jests voted funny by their easy audience
+that stimulates them to mock the peculiarities of their old
+comrades-in-arms, of those who toil night and day on the brink of the
+great war to make ready and make good the fields of battle.
+
+And even the other watchers join in. Miserable themselves, they scoff
+at the still more miserable.
+
+"Look at that one! And that, look!"
+
+"Non, but take me a snapshot of that little rump-end! Hey, earth-worm!"
+
+"And that one that has no ending! Talk about a sky-scratcher! Tiens,
+la, he takes the biscuit. Yes, you take it, old chap!"
+
+This man goes with little steps, and holds his pickax up in front like
+a candle; his face is withered, and his body borne down by the blows of
+lumbago.
+
+"Like a penny, gran'pa?" Barque asks him, as he passes within reach of
+a tap on the shoulder.
+
+The broken-down poilu replies with a great oath of annoyance, and
+provokes the harsh rejoinder of Barque: "Come now, you might be polite,
+filthy-face, old muck-mill!"
+
+Turning right round in fury, the old one defies his tormentor.
+
+"Hullo!" cries Barque, laughing, "He's showing fight; the ruin! He's
+warlike, look you, and he might be mischievous if only he were sixty
+years younger!"
+
+"And if he wasn't alone," wantonly adds Pepin, whose eye is in quest of
+other targets among the flow of new arrivals.
+
+The hollow chest of the last straggler appears, and then his distorted
+back disappears.
+
+The march past of the worn-out and trench-foul veterans comes to an end
+among the ironical and almost malevolent faces of these sinister
+troglodytes, whom their caverns of mud but half reveal.
+
+Meanwhile, the hours slip away, and evening begins to veil the sky and
+darken the things of earth. It comes to blend itself at once with the
+blind fate and the ignorant dark minds of the multitude there
+enshrouded.
+
+Through the twilight comes the rolling hum of tramping men, and another
+throng rubs its way through.
+
+"Africans!"
+
+They march past with faces red-brown, yellow or chestnut, their beards
+scanty and fine or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats
+yellowish-green, and their muddy helmets sporting the crescent in place
+of our grenade. Their eyes are like balls of ivory or onyx, that shine
+from faces like new pennies, flattened or angular. Now and again comes
+swaying along above the line the coal-black mask of a Senegalese
+sharpshooter. Behind the company goes a red flag with a green hand in
+the center.
+
+We watch them in silence. These are asked no questions. They command
+respect, and even a little fear.
+
+All the same, these Africans seem jolly and in high spirits. They are
+going, of course, to the first line. That is their place, and their
+passing is the sign of an imminent attack. They are made for the
+offensive.
+
+"Those and the 75 gun we can take our hats off to. They're everywhere
+sent ahead at big moments, the Moroccan Division."
+
+"They can't quite fit in with us. They go too fast--and there's no way
+of stopping them."
+
+Some of these diabolical images in yellow wood or bronze or ebony are
+serious of mien, uneasy, and taciturn. Their faces have the disquieting
+and secret look of the snare suddenly discovered. The others laugh with
+a laugh that jangles like fantastic foreign instruments of music, a
+laugh that bares the teeth.
+
+We talk over the characteristics of these Africans; their ferocity in
+attack, their devouring passion to be in with the bayonet, their
+predilection for "no quarter." We recall those tales that they
+themselves willingly tell, all in much the same words and with the same
+gestures. They raise their arms over their heads--"Kam'rad, Kam'rad!"
+"Non, pas Kam'rad!" And in pantomime they drive a bayonet forward, at
+belly-height, drawing it back then with the help of a foot.
+
+One of the sharpshooters overhears our talk as he passes. He looks upon
+us, laughs abundantly in his helmeted turban, and repeats our words
+with significant shakes of his head: "Pas Kam'rad, non pas Kam'rad,
+never! Cut head off!"
+
+"No doubt they're a different race from us, with their tent-cloth
+skin," Barque confesses, though he does not know himself what "cold
+feet" are. "It worries them to rest, you know; they only live for the
+minute when the officer puts his watch back in his pocket and says,
+'Off you go!'"
+
+"In fact, they're real soldiers."
+
+"We are not soldiers," says big Lamuse, "we're men." Though the evening
+has grown darker now, that plain true saying sheds something like a
+glimmering light on the men who are waiting here, waiting since the
+morning, waiting since months ago.
+
+They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the joy
+of life. Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are
+ignorant and of narrow outlook, full of a sound common sense--which
+some-times gets off the rails--disposed to be led and to do as they are
+bid, enduring under hardships, long-suffering.
+
+They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive
+instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances--the
+instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living through,
+the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals they are
+cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the silence and the
+shadows of their great human hearts.
+
+When we can no longer see clearly, we hear down there the murmur of a
+command, which comes nearer and rings loud--"Second half-section!
+Muster!" We fall in; it is the call.
+
+"Gee up!" says the corporal. We are set in motion. In front of the
+tool-depot there is a halt and trampling. To each is given a spade or
+pickax. An N.C.O. presents the handles in the gloom: "You, a spade;
+there, hop it! You a spade, too; you a pick. Allons, hurry up and get
+off."
+
+We leave by the communication trench at right angles to our own, and
+straight ahead towards the changeful frontier, now alive and terrible.
+
+Up in the somber sky, the strong staccato panting of an invisible
+aeroplane circles in wide descending coils and fills infinity. In
+front, to right and left, everywhere, thunderclaps roll with great
+glimpses of short-lived light in the dark-blue sky.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] The popular and international name for a French soldier. Its
+literal meaning is "hairy, shaggy," but the word has conveyed for over
+a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose strength lay in
+his locks.--Tr.
+
+[note 2:] 6250 miles.
+
+[note 3:] Pourvu que les civils tiennent. In the early days of the war
+it was a common French saying that victory was certain--"if the
+civilians hold out."--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The Return
+
+
+RELUCTANTLY the ashen dawn is bleaching the still dark and formless
+landscape. Between the declining road on the right that falls into the
+gloom, and the black cloud of the Alleux Wood--where we hear the convoy
+teams assembling and getting under way--a field extends. We have
+reached it, we of the 6th Battalion, at the end of the night. We have
+piled arms, and now, in the center of this circle of uncertain light,
+our feet in the mist and mud, we stand in dark clusters (that yet are
+hardly blue), or as solitary phantoms; and the heads of all are turned
+towards the road that comes from "down there." We are waiting for the
+rest of the regiment, the 5th Battalion, who were in the first line and
+left the trenches after us.
+
+Noises; "There they are!" A long and shapeless mass appears in the west
+and comes down out of the night upon the dawning road.
+
+At last! It is ended, the accursed shift that began at six o'clock
+yesterday evening and has lasted all night, and now the last man has
+stepped from the last communication trench.
+
+This time it has been an awful sojourn in the trenches. The 18th
+company was foremost and has been cut up, eighteen killed and fifty
+wounded--one in three less in four days. And this without attack--by
+bombardment alone.
+
+This is known to us, and as the mutilated battalion approaches down
+there, and we join them in trampling the muddy field and exchanging
+nods of recognition, we cry, "What about the 18th?" We are thinking as
+we put the question, "If it goes on like this, what is to become of all
+of us? What will become of me?"
+
+The 17th, the 19th, and the 20th arrive in turn and pile arms. "There's
+the 18th!" It arrives after all the others; having held the first
+trench, it has been last relieved.
+
+The light is a little cleaner, and the world is paling. We can make
+out, as he comes down the road, the company's captain, ahead of his men
+and alone. He helps himself along with a stick, and walks with
+difficulty, by reason of his old wound of the Marne battle that
+rheumatism is troubling; and there are other pangs, too. He lowers his
+hooded head, and might be attending a funeral. We can see that in his
+mind he is indeed following the dead, and his thoughts are with them.
+
+Here is the company, debouching in dire disorder, and our hearts are
+heavy. It is obviously shorter than the other three, in the march past
+of the battalion.
+
+I reach the road, and confront the descending mass of the 18th. The
+uniforms of these survivors are all earth-yellowed alike, so that they
+appear to be clad in khaki. The cloth is stiff with the ochreous mud
+that has dried underneath. The skirts of their greatcoats are like
+lumps of wood, jumping about on the yellow crust that reaches to their
+knees. Their faces are drawn and blackened; dust and dirt have wrinkled
+them anew; their eyes are big and fevered. And from these soldiers whom
+the depths of horror have given back there rises a deafening din. They
+talk all at once, and loudly; they gesticulate, they laugh and sing.
+You would think, to see them, that it was a holiday crowd pouring over
+the road!
+
+These are the second section and its big sub-lieutenant, whose
+greatcoat is tightened and strapped around a body as stiff as a rolled
+umbrella. I elbow my way along the marching crowd as far as Marchal's
+squad, the most sorely tried of all. Out of eleven comrades that they
+were, and had been without a break for a year and a half, there were
+three men only with Corporal Marchal.
+
+He sees me--with a glad exclamation and a broad smile. He lets go his
+rifle-sling and offers me his hands, from one of which hangs his trench
+stick--"Eh, vieux frere, still going strong? What's become of you
+lately?"
+
+I turn my head away and say, almost under my breath, "So, old chap,
+it's happened badly."
+
+His smile dies at once, and he is serious: "Eh, oui, old man; it can't
+be helped; it was awful this time. Barbier is killed."
+
+"They told us--Barbier!"
+
+"Saturday night it was, at eleven o'clock. He had the top of his back
+taken away by a shell," says Marchal, "cut off like a razor. Besse got
+a bit of shell that went clean through his belly and stomach. Barthlemy
+and Baubex got it in the head and neck. We passed the night skedaddling
+up and down the trench at full speed, to dodge the showers. And little
+Godefroy--did you know him?--middle of his body blown away. He was
+emptied of blood on the spot in an instant, like a bucket kicked over.
+Little as he was, it was remarkable how much blood he had, it made a
+stream at least fifty meters long. Gougnard got his legs cut up by one
+explosion. They picked him up not quite dead. That was at the listening
+post. I was there on duty with them. But when that shell fell I had
+gone into the trench to ask the time. I found my rifle, that I'd left
+in my place, bent double, as if some one had folded it in his hands,
+the barrel like a corkscrew, and half of the stock in sawdust. The
+smell of fresh blood was enough to bring your heart up."
+
+"And Mondain--him, too?"
+
+"Mondain--that was the day after, yesterday in fact, in a dug-out that
+a shell smashed in. He was lying down, and his chest was crushed. Have
+they told you about Franco, who was alongside Mondain? The fall of
+earth broke his spine. He spoke again after they'd got him out and set
+him down. He said, with his head falling to one side, 'I'm dying,' and
+he was gone. Vigile was with them, too; his body wasn't touched, but
+they found him with his head completely flattened out, flat as a
+pancake, and huge-as big as that. To see it spread out on the ground,
+black and distorted, it made you think of his shadow--the shadow one
+gets on the ground sometimes when one walks with a lantern at night."
+
+"Vigile--only Class 1913--a child! And Mondain and Franco--such good
+sorts, in spite of their stripes. We're so many old special pals the
+less, mon vieux Marchal."
+
+"Yes," says Marchal. But he is swallowed up in a crowd of his friends,
+who worry and catechise him. He bandies jests with them, and answers
+their raillery, and all hustle each other, and laugh.
+
+I look from face to face. They are merry, and in spite of the
+contractions of weariness, and the earth-stains, they look triumphant.
+
+What does it mean? If wine had been possible during their stay in the
+first line, I should have said, "All these men are drunk."
+
+I single out one of the survivors, who hums as he goes, and steps in
+time with it flippantly, as hussars of the stage do. It is Vanderborn,
+the drummer.
+
+"Hullo, Vanderborn, you look pleased with yourself!" Vanderborn, who is
+sedate in the ordinary, cries, "It's not me yet, you see! Here I am!"
+With a mad gesticulation he serves me a thump on the shoulder. I
+understand.
+
+If these men are happy in spite of all, as they come out of hell, it is
+because they are coming out of it. They are returning, they are spared.
+Once again the Death that was there has passed them over. Each company
+in its turn goes to the front once in six weeks. Six weeks! In both
+great and minor matters, fighting soldiers manifest the philosophy of
+the child. They never look afar, either ahead or around. Their thought
+strays hardly farther than from day to day. To-day, every one of those
+men is confident that he will live yet a little while.
+
+And that is why, in spite of the weariness that weighs them down and
+the new slaughter with which they are still bespattered, though each
+has seen his brothers torn away from his side, in spite of all and in
+spite of themselves, they are celebrating the Feast of the Survivors.
+The boundless glory in which they rejoice is this--they still stand
+straight.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Volpatte and Fouillade
+
+
+AS we reached quarters again, some one cried: "But where's
+Volpatte?"--"And Fouillade, where's he?"
+
+They had been requisitioned and taken off to the front line by the 5th
+Battalion. No doubt we should find them somewhere in quarters. No
+success. Two men of the squad lost!
+
+"That's what comes of lending men," said the sergeant with a great
+oath. The captain, when apprised of the loss, also cursed and swore and
+said, "I must have those men. Let them be found at once. Allez!"
+
+Farfadet and I are summoned by Corporal Bertrand from the barn where at
+full length we have already immobilized ourselves, and are growing
+torpid: "You must go and look for Volpatte and Fouillade."
+
+Quickly we got up, and set off with a shiver of uneasiness. Our two
+comrades have been taken by the 5th and carried off to that infernal
+shift. Who knows where they are and what they may be by now!
+
+We climb up the hill again. Again we begin, but in the opposite
+direction, the journey done since the dawn and the night. Though we are
+without our heavy stuff, and only carry rifles and accouterments, we
+feel idle, sleepy, and stiff; and the country is sad, and the sky all
+wisped with mist. Farfadet is soon panting. He talked a little at
+first, till fatigue enforced silence on him. He is brave enough, but
+frail, and during all his prewar life, shut up in the Town Hall office
+where he scribbled since the days of his "first sacrament" between a
+stove and some ageing cardboard files, he hardly learned the use of his
+legs.
+
+Just as we emerge from the wood, slipping and floundering, to penetrate
+the region of communication trenches, two faint shadows are outlined in
+front. Two soldiers are coming up. We can see the protuberance of their
+burdens and the sharp lines of their rifles. The swaying double shape
+becomes distinct--"It's them!"
+
+One of the shadows has a great white head, all swathed--"One of them's
+wounded! It's Volpatte!"
+
+We run up to the specters, our feet making the sounds of sinking in
+sponge and of sticky withdrawal, and our shaken cartridges rattle in
+their pouches. They stand still and wait for us. When we are close up,
+"It's about time!" cries Volpatte.
+
+"You're wounded, old chap?"--"What?" he says; the manifold bandages all
+round his head make him deaf, and we must shout to get through them. So
+we go close and shout. Then he replies, "That's nothing; we're coming
+from the hole where the 5th Battalion put us on Thursday."
+
+"You've stayed there--ever since?" yells Farfadet, whose shrill and
+almost feminine voice goes easily through the quilting that protects
+Volpatte's ears.
+
+"Of course we stayed there, you blithering idiot!" says Fouillade. "You
+don't suppose we'd got wings to fly away with, and still less that we
+should have legged it without orders?"
+
+Both of them let themselves drop to a sitting position on the ground.
+Volpatte's head--enveloped in rags with a big knot on the top and the
+same dark yellowish stains as his face--looks like a bundle of dirty
+linen.
+
+"They forgot you, then, poor devils?"
+
+"Rather!" cries Fouillade, "I should say they did. Four days and four
+nights in a shell-hole, with bullets raining down, a hole that stunk
+like a cesspool."
+
+"That's right," says Volpatte. "It wasn't an ordinary listening-post
+hole, where one comes and goes regularly. It was just a shell-hole,
+like any other old shell-hole, neither more nor less. They said to us
+on Thursday, 'Station yourselves in there and keep on firing,' they
+said. Next day, a liaison chap of the 5th Battalion came and showed his
+neb: 'What the hell are you doing there?'--'Why, we're firing. They
+told us to fire, so we're firing,' I says. 'If they told us to do it,
+there must be some reason at the back of it. We're wanting for them to
+tell us to do something else.' The chap made tracks. He looked a bit
+uneasy, and suffering from the effects of being bombed. 'It's 22,' he
+says."
+
+"To us two," says Fouillade, "there was a loaf of bread and a bucket of
+wine that the 18th gave us when they planted us there, and a whole case
+of cartridges, my boy. We fired off the cartridges and drank the booze,
+but we had sense to keep a few cartridges and a hunch of bread, though
+we didn't keep any wine."
+
+"That's where we went wrong," says Volpatte, "seeing that it was a
+thirsty job. Say, boys, you haven't got any gargle?"
+
+"I've still nearly half a pint of wine," replies Farfadet. "Give it to
+him," says Fouillade, pointing to Volpatte, "seeing that he's been
+losing blood. I'm only thirsty."
+
+Volpatte was shivering, and his little strapped-up eyes burned with
+fever in the enormous dump of rags set upon his shoulders. "That's
+good," he says, drinking.
+
+"Ah! And then, too," he added, emptying--as politeness requires--the
+drop of wine that remained at the bottom of Farfadet's cup, "we got two
+Boches. They were crawling about outside, and fell into our holes, as
+blindly as moles into a spring snare, those chaps did. We tied 'em up.
+And see us then--after firing for thirty-six hours, we'd no more
+ammunition. So we filled our magazines with the last, and waited, in
+front of the parcels of Boche. The liaison chap forgot to tell his
+people that we were there. You, the 6th, forgot to ask for us; the 18th
+forgot us, too; and as we weren't in a listening-post where you're
+relieved as regular as if at H.Q., I could almost see us staying there
+till the regiment came back. In the long run, it was the loafers of the
+204th, come to skulk about looking for fuses, that mentioned us. So
+then we got the order to fall back--immediately, they said. That
+'immediately' was a good joke, and we got into harness at once. We
+untied the legs of the Boches, led them off and handed them over to the
+204th, and here we are."
+
+"We even fished out, in passing, a sergeant who was piled up in a hole
+and didn't dare come out, seeing he was shell-shocked. We slanged him,
+and that set him up a bit, and he thanked us. Sergeant Sacerdote he
+called himself."
+
+"But your wound, old chap?"
+
+"It's my ears. Two shells, a little one and a big one, my lad--went off
+while you're saying it. My head came between the two bursts, as you
+might say, but only just; a very close shave, and my lugs got it."
+
+"You should have seen him," says Fouillade, "it was disgusting, those
+two ears hanging down. We had two packets of bandages, and the
+stretcher-men fired us one in. That makes three packets he's got rolled
+round his nut."
+
+"Give us your traps, we're going back."
+
+Farfadet and I divide Volpatte's equipment between us. Fouillade,
+sullen with thirst and racked by stiff joints, growls, and insists
+obstinately on keeping his weapons and bundles.
+
+We stroll back, finding diversion--as always--in walking without ranks.
+It is so uncommon that one finds it surprising and profitable. So it is
+a breach of liberty which soon enlivens all four of us. We are in the
+country as though for the pleasure of it.
+
+"We are pedestrians!" says Volpatte proudly. When we reach the turning
+at the top of the hill, he relapses upon rosy visions: "Old man, it's a
+good wound, after all. I shall be sent back, no mistake about it."
+
+His eyes wink and sparkle in the huge white clump that dithers on his
+shoulders--a clump reddish on each side, where the ears were.
+
+From the depth where the village lies we hear ten o'clock strike. "To
+hell with the time," says Volpatte "it doesn't matter to me any more
+what time it is."
+
+He becomes loquacious. It is a low fever that inspires his
+dissertation, and condenses it to the slow swing of our walk, in which
+his step is already jaunty.
+
+"They'll stick a red label on my greatcoat, you'll see, and take me to
+the rear. I shall be bossed this time by a very polite sort of chap,
+who'll say to me, 'That's one side, now turn the other way--so, my poor
+fellow.' Then the ambulance, and then the sick-train, with the pretty
+little ways of the Red Cross ladies all the way along, like they did to
+Crapelet Jules, then the base hospital. Beds with white sheets, a stove
+that snores in the middle of us all, people with the special job of
+looking after you, and that you watch doing it, regulation
+slippers--sloppy and comfortable--and a chamber-cupboard. Furniture!
+And it's in those big hospitals that you're all right for grub! I shall
+have good feeds, and baths. I shall take all I can get hold of. And
+there'll be presents--that you can enjoy without having to fight the
+others for them and get yourself into a bloody mess. I shall have my
+two hands on the counterpane, and they'll do damn well nothing, like
+things to look at--like toys, what? And under the sheets my legs'll be
+white-hot all the way through, and my trotters'll be expanding like
+bunches of violets."
+
+Volpatte pauses, fumbles about, and pulls out of his pocket, along with
+his famous pair of Soissons scissors, something that he shows to me:
+"Tiens, have you seen this?"
+
+It is a photograph of his wife and two children. He has already shown
+it to me many a time. I look at it and express appreciation.
+
+"I shall go on sick-leave," says Volpatte, "and while my ears are
+sticking themselves on again, the wife and the little ones will look at
+me, and I shall look at them. And while they're growing again like
+lettuces, my friends, the war, it'll make progress--the Russians--one
+doesn't know, what?" He is thinking aloud, lulling himself with happy
+anticipations, already alone with his private festival in the midst of
+us.
+
+"Robber!" Feuillade shouts at him. "You've too much luck, by God!"
+
+How could we not envy him? He would be going away for one, two, or
+three months; and all that time, instead of our wretched privations, he
+would be transformed into a man of means!
+
+"At the beginning," says Farfadet, "it sounded comic when I heard them
+wish for a 'good wound.' But all the same, and whatever can be said
+about it, I understand now that it's the only thing a poor soldier can
+hope for if he isn't daft."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We were drawing near to the village and passing round the wood. At its
+corner, the sudden shape of a woman arose against the sportive sunbeams
+that outlined her with light. Alertly erect she stood, before the
+faintly violet background of the wood's marge and the crosshatched
+trees. She was slender, her head all afire with fair hair, and in her
+pale face we could see the night-dark caverns of great eyes. The
+resplendent being gazed fixedly upon us, trembling, then plunged
+abruptly into the undergrowth and disappeared like a torch.
+
+The apparition and its flight so impressed Volpatte that he lost the
+thread of his discourse.
+
+"She's something like, that woman there!"
+
+"No," said Fouillade, who had misunderstood, "she's called Eudoxie. I
+knew her because I've seen her before. A refugee. I don't know where
+she comes from, but she's at Gamblin, in a family there."
+
+"She's thin and beautiful," Volpatte certified; "one would like to make
+her a little present--she's good enough to eat--tender as a chicken.
+And look at the eyes she's got!"
+
+"She's queer," says Fouillade. "You don't know when you've got her. You
+see her here, there, with her fair hair on top, then--off! Nobody
+about. And you know, she doesn't know what danger is; marching about,
+sometimes, almost in the front line, and she's been seen knocking about
+in No Man's Land. She's queer."
+
+"Look! There she is again. The spook! She's keeping an eye on us.
+What's she after?"
+
+The shadow-figure, traced in lines of light, this time adorned the
+other end of the spinney's edge.
+
+"To hell with women," Volpatte declared, whom the idea of his
+deliverance has completely recaptured.
+
+"There's one in the squad, anyway, that wants her pretty badly.
+See--when you speak of the wolf--"
+
+"You see its tail--"
+
+"Not yet, but almost--look!" From some bushes on our right we saw the
+red snout of Lamuse appear peeping, like a wild boar's.
+
+He was on the woman's trail. He had seen the alluring vision, dropped
+to the crouch of a setting dog, and made his spring. But in that spring
+he fell upon us.
+
+Recognizing Volpatte and Fouillade, big Lamuse gave shouts of delight.
+At once he had no other thought than to get possession of the bags,
+rifles, and haversacks--"Give me all of it--I'm resting--come on, give
+it up."
+
+He must carry everything. Farfadet and I willingly gave up Volpatte's
+equipment; and Fouillade, now at the end of his strength, agreed to
+surrender his pouches and his rifle.
+
+Lamuse became a moving heap. Under the huge burden he disappeared, bent
+double, and made progress only with shortened steps.
+
+But we felt that he was still under the sway of a certain project, and
+his glances went sideways. He was seeking the woman after whom he had
+hurled himself. Every time he halted, the better to trim some detail of
+the load, or puffingly to mop the greasy flow of perspiration, he
+furtively surveyed all the corners of the horizon and scrutinized the
+edges of the wood. He did not see her again.
+
+I did see her again, and got a distinct impression this time that it
+was one of us she was after. She half arose on our left from the green
+shadows of the undergrowth. Steadying herself with one hand on a
+branch, she leaned forward and revealed the night-dark eyes and pale
+face, which showed--so brightly lighted was one whole side of it--like
+a crescent moon.
+
+I saw that she was smiling. And following the course of the look that
+smiled, I saw Farfadet a little way behind us, and he was smiling too.
+Then she slipped away into the dark foliage, carrying the twin smile
+with her.
+
+Thus was the understanding revealed to me between this lissom and
+dainty gypsy, who was like no one at all, and Farfadet, conspicuous
+among us all--slender, pliant and sensitive as lilac. Evidently--!
+
+Lamuse saw nothing, blinded and borne down as he was by the load he had
+taken from Farfadet and me, occupied in the poise of them, and in
+finding where his laden and leaden feet might tread.
+
+But he looks unhappy; he groans. A weighty and mournful obsession is
+stifling him. In his harsh breathing it seems to me that I can hear his
+heart beating and muttering. Looking at Volpatte, hooded in bandages,
+and then at the strong man, muscular and full-blooded, with that
+profound and eternal yearning whose sharpness he alone can gauge, I say
+to myself that the worst wounded man is not he whom we think.
+
+We go down at last to the village. "Let's have a drink," says
+Fouillade. "I'm going to be sent back," says Volpatte. Lamuse puffs and
+groans.
+
+Our comrades shout and come running, and we gather in the little square
+where the church stands with its twin towers--so thoroughly mutilated
+by a shell that one can no longer look it in the face.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Sanctuary
+
+
+THE dim road which rises through the middle of the night-bound wood is
+so strangely full of obstructing shadows that the deep darkness of the
+forest itself might by some magic have overflowed upon it. It is the
+regiment on the march, in quest of a new home.
+
+The weighty ranks of the shadows, burdened both high and broad, hustle
+each other blindly. Each wave, pushed by the following, stumbles upon
+the one in front, while alongside and detached are the evolutions of
+those less bulky ghosts, the N.C.O.'s. A clamor of confusion, compound
+of exclamations, of scraps of chat, of words of command, of spasms of
+coughing and of song, goes up from the dense mob enclosed between the
+banks. To the vocal commotion is added the tramping of feet, the
+jingling of bayonets in their scabbards, of cans and drinking-cups, the
+rumbling and hammering of the sixty vehicles of the two
+convoys--fighting and regimental--that follow the two battalions. And
+such a thing is it that trudges and spreads itself over the climbing
+road that, in spite of the unbounded dome of night, one welters in the
+odor of a den of lions.
+
+In the ranks one sees nothing. Sometimes, when one can lift his nose
+up, by grace of an eddy in the tide, one cannot help seeing the
+whiteness of a mess-tin, the blue steel of a helmet, the black steel of
+a rifle. Anon, by the dazzling jet of sparks that flies from a pocket
+flint-and-steel, or the red flame that expands upon the lilliputian
+stem of a match, one can see beyond the vivid near relief of hands and
+faces to the silhouetted and disordered groups of helmeted shoulders,
+swaying like surges that would storm the sable stronghold of the night.
+Then, all goes out, and while each tramping soldier's legs swing to and
+fro, his eye is fixed inflexibly upon the conjectural situation of the
+back that dwells in front of him.
+
+After several halts, when we have allowed ourselves to collapse on our
+haversacks at the foot of the stacked rifles--stacks that form on the
+call of the whistle with feverish haste and exasperating delay, through
+our blindness in that atmosphere of ink-dawn reveals itself, extends,
+and acquires the domain of Space. The walls of the Shadow crumble in
+vague ruin. Once more we pass under the grand panorama of the day's
+unfolding upon the ever-wandering horde that we are.
+
+We emerge at last from this night of marching, across concentric
+circles as it seems, of darkness less dark, then of half-shadow, then
+of gloomy light. Legs have a wooden stiffness, backs are benumbed,
+shoulders bruised. Faces are still so gray or so black, one would say
+they had but half rid themselves of the night. Now, indeed, one never
+throws it off altogether.
+
+It is into new quarters that the great company is going--this time to
+rest. What will the place be like that we have to live in for eight
+days? It is called, they say--but nobody is certain of
+anything--Gauchin-l'Abbe. We have heard wonders about it--"It appears
+to be just it."
+
+In the ranks of the companies whose forms and features one begins to
+make out in the birth of morning, and to distinguish the lowered heads
+and yawning mouths, some voices are heard in still higher praise.
+"There never were such quarters. The Brigade's there, and the
+court-martial. You can get anything in the shops."--"If the Brigade's
+there, we're all right."--
+
+"Think we can find a table for the squad?"--"Everything you want, I
+tell you."
+
+A pessimist prophet shakes his head: "What these quarters'll be like
+where we've never been, I don't know," he says. "What I do know is that
+it'll be like the others."
+
+But we don't believe him, and emerging from the fevered turmoil of the
+night, it seems to all that it is a sort of Promised Land we are
+approaching by degrees as the light brings us out of the east and the icy
+air towards the unknown village.
+
+At the foot of a bill in the half-light, we reach some houses, still
+slumbering and wrapped in heavy grayness.
+
+"There it is!"
+
+Poof! We've done twenty-eight kilometers in the night. But what of
+that? There is no halt. We go past the houses, and they sink back again
+into their vague vapors and their mysterious shroud.
+
+"Seems we've got to march a long time yet. It's always there, there,
+there!"
+
+We march like machines, our limbs invaded by a sort of petrified
+torpor; our joints cry aloud, and force us to make echo.
+
+Day comes slowly, for a blanket of mist covers the earth. It is so cold
+that the men dare not sit down during the halts, though overborne by
+weariness, and they pace to and fro in the damp obscurity like ghosts.
+The besom of a biting wintry wind whips our skin, sweeps away and
+scatters our words and our sighs.
+
+At last the sun pierces the reek that spreads over us and soaks what it
+touches, and something like a fairy glade opens out in the midst of
+this gloom terrestrial. The regiment stretches itself and wakes up in
+truth, with slow-lifted faces to the gilded silver of the earliest
+rays. Quickly, then, the sun grows fiery, and now it is too hot. In the
+ranks we pant and sweat, and our grumbling is louder even than just
+now, when our teeth were chattering and the fog wet-sponged our hands
+and faces.
+
+It is a chalk country through which we are passing on this torrid
+forenoon--"They mend this road with lime, the dirty devils!" The road
+has become blinding--a long-drawn cloud of dessicated chalk and dust
+that rises high above our columns and powders us as we go. Faces turn
+red, and shine as though varnished; some of the full-blooded ones might
+be plastered with vaseline. Cheeks and foreheads are coated with a
+rusty paste which agglutinates and cracks. Feet lose their dubious
+likeness to feet and might have paddled in a mason's mortar-trough.
+Haversacks and rifles are powdered in white, and our legion leaves to
+left and right a long milky track on the bordering grass. And to crown
+all--"To the right! A convoy!"
+
+We bear to the right, hurriedly, and not without bumpings. The convoy
+of lorries, a long chain of foursquare and huge projectiles, rolling up
+with diabolical din, hurls itself along the road. Curse it! One after
+another, they gather up the thick carpet of white powder that
+upholsters the ground and send it broadcast over our shoulders! Now we
+are garbed in a stuff of light gray and our faces are pallid masks,
+thickest on the eyebrows and mustaches, on beards, and the cracks of
+wrinkles. Though still ourselves, we look like strange old men.
+
+"When we're old buffers, we shall be as ugly as this," says Tirette.
+
+"Tu craches blanc," declares Biquet. [note 1]
+
+When a halt puts us out of action, you might take us for rows of
+plaster statues, with some dirty indications of humanity showing
+through.
+
+We move again, silent and chagrined. Every step becomes hard to
+complete. Our faces assume congealed and fixed grimaces under the wan
+leprosy of dust. The unending effort contracts us and quite fills us
+with dismal weariness and disgust.
+
+We espy at last the long-sought oasis. Beyond a hill, on a still higher
+one, some slated roofs peep from clusters of foliage as brightly green
+as a salad. The village is there, and our looks embrace it, but we are
+not there yet. For a long time it seems to recede as fast as the
+regiment crawls towards it.
+
+At long last, on the stroke of noon, we reach the quarters that had
+begun to appear a pretense and a legend. In regular step and with
+rifles on shoulders, the regiment floods the street of Gauchin-l'Abbe
+right to its edges. Most of the villages of the Pas du Calais are
+composed of a single street, but such a street! It is often several
+kilometers long. In this one, the street divides in front of the mairie
+and forms two others, so that the hamlet becomes a big Y, brokenly
+bordered by low-built dwellings.
+
+The cyclists, the officers, the orderlies, break away from the long
+moving mass. Then, as they come up, a few of the men at a time are
+swallowed up by the barns, the still available houses being reserved
+for officers and departments. Our half-company is led at first to the
+end of the village, and then--by some misunderstanding among the
+quartermasters--back to the other end, the one by which we entered.
+This oscillation takes up time, and the squad, dragged thus from north
+to south and from south to north, heavily fatigued and irritated by
+wasted walking, evinces feverish impatience. For it is supremely
+important to be installed and set free as early as possible if we are
+to carry out the plan we have cherished so long--to find a native with
+some little place to let, and a table where the squad can have its
+meals. We have talked a good deal about this idea and its delightful
+advantages. We have taken counsel, subscribed to a common fund, and
+decided that this time we will take the header into the additional
+outlay.
+
+But will it be possible? Very many places are already snapped up. We
+are not the only ones to bring our dream of comfort here, and it will
+be a race for that table. Three companies are coming in after ours, but
+four were here before us, and there are the officers, the cooks of the
+hospital staff for the Section, and the clerks, the drivers, the
+orderlies and others, official cooks of the sergeants' mess, and I
+don't know how many more. All these men are more influential than the
+soldiers of the line, they have more mobility and more money, and can
+bring off their schemes beforehand. Already, while we march four
+abreast towards the barn assigned to the squad, we see some of these
+jokers across the conquered thresholds, domestically busy.
+
+Tirette imitates the sounds of lowing and bleating--"There's our
+cattle-shed." A fairly big barn. The chopped straw smells of
+night-soil, and our feet stir up clouds of dust. But it is almost
+enclosed. We choose our places and cast off our equipment.
+
+Those who dreamed yet once again of a special sort of Paradise sing
+low--yet once again. "Look now, it seems as ugly as the other
+places."--"It's something like the same."--"Naturally."
+
+But there is no time to waste in talking. The thing is to get clear and
+be after the others with all strength and speed. We hurry out. In spite
+of broken backs and aching feet, we set ourselves savagely to this last
+effort on which the comfort of a week depends.
+
+The squad divides into two patrols and sets off at the double, one to
+left and one to right along the street, which is already obstructed by
+busy questing poilus; and all the groups see and watch each other--and
+hurry. In places there are collisions, jostlings, and abuse.
+
+"Let's begin down there at once, or our goose'll be cooked!" I have an
+impression of a kind of fierce battle between all the soldiers, in the
+streets of the village they have just occupied. "For us," says
+Marthereau, "war is always struggling and fighting--always, always."
+
+We knock at door after door, we show ourselves timidly, we offer
+ourselves like undesirable goods. A voice arises among us, "You haven't
+a bit of a corner, madame, for some soldiers? We would pay."
+
+"No--you see, I've got officers--under-officers, that is--you see, it's
+the mess for the band, and the secretaries, and the gentlemen of the
+ambulance--"
+
+Vexation after vexation. We close again, one after the other, all the
+doors we had half-opened, and look at each other, on the wrong side of
+the threshold, with dwindling hope in our eyes.
+
+"Bon Dieu! You'll see that we shan't find anything," growls Barque.
+"Damn those chaps that got on the midden before us!"
+
+The human flood reaches high-water mark everywhere. The three streets
+are all growing dark as each overflows into another. Some natives cross
+our path, old men or ill-shapen, contorted in their walk, stunted in
+the face; and even young people, too, over whom hovers the mystery of
+secret disorders or political connections. As for the petticoats, there
+are old women and many young ones--fat, with well-padded cheeks, and
+equal to geese in their whiteness.
+
+Suddenly, in an alley between two houses, I have a fleeting vision of a
+woman who crossed the shadowy gap--Eudoxie! Eudoxie, the fairy woman
+whom Lamuse hunted like a satyr, away back in the country, that morning
+we brought back Volpatte wounded, and Fouillade, the woman I saw
+leaning from the spinney's edge and bound to Farfadet in a mutual
+smile. It is she whom I just glimpsed like a gleam of sunshine in that
+alley. But the gleam was eclipsed by the tail of a wall, and the place
+thereof relapsed upon gloom. She here, already! Then she has followed
+our long and painful trek! She is attracted--?
+
+And she looks like one allured, too. Brief glimpse though it was of her
+face and its crown of fair hair, plainly I saw that she was serious,
+thoughtful, absentminded.
+
+Lamuse, following close on my heels, saw nothing, and I do not tell
+him. He will discover quite soon enough the bright presence of that
+lovely flame where he would fain cast himself bodily, though it evades
+him like a Will-o'-th'-wisp. For the moment, besides, we are on
+business bent. The coveted corner must be won. We resume the hunt with
+the energy of despair. Barque leads us on; he has taken the matter to
+heart. He is trembling--you can see it in his dusty scalp. He guides
+us, nose to the wind. He suggests that we make an attempt on that
+yellow door over there. Forward!
+
+Near the yellow door, we encounter a shape down-bent. Blaire, his foot
+on a milestone, is reducing the bulk of his boot with his knife, and
+plaster-like debris is falling fast. He might be engaged in sculpture.
+
+"You never had your feet so white before," jeers Barque. "Rotting
+apart," says Blaire, "you don't know where it is, that special van?" He
+goes on to explain: "I've got to look up the dentist-van, so they can
+grapple with my ivories, and strip off the old grinders that's left.
+Oui, seems it's stationed here, the chop-caravan."
+
+He folds up his knife, pockets it, and goes off alongside the wall,
+possessed by the thought of his jaw-bones' new lease of life.
+
+Once more we put up our beggars' petition: "Good-day, madame; you
+haven't got a little corner where we could feed? We would pay, of
+course, we would pay--"
+
+Through the glass of the low window we see lifted the face of an old
+man--like a fish in a bowl, it looks--a face curiously flat, and lined
+with parallel wrinkles, like a page of old manuscript.
+
+"You've the little shed there."
+
+"There's no room in the shed, and when the washing's done there--"
+
+Barque seizes the chance. "It'll do very likely. May we see it?"
+
+"We do the washing there," mutters the woman, continuing to wield her
+broom.
+
+"You know," says Barque, with a smile and an engaging air, "we're not
+like those disagreeable people who get drunk and make themselves a
+nuisance. May we have a look?"
+
+The woman has let her broom rest. She is thin and inconspicuous. Her
+jacket hangs from her shoulders as from a valise. Her face is like
+cardboard, stiff and without expression. She looks at us and hesitates,
+then grudgingly leads the way into a very dark little place, made of
+beaten earth and piled with dirty linen.
+
+"It's splendid," cries Lamuse, in all honesty.
+
+"Isn't she a darling, the little kiddie!" says Barque, as he pats the
+round cheek, like painted india-rubber, of a little girl who is staring
+at us with her dirty little nose uplifted in the gloom. "Is she yours,
+madame?"
+
+"And that one, too?" risks Marthereau, as he espies an over-ripe infant
+on whose bladder-like cheeks are shining deposits of jam, for the
+ensnaring of the dust in the air. He offers a half-hearted caress in
+the direction of the moist and bedaubed countenance. The woman does not
+deign an answer.
+
+So there we are, trifling and grinning, like beggars whose plea still
+hangs fire.
+
+Lamuse whispers to me, in a torment of fear and cupidity, "Let's hope
+she'll catch on, the filthy old slut. It's grand here, and, you know,
+everything else is pinched!"
+
+"There's no table," the woman says at last.
+
+"Don't worry about the table," Barque exclaims. "Tenez! there, put away
+in that corner, the old door; that would make us a table."
+
+"You're not going to trail me about and upset all my work!" replies the
+cardboard woman suspiciously, and with obvious regret that she had not
+chased us away immediately.
+
+"Don't worry, I tell you. Look, I'll show you. Hey, Lamuse, old cock,
+give me a hand."
+
+Under the displeased glances of the virago we place the old door on a
+couple of barrels.
+
+"With a bit of a rub-down," says I, "that will be perfect."
+
+"Eh, oui, maman, a flick with a brush'll do us instead of tablecloth."
+
+The woman hardly knows what to say; she watches us spitefully: "There's
+only two stools, and how many are there of you?"
+
+"About a dozen."
+
+"A dozen. Jesus Maria!"
+
+"What does it matter? That'll be all right, seeing there's a plank
+here--and that's a bench ready-made, eh, Lamuse?"
+
+"Course," says Lamuse.
+
+"I want that plank," says the woman. "Some soldiers that were here
+before you have tried already to take it away."
+
+"But us, we're not thieves," suggests Lamuse gently, so as not to
+irritate the creature that has our comfort at her disposal.
+
+"I don't say you are, but soldiers, vous savez, they smash everything
+up. Oh, the misery of this war!"
+
+"Well then, how much'll it be, to hire the table, and to heat up a
+thing or two on the stove?"
+
+"It'll be twenty sous a day," announces the hostess with restraint, as
+though we were wringing that amount from her.
+
+"It's dear," says Lamuse.
+
+"It's what the others gave me that were here, and they were very kind,
+too, those gentlemen, and it was worth my while to cook for them. I
+know it's not difficult for soldiers. If you think it's too much, it's
+no job to find other customers for this room and this table and the
+stove, and who wouldn't be in twelves. They're coming along all the
+time, and they'd pay still more, if I wanted. A dozen!--"
+
+Lamuse hastens to add, "I said 'It's dear,' but still, it'll do, eh,
+you others?" On this downright question we record our votes.
+
+"We could do well with a drop to drink," says Lamuse. "Do you sell
+wine?"
+
+"No," said the woman, but added, shaking with anger, "You see, the
+military authority forces them that's got wine to sell it at fifteen
+sous! Fifteen sous! The misery of this cursed war! One loses at it, at
+fifteen sous, monsieur. So I don't sell any wine. I've got plenty for
+ourselves. I don't say but sometimes, and just to oblige, I don't allow
+some to people that one knows, people that knows what things are, but
+of course, messieurs, not at fifteen sous."
+
+Lamuse is one of those people "that knows what things are." He grabs at
+his water-bottle, which is hanging as usual on his hip. "Give me a
+liter of it. That'll be what?"
+
+"That'll be twenty-two sous, same as it cost me. But you know it's just
+to oblige you, because you're soldiers."
+
+Barque, losing patience, mutters an aside. The woman throws him a surly
+glance, and makes as if to hand Lamuse's bottle back to him. But
+Lamuse, launched upon the hope of drinking wine at last, so that his
+cheeks redden as if the draught already pervaded them with its grateful
+hue, hastens to intervene--
+
+"Don't be afraid--it's between ourselves, la mere, we won't give you
+away."
+
+She raves on, rigid and bitter, against the limited price on wine; and,
+overcome by his lusty thirst, Lamuse extends the humiliation and
+surrender of conscience so far as to say, "No help for it, madame! It's
+a military order, so it's no use trying to understand it."
+
+She leads us into the store-room. Three fat barrels occupy it in
+impressive rotundity. "Is this your little private store?"
+
+"She knows her way about, the old lady," growls Barque.
+
+The shrew turns on her heel, truculent: "Would you have me ruin myself
+by this miserable war? I've about enough of losing money all ways at
+once."
+
+"How?" insists Barque.
+
+"I can see you're not going to risk your money!"
+
+"That's right--we only risk our skins."
+
+We intervene, disturbed by the tone of menace for our present concern
+that the conversation has assumed. But the door of the wine-cellar is
+shaken, and a man's voice comes through. "Hey, Palmyra!" it calls.
+
+The woman hobbles away, discreetly leaving the door open. "That's all
+right--we've taken root!" Lamuse says.
+
+"What dirty devils these, people are!" murmurs Barque, who finds his
+reception hard to stomach.
+
+"It's shameful and sickening," says Marthereau.
+
+"One would think it was the first time you'd had any of it!"
+
+"And you, old gabbler," chides Barque, "that says prettily to the
+wine-robber, 'Can't be helped, it's a military order'! Gad, old man,
+you're not short of cheek!"
+
+"What else could I do or say? We should have had to go into mourning
+for our table and our wine. She could make us pay forty sous for the
+wine, and we should have had it all the same, shouldn't we? Very well,
+then, got to think ourselves jolly lucky. I'll admit I'd no confidence,
+and I was afraid it was no go."
+
+"I know; it's the same tale everywhere and always, but all the same--"
+
+"Damn the thieving natives, ah, oui! Some of 'em must be making
+fortunes. Everybody can't go and get killed."
+
+"Ah, the gallant people of the East!"
+
+"Yes, and the gallant people of the North!"
+
+"Who welcome us with open arms!"
+
+"With open hands, yes--"
+
+"I tell you," Marthereau says again, "it's a shame and it's sickening."
+
+"Shut it up--there's the she-beast coming back." We took a turn round
+to quarters to announce our success, and then went shopping. When we
+returned to our new dining-room, we were hustled by the preparations
+for lunch. Barque had been to the rations distribution, and had
+managed, thanks to personal relations with the cook (who was a
+conscientious objector to fractional divisions), to secure the potatoes
+and meat that formed the rations for all the fifteen men of the squad.
+He had bought some lard--a little lump for fourteen sous--and some one
+was frying. He had also acquired some green peas in tins, four tins.
+Mesnil Andre's tin of veal in jelly would be a hors-d'oeuvre.
+
+"And not a dirty thing in all the lot!" said Lamuse, enchanted.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We inspected the kitchen. Barque was moving cheerfully about the iron
+Dutch oven whose hot and steaming bulk furnished all one side of the
+room.
+
+"I've added a stewpan on the quiet for the soup," he whispered to me.
+Lifting the lid of the stove--"Fire isn't too hot. It's half an hour
+since I chucked the meat in, and the water's clean yet."
+
+A minute later we heard some one arguing with the hostess. This extra
+stove was the matter in dispute. There was no more room left for her on
+her stove. They had told her they would only need a casserole, and she
+had believed them. If she had known they were going to make trouble she
+would not have let the room to them. Barque, the good fellow, replied
+jokingly, and succeeded in soothing the monster.
+
+One by one the others arrived. They winked and rubbed their hands
+together, full of toothsome anticipation, like the guests at a
+wedding-breakfast. As they break away from the dazzling light outside
+and penetrate this cube of darkness, they are blinded, and stand like
+bewildered owls for several minutes.
+
+"It's not too brilliant in here," says Mesnil Joseph. "Come, old chap,
+what do you want?" The others exclaim in chorus, "We're damned well off
+here." And I can see heads nodding assent in the cavern's twilight.
+
+An incident: Farfadet having by accident rubbed against the damp and
+dirty wall, his shoulder has brought away from it a smudge so big and
+black that it can be seen even here. Farfadet, so careful of his
+appearance, growls, and in avoiding a second contact with the wall,
+knocks the table so that his spoon drops to the ground. Stooping, he
+fumbles among the loose earth, where dust and spiders' webs for years
+have silently fallen. When he recovers his spoon it is almost black,
+and webby threads hang from it. Evidently it is disastrous to let
+anything fall on the ground. One must live here with great care.
+
+Lamuse brings down his fat hand, like a pork-pie, between two of the
+places at table. "Allons, a table!" We fall to. The meal is abundant
+and of excellent quality. The sound of conversation mingles with those
+of emptying bottles and filling jaws. While we taste the joy of eating
+at a table, a glimmer of light trickles through a vent-hole, and wraps
+in dusty dawn a piece of the atmosphere and a patch of the table, while
+its reflex lights up a plate, a cap's peak, an eye. Secretly I take
+stock of this gloomy little celebration that overflows with gayety.
+Biquet is telling about his suppliant sorrows in quest of a washerwoman
+who would agree to do him the good turn of washing some linen, but "it
+was too damned dear." Tulacque describes the queue outside the
+grocer's. One might not go in; customers were herded outside, like
+sheep. "And although you were outside, if you weren't satisfied, and
+groused too much, they chased you off."
+
+Any news yet? It is said that severe penalties have been imposed on
+those who plunder the population, and there is already a list of
+convictions. Volpatte has been sent down. Men of Class '93 are going to
+be sent to the rear, and Pepere is one of them.
+
+When Barque brings in the harvest of the fry-pan, he announces that our
+hostess has soldiers at her table--ambulance men of the machine-guns.
+"They thought they were the best off, but it's us that's that," says
+Fouillade with decision, lolling grandly in the darkness of the narrow
+and tainted hole where we are just as confusedly heaped together as in
+a dug-out. But who would think of making the comparison?
+
+"Vous savez pas," says Pepin, "the chaps of the 9th, they're in clover!
+An old woman has taken them in for nothing, because of her old man
+that's been dead fifty years and was a rifleman once on a time. Seems
+she's even given them a rabbit for nix, and they're just worrying it
+jugged."
+
+"There's good sorts everywhere. But the boys of the 9th had famous luck
+to fall into the only shop of good sorts in the whole village."
+
+Palmyra comes with the coffee, which she supplies. She thaws a little,
+listens to us, and even asks questions in a supercilious way: "Why do
+you call the adjutant 'le juteux'?"
+
+Barque replies sententiously, "'Twas ever thus."
+
+When she has disappeared, we criticize our coffee. "Talk about clear!
+You can see the sugar ambling round the bottom of the glass."--"She
+charges six sous for it."--"It's filtered water."
+
+The door half opens, and admits a streak of light. The face of a little
+boy is defined in it. We entice him in like a kitten and give him a bit
+of chocolate.
+
+Then, "My name's Charlie," chirps the child. "Our house, that's close
+by. We've got soldiers, too. We always had them, we had. We sell them
+everything they want. Only, voila, sometimes they get drunk."
+
+"Tell me, little one, come here a bit," says Cocon, taking the boy
+between his knees. "Listen now. Your papa, he says, doesn't he, 'Let's
+hope the war goes on,' eh?" [note 2]
+
+"Of course," says the child, tossing his head, "because we're getting
+rich. He says, by the end of May, we shall have got fifty thousand
+francs."
+
+"Fifty thousand francs! Impossible!"
+
+"Yes, yes!" the child insists, stamping, "he said it to mamma. Papa
+wished it could be always like that. Mamma, sometimes, she isn't sure,
+because my brother Adolphe is at the front. But we're going to get him
+sent to the rear, and then the war can go on."
+
+These confidences are disturbed by sharp cries, coming from the rooms
+of our hosts. Biquet the mobile goes to inquire. "It's nothing," says
+he, coming back; "it's the good man slanging the woman because she
+doesn't know how to do things, he says, because she's made the mustard
+in a tumbler, and he never heard of such a thing, he says."
+
+We get up, and leave the strong odor of pipes, wine, and stale coffee
+in our cave. As soon as we have crossed the threshold, a heaviness of
+heat puffs in our faces, fortified by the mustiness of frying that
+dwells in the kitchen and emerges every time the door is opened. We
+pass through legions of flies which, massed on the walls in black
+hordes, fly abroad in buzzing swarms as we pass: "It's beginning again
+like last year! Flies outside, lice inside.--"
+
+"And microbes still farther inside!"
+
+In a corner of this dirty little house and its litter of old rubbish,
+its dusty debris of last year and the relics of so many summers gone
+by, among the furniture and household gear, something is moving. It is
+an old simpleton with a long bald neck, pink and rough, making you
+think of a fowl's neck which has prematurely molted through disease.
+His profile is that of a hen, too--no chin and a long nose. A gray
+overlay of beard felts his receded cheek, and you see his heavy
+eyelids, rounded and horny, move up and down like shutters on the dull
+beads of his eyes.
+
+Barque has already noticed him: "Watch him--he's a treasure-seeker. He
+says there's one somewhere in this hovel that he's stepfather to.
+You'll see him directly go on all-fours and push his old phizog in
+every corner there is. Tiens, watch him."
+
+With the aid of his stick, the old man proceeded to take methodical
+soundings. He tapped along the foot of the walls and on the
+floor-tiles.. He was hustled by the coming and going of the occupants
+of the house, by callers, and by the swing of Palmyra's broom; but she
+let him alone and said nothing, thinking to herself, no doubt, that the
+exploitation of the national calamity is a more profitable treasure
+than problematical caskets.
+
+Two gossips are standing in a recess and exchanging confidences in low
+voices, hard by an old map of Russia that is peopled with flies. "Oui,
+but it's with the Picon bitters that you've got to be careful. If you
+haven't got a light touch, you can't get your sixteen glasses out of a
+bottle, and so you lose too much profit. I don't say but what one's all
+right in one's purse, even so, but one doesn't make enough. To guard
+against that, the retailers ought to agree among themselves, but the
+understanding's so difficult to bring off, even when it's in the
+general interest."
+
+Outside there is torrid sunshine, riddled with flies. The little
+beasts, quite scarce but a few days ago, multiply everywhere the murmur
+of their minute and innumerable engines. I go out in the company of
+Lamuse; we are going for a saunter. One can be at peace today--it is
+complete rest, by reason of the overnight march. We might sleep, but it
+suits us much better to use the rest for an extensive promenade.
+To-morrow, the exercise and fatigues will get us again. There are some,
+less lucky than we, who are already caught in the cogwheels of fatigue.
+To Lamuse, who invites him to come and stroll with us, Corvisart
+replies, screwing up the little round nose that is laid flatly on his
+oblong face like a cork, "Can't--I'm on manure!" He points to the
+shovel and broom by whose help he is performing his task of scavenger
+and night-soil man.
+
+We walk languidly. The afternoon lies heavy on the drowsy land and on
+stomachs richly provided and embellished with food. The remarks we
+exchange are infrequent.
+
+Over there, we hear noises. Barque has fallen a victim to a menagerie
+of housewives; and the scene is pointed by a pale little girl, her hair
+tied behind in a pencil of tow and her mouth embroidered with fever
+spots, and by women who are busy with some unsavory job of washing in
+the meager shade before their doors.
+
+Six men go by, led by a quartermaster corporal. They carry heaps of new
+greatcoats and bundles of boots. Lamuse regards his bloated and horny
+feet--"I must have some new sheds, and no mistake; a bit more and
+you'll see my splay-feet through these ones. Can't go marching on the
+skin of my tongs, eh?"
+
+An aeroplane booms overhead. We follow its evolutions with our faces
+skyward, our necks twisted, our eyes watering at the piercing
+brightness of the sky.
+
+Lamuse declares to me, when we have brought our gaze back to earth,
+"Those machines'll never become practical, never."
+
+"How can you say that? Look at the progress they've made already, and
+the speed of it."
+
+"Yes, but they'll stop there. They'll never do any better, never."
+
+This time I do not challenge the dull and obstinate denial that
+ignorance opposes to the promise of progress, and I let my big comrade
+alone in his stubborn belief that the wonderful effort of science and
+industry has been suddenly cut short.
+
+Having thus begun to reveal to me his inmost thoughts, Lamuse
+continues. Coming nearer and lowering his head, he says to me, "You
+know she's here--Eudoxie?"
+
+"Ah!" said I.
+
+"Yes, old chap. You never notice anything, you don't, but I noticed,"
+and Lamuse smiles at me indulgently. "Now, do you catch on? If she's
+come here, it's because we interest her, eh? She's followed us for one
+of us, and don't you forget it."
+
+He gets going again. "My boy, d'you want to know what I say? She's come
+after me."
+
+"Are you sure of it, old chap?"
+
+"Yes," says the ox-man, in a hollow voice. "First, I want her. Then,
+twice, old man, I've found her exactly in my path, in mine, d'you
+understand? You may tell me that she ran away; that's because she's
+timid, that, yes--"
+
+He stopped dead in the middle of the street and looked straight at me.
+The heavy face, greasily moist on the cheeks and nose, was serious. His
+rotund fist went up to the dark yellow mustache, so carefully pointed,
+and smoothed it tenderly. Then he continued to lay bare his heart to me
+"I want her; but, you know, I shall marry her all right, I shall. She's
+called Eudoxie Dumail. At first, I wasn't thinking of marrying her. But
+since I've got to know her family name, it seems to me that it's
+different, and I should get on all right. Ah, nom de Dieu! She's so
+pretty, that woman! And it's not only that she's pretty--ah!"
+
+The huge child was overflowing with sentiment and emotion, and trying
+to make them speak to me. "Ah, my boy, there are times when I've just
+got to hold myself back with a hook," came the strained and gloomy
+tones, while the blood flushed to the fleshy parts of his cheeks and
+neck. "She's so beautiful, she's--and me I'm--she's so unlike--you'll
+have noticed it, surely, you that notices--she's a country girl, oui;
+eh bien, she's got a God knows what that's better than a Parisienne,
+even a toffed-up and stylish Parisienne, pas? She--as for me, I--"
+
+He puckered his red eyebrows. He would have liked to tell me all the
+splendor of his thoughts, but he knew not the art of expressing
+himself, so he was silent. He remained alone in his voiceless emotion,
+as always alone.
+
+We went forward side by side between the rows of houses. In front of
+the doors, drays laden with casks were drawn up. The front windows
+blossomed with many-hued heaps of jam-pots, stacks of tinder
+pipe-lighters--everything that the soldier is compelled to buy. Nearly
+all the natives had gone into grocery. Business had been getting out of
+gear locally for a long time, but now it was booming. Every one,
+smitten with the fever of sum-totals and dazzled by the multiplication
+table, plunged into trade.
+
+Bells tolled, and the procession of a military funeral came out. A
+forage wagon, driven by a transport man, carried a coffin wrapped in a
+flag. Following, were a detachment of men, an adjutant, a padre, and a
+civilian.
+
+"The poor little funeral with its tail lopped off!" said Lamuse. "Ah,
+those that are dead are very happy. But only sometimes, not
+always--voila!"
+
+We have passed the last of the houses. In the country, beyond the end
+of the street, the fighting convoy and the regimental convoy have
+settled themselves, the traveling kitchens and jingling carts that
+follow them with odds and ends of equipment, the Red Cross wagons, the
+motor lorries, the forage carts, the baggage-master's gig. The tents of
+drivers and conductors swarm around the vehicles. On the open spaces
+horses lift their metallic eyes to the sky's emptiness, with their feet
+on barren earth. Four poilus are setting up a table. The open-air
+smithy is smoking. This heterogeneous and swarming city, planted in
+ruined fields whose straight or winding ruts are stiffening in the
+heat, is already broadly valanced with rubbish and dung.
+
+On the edge of the camp a big, white-painted van stands out from the
+others in its tidy cleanliness. Had it been in the middle of a fair,
+one would have said it was the stylish show where one pays more than at
+the others.
+
+This is the celebrated "stomatological" van that Blaire was asking
+about. In point of fact, Blaire is there in front, looking at it. For
+some long time, no doubt, he has been going round it and gazing.
+Field-hospital orderly Sambremeuse, of the Division, returning from
+errands, is climbing the portable stair of painted wood which leads to
+the van door. In his arms he carries a bulky box of biscuits, a loaf of
+fancy bread, and a bottle of champagne. Blaire questions him--"Tell me,
+Sir Rump, this horse-box--is it the dentist's?"
+
+"It's written up there," replies Sambremeuse--a little corpulent man,
+clean, close-shaven, and his chin starch-white. "If you can't see it,
+you don't want the dentist to look after your grinders, you want the
+vet to clean your eyesight."
+
+Blaire comes nearer and scrutinizes the establishment. "It's a queer
+shop," he says. He goes nearer yet, draws back, hesitates to risk his
+gums in that carriage. At last he decides, puts a foot on the stair,
+and disappears inside the caravan.
+
+We continue our walk, and turn into a footpath where are high, dusty
+bushes and the noises are subdued. The sunshine blazes everywhere; it
+heats and roasts the hollow of the way, spreading blinding and burning
+whiteness in patches, and shimmers in the sky of faultless blue.
+
+At the first turning, almost before we had heard the light grating of a
+footstep, we are face to face with Eudoxie!
+
+Lamuse utters a deep exclamation. Perhaps he fancies once more that she
+is looking for him, and believes that she is the gift of his destiny.
+He goes up to her--all the bulk of him.
+
+She looks at him and stops, framed by the hawthorn. Her strangely
+slight and pale face is apprehensive, the lids tremble on her
+magnificent eyes. She is bareheaded, and in the hollowed neck of her
+linen corsage there is the dawning of her flesh. So near, she is truly
+enticing in the sunshine, this woman crowned with gold, and one's
+glance is impelled and astonished by the moon-like purity of her skin.
+Her eyes sparkle; her teeth, too, glisten white in the living wound of
+her half-open mouth, red as her heart.
+
+"Tell me--I am going to tell you," pants Lamuse. "I like you so much--"
+He outstretches his arm towards the motionless, beloved wayfarer.
+
+She starts, and replies to him, "Leave me alone--you disgust me!"
+
+The man's hand is thrown over one of her little ones. She tries to draw
+it back, and shakes it to free herself. Her intensely fair hair falls
+loose, flaming. He draws her to him. His head bends towards her, and
+his lips are ready. His desire--the wish of all his strength and all
+his life--is to caress her. He would die that he might touch her with
+his lips. But she struggles, and utters a choking cry. She is
+trembling, and her beautiful face is disfigured with abhorrence.
+
+I go up and put my hand on my friend's shoulder, but my intervention is
+not needed. Lamuse recoils and growls, vanquished.
+
+"Are you taken that way often?" cries Eudoxie.
+
+"No!" groans the miserable man, baffled, overwhelmed, bewildered.
+
+"Don't do it again, vous savez!" she says, and goes off panting, and he
+does not even watch her go. He stands with his arms hanging, gazing at
+the place whence she has gone, tormented to the quick, torn from his
+dreams of her, and nothing left him to desire.
+
+I lead him away and he comes in dumb agitation, sniffling and out of
+breath, as though he had run a long way. The mass of his big head is
+bent. In the pitiless light of eternal spring, he is like the poor
+Cyclops who roamed the shores of ancient Sicily in the beginnings of
+time--like a huge toy, a thing of derision, that a child's shining
+strength could subdue.
+
+The itinerant wine-seller, whose barrow is hunchbacked with a barrel,
+has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He disappears round
+the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow as a Camembert, his
+scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and so emaciated himself
+that one could fancy his feet were fastened to his trunk by strings
+through his flopping trousers.
+
+And among the idle poilus of the guard-room at the end of the place,
+under the wing of the shaking and rattling signboard which serves as
+advertisement of the village, [note 3] a conversation is set up on the
+subject of this wandering buffoon.
+
+"He has a dirty neb," says Bigornot; "and I'll tell you what I
+think--they've no business to let civvies mess about at the front with
+their pretty ringlets, and especially individuals that you don't know
+where they come from."
+
+"You're quite crushing, you portable louse," replies Cornet.
+
+"Never mind, shoe-sole face," Bigornot insists; "we trust 'em too much.
+I know what I'm saying when I open it."
+
+"You don't," says Canard. "Pepere's going to the rear."
+
+"The women here," murmurs La Mollette, "they're ugly; they're a lot of
+frights."
+
+The other men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space, watch
+two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around
+the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now black like crows
+and now white like gulls, according to the play of the light, clouds of
+bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem like a long flight of
+snowflakes in the sunshine.
+
+As we are going back, two strollers come up--Carassus and Cheyssier.
+They announce that mess-man Pepere is going to the rear, to be sent to
+a Territorial regiment, having come under the operation of the Dalbiez
+Act.
+
+"That's a hint for Blaire," says Carassus, who has a funny big nose in
+the middle of his face that suits him ill.
+
+In the village groups of poilus go by, or in twos, joined by the
+crossing bonds of converse. We see the solitary ones unite in couples,
+separate, then come together again with a new inspiration of talk,
+drawn to each other as if magnetized.
+
+In the middle of an excited crowd white papers are waving. It is the
+newspaper hawker, who is selling for two sous papers which should be
+one sou. Fouillade is standing in the middle of the road, thin as the
+legs of a hare. At the corner of a house Paradis shows to the sun face
+pink as ham.
+
+Biquet joins us again, in undress, with a jacket and cap of the police.
+He is licking his chops: "I met some pals and we've had a drink. You
+see, to-morrow one starts scratching again, and cleaning his old rags
+and his catapult. But my greatcoat!--going to be some job to filter
+that! It isn't a greatcoat any longer--it's armor-plate."
+
+Montreuil, a clerk at the office, appears and hails Biquet: "Hey,
+riff-raff! A letter! Been chasing you an hour. You're never to be
+found, rotter!"
+
+"Can't be both here and there, looney. Give us a squint." He examines
+the letter, balances it in his hand, and announces as he tears the
+envelope, "It's from the old woman."
+
+We slacken our pace. As he reads, he follows the lines with his finger,
+wagging his head with an air of conviction, and his lips moving like a
+woman's in prayer.
+
+The throng increases the nearer we draw to the middle of the village.
+We salute the commandant and the black-skirted padre who walks by the
+other's side like his nurse. We are questioned by Pigeon, Guenon, young
+Escutenaire, and Chasseur Clodore. Lamuse appears blind and deaf, and
+concerned only to walk.
+
+Bizouarne, Chanrion, and Roquette arrive excitedly to announce big
+news--"D'you know, Pepere's going to the rear."
+
+"Funny," says Biquet, raising his nose from his letter, "how people kid
+themselves. The old woman's bothered about me!" He shows me a passage
+in the maternal epistle: "'When you get my letter,'" he spells out,
+"'no doubt you will be in the cold and mud, deprived of everything, mon
+pauvre Eugene'" He laughs: "It's ten days since she put that down for
+me, and she's clean off it. We're not cold, 'cos it's been fine since
+this morning; and we're not miserable, because we've got a room that's
+good enough. We've had hard times, but we're all right now."
+
+As we reach the kennel in which we are lodgers, we are thinking that
+sentence over. Its touching simplicity affects me, shows me a soul--a
+host of souls. Because the sun has shown himself, because we have felt
+a gleam and a similitude of comfort, suffering exists no longer, either
+of the past or the terrible future. "We're all right now." There is no
+more to say.
+
+Biquet establishes himself at the table, like a gentleman, to write a
+reply. Carefully he lays abroad his pen ink, and paper, and examines
+each, then smilingly traces the strictly regular lines of his big
+handwriting across the meager page.
+
+"You'd laugh," he says, "if you knew what I've written to the old
+woman." He reads his letter again, fondles it, and smiles to himself.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] Pity to spoil this jest by translation, but Biquet's primary
+meaning was "You're cross because you've a throat like a lime-kiln."
+His secondary or literal meaning is obvious.--Tr.
+
+[note 2:] See p. 34 ante; [chapter 5, note 3] another reference to the
+famous phrase. "Pourvu que les civils tiennent."--Tr.
+
+[note 3:] Every French village has a plaque attached to the first house
+on each road of approach, giving its name and the distance to the
+next.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Habits
+
+
+WE are enthroned in the back yard. The big hen, white as a cream
+cheese, is brooding in the depths of a basket near the coop whose
+imprisoned occupant is rummaging about. But the black hen is free to
+travel. She erects and withdraws her elastic neck in jerks, and
+advances with a large and affected gait. One can just see her profile
+and its twinkling spangle, and her talk appears to proceed from a metal
+spring. She marches, glistening black and glossy like the love-locks of
+a gypsy; and as she marches, she unfolds here and there upon the ground
+a faint trail of chickens.
+
+These trifling little yellow balls, kept always by a whispering
+instinct on the ebb-tide to safety, hurry along under the maternal
+march in short, sharp jerks, pecking as they go. Now the train comes to
+a full stop, for two of the chickens are thoughtful and immobile,
+careless of the parental clucking.
+
+"A bad sign," says Paradis; "the hen that reflects is ill." And Paradis
+uncrosses and recrosses his legs. Beside him on the bench, Blaire
+extends his own, lets loose a great yawn that he maintains in placid
+duration, and sets himself again to observe, for of all of us he most
+delights in watching fowls during the brief life when they are in such
+a hurry to eat.
+
+And we watch them in unison, not forgetting the shabby old cock, worn
+threadbare. Where his feathers have fallen appears the naked
+india-rubber leg, lurid as a grilled cutlet. He approaches the white
+sitter, which first turns her head away in tart denial, with several
+"No's" in a muffled rattle, and then watches him with the little blue
+enamel dials of her eyes.
+
+"We're all right," says Barque.
+
+"Watch the little ducks," says Blaire, "going along the communication
+trench."
+
+We watch a single file of all-golden ducklings go past--still almost
+eggs on feet--their big heads pulling their little lame bodies along by
+the string of their necks, and that quickly. From his corner, the big
+dog follows them also with his deeply dark eye, on which the slanting
+sun has shaped a fine tawny ring.
+
+Beyond this rustic yard and over the scalloping of the low wall, the
+orchard reveals itself, where a green carpet, moist and thick, covers
+the rich soil and is topped by a screen of foliage with a garniture of
+blossom, some white as statuary, others pied and glossy as knots in
+neckties. Beyond again is the meadow, where the shadowed poplars throw
+shafts of dark or golden green. Still farther again is a square patch
+of upstanding hops, followed by a patch of cabbages, sitting on the
+ground and dressed in line. In the sunshine of air and of earth we hear
+the bees, as they work and make music (in deference to the poets), and
+the cricket which, in defiance of the fable, sings with no humility and
+fills Space by himself.
+
+Over yonder, there falls eddying from a poplar's peak a magpie--half
+white, half black, like a shred of partly-burned paper.
+
+The soldiers outstretch themselves luxuriously on the stone bench,
+their eyes half closed, and bask in the sunshine that warms the basin
+of the big yard till it is like a bath.
+
+"That's seventeen days we've been here! After thinking we were going
+away day after day!"
+
+"One never knows," said Paradis, wagging his head and smacking his lips.
+
+Through the yard gate that opens on to the road we see a group of
+poilus strolling, nose in air, devouring the sunshine; and then, all
+alone, Tellurure. In the middle of the street he oscillates the
+prosperous abdomen of which he is proprietor, and rocking on legs
+arched like basket-handles, he expectorates in wide abundance all
+around him.
+
+"We thought, too, that we should be as badly off here as in the other
+quarters. But this time it's real rest, both in the time it lasts and
+the kind it is."
+
+"You're not given too many exercises and fatigues."
+
+"And between whiles you come in here to loll about."
+
+The old man huddled up at the end of the seat--no other than the
+treasure-seeking grandfather whom we saw the day of our arrival--came
+nearer and lifted his finger. "When I was a young man, I was thought a
+lot of by women," he asserted, shaking his head. "I have led young
+ladies astray!"
+
+"Ah!" said we, heedless, our attention taken away from his senile
+prattle by the timely noise of a cart that was passing, laden and
+laboring.
+
+"Nowadays," the old man went on, "I only think about money."
+
+"Ah, oui, the treasure you're looking for, papa."
+
+"That's it," said the old rustic, though he felt the skepticism around
+him. He tapped his cranium with his forefinger, which he then extended
+towards the house. "Take that insect there," he said, indicating a
+little beast that ran along the plaster. "What does it say? It says, 'I
+am the spider that spins the Virgin's thread.'" And the archaic
+simpleton added, "One must never judge what people do, for one can
+never tell what may happen."
+
+"That's true," replied Paradis politely. "He's funny," said Mesnil
+Andre, between his teeth, while he sought the mirror in his pocket to
+look at the facial benefit of fine weather. "He's crazy," murmured
+Barque in his ecstasy.
+
+"I leave you," said the old man, yielding in annoyance.
+
+He got up to go and look for his treasure again, entered the house that
+supported our backs, and left the door open, where beside the huge
+fireplace in the room we saw a little girl, so seriously playing with a
+doll that Blaire fell considering, and said, "She's right."
+
+The games of children are a momentous preoccupation. Only the grown-ups
+play.
+
+After we have watched the animals and the strollers go by, we watch the
+time go by, we watch everything.
+
+We are seeing the life of things, we are present with Nature, blended
+with climates, mingled even with the sky, colored by the seasons. We
+have attached ourselves to this corner of the land where chance has
+held us back from our endless wanderings in longer and deeper peace
+than elsewhere; and this closer intercourse makes us sensible of all
+its traits and habits. September--the morrow of August and eve of
+October, most affecting of months--is already sprinkling the fine days
+with subtle warnings. Already one knows the meaning of the dead leaves
+that flit about the flat stones like a flock of sparrows.
+
+In truth we have got used to each other's company, we and this place.
+So often transplanted, we are taking root here, and we no longer
+actually think of going away, even when we talk about it.
+
+"The 11th Division jolly well stayed a month and a half resting," says
+Blaire.
+
+"And the 375th, too, nine weeks!" replies Barque, in a tone of
+challenge.
+
+"I think we shall stay here at least as long--at least, I say."
+
+"We could finish the war here all right."
+
+Barque is affected by the words, nor very far from believing them.
+"After all, it will finish some day, what!"
+
+"After all!" repeat the others.
+
+"To be sure, one never knows," says Paradis. He says this weakly,
+without deep conviction. It is, however, a saying which leaves no room
+for reply. We say it over again, softly, lulling ourselves with it as
+with an old song.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Farfadet rejoined us a moment ago. He took his place near us, but a
+little withdrawn all the same, and sits on an overturned tub, his chin
+on his fists.
+
+This man is more solidly happy than we are. We know it well, and he
+knows it well. Lifting his head he has looked in turn, with the same
+distant gaze, at the back of the old man who went to seek his treasure,
+and at the group that talks of going away no more. There shines over
+our sensitive and sentimental comrade a sort of personal glamour, which
+makes of him a being apart, which gilds him and isolates him from us,
+in spite of himself, as though an officer's tabs had fallen on him from
+the sky.
+
+His idyll with Eudoxie has continued here. We have had the proofs; and
+once, indeed, he spoke of it. She is not very far away, and they are
+very near to each other. Did I not see her the other evening, passing
+along the wall of the parsonage, her hair but half quenched by a
+mantilla, as she went obviously to a rendezvous? Did I not see that she
+began to hurry and to lean forward, already smiling? Although there is
+no more between them yet than promises and assurances, she is his, and
+he is the man who will hold her in his arms.
+
+Then, too, he is going to leave us, called to the rear, to Brigade
+H.Q., where they want a weakling who can work a typewriter. It is
+official; it is in writing; he is saved. That gloomy future at which we
+others dare not look is definite and bright for him.
+
+He looks at an open window and the dark gap behind it of some room or
+other over there, a shadowy room that bemuses him. His life is twofold
+in hope; he is happy, for the imminent happiness that does not yet
+exist is the only real happiness down here.
+
+So a scanty spirit of envy grows around him. "One never knows," murmurs
+Paradis again, but with no more confidence than when before, in the
+straitened scene of our life to-day, he uttered those immeasurable
+words.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Entraining
+
+
+THE next day, Barque began to address us, and said: "I'll just explain
+to you what it is. There are some i--"
+
+A ferocious whistle cut his explanation off short, on the syllable. We
+were in a railway station, on a platform. A night alarm had torn us
+from our sleep in the village and we had marched here. The rest was
+over; our sector was being changed; they were throwing us somewhere
+else. We had disappeared from Gauchin under cover of darkness without
+seeing either the place or the people, without bidding them good-by
+even in a look, without bringing away a last impression.
+
+A locomotive was shunting, near enough to elbow us, and screaming
+full-lunged. I saw Barque's mouth, stoppered by the clamor of our huge
+neighbor, pronounce an oath, and I saw the other faces grimacing in
+deafened impotence, faces helmeted and chin-strapped, for we were
+sentries in the station.
+
+"After you!" yelled Barque furiously, addressing the white-plumed
+whistle. But the terrible mechanism continued more imperiously than
+ever to drive his words back in his throat. When it ceased, and only
+its echo rang in our ears, the thread of the discourse was broken for
+ever, and Barque contented himself with the brief conclusion, "Oui."
+
+Then we looked around us. We were lost in a sort of town. Interminable
+strings of trucks, trains of forty to sixty carriages, were taking
+shape like rows of dark-fronted houses, low built, all alike, and
+divided by alleys. Before us, alongside the collection of moving
+houses, was the main line, the limitless street where the white rails
+disappeared at both ends, swallowed up in distance. Sections of trains
+and complete trains were staggering in great horizontal columns,
+leaving their places, then taking them again. On every side one heard
+the regular hammering on the armored ground, piercing whistles, the
+ringing of warning bells, the solid metallic crash of the colossal
+cubes telescoping their steel stumps, with the counter-blows of chains
+and the rattle of the long carcases' vertebrae. On the ground floor of
+the building that arises in the middle of the station like a town hall,
+the hurried bell of telegraph and telephone was at work, punctuated by
+vocal noises. All about on the dusty ground were the goods sheds, the
+low stores through whose doors one could dimly see the stacked
+interiors--the pointsmen's cabins, the bristling switches, the
+hydrants, the latticed iron posts whose wires ruled the sky like
+music-paper; here and there the signals, and rising naked over this
+flat and gloomy city, two steam cranes, like steeples.
+
+Farther away, on waste ground and vacant sites in the environs of the
+labyrinth of platforms and buildings, military carts and lorries were
+standing idle, and rows of horses, drawn out farther than one could see.
+
+"Talk about the job this is going to be!"--"A whole army corps
+beginning to entrain this evening!"--"Tiens, they're coming now!"
+
+A cloud which overspread a noisy vibration of wheels and the rumble of
+horses' hoofs was coming near and getting bigger in the approach to the
+station formed by converging buildings.
+
+"There are already some guns on board." On some flat trucks down there,
+between two long pyramidal dumps of chests, we saw indeed the outline
+of wheels, and some slender muzzles. Ammunition wagons, guns and wheels
+were streaked and blotched with yellow, brown, and green.
+
+"They're camoufles. [note 1] Down there, there are even horses painted.
+Look! spot that one, there, with the big feet as if he had trousers on.
+Well, he was white, and they've slapped some paint on to change his
+color."
+
+The horse in question was standing apart from the others, which seemed
+to mistrust it, and displayed a grayish yellow tone, obviously with
+intent to deceive. "Poor devil!" said Tulacque.
+
+"You see," said Paradis, "we not only take 'em to get killed, but mess
+them about first!"
+
+"It's for their good, any way!"
+
+"Eh oui, and us too, it's for our good!"
+
+Towards evening soldiers arrived. From all sides they flowed towards
+the station. Deep-voiced non-coms. ran in front of the files. They were
+stemming the tide of men and massing them along the barriers or in
+railed squares--pretty well everywhere. The men piled their arms,
+dropped their knapsacks, and not being free to go out, waited, buried
+side by side in shadow.
+
+The arrivals followed each other in volume that grew as the twilight
+deepened. Along with the troops, the motors flowed up, and soon there
+was an unbroken roar. Limousines glided through an enormous sea of
+lorries, little, middling, and big. All these cleared aside, wedged
+themselves in, subsided in their appointed places. A vast hum of voices
+and mingled noises arose from the ocean of men and vehicles that beat
+upon the approaches to the station and began in places to filter
+through.
+
+"That's nothing yet," said Cocon, The Man of Figures. "At Army Corps
+Headquarters alone there are thirty officers' motors; and you don't
+know," he added, "how many trains of fifty trucks it takes to entrain
+all the Corpsmen and all the box of tricks--except, of course, the
+lorries, that'll join the new sector on their feet? Don't guess,
+flat-face. It takes ninety."
+
+"Great Scott! And there are thirty-three Corps?"
+
+"There are thirty-nine, lousy one!"
+
+The turmoil increases; the station becomes still more populous. As far
+as the eye can make out a shape or the ghost of a shape, there is a
+hurly-burly of movement as lively as a panic. All the hierarchy of the
+non-coms. expand themselves and go into action, pass and repass like
+meteors, wave their bright-striped arms, and multiply the commands and
+counter-commands that are carried by the worming orderlies and
+cyclists, the former tardy, the latter maneuvering in quick dashes,
+like fish in water.
+
+Here now is evening, definitely. The blots made by the uniforms of the
+poilus grouped about the hillocks of rifles become indistinct, and
+blend with the ground; and then their mass is betrayed only by the glow
+of pipes and cigarettes. In some places on the edge of the clusters,
+the little bright points festoon the gloom like illuminated streamers
+in a merry-making street.
+
+Over this confused and heaving expanse an amalgam of voices rises like
+the sea breaking on the shore: and above this unending murmur, renewed
+commands, shouts, the din of a shot load or of one transferred, the
+crash of steam-hammers redoubling their dull endeavors, and the roaring
+of boilers.
+
+In the immense obscurity, surcharged with men and with all things,
+lights begin everywhere to appear. These are the flash-lamps of
+officers and detachment leaders, and the cyclists' acetylene lamps,
+whose intensely white points zigzag hither and thither and reveal an
+outer zone of pallid resurrection.
+
+An acetylene searchlight blazes blindingly out and depicts a dome of
+daylight. Other beams pierce and rend the universal gray.
+
+Then does the station assume a fantastic air. Mysterious shapes spring
+up and adhere to the sky's dark blue. Mountains come into view,
+rough-modeled, and vast as the ruins of a town. One can see the
+beginning of unending rows of objects, finally plunged in night. One
+guesses what the great bulks may be whose outermost outlines flash
+forth from a black abyss of the unknown.
+
+On our left, detachments of cavalry and infantry move ever forward like
+a ponderous flood. We hear the diffused obscurity of voices. We see
+some ranks delineated by a flash of phosphorescent light or a ruddy
+glimmering, and we listen to long-drawn trails of noise.
+
+Up the gangways of the vans whose gray trunks and black mouths one sees
+by the dancing and smoking flame of torches, artillerymen are leading
+horses. There are appeals and shouts, a frantic trampling of conflict,
+and the angry kicking of some restive animal--insulted by its
+guide--against the panels of the van where he is cloistered.
+
+Not far away, they are putting wagons on to railway trucks. Swarming
+humanity surrounds a hill of trusses of fodder. A scattered multitude
+furiously attacks great strata of bales.
+
+"That's three hours we've been on our pins," sighs Paradis.
+
+"And those, there, what are they?" In some snatches of light we see a
+group of goblins, surrounded by glowworms and carrying strange
+instruments, come out and then disappear.
+
+"That's the searchlight section," says Cocon.
+
+"You've got your considering cap on, camarade; what's it about?"
+
+"There are four Divisions, at present, in an Army Corps," replies
+Cocon; "the number changes, sometimes it is three, sometimes five. Just
+now, it's four. And each of our Divisions," continues the mathematical
+one, whom our squad glories in owning, "includes three R.I.--regiments
+of infantry; two B.C.P.--battalions of chasseurs pied; one
+R.T.I.--regiment of territorial infantry--without counting the special
+regiments, Artillery, Engineers, Transport, etc., and not counting
+either Headquarters of the D.I. and the departments not brigaded but
+attached directly to the D.I. A regiment of the line of three
+battalions occupies four trains, one for H.Q., the machine-gun company,
+and the C.H.R. (compagnie hors rang [note 2]), and one to each
+battalion. All the troops won't entrain here. They'll entrain in
+echelons along the line according to the position of the quarters and
+the period of reliefs."
+
+"I'm tired," says Tulacque. "We don't get enough solids to eat, mark
+you. We stand up because it's the fashion, but we've no longer either
+force or freshness."
+
+"I've been getting information," Cocon goes on; "the troops--the real
+troops--will only entrain as from midnight. They are still mustered
+here and there in the villages ten kilometers round about. All the
+departments of the Army Corps will first set off, and the
+E.N.E.--elements non endivisionnes," Cocon obligingly explains, "that
+is, attached directly to the A.C. Among the E.N.E. you won't see the
+Balloon Department nor the Squadron--they're too big goods, and they
+navigate on their own, with their staff and officers and hospitals. The
+chasseurs regiment is another of these E.N.E."
+
+"There's no regiment of chasseurs," says Barque, thoughtlessly, "it's
+battalions. One says 'such and such a battalion of chasseurs.'"
+
+We can see Cocon shrugging his shoulders in the shadows, and his
+glasses cast a scornful gleam. "Think so, duck-neb? Then I'll tell you,
+since you're so clever, there are two--foot chasseurs and horse
+chasseurs."
+
+"Gad! I forgot the horsemen," says Barque.
+
+"Only them!" Cocon said. "In the E.N.E. of the Army Corps, there's the
+Corps Artillery, that is to say, the central artillery that's
+additional to that of the divisions. It includes the H.A.--heavy
+artillery; the T.A.--trench artillery; the A.D.--artillery depot, the
+armored cars, the anti-aircraft batteries--do I know, or don't I?
+There's the Engineers; the Military Police--to wit, the service of cops
+on foot and slops on horseback; the Medical Department; the Veterinary
+ditto; a squadron of the Draught Corps; a Territorial regiment for the
+guards and fatigues at H.Q.--Headquarters; the Service de l'Intendance,
+[note 3] and the supply column. There's also the drove of cattle, the
+Remount Depot, the Motor Department--talk about the swarm of soft jobs
+I could tell you about in an hour if I wanted to!--the Paymaster that
+controls the pay-offices and the Post, the Council of War, the
+Telegraphists, and all the electrical lot. All those have chiefs,
+commandants, sections and sub-sections, and they're rotten with clerks
+and orderlies of sorts, and all the bally box of tricks. You can see
+from here the sort of job the C.O. of a Corp's got!"
+
+At this moment we were surrounded by a party of soldiers carrying boxes
+in addition to their equipment, and parcels tied up in paper that they
+bore reluctantly and anon placed on the ground, puffing.
+
+"Those are the Staff secretaries. They are a part of the
+H.Q.--Headquarters--that is to say, a sort of General's suite. When
+they're flitting, they lug about their chests of records, their tables,
+their registers, and all the dirty oddments they need for their
+writing. Tiens! see that, there; it's a typewriter those two are
+carrying, the old papa and the little sausage, with a rifle threaded
+through the parcel. They're in three offices, and there's also the
+dispatch-riders' section, the Chancellerie, the A.C.T.S.--Army Corps
+Topographical Section--that distributes maps to the Divisions, and
+makes maps and plans from the aviators and the observers and the
+prisoners. It's the officers of all the departments who, under the
+orders of two colonels, form the Staff of the Army Corps. But the H.Q.,
+properly so called, which also includes orderlies, cooks, storekeepers,
+workpeople, electricians, police, and the horsemen of the Escort, is
+bossed by a commandant."
+
+At this moment we receive collectively a tremendous bump. "Hey, look
+out! Out of the way!" cries a man, by way of apology, who is being
+assisted by several others to push a cart towards the wagons. The work
+is hard, for the ground slopes up, and so soon as they cease to
+buttress themselves against the cart and adhere to the wheels, it slips
+back. The sullen men crush themselves against it in the depth of the
+gloom, grinding their teeth and growling, as though they fell upon some
+monster.
+
+Barque, all the while rubbing his back, questions one of the frantic
+gang: "Think you're going to do it, old duckfoot?"
+
+"Nom de Dieu!" roars he, engrossed in his job, "mind these setts!
+You're going to wreck the show!" With a sudden movement he jostles
+Barque again, and this time turns round on him: "What are you doing
+there, dung-guts, numskull?"
+
+"Non, it can't be that you're drunk?" Barque retorts. "'What am I doing
+here?' It's good, that! Tell me, you lousy gang, wouldn't you like to
+do it too!"
+
+"Out of the way!" cries a new voice, which precedes some men doubled up
+under burdens incongruous, but apparently overwhelming.
+
+One can no longer remain anywhere. Everywhere we are in the way. We go
+forward, we scatter, we retire in the turmoil.
+
+"In addition, I tell you," continues Cocon, tranquil as a scientist,
+"there are the Divisions, each organized pretty much like an Army
+Corps--"
+
+"Oui, we know it; miss the deal!"
+
+"He makes a fine to-do about it all, that mountebank in the horse-box
+on casters. What a mother-in-law he'd make!"
+
+"I'll bet that's the Major's wrong-headed horse, the one that the vet
+said was a calf in process of becoming a cow."
+
+"It's well organized, all the same, all that, no doubt about it," says
+Lamuse admiringly, forced back by a wave of artillerymen carrying boxes.
+
+"That's true," Marthereau admits; "to get all this lot on the way,
+you've not got to be a lot of turnip-heads nor a lot of custards--Bon
+Dieu, look where you're putting your damned boots, you black-livered
+beast!"
+
+"Talk about a flitting! When I went to live at Marcoussis with my
+family, there was less fuss than this. But then I'm not built that way
+myself."
+
+We are silent; and then we hear Cocon saying, "For the whole French
+Army that holds the lines to go by--I'm not speaking of those who are
+fixed up at the rear, where there are twice as many men again, and
+services like the ambulance that cost nine million francs and can clear
+you seven thousand cases a day--to see them go by in trains of sixty
+coaches each, following each other without stopping, at intervals of a
+quarter of an hour, it would take forty days and forty nights."
+
+"Ah!" they say. It is too much effort for their imagination; they lose
+interest and sicken of the magnitude of these figures. They yawn, and
+with watering eyes they follow, in the confusion of haste and shouts
+and smoke, of roars and gleams and flashes, the terrible line of the
+armored train that moves in the distance, with fire in the sky behind
+it.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] The word is likely to become of international usage. It
+stands for the use of paint in blotches of different colors, and of
+branches and other things to disguise almost any object that may be
+visible to hostile aircraft.--Tr.
+
+[note 2:] Non-combatant.--Tr.
+
+[note 3:] Akin to the British A.S.C.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+On Leave
+
+
+EUDORE sat down awhile, there by the roadside well, before taking the
+path over the fields that led to the trenches, his hands crossed over
+one knee, his pale face uplifted. He had no mustache under his
+nose--only a little flat smear over each corner of his mouth. He
+whistled, and then yawned in the face of the morning till the tears
+came.
+
+An artilleryman who was quartered on the edge of the wood--over there
+where a line of horses and carts looked like a gypsies' bivouac--came
+up, with the well in his mind, and two canvas buckets that danced at
+the end of his arms in time with his feet. In front of the sleepy
+unarmed soldier with a bulging bag he stood fast.
+
+"On leave?"
+
+"Yes," said Eudore; "just back."
+
+"Good for you," said the gunner as he made off.
+
+"You've nothing to grumble at--with six days' leave in your
+water-bottle!"
+
+And here, see, are four more men coming down the road, their gait heavy
+and slow, their boots turned into enormous caricatures of boots by
+reason of the mud. As one man they stopped on espying the profile of
+Eudore.
+
+"There's Eudore! Hello, Eudore! hello, the old sport! You're back
+then!" they cried together, as they hurried up and offered him hands as
+big and ruddy as if they were hidden in woolen gloves.
+
+"Morning, boys," said Eudore.
+
+"Had a good time? What have you got to tell us, my boy?"
+
+"Yes," replied Eudore, "not so bad."
+
+"We've been on wine fatigue, and we've finished. Let's go back
+together, pas?"
+
+In single file they went down the embankment of the road--arm in arm
+they crossed the field of gray mud, where their feet fell with the
+sound of dough being mixed in the kneading-trough.
+
+"Well, you've seen your wife, your little Mariette--the only girl for
+you--that you could never open your jaw without telling us a tale about
+her, eh?"
+
+Eudore's wan face winced.
+
+"My wife? Yes, I saw her, sure enough, but only for a little
+while--there was no way of doing any better--but no luck, I admit, and
+that's all about it."
+
+"How's that?"
+
+"How? You know that we live at Villers-l'Abbaye, a hamlet of four
+houses neither more nor less, astraddle over the road. One of those
+houses is our cafe, and she runs it, or rather she is running it again
+since they gave up shelling the village.
+
+"Now then, with my leave coming along, she asked for a permit to
+Mont-St-Eloi, where my old folks are, and my permit was for
+Mont-St-Eloi too. See the move?
+
+"Being a little woman with a head-piece, you know, she had applied for
+her permit long before the date when my leave was expected. All the
+same, my leave came before her permit. Spite o' that I set off--for one
+doesn't let his turn in the company go by, eh? So I stayed with the old
+people, and waited. I like 'em well enough, but I got down in the mouth
+all the same. As for them, it was enough that they could see me, and it
+worried them that I was bored by their company-how else could it be? At
+the end of the sixth day--at the finish of my leave, and the very
+evening before returning--a young man on a bicycle, son of the Florence
+family, brings me a letter from Mariette to say that her permit had not
+yet come--"
+
+"Ah, rotten luck," cried the audience.
+
+"And that," continued Eudore, "there was only one thing to do.--I was
+to get leave from the mayor of Mont-St-Eloi, who would get it from the
+military, and go myself at full speed to see her at Villers."
+
+"You should have done that the first day, not the sixth!"
+
+"So it seems, but I was afraid we should cross and me miss her--y'see,
+as soon as I landed, I was expecting her all the time, and every minute
+I fancied I could see her at the open door. So I did as she told me."
+
+"After all, you saw her?"
+
+"Just one day--or rather, just one night."
+
+"Quite sufficient!" merrily said Lamuse, and Eudore the pale and
+serious shook his head under the shower of pointed and perilous jests
+that followed.
+
+"Shut your great mouths for five minutes, chaps."
+
+"Get on with it, petit."
+
+"There isn't a great lot of it," said Eudore.
+
+"Well, then, you were saying you had got a hump with your old people?"
+
+"Ah, yes. They had tried their best to make up for Mariette--with
+lovely rashers of our own ham, and plum brandy, and patching up my
+linen, and all sorts of little spoiled-kid tricks--and I noticed they
+were still slanging each other in the old familiar way! But you talk
+about a difference! I always had my eye on the door to see if some time
+or other it wouldn't get a move on and turn into a woman. So I went and
+saw the mayor, and set off, yesterday, towards two in the
+afternoon--towards fourteen o'clock I might well say, seeing that I had
+been counting the hours since the day before! I had just one day of my
+leave left then.
+
+"As we drew near in the dusk, through the carriage window of the little
+railway that still keeps going down there on some fag-ends of line, I
+recognized half the country, and the other half I didn't. Here and
+there I got the sense of it, all at once, and it came back all fresh to
+me, and melted away again, just as if it was talking to me. Then it
+shut up. In the end we got out, and I found--the limit, that was--that
+we had to pad the hoof to the last station.
+
+"Never, old man, have I been in such weather. It had rained for six
+days. For six days the sky washed the earth and then washed it again.
+The earth was softening and shifting, and filling up the holes and
+making new ones."
+
+"Same here--it only stopped raining this morning."
+
+"It was just my luck. And everywhere there were swollen new streams,
+washing away the borders of the fields as though they were lines on
+paper. There were hills that ran with water from top to bottom. Gusts
+of wind sent the rain in great clouds flying and whirling about, and
+lashing our hands and faces and necks.
+
+"So you bet, when I had tramped to the station, if some one had pulled
+a really ugly face at me, it would have been enough to make me turn
+back.
+
+"But when we did get to the place, there were several of us--some more
+men on leave--they weren't bound for Villers, but they had to go
+through it to get somewhere else. So it happened that we got there in a
+lump--five old cronies that didn't know each other.
+
+"I could make out nothing of anything. They've been worse shelled over
+there than here, and then there was the water everywhere, and it was
+getting dark.
+
+"I told you there are only four houses in the little place, only
+they're a good bit off from each other. You come to the lower end of a
+slope. I didn't know too well where I was, no more than my pals did,
+though they belonged to the district and had some notion of the lay of
+it--and all the less because of the rain falling in bucketsful.
+
+"It got so bad that we couldn't keep from hurrying and began to run. We
+passed by the farm of the Alleux--that's the first of the houses--and
+it looked like a sort of stone ghost. Bits of walls like splintered
+pillars standing up out of the water; the house was shipwrecked. The
+other farm, a little further, was as good as drowned dead.
+
+"Our house is the third. It's on the edge of the road that runs along
+the top of the slope. We climbed up, facing the rain that beat on us in
+the dusk and began to blind us--the cold and wet fairly smacked us in
+the eye, flop!--and broke our ranks like machine-guns.
+
+"The house! I ran like a greyhound--like an African attacking.
+Mariette! I could see her with her arms raised high in the doorway
+behind that fine curtain of night and rain--of rain so fierce that it
+drove her back and kept her shrinking between the doorposts like a
+statue of the Virgin in its niche. I just threw myself forward, but
+remembered to give my pals the sign to follow me. The house swallowed
+the lot of us. Mariette laughed a little to see me, with a tear in her
+eye. She waited till we were alone together and then laughed and cried
+all at once. I told the boys to make themselves at home and sit down,
+some on the chairs and the rest on the table.
+
+"'Where are they going, ces messieurs?' asked Manette.
+
+"'We are going to Vauvelles.'
+
+"'Jesus!' she said, 'you'll never get there. You can't do those two
+miles and more in the night, with the roads washed away, and swamps
+everywhere. You mustn't even try to.'
+
+"'Well, we'll go on to-morrow, then; only we must find somewhere to
+pass the night.'
+
+"'I'll go with you,' I said, 'as far as the Pendu farm--they're not
+short of room in that shop. You'll snore in there all right, and you
+can start at daybreak.'
+
+"'Right! let's get a move on so far.'
+
+"We went out again. What a downpour! We were wet past bearing. The
+water poured into our socks through the boot-soles and by the trouser
+bottoms, and they too were soaked through and through up to the knees.
+Before we got to this Pendu, we meet a shadow in a big black cloak,
+with a lantern. The lantern is raised, and we see a gold stripe on the
+sleeve, and then an angry face.
+
+"'What the hell are you doing there?' says the shadow, drawing back a
+little and putting one fist on his hip, while the rain rattled like
+hail on his hood.
+
+"'They're men on leave for Vauvelles--they can't set off again
+to-night--they would like to sleep in the Pendu farm.'
+
+"'What do you say? Sleep here?--This is the police station--I am the
+officer on guard and there are Boche prisoners in the buildings.' And
+I'll tell you what he said as well--'I must see you hop it from here in
+less than two seconds. Bonsoir.'
+
+"So we right about face and started back again--stumbling as if we were
+boozed, slipping, puffing, splashing and bespattering ourselves. One of
+the boys cried to me through the wind and rain, 'We'll go back with you
+as far as your home, all the same. If we haven't a house we've time
+enough.'
+
+"'Where will you sleep?'
+
+"'Oh, we'll find somewhere, don't worry, for the little time we have to
+kill here.'
+
+"'Yes, we'll find somewhere, all right,' I said. 'Come in again for a
+minute meanwhile--I won't take no--and Mariette sees us enter once more
+in single file, all five of us soaked like bread in soup.
+
+"So there we all were, with only one little room to go round in and go
+round again--the only room in the house, seeing that it isn't a palace.
+
+"'Tell me, madame,' says one of our friends, 'isn't there a cellar
+here?'
+
+"'There's water in it,' says Mariette; 'you can't see the bottom step
+and it's only got two.'
+
+"'Damn,' says the man, 'for I see there's no loft, either.'
+
+"After a minute or two he gets up: 'Good-night, old pal,' he says to
+me, and they get their hats on.
+
+"'What, are you going off in weather like this, boys?'
+
+"'Do you think,' says the old sport, 'that we're going to spoil your
+stay with your wife?'
+
+"'But, my good man--'
+
+"'But me no buts. It's nine o'clock, and you've got to take your hook
+before day. So good-night. Coming, you others?'
+
+"'Rather,' say the boys. 'Good-night all.'
+
+"There they are at the door and opening it. Mariette and me, we look at
+each other--but we don't move. Once more we look at each other, and
+then we sprang at them. I grabbed the skirt of a coat and she a
+belt--all wet enough to wring out.
+
+"'Never! We won't let you go--it can't be done.'
+
+"'But--'
+
+"'But me no buts,' I reply, while she locks the door."
+
+"Then what?" asked Lamuse.
+
+"Then? Nothing at all," replied Eudore. "We just stayed like that, very
+discreetly--all the night--sitting, propped up in the corners,
+yawning--like the watchers over a dead man. We made a bit of talk at
+first. From time to time some one said, 'Is it still raining?' and went
+and had a look, and said, 'It's still raining'--we could hear it, by
+the way. A big chap who had a mustache like a Bulgarian fought against
+sleeping like a wild man. Sometimes one or two among the crowd slept,
+but there was always one to yawn and keep an eye open for politeness,
+who stretched himself or half got up so that he could settle more
+comfortably.
+
+"Mariette and me, we never slept. We looked at each other, but we
+looked at the others as well, and they looked at us, and there you are.
+
+"Morning came and cleaned the window. I got up to go and look outside.
+The rain was hardly less. In the room I could see dark forms that began
+to stir and breathe hard. Mariette's eyes were red with looking at me
+all night. Between her and me a soldier was filling his pipe and
+shivering.
+
+"Some one beats a tattoo on the window, and I half open it. A
+silhouette with a streaming hat appears, as though carried and driven
+there by the terrible force of the blast that came with it, and asks--
+
+"'Hey, in the cafe there! Is there any coffee to be had?'
+
+"'Coming, sir, coming,' cried Mariette.
+
+"She gets up from her chair, a little benumbed. Without a word she
+looks at her self in our bit of a mirror, touches her hair lightly, and
+says quite simply, the good lass--
+
+"'I am going to make coffee for everybody.'
+
+"When that was drunk off, we had all of us to go. Besides, customers
+turned up every minute.
+
+"'Hey, la p'tite mere,' they cried, shoving their noses in at the
+half-open window, 'let's have a coffee--or three--or four'--'and two
+more again,' says another voice.
+
+"We go up to Mariette to say good-by. They knew they had played
+gooseberry that night most damnably, but I could see plainly that they
+didn't know if it would be the thing to say something about it or just
+let it drop altogether.
+
+"Then the Bulgarian made up his mind: 'We've made a hell of a mess of
+it for you, eh, ma p'tite dame?'
+
+"He said that to show he'd been well brought up, the old sport.
+
+"Mariette thanks him and offers him her hand--'That's nothing at all,
+sir. I hope you'll enjoy your leave.'
+
+"And me, I held her tight in my arms and kissed her as long as I
+could--half a minute--discontented--my God, there was reason to be--but
+glad that Mariette had not driven the boys out like dogs, and I felt
+sure she liked me too for not doing it.
+
+"'But that isn't all,' said one of the leave men, lifting the skirt of
+his cape and fumbling in his coat pocket; 'that's not all. What do we
+owe you for the coffees?'
+
+"'Nothing, for you stayed the night with me; you are my guests.'
+
+"'Oh, madame, we can't have that!'
+
+"And how they set to to make protests and compliments in front of each
+other! Old man, you can say what you like--we may be only poor devils,
+but it was astonishing, that little palaver of good manners.
+
+"'Come along! Let's be hopping it, eh?'
+
+"They go out one by one. I stay till the last. Just then another
+passer-by begins to knock on the window--another who was dying for a
+mouthful of coffee. Mariette by the open door leaned forward and cried,
+'One second!'
+
+"Then she put into my arms a parcel that she had ready. 'I had bought a
+knuckle of ham--it was for supper--for us--for us two--and a liter of
+good wine. But, ma foi! when I saw there were five of you, I didn't
+want to divide it out so much, and I want still less now. There's the
+ham, the bread, and the wine. I give them to you so that you can enjoy
+them by yourself, my boy. As for them, we have given them enough,' she
+says.
+
+"Poor Mariette," sighs Eudore. "Fifteen months since I'd seen her. And
+when shall I see her again? Ever?--It was jolly, that idea of hers. She
+crammed all that stuff into my bag--"
+
+He half opens his brown canvas pouch.
+
+"Look, here they are! The ham here, and the bread, and there's the
+booze. Well, seeing it's there, you don't know what we're going to do
+with it? We're going to share it out between us, eh, old pals?"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The Anger of Volpatte
+
+
+WHEN Volpatte arrived from his sick-leave, after two months' absence,
+we surrounded him. But he was sullen and silent, and tried to get away.
+
+"Well, what about it? Volpatte, have you nothing to tell us?"
+
+"Tell us all about the hospital and the sick-leave, old cock, from the
+day when you set off in your bandages, with your snout in parenthesis!
+You must have seen something of the official shops. Speak then, nome de
+Dieu!"
+
+"I don't want to say anything at all about it," said Volpatte.
+
+"What's that? What are you talking about?"
+
+"I'm fed up--that's what I am! The people back there, I'm sick of
+them--they make me spew, and you can tell 'em so!"
+
+"What have they done to you?"
+
+"A lot of sods, they are!" says Volpatte.
+
+There he was, with his head as of yore, his ears "stuck on again" and
+his Mongolian cheekbones--stubbornly set in the middle of the puzzled
+circle that besieged him; and we felt that the mouth fast closed on
+ominous silence meant high pressure of seething exasperation in the
+depth of him.
+
+Some words overflowed from him at last. He turned round--facing towards
+the rear and the bases--and shook his fist at infinite space. "There
+are too many of them," he said between his teeth, "there are too many!"
+He seemed to be threatening and repelling a rising sea of phantoms.
+
+A little later, we questioned him again, knowing well that his anger
+could not thus be retained within, and that the savage silence would
+explode at the first chance.
+
+It was in a deep communication trench, away back, where we had come
+together for a meal after a morning spent in digging. Torrential rain
+was falling. We were muddled and drenched and hustled by the flood, and
+we ate standing in single file, without shelter, under the dissolving
+sky. Only by feats of skill could we protect the bread and bully from
+the spouts that flowed from every point in space; and while we ate we
+put our hands and faces as much as possible under our cowls. The rain
+rattled and bounced and streamed on our limp woven armor, and worked
+with open brutality or sly secrecy into ourselves and our food. Our
+feet were sinking farther and farther, taking deep root in the stream
+that flowed along the clayey bottom of the trench. Some faces were
+laughing, though their mustaches dripped. Others grimaced at the spongy
+bread and flabby meat, or at the missiles which attacked their skin
+from all sides at every defect in their heavy and miry armor-plate.
+
+Barque, who was hugging his mess-tin to his heart, bawled at Volpatte:
+"Well then, a lot of sods, you say, that you've seen down there where
+you've been?"
+
+"For instance?" cried Blaire, while a redoubled squall shook and
+scattered his words; "what have you seen in the way of sods?"
+
+"There are--" Volpatte began, "and then--there are too many of them,
+nom de Dieu! There are--"
+
+He tried to say what was the matter with him, but could only repeat,
+"There are too many of them!" oppressed and panting. He swallowed a
+pulpy mouthful of bread as if there went with it the disordered and
+suffocating mass of his memories.
+
+"Is it the shirkers you want to talk about?"
+
+"By God!" He had thrown the rest of his beef over the parapet, and this
+cry, this gasp, escaped violently from his mouth as if from a valve.
+
+"Don't worry about the soft-job brigade, old cross-patch," advised
+Barque, banteringly, but not without some bitterness. "What good does
+it do?"
+
+Concealed and huddled up under the fragile and unsteady roof of his
+oiled hood, while the water poured down its shining slopes, and holding
+his empty mess-tin out for the rain to clean it, Volpatte snarled, "I'm
+not daft--not a bit of it--and I know very well there've got to be
+these individuals at the rear. Let them have their dead-heads for all I
+care--but there's too many of them, and they're all alike, and all
+rotters, voila!"
+
+Relieved by this affirmation, which shed a little light on the gloomy
+farrago of fury he was loosing among us, Volpatte began to speak in
+fragments across the relentless sheets of rain--
+
+"At the very first village they sent me to, I saw duds, and duds
+galore, and they began to get on my nerves. All sorts of departments
+and sub-departments and managements and centers and offices and
+committees--you're no sooner there than you meet swarms of fools,
+swarms of different services that are only different in name--enough to
+turn your brain. I tell you, the man that invented the names of all
+those committees, he was wrong in his head.
+
+"So could I help but be sick of it? Ah, mon vieux," said our comrade,
+musing, "all those individuals fiddle-faddling and making believe down
+there, all spruced up with their fine caps and officers' coats and
+shameful boots, that gulp dainties and can put a dram of best brandy
+down their gullets whenever they want, and wash themselves oftener
+twice than once, and go to church, and never stop smoking, and pack
+themselves up in feathers at night to read the newspaper--and then they
+say afterwards, 'I've been in the war!'"
+
+One point above all had got hold of Volpatte and emerged from his
+confused and impassioned vision: "All those soldiers, they haven't to
+run away with their table-tools and get a bite any old way--they've got
+to be at their ease--they'd rather go and sit themselves down with some
+tart in the district, at a special reserved table, and guzzle
+vegetables, and the fine lady puts their crockery out all square for
+them on the dining-table, and their pots of jam and every other blasted
+thing to eat; in short, the advantages of riches and peace in that
+doubly-damned hell they call the Rear!"
+
+Volpatte's neighbor shook his head under the torrents that fell from
+heaven and said, "So much the better for them."
+
+"I'm not crazy--" Volpatte began again.
+
+"P'raps, but you're not fair."
+
+Volpatte felt himself insulted by the word. He started, and raised his
+head furiously, and the rain, that was waiting for the chance, took him
+plump in the face. "Not fair--me? Not fair--to those dung-hills?"
+
+"Exactly, monsieur," the neighbor replied; "I tell you that you play
+hell with them and yet you'd jolly well like to be in the rotters'
+place."
+
+"Very likely--but what does that prove, rump-face? To begin with, we,
+we've been in danger, and it ought to be our turn for the other. But
+they're always the same, I tell you; and then there's young men there,
+strong as bulls and poised like wrestlers, and then--there are too many
+of them! D'you hear? It's always too many, I say, because it is so."
+
+"Too many? What do you know about it, vilain? These departments and
+committees, do you know what they are?"
+
+"I don't know what they are," Volpatte set off again, "but I know--"
+
+"Don't you think they need a crowd to keep all the army's affairs
+going?"
+
+"I don't care a damn, but--"
+
+"But you wish it was you, eh?" chaffed the invisible neighbor, who
+concealed in the depth of the hood on which the reservoirs of space
+were emptying either a supreme indifference or a cruel desire to take a
+rise out of Volpatte.
+
+"I can't help it," said the other, simply.
+
+"There's those that can help it for you," interposed the shrill voice
+of Barque; "I knew one of 'em--"
+
+"I, too, I've seen 'em!" Volpatte yelled with a desperate effort
+through the storm. "Tiens! not far from the front, don't know where
+exactly, where there's an ambulance clearing-station and a
+sous-intendance--I met the reptile there."
+
+The wind, as it passed over us, tossed him the question, "What was it?"
+
+At that moment there was a lull, and the weather allowed Volpatte to
+talk after a fashion. He said: "He took me round all the jumble of the
+depot as if it was a fair, although he was one of the sights of the
+place. He led me along the passages and into the dining-rooms of houses
+and supplementary barracks. He half opened doors with labels on them,
+and said, 'Look here, and here too--look!' I went inspecting with him,
+but he didn't go back, like I did, to the trenches, don't fret
+yourself, and he wasn't coming back from them either, don't worry! The
+reptile, the first time I saw him he was walking nice and leisurely in
+the yard--'I'm in the Expenses Department,' he says. We talked a bit,
+and the next day he got an orderly job so as to dodge getting sent
+away, seeing it was his turn to go since the beginning of the war.
+
+"On the step of the door where he'd laid all night on a feather bed, he
+was polishing the pumps of his monkey master--beautiful yellow
+pumps--rubbing 'em with paste, fairly glazing 'em, my boy. I stopped to
+watch him, and the chap told me all about himself. Mon vieux, I don't
+remember much more of the stuffing that came out of his crafty skull
+than I remember of the History of France and the dates we whined at
+school. Never, I tell you, had he been sent to the front, although he
+was Class 1903, [note 1] and a lusty devil at that, he was. Danger and
+dog-tiredness and all the ugliness of war--not for him, but for the
+others, oui. He knew damned well that if he set foot in the
+firing-line, the line would see that the beast got it, so he ran like
+hell from it, and stopped where he was. He said they'd tried all ways
+to get him, but he'd given the slip to all the captains, all the
+colonels, all the majors, and they were all damnably mad with him. He
+told me about it. How did he work it? He'd sit down all of a sudden,
+put on a stupid look, do the scrim-shanker stunt, and flop like a
+bundle of dirty linen. 'I've got a sort of general fatigue,' he'd
+blubber. They didn't know how to take him, and after a bit they just
+let him drop--everybody was fit to spew on him. And he changed his
+tricks according to the circumstances, d'you catch on? Sometimes he had
+something wrong with his foot--he was damned clever with his feet. And
+then he contrived things, and he knew one head from another, and how to
+take his opportunities. He knew what's what, he did. You could see him
+go and slip in like a pretty poilu among the depot chaps, where the
+soft jobs were, and stay there; and then he'd put himself out no end to
+be useful to the pals. He'd get up at three o'clock in the morning to
+make the juice, go and fetch the water while the others were getting
+their grub. At last, he'd wormed himself in everywhere, he came to be
+one of the family, the rotter, the carrion. He did it so he wouldn't
+have to do it. He seemed to me like an individual that would have
+earned five quid honestly with the same work and bother that he puts
+into forging a one-pound note. But there, he'll get his skin out of it
+all right, he will. At the front he'd be lost sight of in the throng of
+it, but he's not so stupid. Be damned to them, he says, that take their
+grub on the ground, and be damned to them still more when they're under
+it. When we've all done with fighting, he'll go back home and he'll say
+to his friends and neighbors, 'Here I am safe and sound,' and his
+pals'll be glad, because be's a good sort, with engaging manners,
+contemptible creature that he is, and--and this is the most stupid
+thing of all--but he takes you in and you swallow him whole, the son of
+a bug.
+
+"And then, those sort of beings, don't you believe there's only one of
+them. There are barrels of 'em in every depot, that hang on and writhe
+when their time comes to go, and they say, 'I'm not going,' and they
+don't go, and they never succeed in driving them as far as the front."
+
+"Nothing new in all that," said Barque, "we know it, we know it!"
+
+"Then there are the offices," Volpatte went on, engrossed in his story
+of travel; "whole houses and streets and districts. I saw that my
+little corner in the rear was only a speck, and I had full view of
+them. Non, I'd never have believed there'd be so many men on chairs
+while war was going on--"
+
+A hand protruded from the rank and made trial of space--"No more sauce
+falling"--"Then we're going out, bet your life on it." So "March!" was
+the cry.
+
+The storm held its peace. We filed off in the long narrow swamp
+stagnating in the bottom of the trench where the moment before it had
+shaken under slabs of rain. Volpatte's grumbling began again amidst our
+sorry stroll and the eddies of floundering feet. I listened to him as I
+watched the shoulders of a poverty-stricken overcoat swaying in front
+of me, drenched through and through. This time Volpatte was on the
+track of the police--
+
+"The farther you go from the front the more you see of them."
+
+"Their battlefield is not the same as ours."
+
+Tulacque had an ancient grudge against them. "Look," he said, "how the
+bobbies spread themselves about to get good lodgings and good food, and
+then, after the drinking regulations, they dropped on the secret
+wine-sellers. You saw them lying in wait, with a corner of an eye on
+the shop-doors, to see if there weren't any poilus slipping quietly
+out, two-faced that they are, leering to left and to right and licking
+their mustaches."
+
+"There are good ones among 'em. I knew one in my country, the Cote
+d'Or, where I--"
+
+"Shut up!" was Tulacque's peremptory interruption; "they're all alike.
+There isn't one that can put another right."
+
+"Yes, they're lucky," said Volpatte, "but do you think they're
+contented? Not a bit; they grouse. At least," he corrected himself,
+"there was one I met, and he was a grouser. He was devilish bothered by
+the drill-manual. 'It isn't worth while to learn the drill
+instruction,' he said, 'they're always changing it. F'r instance, take
+the department of military police; well, as soon as you've got the gist
+of it, it's something else. Ah, when will this war be over?' he says."
+
+"They do what they're told to do, those chaps," ventured Eudore.
+
+"Surely. It isn't their fault at all. It doesn't alter the fact that
+these professional soldiers, pensioned and decorated in the time when
+we're only civvies, will have made war in a damned funny way."
+
+"That reminds me of a forester that I saw as well," said Volpatte, "who
+played hell about the fatigues they put him to. 'It's disgusting,' the
+fellow said to me, 'what they do with us. We're old non-coms., soldiers
+that have done four years of service at least. We're paid on the higher
+scale, it's true, but what of that? We are Officials, and yet they
+humiliate us. At H.Q. they set us to cleaning, and carrying the dung
+away. The civilians see the treatment they inflict on us, and they look
+down on us. And if you look like grousing, they'll actually talk about
+sending you off to the trenches, like foot-soldiers! What's going to
+become of our prestige? When we go back to the parishes as rangers
+after the war--if we do come back from it--the people of the villages
+and forests will say, "Ah, it was you that was sweeping the streets at
+X--!" To get back our prestige, compromised by human injustice and
+ingratitude, I know well,' he says, 'that we shall have to make
+complaints, and make complaints and make 'em with all our might, to the
+rich and to the influential!' he says."
+
+"I knew a gendarme who was all right," said Lamuse. "'The police are
+temperate enough in general,' he says, 'but there are always dirty
+devils everywhere, pas? The civilian is really afraid of the gendarme,'
+says he, 'and that's a fact; and so, I admit it, there are some who
+take advantage of it, and those ones--the tag-rag of the
+gendarmerie--know where to get a glass or two. If I was Chief or
+Brigadier, I'd screw 'em down; not half I wouldn't,' he says; 'for
+public opinion,' he says again, 'lays the blame on the whole force when
+a single one with a grievance makes a complaint.'"
+
+"As for me," says Paradis, "one of the worst days of my life was once
+when I saluted a gendarme, taking him for a lieutenant, with his white
+stripes. Fortunately--I don't say it to console myself, but because
+it's probably true--fortunately, I don't think he saw me."
+
+A silence. "Oui, 'vidently," the men murmured; "but what about it? No
+need to worry."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+A little later, when we were seated along a wall, with our backs to the
+stones, and our feet plunged and planted in the ground, Volpatte
+continued unloading his impressions.
+
+"I went into a big room that was a Depot office--bookkeeping
+department, I believe. It swarmed with tables, and people in it like in
+a market. Clouds of talk. All along the walls on each side and in the
+middle, personages sitting in front of their spread-out goods like
+waste-paper merchants. I put in a request to be put back into my
+regiment, and they said to me, 'Take your damned hook, and get busy
+with it.' I lit on a sergeant, a little chap with airs, spick as a
+daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass--eye-glasses with a tape on them.
+He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the right not to
+go to the front. I said to him, 'Sergeant!' But he didn't hear me,
+being busy slanging a secretary--it's unfortunate, mon garcon,' he was
+saying; 'I've told you twenty times that you must send one notice of it
+to be carried out by the Squadron Commander, Provost of the C.A., and
+one by way of advice, without signature, but making mention of the
+signature, to the Provost of the Force Publique d'Amiens and of the
+centers of the district, of which you have the list--in envelopes, of
+course, of the general commanding the district. It's very simple,' he
+says.
+
+"I'd drawn back three paces to wait till he'd done with jawing. Five
+minutes after, I went up to the sergeant. He said to me, 'My dear sir,
+I have not the time to bother with you; I have many other matters to
+attend to.' As a matter of fact, he was all in a flummox in front of
+his typewriter, the chump, because he'd forgotten, he said, to press on
+the capital-letter lever, and so, instead of underlining the heading of
+his page, he'd damn well scored a line of 8's in the middle of the top.
+So he couldn't hear anything, and he played hell with the Americans,
+seeing the machine came from there.
+
+"After that, he growled against another woolly-leg, because on the
+memorandum of the distribution of maps they hadn't put the names of the
+Ration Department, the Cattle Department, and the Administrative Convoy
+of the 328th D.I.
+
+"Alongside, a fool was obstinately trying to pull more circulars off a
+jellygraph than it would print, doing his damnedest to produce a lot of
+ghosts that you could hardly read. Others were talking: 'Where are the
+Parisian fasteners?' asked a toff. And they don't call things by their
+proper names: 'Tell me now, if you please, what are the elements
+quartered at X--?' The elements! What's all that sort of babble?" asked
+Volpatte.
+
+"At the end of the big table where these fellows were that I've
+mentioned and that I'd been to, and the sergeant floundering about
+behind a hillock of papers at the top of it and giving orders, a
+simpleton was doing nothing but tap on his blotting-pad with his hands.
+His job, the mug, was the department of leave-papers, and as the big
+push had begun and all leave was stopped, he hadn't anything to
+do--'Capital!' he says.
+
+"And all that, that's one table in one room in one department in one
+depot. I've seen more, and then more, and more and more again. I don't
+know, but it's enough to drive you off your nut, I tell you."
+
+"Have they got brisques?" [note 2]
+
+"Not many there, but in the department of the second line every one had
+'em. You had museums of 'em there--whole Zoological Gardens of stripes."
+
+"Prettiest thing I've seen in the way of stripes," said Tulacque, "was
+a motorist, dressed in cloth that you'd have said was satin, with new
+stripes, and the leathers of an English officer, though a second-class
+soldier as he was. With his finger on his cheek, he leaned with his
+elbows on that fine carriage adorned with windows that he was the valet
+de chambre of. He'd have made you sick, the dainty beast. He was just
+exactly the poilu that you see pictures of in the ladies' papers--the
+pretty little naughty papers."
+
+Each has now his memories, his tirade on this much-excogitated subject
+of the shirkers, and all begin to overflow and to talk at once. A
+hubbub surrounds the foot of the mean wall where we are heaped like
+bundles, with a gray, muddy, and trampled spectacle lying before us,
+laid waste by rain.
+
+"--orderly in waiting to the Road Department, then at the Bakery, then
+cyclist to the Revictualing Department of the Eleventh Battery."
+
+"--every morning he had a note to take to the Service de l'Intendance,
+to the Gunnery School, to the Bridges Department, and in the evening to
+the A.D. and the A.T.--that was all."
+
+"--when I was coming back from leave,' said that orderly, 'the women
+cheered us at all the level-crossing gates that the train passed.'
+'They took you for soldiers,' I said."
+
+"--'Ah,' I said, 'you're called up, then, are you?' 'Certainly,' he
+says to me, 'considering that I've been a round of meetings in America
+with a Ministerial deputation. P'raps it's not exactly being called up,
+that? Anyway, mon ami,' he says, 'I don't pay any rent, so I must be
+called up.' 'And me--'"
+
+"To finish," cries Volpatte, silencing the hum with his authority of a
+traveler returned from "down there," "to finish, I saw a whole legion
+of 'em all together at a blow-out. For two days I was a sort of helper
+in the kitchen of one of the centers of the C.O.A., 'cos they couldn't
+let me do nothing while waiting for my reply, which didn't hurry,
+seeing they'd sent another inquiry and a super-inquiry after it, and
+the reply had too many halts to make in each office, going and coming.
+
+"In short, I was cook in the shop. Once I waited at table, seeing that
+the head cook had just got back from leave for the fourth time and was
+tired. I saw and I heard those people every time I went into the
+dining-room, that was in the Prefecture, and all that hot and
+illuminated row got into my head. They were only auxiliaries in there,
+but there were plenty of the armed service among the number, too. They
+were almost all old men, with a few young ones besides, sitting here
+and there.
+
+"I'd begun to get about enough of it when one of the broomsticks said,
+'The shutters must be closed; it's more prudent.' My boy, they were a
+lump of a hundred and twenty-five miles from the firing-line, but that
+pock-marked puppy he wanted to make believe there was danger of
+bombardment by aircraft--"
+
+"And there's my cousin," said Tulacque, fumbling, "who wrote to
+me--Look, here's what he says: 'Mon cher Adolphe, here I am definitely
+settled in Paris as attache to Guard-Room 60. While you are down there.
+I must stay in the capital at the mercy of a Taube or a Zeppelin!'"
+
+The phrase sheds a tranquil delight abroad, and we assimilate it like a
+tit-bit, laughing.
+
+"After that," Volpatte went on, "those layers of soft-jobbers fed me up
+still more. As a dinner it was all right--cod, seeing it was Friday,
+but prepared like soles a la Marguerite--I know all about it. But the
+talk!--"
+
+"They call the bayonet Rosalie, don't they?"
+
+"Yes, the padded luneys. But during dinner these gentlemen talked above
+all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he wasn't
+somewhere else, as good as said (but all the while saying something
+else and gorging like an ogre), 'I'm ill, I'm feeble, look at me, ruin
+that I am. Me, I'm in my dotage.' They were all seeking inside
+themselves to find diseases to wrap themselves up in--'I wanted to go
+to the war, but I've a rupture, two ruptures, three ruptures.' Ah, non,
+that feast!--'The orders that speak of sending everybody away,'
+explained a funny man, 'they're like the comedies,' he explained,
+'there's always a last act to clear up all the jobbery of the others.
+That third act is this paragraph, "Unless the requirements of the
+Departments stand in the way."' There was one that told this tale, 'I
+had three friends that I counted on to give me a lift up. I was going
+to apply to them; but, one after another, a little before I put my
+request, they were killed by the enemy; look at that,' he says, 'I've
+no luck!' Another was explaining to another that, as for him, he would
+very much have liked to go, but the surgeon-major had taken him round
+the waist to keep him by force in the depot with the auxiliary. 'Eh
+bien,' he says, 'I resigned myself. After all, I shall be of greater
+value in putting my intellect to the service of the country than in
+carrying a knapsack.' And him that was alongside said, 'Oui,' with his
+headpiece feathered on top. He'd jolly well consented to go to Bordeaux
+at the time when the Boches were getting near Paris, and then Bordeaux
+became the stylish place; but afterwards he returned firmly to the
+front--to Paris--and said something like this, 'My ability is of value
+to France; it is absolutely necessary that I guard it for France.'
+
+"They talked about other people that weren't there--of the commandant
+who was getting an impossible temper, and they explained that the more
+imbecile he got the harsher he got; and the General that made
+unexpected inspections with the idea of kicking all the soft-jobbers
+out, but who'd been laid up for eight days, very ill--'he's certainly
+going to die; his condition no longer gives rise to any uneasiness,'
+they said, smoking the cigarettes that Society swells send to the
+depots for the soldiers at the front. 'D'you know,' they said, 'little
+Frazy, who is such a nice boy, the cherub, he's at last found an excuse
+for staying behind. They wanted some cattle slaughterers for the
+abattoir, and he's enlisted himself in there for protection, although
+he's got a University degree and in spite of being an attorney's clerk.
+As for Flandrin's son, he's succeeded in getting himself attached to
+the roadmenders.--Roadmender, him? Do you think they'll let him stop
+so?' 'Certain sure,' replies one of the cowardly milksops. 'A
+road-mender's job is for a long time.'
+
+"Talk about idiots," Marthereau growls.
+
+"And they were all jealous, I don't know why, of a chap called Bourin.
+Formerly he moved in the best Parisian circles. He lunched and dined in
+the city. He made eighteen calls a day, and fluttered about the
+drawing-rooms from afternoon tea till daybreak. He was indefatigable in
+leading cotillons, organizing festivities, swallowing theatrical shows,
+without counting the motoring parties, and all the lot running with
+champagne. Then the war came. So he's no longer capable, the poor boy,
+of staying on the look-out a bit late at an embrasure, or of cutting
+wire. He must stay peacefully in the warm. And then, him, a Parisian,
+to go into the provinces and bury himself in the trenches! Never in
+this world! 'I realize, too,' replied an individual, 'that at
+thirty-seven I've arrived at the age when I must take care of myself!'
+And while the fellow was saying that, I was thinking of Dumont the
+gamekeeper, who was forty-two, and was done in close to me on Hill 132,
+so near that after he got the handful of bullets in his head, my body
+shook with the trembling of his."
+
+"And what were they like with you, these thieves?"
+
+"To hell with me, it was, but they didn't show it too much, only now
+and again when they couldn't hold themselves in. They looked at me out
+of the corner of their eyes, and took damn good care not to touch me in
+passing, for I was still war-mucky.
+
+"It disgusted me a bit to be in the middle of that heap of
+good-for-nothings, but I said to myself, 'Come, it's only for a bit,
+Firmin.' There was just one time that I very near broke out with the
+itch, and that was when one of 'em said, 'Later, when we return, if we
+do return.'--NO! He had no right to say that. Sayings like that, before
+you let them out of your gob, you've got to earn them; it's like a
+decoration. Let them get cushy jobs, if they like, but not play at
+being men in the open when they've damned well run away. And you hear
+'em discussing the battles, for they're in closer touch than you with
+the big bugs and with the way the war's managed; and afterwards, when
+you return, if you do return, it's you that'll be wrong in the middle
+of all that crowd of humbugs, with the poor little truth that you've
+got.
+
+"Ah, that evening, I tell you, all those heads in the reek of the
+light, the foolery of those people enjoying life and profiting by
+peace! It was like a ballet at the theater or the make-believe of a
+magic lantern. There were--there were--there are a hundred thousand
+more of them," Volpatte at last concluded in confusion.
+
+But the men who were paying for the safety of the others with their
+strength and their lives enjoyed the wrath that choked him, that
+brought him to bay in his corner, and overwhelmed him with the
+apparitions of shirkers.
+
+"Lucky he doesn't start talking about the factory hands who've served
+their apprenticeship in the war, and all those who've stayed at home
+under the excuse of National Defense, that was put on its feet in five
+secs!" murmured Tirette; "he'd keep us going with them till Doomsday."
+
+"You say there are a hundred thousand of them, flea-bite," chaffed
+Barque. "Well, in 1914--do you hear me?--Millerand, the War Minister,
+said to the M.P.'s, 'There are no shirkers.'"
+
+"Millerand!" growled Volpatte. "I tell you, I don't know the man; but
+if he said that, he's a dirty sloven, sure enough!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"One is always," said Bertrand, "a shirker to some one else."
+
+"That's true; no matter what you call yourself, you'll
+always--always--find worse blackguards and better blackguards than
+yourself."
+
+"All those that never go up to the trenches, or those who never go into
+the first line, and even those who only go there now and then, they're
+shirkers, if you like to call 'em so, and you'd see how many there are
+if they only gave stripes to the real fighters."
+
+"There are two hundred and fifty to each regiment of two battalions,"
+said Cocon.
+
+"There are the orderlies, and a bit since there were even the servants
+of the adjutants."--"The cooks and the under-cooks."--"The
+sergeant-majors, and the quartermaster-sergeants, as often as
+not."--"The mess corporals and the mess fatigues."--"Some office-props
+and the guard of the colors."--"The baggage-masters." "The drivers, the
+laborers, and all the section, with all its non-coms., and even the
+sappers."--"The cyclists." "Not all of them."--"Nearly all the Red
+Cross service."--"Not the stretcher-bearers, of course; for they've not
+only got a devilish rotten job, but they live with the companies, and
+when attacks are on they charge with their stretchers; but the hospital
+attendants."
+
+"Nearly all parsons, especially at the rear. For, you know, parsons
+with knapsacks on, I haven't seen a devil of a lot of 'em, have you?"
+
+"Nor me either. In the papers, but not here."
+
+"There are some, it seems."--"Ah!"
+
+"Anyway, the common soldier's taken something on in this war."
+
+"There are others that are in the open. We're not the only ones."
+
+"We are!" said Tulacque, sharply; "we're almost the only ones!"
+
+He added, "You may say--I know well enough what you'll tell me--that it
+was the motor lorries and the heavy artillery that brought it off at
+Verdun. It's true, but they've got a soft job all the same by the side
+of us. We're always in danger, against their once, and we've got the
+bullets and the bombs, too, that they haven't. The heavy artillery
+reared rabbits near their dug-outs, and they've been making themselves
+omelettes for eighteen months. We are really in danger. Those that only
+get a bit of it, or only once, aren't in it at all. Otherwise,
+everybody would be. The nursemaid strolling the streets of Paris would
+be, too, since there are the Taubes and the Zeppelins, as that
+pudding-head said that the pal was talking about just now."
+
+"In the first expedition to the Dardanelles, there was actually a
+chemist wounded by a shell. You don't believe me, but it's true all the
+same--an officer with green facings, wounded!"
+
+"That's chance, as I wrote to Mangouste, driver of a remount horse for
+the section, that got wounded--but it was done by a motor lorry."
+
+"That's it, it's like that. After all, a bomb can tumble down on a
+pavement, in Paris or in Bordeaux."
+
+"Oui, oui; so it's too easy to say, 'Don't let's make distinctions in
+danger!' Wait a bit. Since the beginning, there are some of those
+others who've got killed by an unlucky chance; among us there are some
+that are still alive by a lucky chance. It isn't the same thing, that,
+seeing that when you're dead, it's for a long time."
+
+"Yes," says Tirette, "but you're getting too venomous with your stories
+of shirkers. As long as we can't help it, it's time to turn over. I'm
+thinking of a retired forest-ranger at Cherey, where we were last
+month, who went about the streets of the town spying everywhere to rout
+out some civilian of military age, and he smelled out the dodgers like
+a mastiff. Behold him pulling up in front of a sturdy goodwife that had
+a mustache, and he only sees her mustache, so he bullyrags her--'Why
+aren't you at the front, you?'"
+
+"For my part," says Pepin, "I don't fret myself about the shirkers or
+the semi-shirkers, it's wasting one's time; but where they get on my
+nerves, it's when they swank. I'm of Volpatte's opinion. Let 'em shirk,
+good, that's human nature; but afterwards they shouldn't say, 'I've
+been a soldier.' Take the engages, [note 3] for instance--"
+
+"That depends on the engages. Those who have offered for the infantry
+without conditions, I look up to those men as much as to those that
+have got killed; but the engages in the departments or special arms,
+even in the heavy artillery, they begin to get my back up. We know 'em!
+When they're doing the agreeable in their social circle, they'll say,
+'I've offered for the war.'--'Ah, what a fine thing you have done; of
+your own free will you have defied the machine-guns! '--'Well, yes,
+madame la marquise, I'm built like that!' Eh, get out of it, humbug!"
+
+"Oui, it's always the same tale. They wouldn't be able to say in the
+drawing-rooms afterwards, 'Tenez, here I am; look at me for a voluntary
+engage!'"
+
+"I know a gentleman who enlisted in the aerodromes. He had a fine
+uniform--he'd have done better to offer for the Opera-Comique. What am
+I saying--'he'd have done better?' He'd have done a damn sight better,
+oui. At least he'd have made other people laugh honestly, instead of
+making them laugh with the spleen in it."
+
+"They're a lot of cheap china, fresh painted, and plastered with
+ornaments and all sorts of falderals, but they don't go under fire."
+
+"If there'd only been people like those, the Boches would be at
+Bayonne."
+
+"When war's on, one must risk his skin, eh, corporal?"
+
+"Yes," said Bertrand, "there are some times when duty and danger are
+exactly the same thing; when the country, when justice and liberty are
+in danger, it isn't in taking shelter that you defend them. On the
+contrary, war means danger of death and sacrifice of life for
+everybody, for everybody; no one is sacred. One must go for it,
+upright, right to the end, and not pretend to do it in a fanciful
+uniform. These services at the bases, and they're necessary, must be
+automatically guaranteed by the really weak and the really old."
+
+"Besides, there are too many rich and influential people who have
+shouted, 'Let us save France!--and begin by saving ourselves!' On the
+declaration of war, there was a big rush to get out of it, that's what
+there was, and the strongest succeeded. I noticed myself, in my little
+corner, it was especially those that jawed most about patriotism
+previously. Anyway, as the others were saying just now, if they get
+into a funk-hole, the worst filthiness they can do is to make people
+believe they've run risks. 'Cos those that have really run risks, they
+deserve the same respect as the dead."
+
+"Well, what then? It's always like that, old man; you can't change
+human nature."
+
+"It can't be helped. Grouse, complain? Tiens! talking about
+complaining, did you know Margoulin?"
+
+"Margoulin? The good sort that was with us, that they left to die at le
+Crassier because they thought he was dead?"
+
+"Well, he wanted to make a complaint. Every day he talked about
+protesting against all those things to the captain and the commandant.
+He'd say after breakfast, 'I'll go and say it as sure as that pint of
+wine's there.' And a minute later, 'If I don't speak, there's never a
+pint of wine there at all.' And if you were passing later you'd hear
+him again, 'Tiens! is that a pint of wine there? Well, you'll see if I
+don't speak! Result--he said nothing at all. You'll say, 'But he got
+killed.' True, but previously he had God's own time to do it two
+thousand times if he'd dared."
+
+"All that, it makes me ill," growled Blaire, sullen, but with a flash
+of fury.
+
+"We others, we've seen nothing--seeing that we don't see anything--but
+if we did see--!"
+
+"Old chap," Volpatte cried, "those depots--take notice of what I
+say--you'd have to turn the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone and the Loire
+into them to clean them. In the interval, they're living, and they live
+well, and they go to doze peacefully every night, every night!"
+
+The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they
+would pass it--cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep
+darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws showed
+in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn into the sky.
+
+Bitterly said Cocon: "All that, it doesn't give you any desire to die."
+
+"Yes, it does," some one replies tranquilly. "Yes, it does. Don't
+exaggerate, old kipper-skin."
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.--Tr.
+
+[note 2:] A-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the duration
+of service at the front.--Tr.
+
+[note 3:] Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three,
+four, or five years. Those enlisted for four or five year' have the
+right to choose their arm of the service, subject to conditions.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Argoval
+
+
+THE twilight of evening was coming near from the direction of the
+country, and a gentle breeze, soft as a whisper, came with it.
+
+In the houses alongside this rural way--a main road, garbed for a few
+paces like a main street--the rooms whose pallid windows no longer fed
+them with the limpidity of space found their own light from lamps and
+candles, so that the evening left them and went outside, and one saw
+light and darkness gradually changing places.
+
+On the edge of the village, towards the fields, some unladen soldiers
+were wandering, facing the breeze. We were ending the day in peace, and
+enjoying that idle ease whose happiness one only realizes when one is
+really weary. It was fine weather, we were at the beginning of rest,
+and dreaming about it. Evening seemed to make our faces bigger before
+it darkened them, and they shone with the serenity of nature.
+
+Sergeant Suilhard came to me, took my arm, and led me away. "Come," he
+said, "and I'll show you something."
+
+The approaches to the village abounded in rows of tall and tranquil
+trees, and we followed them along. Under the pressure of the breeze
+their vast verdure yielded from time to time in slow majestic movements.
+
+Suilhard went in front of me. He led me into a deep lane, which twisted
+about between high banks; and on each side grew a border of bushes,
+whose tops met each other. For some moments we walked in a bower of
+tender green. A last gleam of light, falling aslant across the lane,
+made points of bright yellow among the foliage, and round as gold
+coins. "This is pretty," I said.
+
+He said nothing, but looked aside and hard. Then he stopped. "It must
+be there."
+
+He made me climb up a bit of a track to a field, a great quadrangle
+within tall trees, and full of the scent of hay.
+
+"Tiens!" I said, looking at the ground, "it's all trampled here;
+there's been something to do."
+
+"Come," said Suilhard to me. He led me into the field, not far from its
+gate. There was a group of soldiers there, talking in low voices. My
+companion stretched out his hand. "It's there," he said.
+
+A very short post, hardly a yard high, was implanted a few paces from
+the hedge, composed just there of young trees. "It was there," he said,
+"that they shot a soldier of the 204th this morning. They planted that
+post in the night. They brought the chap here at dawn, and these are
+the fellows of his squad who killed him. He tried to dodge the
+trenches. During relief he stayed behind, and then went quietly off to
+quarters. He did nothing else; they meant, no doubt, to make an example
+of him."
+
+We came near to the conversation of the others. "No, no, not at all,"
+said one. "He wasn't a ruffian, he wasn't one of those toughs that we
+all know. We all enlisted together. He was a decent sort, like
+ourselves, no more, no less--a bit funky, that's all. He was in the
+front line from the beginning, he was, and I've never seen him boozed,
+I haven't."
+
+"Yes, but all must be told. Unfortunately for him, there was a
+'previous conviction.' There were two, you know, that did the
+trick--the other got two years. But Cajard, [note 1] because of the
+sentence he got in civil life couldn't benefit by extenuating
+circumstances. He'd done some giddy-goat trick in civil life, when he
+was drunk."
+
+"You can see a little blood on the ground if you look," said a stooping
+soldier.
+
+"There was the whole ceremonial," another went on, "from A to Z--the
+colonel on horseback, the degradation; then they tied him to the little
+post, the cattle-stoup. He had to be forced to kneel or sit on the
+ground with a similar post."
+
+"It's past understanding," said a third, after a silence, "if it wasn't
+for the example the sergeant spoke about."
+
+On the post the soldiers had scrawled inscriptions and protests. A
+croix de guerre, cut clumsily of wood, was nailed to it, and read: "A.
+Cajard, mobilized in August, 1914, in gratitude to France."
+
+Returning to quarters I met Volpatte, still surrounded and talking. He
+was relating some new anecdotes of his journey among the happy ones.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] I have altered the name of this soldier as well as that of
+the village.--H. B.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+The Dog
+
+
+THE weather was appalling. Water and wind attacked the passers-by;
+riddled, flooded, and upheaved the roads.
+
+I was returning from fatigue to our quarters at the far end of the
+village. The landscape that morning showed dirty yellow through the
+solid rain, and the sky was dark as a slated roof. The downpour flogged
+the horse-trough as with birchen rods. Along the walls, human shapes
+went in shrinking files, stooping, abashed, splashing.
+
+In spite of the rain and the cold and bitter wind, a crowd had gathered
+in front of the door of the barn where we were lodging. All close
+together and back to back, the men seemed from a distance like a great
+moving sponge. Those who could see, over shoulders and between heads,
+opened their eyes wide and said, "He has a nerve, the boy!" Then the
+inquisitive ones broke away, with red noses and streaming faces, into
+the down-pour that lashed and the blast that bit, and letting the hands
+fall that they had upraised in surprise, they plunged them in their
+pockets.
+
+In the center, and running with rain, abode the cause of the
+gathering--Fouillade, bare to the waist and washing himself in abundant
+water. Thin as an insect, working his long slender arms in riotous
+frenzy, he soaped and splashed his head, neck, and chest, down to the
+upstanding gridirons of his sides. Over his funnel-shaped cheeks the
+brisk activity had spread a flaky beard like snow, and piled on the top
+of his head a greasy fleece that the rain was puncturing with little
+holes.
+
+By way of a tub, the patient was using three mess-tins which he had
+filled with water--no one knew how--in a village where there was none;
+and as there was no clean spot anywhere to put anything down in that
+universal streaming of earth and sky, he thrust his towel into the
+waistband of his trousers, while the soap went back into his pocket
+every time he used it.
+
+They who still remained wondered at this heroic gesticulation in the
+face of adversity, and said again, as they wagged their heads, "It's a
+disease of cleanliness he's got."
+
+"You know he's going to be carpeted, they say, for that affair of the
+shell-hole with Volpatte." And they mixed the two exploits together in
+a muddled way, that of the shell-hole, and the present, and looked on
+him as the hero of the moment, while he puffed, sniffled, grunted,
+spat, and tried to dry himself under the celestial shower-bath with
+rapid rubbing and as a measure of deception; then at last he resumed
+his clothes.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+After his wash, Fouillade feels cold. He turns about and stands in the
+doorway of the barn that shelters us. The arctic blast discolors and
+disparages his long face, so hollow and sunburned; it draws tears from
+his eyes, and scatters them on the cheeks once scorched by the mistral;
+his nose, too, weeps increasingly.
+
+Yielding to the ceaseless bite of the wind that grips his ears in spite
+of the muffler knotted round his head, and his calves in spite of the
+yellow puttees with which his cockerel legs are enwound, he reenters
+the barn, but comes out of it again at once, rolling ferocious eyes,
+and muttering oaths with the accent one hears in that corner of the
+land, over six hundred miles from here, whence he was driven by war.
+
+So he stands outside, erect, more truly excited than ever before in
+these northern scenes. And the wind comes and steals into him, and
+comes again roughly, shaking and maltreating his scarecrow's slight and
+flesh-less figure.
+
+Ye gods! It is almost uninhabitable, the barn they have assigned to us
+to live in during this period of rest. It is a collapsing refuge,
+gloomy and leaky, confined as a well. One half of it is under water--we
+see rats swimming in it--and the men are crowded in the other half. The
+walls, composed of laths stuck together with dried mud, are cracked,
+sunken, holed in all their circuit, and extensively broken through
+above. The night we got here--until the morning--we plugged as well as
+we could the openings within reach, by inserting leafy branches and
+hurdles. But the higher holes, and those in the roof, still gaped and
+always. When dawn hovers there, weakling and early, the wind for
+contrast rushes in and blows round every side with all its strength,
+and the squad endures the hustling of an everlasting draught.
+
+When we are there, we remain upright in the ruined obscurity, groping,
+shivering, complaining.
+
+Fouillade, who has come in once more, goaded by the cold, regrets his
+ablutions. He has pains in his loins and back. He wants something to
+do, but what?
+
+Sit down? Impossible; it is too dirty inside there. The ground and the
+paving-stones are plastered with mud; the straw scattered for our
+sleeping is soaked through, by the water that comes through the holes
+and by the boots that wipe themselves with it. Besides, if you sit
+down, you freeze; and if you lie on the straw, you are troubled by the
+smell of manure, and sickened by the vapors of ammonia. Fouillade
+contents himself by looking at his place, and yawning wide enough to
+dislocate his long jaw, further lengthened by a goatee beard where you
+would see white hairs if the daylight were really daylight.
+
+"The other pals and boys," said Marthereau, "they're no better off than
+we are. After breakfast I went to see a jail-bird of the 11th on the
+farm near the hospital. You've to clamber over a wall by a ladder
+that's too short--talk about a scissor-cut!" says Marthereau, who is
+short in the leg; "and when once you're in the hen-run and rabbit-hutch
+you're shoved and poked by everybody and a nuisance to 'em all. You
+don't know where to put your pasties down. I vamoosed from there, and
+sharp."
+
+"For my part," says Cocon, "I wanted to go to the blacksmith's when
+we'd got quit of grubbing, to imbibe something hot, and pay for it.
+Yesterday he was selling coffee, but some bobbies called there this
+morning, so the good man's got the shakes, and he's locked his door."
+
+Lamuse has tried to clean his rifle. But one cannot clean his rifle
+here, even if he squats on the ground near the door, nor even if he
+takes away the sodden tent-cloth, hard and icy, which hangs across the
+doorway like a stalactite; it is too dark. "And then, old chap, if you
+let a screw fall, you may as well hang yourself as try to find it,
+'specially when your fists are frozen silly."
+
+"As for me, I ought to be sewing some things, but--what cheer!"
+
+One alternative remains--to stretch oneself on the straw, covering the
+head with handkerchief or towel to isolate it from the searching stench
+of fermenting straw, and sleep. Fouillade, master of his time to-day,
+being on neither guard nor fatigues, decides. He lights a taper to seek
+among his belongings, and unwinds the coils of his comforter, and we
+see his emaciated shape, sculptured in black relief, folding and
+refolding it.
+
+"Potato fatigue, inside there, my little lambs!" a sonorous voice
+bellows at the door. The hooded shape from which it comes is Sergeant
+Henriot. He is a malignant sort of simpleton, and though all the while
+joking in clumsy sympathy he supervises the evacuation of quarters with
+a sharp eye for the evasive malingerer.
+
+Outside, on the streaming road in the perpetual rain, the second
+section is scattered, also summoned and driven to work by the adjutant.
+The two sections mingle together. We climb the street and the hillock
+of clayey soil where the traveling kitchen is smoking.
+
+"Now then, my lads, get on with it; it isn't a long job when everybody
+sets to--Come--what have you got to grumble about, you? That does no
+good."
+
+Twenty minutes later we return at a trot. As we grope about in the
+barn, we cannot touch anything but what is sodden and cold, and the
+sour smell of wet animals is added to the vapor of the liquid manure
+that our beds contain.
+
+We gather again, standing, around the props that hold the barn up, and
+around the rills that fall vertically from the holes in the roof--faint
+columns which rest on vague bases of splashing water. "Here we are
+again!" we cry.
+
+Two lumps in turn block the doorway, soaked with the rain that drains
+from them--Lamuse and Barque, who have been in quest of a brasier, and
+now return from the expedition empty-handed, sullen and vicious. "Not a
+shadow of a fire-bucket, and what's more, no wood or coal either, not
+for a fortune." It is impossible to have any fire. "If I can't get any,
+no one can," says Barque, with a pride which a hundred exploits justify.
+
+We stay motionless, or move slowly in the little space we have, aghast
+at so much misery. "Whose is the paper?"
+
+"It's mine," says Becuwe.
+
+"What does it say? Ah, zut, one can't read in this darkness!"
+
+"It says they've done everything necessary now for the soldiers, to
+keep them warm in the trenches. They've got all they want, and blankets
+and shirts and brasiers and fire-buckets and bucketsful of coal; and
+that it's like that in the first-line trenches."
+
+"Ah, damnation!" growl some of the poor prisoners of the barn, and they
+shake their fists at the emptiness without and at the newspaper itself.
+
+But Fouillade has lost interest in what they say. He has bent his long
+Don Quixote carcase down in the shadow, and outstretched the lean neck
+that looks as if it were braided with violin strings. There is
+something on the ground that attracts him.
+
+It is Labri, the other squad's dog, an uncertain sort of mongrel
+sheep-dog, with a lopped tail, curled up on a tiny litter of
+straw-dust. Fouillade looks at Labri, and Labri at him. Becuwe comes up
+and says, with the intonation of the Lille district, "He won't eat his
+food; the dog isn't well. Hey, Labri, what's the matter with you?
+There's your bread and meat; eat it up; it's good when it's in your
+bucket. He's poorly. One of these mornings we shall find him dead."
+
+Labri is not happy. The soldier to whom he is entrusted is hard on him,
+and usually ill-treats him--when he takes any notice of him at all. The
+animal is tied up all day. He is cold and ill and left to himself. He
+only exists. From time to time, when there is movement going on around
+him, he has hopes of going out, rises and stretches himself, and
+bestirs his tail to incipient demonstration. But he is disillusioned,
+and lies down again, gazing past his nearly full mess-tin.
+
+He is weary, and disgusted with life. Even if he has escaped the bullet
+or bomb to which he is as much exposed as we, he will end by dying
+here. Fouillade puts his thin hand on the dog's head, and it gazes at
+him again. Their two glances are alike--the only difference is that one
+comes from above and the other from below.
+
+Fouillade sits down also--the worse for him!--in a corner, his hands
+covered by the folds of his greatcoat, his long legs doubled up like a
+folding bed. He is dreaming, his eyes closed under their bluish lids;
+there is something that he sees again. It is one of those moments when
+the country from which he is divided assumes in the distance the charms
+of reality--the perfumes and colors of l'Herault, the streets of Cette.
+He sees so plainly and so near that he hears the noise of the shallops
+in the Canal du Midi, and the unloading at the docks; and their call to
+him is distinctly clear.
+
+Above the road where the scent of thyme and immortelles is so strong
+that it is almost a taste in the mouth, in the heart of the sunshine
+whose winging shafts stir the air into a warmed and scented breeze, on
+Mont St. Clair, blossoms and flourishes the home of his folks. Up
+there, one can see with the same glance where the Lake of Thau, which
+is green like glass, joins hands with the Mediterranean Sea, which is
+azure; and sometimes one can make out as well, in the depths of the
+indigo sky, the carven phantoms of the Pyrenees.
+
+There was he born, there he grew up, happy and free. There he played,
+on the golden or ruddy ground; played--even--at soldiers. The eager joy
+of wielding a wooden saber flushed the cheeks now sunken and seamed. He
+opens his eyes, looks about him, shakes his head, and falls upon regret
+for the days when glory and war to him were pure, lofty, and sunny
+things.
+
+The man puts his hand over his eyes, to retain the vision within.
+Nowadays, it is different.
+
+It was up there in the same place, later, that he came to know
+Clemence. She was just passing, the first time, sumptuous with
+sunshine, and so fair that the loose sheaf of straw she carried in her
+arms seemed to him nut-brown by contrast. The second time, she had a
+friend with her, and they both stopped to watch him. He heard them
+whispering, and turned towards them. Seeing themselves discovered, the
+two young women made off, with a sibilance of skirts, and giggles like
+the cry of a partridge.
+
+And it was there, too, that he and she together set up their home. Over
+its front travels a vine, which he coddled under a straw hat, whatever
+the season. By the garden gate stands the rose-tree that he knows so
+well--it never used its thorns except to try to hold him back a little
+as he went by.
+
+Will he return again to it all? Ah, he has looked too deeply into the
+profundity of the past not to see the future in appalling accuracy. He
+thinks of the regiment, decimated at each shift; of the big knocks and
+hard he has had and will have, of sickness, and of wear--
+
+He gets up and snorts, as though to shake off what was and what will
+be. He is back in the middle of the gloom, and is frozen and swept by
+the wind, among the scattered and dejected men who blindly await the
+evening. He is back in the present, and he is shivering still.
+
+Two paces of his long legs make him butt into a group that is
+talking--by way of diversion or consolation--of good cheer.
+
+"At my place," says one, "they make enormous loaves, round ones, big as
+cart-wheels they are!" And the man amuses himself by opening his eyes
+wide, so that he can see the loaves of the homeland.
+
+"Where I come from," interposes the poor Southerner, "holiday feasts
+last so long that the bread that's new at the beginning is stale at the
+end!"
+
+"There's a jolly wine--it doesn't look much, that little wine where I
+come from; but if it hasn't fifteen degrees of alcohol it hasn't
+anything!"
+
+Fouillade speaks then of a red wine which is almost violet, which
+stands dilution as well as if it had been brought into the world to
+that end.
+
+"We've got the jurancon wine," said a Bearnais, "the real thing, not
+what they sell you for jurancon, which comes from Paris; indeed, I know
+one of the makers."
+
+"If it comes to that," said Fouillade, "in our country we've got
+muscatels of every sort, all the colors of the rainbow, like patterns
+of silk stuff. You come home with me some time, and every day you shall
+taste a nonsuch, my boy."
+
+"Sounds like a wedding feast," said the grateful soldier.
+
+So it comes about that Fouillade is agitated by the vinous memories
+into which he has plunged, which recall to him as well the dear perfume
+of garlic on that far-off table. The vapors of the blue wine in big
+bottles, and the liqueur wines so delicately varied, mount to his head
+amid the sluggish and mournful storm that fills the barn.
+
+Suddenly he calls to mind that there is settled in the village where
+they are quartered a tavern-keeper who is a native of Beziers, called
+Magnac. Magnac had said to him, "Come and see me, mon camarade, one of
+these mornings, and we'll drink some wine from down there, we will!
+I've several bottles of it, and you shall tell me what you think of it."
+
+This sudden prospect dazzles Fouillade. Through all his length runs a
+thrill of delight, as though he had found the way of salvation. Drink
+the wine of the South--of his own particular South, even--drink much of
+it--it would be so good to see life rosy again, if only for a day! Ah
+yes, he wants wine; and he gets drunk in a dream.
+
+But as he goes out he collides at the entry with Corporal Broyer, who
+is running down the street like a peddler, and shouting at every
+opening, "Morning parade!"
+
+The company assembles and forms in squares on the sticky mound where
+the traveling kitchen is sending soot into the rain. "I'll go and have
+a drink after parade," says Fouillade to himself.
+
+And he listens listlessly, full of his plan, to the reading of the
+report. But carelessly as he listens, he hears the officer read, "It is
+absolutely forbidden to leave quarters before 5 p.m. and after 8 p.m.,"
+and he hears the captain, without noticing the murmur that runs round
+the poilus, add this comment on the order: "This is Divisional
+Headquarters. However many there are of you, don't show yourselves.
+Keep under cover. If the General sees you in the street, he will have
+you put to fatigues at once. He must not see a single soldier. Stay
+where you are all day in your quarters. Do what you like as long as no
+one sees you--no one!"
+
+We go back into the barn.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Two o'clock. It is three hours yet, and then it will be totally dark,
+before one may risk going outside without being punished.
+
+Shall we sleep while waiting? Fouillade is sleepy no longer; the hope
+of wine has shaken him up. And then, if one sleeps in the day, he will
+not sleep at night. No! To lie with your eyes open is worse than a
+nightmare. The weather gets worse; wind and rain increase, without and
+within.
+
+Then what? If one may not stand still, nor sit down, nor lie down, nor
+go for a stroll, nor work--what?
+
+Deepening misery settles on the party of benumbed and tired soldiers.
+They suffer to the bone, nor know what to do with their bodies. "Nom de
+Dieu, we're badly off!" is the cry of the derelicts--a lamentation, an
+appeal for help.
+
+Then by instinct they give themselves up to the only occupation
+possible to them in there--to walk up and down on the spot, and thus
+ward off anchylosis.
+
+So they begin to walk quickly to and fro in the scanty place that three
+strides might compass; they turn about and cross and brush each other,
+bent forward, hands pocketed--tramp, tramp. These human beings whom the
+blast cuts even among their straw are like a crowd of the wretched
+wrecks of cities who await, under the lowering sky of winter, the
+opening of some charitable institution. But no door will open for
+them--unless it be four days hence, one evening at the end of the rest,
+to return to the trenches.
+
+Alone in a corner, Cocon cowers. He is tormented by lice; but weakened
+by the cold and wet he has not the pluck to change his linen; and he
+sits there sullen, unmoving--and devoured.
+
+As five o'clock draws near, in spite of all, Fouillade begins again to
+intoxicate himself with his dream of wine, and he waits, with its gleam
+in his soul. What time is it?--A quarter to five.--Five minutes to
+five.--Now!
+
+He is outside in black night. With great splashing skips he makes his
+way towards the tavern of Magnac, the generous and communicative
+Biterrois. Only with great trouble does he find the door in the dark
+and the inky rain. By God, there is no light! Great God again, it is
+closed! The gleam of a match that his great lean hand covers like a
+lamp-shade shows him the fateful notice--"Out of Bounds." Magnac,
+guilty of some transgression, has been banished into gloom and idleness!
+
+Fouillade turns his back on the tavern that has become the prison of
+its lonely keeper. He will not give up his dream. He will go somewhere
+else and have vin ordinaire, and pay for it, that's all. He puts his
+hand in his pocket to sound his purse; it is there. There ought to be
+thirty-seven sous in it, which will not run to the wine of Prou, but--
+
+But suddenly he starts, stops dead, and smites himself on the forehead.
+His long-drawn face is contracted in a frightful grimace, masked by the
+night. No, he no longer has thirty-seven sous, fool that he is! He has
+forgotten the tin of sardines that he bought the night before--so
+disgusting did he find the dark macaroni of the soldiers' mess--and the
+drinks he stood to the cobbler who put him some nails in his boots.
+
+Misery! There could not be more than thirteen sous left!
+
+To get as elevated as one ought, and to avenge himself on the life of
+the moment, he would certainly need--damn'ation--a liter and a half, In
+this place, a liter of red ordinary costs twenty-one sous. It won't go.
+
+His eyes wander around him in the darkness, looking for some one.
+Perhaps there is a pal somewhere who will lend him money, or stand him
+a liter.
+
+But who--who? Not Becuwe, he has only a marraine [note 1:] who sends
+him tobacco and note-paper every fortnight. Not Barque, who would not
+toe the line; nor Blaire, the miser--he wouldn't understand. Not
+Biquet, who seems to have something against him; nor Pepin who himself
+begs, and never pays, even when he is host. Ah, if Volpatte were there!
+There is Mesnil Andre, but he is actually in debt to Fouillade on
+account of several drinks round. Corporal Bertrand? Following on a
+remark of Fouillade's, Bertrand told him to go to the devil, and now
+they look at each other sideways. Farfadet? Fouillade hardly speaks a
+word to him in the ordinary way. No, he feels that he cannot ask this
+of Farfadet. And then--a thousand thunders!--what is the use of seeking
+saviors in one's imagination? Where are they, all these people, at this
+hour?
+
+Slowly he goes back towards the barn. Then mechanically he turns and
+goes forward again, with hesitating steps. He will try, all the same.
+Perhaps he can find convivial comrades. He approaches the central part
+of the village just when night has buried the earth.
+
+The lighted doors and windows of the taverns shine again in the mud of
+the main street. There are taverns every twenty paces. One dimly sees
+the heavy specters of soldiers, mostly in groups, descending the
+street. When a motor-car comes along, they draw aside to let it pass,
+dazzled by the head-lights, and bespattered by the liquid mud that the
+wheels hurl over the whole width of the road.
+
+The taverns are full. Through the steamy windows one can see they are
+packed with compact clouds of helmeted men. Fouillade goes into one or
+two, on chance. Once over the threshold, the dram-shop's tepid breath,
+the light, the smell and the hubbub, affect him with longing. This
+gathering at tables is at least a fragment of the past in the present.
+
+He looks from table to table, and disturbs the groups as he goes up to
+scrutinize all the merrymakers in the room. Alas, he knows no one!
+Elsewhere, it is the same; he has no luck. In vain he has extended his
+neck and sent his desperate glances in search of a familiar head among
+the uniformed men who in clumps or couples drink and talk or in
+solitude write. He has the air of a cadger, and no one pays him heed.
+
+Finding no soul to come to his relief, he decides to invest at least
+what he has in his pocket. He slips up to the counter. "A pint of
+wine--and good."
+
+"White?"
+
+"Eh, oui."
+
+"You, mon garcon, you're from the South," says the landlady, handing
+him a little full bottle and a glass, and gathering his twelve sous.
+
+He places himself at the corner of a table already overcrowded by four
+drinkers who are united in a game of cards. He fills the glass to the
+brim and empties it, then fills it again.
+
+"Hey, good health to you! Don't drink the tumbler!" yelps in his face a
+man who arrives in the dirty blue jumper of fatigues, and displays a
+heavy cross-bar of eyebrows across his pale face, a conical head, and
+half a pound's weight of ears. It is Harlingue, the armorer.
+
+It is not very glorious to be seated alone before a pint in the
+presence of a comrade who gives signs of thirst. But Fouillade pretends
+not to understand the requirements of the gentleman who dallies in
+front of him with an engaging smile, and he hurriedly empties his
+glass. The other turns his back, not without grumbling that "they're
+not very generous, but on the contrary greedy, these Southerners."
+
+Fouillade has put his chin on his fists, and looks unseeing at a corner
+of the room where the crowded poilus elbow, squeeze, and jostle each
+other to get by.
+
+It was pretty good, that swig of white wine, but of what use are those
+few drops in the Sahara of Fouillade? The blues did not far recede, and
+now they return.
+
+The Southerner rises and goes out, with his two glasses of wine in his
+stomach and one sou in his pocket. He plucks up courage to visit one
+more tavern, to plumb it with his eyes, and by way of excuse to mutter,
+as he leaves the place, "Curse him! He's never there, the animal!"
+
+Then he returns to the barn, which still--as always--whistles with wind
+and water. Fouillade lights his candle, and by the glimmer of the flame
+that struggles desperately to take wing and fly away, he sees Labri. He
+stoops low, with his light over the miserable dog--perhaps it will die
+first. Labri is sleeping, but feebly, for he opens an eye at once, and
+his tail moves.
+
+The Southerner strokes him, and says to him in a low voice, "It can't
+be helped, it--" He will not say more to sadden him, but the dog
+signifies appreciation by jerking his head before closing his eyes
+again. Fouillade rises stiffly, by reason of his rusty joints, and
+makes for his couch. For only one thing more he is now hoping--to
+sleep, that the dismal day may die, that wasted day, like so many
+others that there will be to endure stoically and to overcome, before
+the last day arrives of the war or of his life.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] French soldiers have extensively developed a system of
+corresponding with French women whom they do not know from Eve and
+whose acquaintance they usually make through newspaper advertisements.
+As typical of the latter I copy the following: "Officier artilleur, 30
+ans, desire correspondance discrete avec jeune marraine, femme du
+monde. Ecrire," etc. The "lonely soldier" movement in this country is
+similar.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+The Doorway
+
+
+"IT's foggy. Would you like to go?"
+
+It is Poterloo who asks, as he turns towards me and shows eyes so blue
+that they make his fine, fair head seem transparent.
+
+Poterloo comes from Souchez, and now that the Chasseurs have at last
+retaken it, he wants to see again the village where he lived happily in
+the days when he was only a man.
+
+It is a pilgrimage of peril; not that we should have far to go--Souchez
+is just there. For six months we have lived and worked in the trenches
+almost within hail of the village. We have only to climb straight from
+here on to the Bethune road along which the trench creeps, the road
+honeycombed underneath by our shelters, and descend it for four or five
+hundred yards as it dips down towards Souchez. But all that ground is
+under regular and terrible attention. Since their recoil, the Germans
+have constantly sent huge shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in
+our caverns from time to time, and we see, high above the scarps, now
+here now there, the great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the
+piled columns of smoke, as high as churches. Why do they bombard
+Souchez? One cannot say why, for there is no longer anybody or anything
+in the village so often taken and retaken, that we have so fiercely
+wrested from each other.
+
+But this morning a dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great
+curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are
+sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the
+perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there,
+enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of partition
+between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and Angres,
+whence the enemy spies upon us.
+
+"Right you are!" I say to Poterloo.
+
+Adjutant Barthe, informed of our project, wags his head up and down,
+and lowers his eyelids in token that he does not see.
+
+We hoist ourselves out of the trench, and behold us both, upright, on
+the Bethune road!
+
+It is the first time I have walked there during the day. I have never
+seen it, except from afar, the terrible road that we have so often
+traveled or crossed in leaps, bowed down in the darkness, and under the
+whistling of missiles.
+
+"Well, are you coming, old man?"
+
+After some paces, Poterloo has stopped in the middle of the road, where
+the fog like cotton-wool unravels itself into pendent fragments, and
+there he dilates his sky-blue eyes and half opens his scarlet mouth.
+
+"Ah, la, la! Ah, la, la!" he murmurs. When I turn to him he points to
+the road, shakes his head and says, "This is it, Bon Dieu, to think
+this is it! This bit where we are, I know it so well that if I shut my
+eyes I can see it as it was, exactly. Old chap, it's awful to see it
+again like that. It was a beautiful road, planted all the way along
+with big trees.
+
+"And now, what is it? Look at it--a sort of long thing without a
+soul--sad, sad. Look at these two trenches on each side, alive; this
+ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these trees uprooted, split,
+scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by
+bullets--look, this pock-marked pestilence, here! Ah, my boy, my boy,
+you can't imagine how it is disfigured, this road!" And he goes
+forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.
+
+It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are
+crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year and
+a half. It is a great disheveled highway, traveled only by bullets and
+by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and upheaved it,
+covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and laid bare its
+bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no color, burned and
+old, sinister and awful to see.
+
+"If you'd only known it--how clean and smooth it was!" says Poterloo.
+"All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and colors--like
+butterflies; and there was always some one passing on it to give
+good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets, or people
+shouting [note 1] to each other in a chaise, with the good wind
+ballooning their smocks. Ah, how happy life was once on a time!"
+
+He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the roadway
+towards the land of parapets. Stooping, he stops by some faint
+swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed--tombs, recessed at
+intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the Cross in a
+church.
+
+I call him--we shall never get there at such a funeral pace. Allons!
+
+We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo
+lagging behind, his head confused and heavy with thought as he tries in
+vain to exchange with inanimate things his glances of recognition. Just
+there the road is lower, a fold secretes it from the side towards the
+north. On this sheltered ground there is a little traffic.
+
+Along the hazy, filthy, and unwholesome space, where withered grass is
+embedded in black mud, there are rows of dead. They are carried there
+when the trenches or the plain are cleared during the night. They are
+waiting--some of them have waited long--to be taken back to the
+cemeteries after dark.
+
+We approach them slowly. They are close against each other, and each
+one indicates with arms or legs some different posture of stiffened
+agony. There are some with half-moldy faces, the skin rusted, or yellow
+with dark spots. Of several the faces are black as tar, the lips hugely
+distended--the heads of negroes blown out in goldbeaters' skin. Between
+two bodies, protruding uncertainly from one or the other, is a severed
+wrist, ending with a cluster of strings.
+
+Others are shapeless larvae of pollution, with dubious items of
+equipment pricking up, or bits of bone. Farther on, a corpse has been
+brought in in such a state that they have been obliged--so as not to
+lose it on the way--to pile it on a lattice of wire which was then
+fastened to the two ends of a stake. Thus was it carried in the hollow
+of its metal hammock, and laid there. You cannot make out either end of
+the body; alone, in the heap that it makes, one recognizes the gape of
+a trouser-pocket. An insect goes in and out of it.
+
+Around the dead flutter letters that have escaped from pockets or
+cartridge pouches while they were being placed on the ground. Over one
+of these bits of white paper, whose wings still beat though the mud
+ensnares them, I stoop slightly and read a sentence--"My dear Henry,
+what a fine day it is for your birthday!" The man is on his belly; his
+loins are rent from hip to hip by a deep furrow; his head is half
+turned round; we see a sunken eye; and on temples, cheek and neck a
+kind of green moss is growing.
+
+A sickening atmosphere roams with the wind around these dead and the
+heaped-up debris, that lies about them--tent-cloth or clothing in
+stained tatters, stiff with dried blood, charred by the scorch of the
+shell, hardened, earthy and already rotting, quick with swarming and
+questing things. It troubles us. We look at each other and shake our
+heads, nor dare admit aloud that the place smells bad. All the same, we
+go away slowly.
+
+Now come breaking out of the fog the bowed backs of men who are joined
+together by something they are carrying. They are Territorial
+stretcher-bearers with a new corpse. They come up with their old wan
+faces, toiling, sweating, and grimacing with the effort. To carry a
+dead man in the lateral trenches when they are muddy is a work almost
+beyond human power. They put down the body, which is dressed in new
+clothes.
+
+"It's not long since, now, that he was standing," says one of the
+bearers. "It's two hours since he got his bullet in the head for going
+to look for a Boche rifle in the plain. He was going on leave on
+Wednesday and wanted to take a rifle home with him. He is a sergeant of
+the 405th, Class 1914. A nice lad, too."
+
+He takes away the handkerchief that is over the face. It is quite
+young, and seems to sleep, except that an eyeball has gone, the cheek
+looks waxen, and a rosy liquid has run over the nostrils, mouth, and
+eyes.
+
+The body strikes a note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this still
+pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if to lie
+better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than the
+others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic, nearer to
+one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything in the
+presence of all that heap of beings destroyed, it would have been "Poor
+boy!"
+
+We take the road again, which at this point begins to slope down to the
+depth where Souchez lies. Under our feet in the whiteness of the fog it
+appears like a valley of frightful misery. The piles of rubbish, of
+remains and of filthiness accumulate on the shattered spine of the
+road's paving and on its miry borders in final confusion. The trees
+bestrew the ground or have disappeared, torn away, their stumps
+mangled. The banks of the road are overturned and overthrown by
+shell-fire. All the way along, on both sides of this highway where only
+the crosses remain standing, are trenches twenty times blown in and
+re-hollowed, cavities--some with passages into them--hurdles on
+quagmires.
+
+The more we go forward, the more is everything turned terribly inside
+out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic. We walk on a surface of shell
+fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step. We go among them
+as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or
+bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets,
+sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and
+German accouterments all mutilated and encrusted in dried mud, and
+among the sinister piles of clothing, stuck together with a
+reddish-brown cement. And one must look out, too, for the unexploded
+shells, which everywhere protrude their noses or reveal their flanks or
+their bases, painted red, blue, and tawny brown.
+
+"That's the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end." It
+is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes. The
+sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled, emptied,
+scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams arc splintered, and
+point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim with earth and
+with--no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed of a river,
+smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned. In
+one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the guns. The wide
+fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of new-turned earth,
+made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in length and in
+breadth.
+
+I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to
+have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very
+vitals in the metamorphosis of the country's face.
+
+He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a stupefied
+air, as though he came out of a dream--"The Red Tavern!" It is a flat
+field, carpeted with broken bricks.
+
+And what is that, there? A milestone? No, it is not a milestone. It is
+a head, a black head, tanned and polished. The mouth is all askew, and
+you can see something of the mustache bristling on each side--the great
+head of a carbonized cat. The corpse--it is German--is underneath,
+buried upright.
+
+"And that?" It is a ghastly collection containing an entirely white
+skull, and then, six feet away, a pair of boots, and between the two a
+heap of frayed leather and of rags, cemented by brown mud.
+
+"Come on, there's less fog already. We must hurry."
+
+A hundred yards in front of us, among the more transparent waves of fog
+that are changing places with us and hide us less and less, a shell
+whistles and bursts. It has fallen in the spot we are just nearing. We
+are descending, and the gradient is less steep. We go side by side. My
+companion says nothing, but looks to right and to left. Then he stops
+again, as he did at the top of the road. I hear his faltering voice,
+almost inaudible--"What's this! We're there--this is it--"
+
+In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and
+barren--but we are in Souchez!
+
+The village has disappeared, nor have I seen a village go so
+completely. Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency, these still retained
+some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses, their
+yards heaped high with plaster and tiles. Here, within the framework of
+slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the
+fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not even an end of wall,
+fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover
+that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, stones, and
+scrap-iron. This--here--was a street.
+
+It might have been a dirty and boggy waste near a big town, whose
+rubbish of demolished buildings and its domestic refuse had been shot
+here for years, till no spot was empty. We plunge into a uniform layer
+of dung and debris, and make but slow and difficult progress. The
+bombardment has so changed the face of things that it has diverted the
+course of the millstream, which now runs haphazard and forms a pond on
+the remains of the little place where the cross stood.
+
+Here are several shell-holes where swollen horses are rotting; in
+others the remains of what were once human beings are scattered,
+distorted by the monstrous injury of shells.
+
+Here, athwart the track we are following, that we ascend as through an
+avalanche or inundation of ruin, under the unbroken melancholy of the
+sky, here is a man stretched out as if he slept, but he has that close
+flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man from a
+sleeper. He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves threaded
+over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades' water-bottles slung on his
+shoulder by a skein of straps. It must have been only last night that
+the fragment of a shell caught him in the back. No doubt we are the
+first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly dead. Perhaps he will
+be scattered before others find him, so we look for his identity
+disc--it is stuck in the clotted blood where his right hand stagnates.
+I copy down the name that is written in letters of blood.
+
+Poterloo lets me do it by myself--he is like a sleepwalker. He looks,
+and looks in despair, everywhere. He seeks endlessly among those
+evanished and eviscerated things; through the void he gazes to the haze
+of the horizon. Then he sits down on a beam, having first sent flying
+with a kick a saucepan that lay on it, and I sit by his side. A light
+drizzle is falling. The fog's moisture is resolving in little drops
+that cover everything with a slight gloss. He murmurs, "Ah, la, la!"
+
+He wipes his forehead and raises imploring eyes to me. He is trying to
+make out and take in the destruction of all this corner of the earth,
+and the mournfulness of it. He stammers disjointed remarks and
+interjections. He takes off his great helmet and his head is smoking.
+Then he says to me with difficulty, "Old man, you cannot imagine, you
+cannot, you cannot--"
+
+He whispers: "The Red Tavern, where that--where that Boche's head is,
+and litters of beastliness all around, that sort of cesspool--it was on
+the edge of the road, a brick house and two out-buildings
+alongside--how many times, old man, on the very spot where we stood,
+how many times, there, the good woman who joked with me on her
+doorstep, I've given her good-day as I wiped my mouth and looked
+towards Souchez that I was going back to! And then, after a few steps,
+I've turned round to shout some nonsense to her! Oh, you cannot
+imagine! But that, now, that!" He makes an inclusive gesture to
+indicate all the emptiness that surrounds him.
+
+"We mustn't stay here too long, old chap. The fog's lifting, you know."
+
+He stands up with an effort--"Allons."
+
+The most serious part is yet to come. His house--
+
+He hesitates, turns towards the east, goes. "It's there--no, I've
+passed it. It's not there. I don't know where it is--or where it was.
+Ah, misery, misery!" He wrings his hands in despair and staggers in the
+middle of the medley of plaster and bricks. Then, bewildered by this
+encumbered plain of lost landmarks, he looks questioningly about in the
+air, like a thoughtless child, like a madman. He is looking for the
+intimacy of the bedrooms scattered in infinite space, for their inner
+form and their twilight now cast upon the winds!
+
+After several goings and comings, he stops at one spot and draws back a
+little--"It was there, I'm right. Look--it's that stone there that I
+knew it by. There was a vent-hole there, you can see the mark of the
+bar of iron that was over the hole before it disappeared."
+
+Sniffling he reflects, and gently shaking his head as though he could
+not stop it: "It is when you no longer have anything that you
+understand how happy you were. Ah, how happy we were!"
+
+He comes up to me and laughs nervously: "It's out of the common, that,
+eh? I'm sure you've never seen yourself like it--can't find the house
+where you've always lived since--since always--"
+
+He turns about, and it is he who leads me away:
+
+"Well, let's leg it, since there is nothing. Why spend a whole hour
+looking at places where things were? Let's be off, old man."
+
+We depart--the only two living beings to be seen in that unreal and
+miasmal place, that village which bestrews the earth and lies under our
+feet.
+
+We climb again. The weather is clearing and the fog scattering quickly.
+My silent comrade, who is making great strides with lowered head,
+points out a field: "The cemetery," he says; "it was there before it
+was everywhere, before it laid hold on everything without end, like a
+plague."
+
+Half-way, we go more slowly, and Poterloo comes close to me-"You know,
+it's too much, all that. It's wiped out too much--all my life up to
+now. It makes me afraid--it is so completely wiped out."
+
+"Come; your wife's in good health, you know; your little girl, too."
+
+He looks at me comically: "My wife--I'll tell you something; my wife--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, old chap, I've seen her again."
+
+"You've seen her? I thought she was in the occupied country?"
+
+"Yes, she's at Lens, with my relations. Well, I've seen her--ah, and
+then, after all, zut!--I'll tell you all about it. Well, I was at Lens,
+three weeks ago. It was the eleventh; that's twenty days since."
+
+I look at him, astounded. But he looks like one who is speaking the
+truth. He talks in sputters at my side, as we walk in the increasing
+light--
+
+"They told us--you remember, perhaps--but you weren't there, I
+believe--they told us the wire had got to be strengthened in front of
+the Billard Trench. You know what that means, eh? They hadn't been able
+to do it till then. As soon as one gets out of the trench he's on a
+downward slope, that's got a funny name."
+
+"The Toboggan."
+
+"Yes, that's it; and the place is as bad by night or in fog as in broad
+daylight, because of the rifles trained on it before hand on trestles,
+and the machine-guns that they point during the day. When they can't
+see any more, the Boches sprinkle the lot.
+
+"They took the pioneers of the C.H.R., but there were some missing, and
+they replaced 'em with a few poilus. I was one of 'em. Good. We climb
+out. Not a single rifle-shot! 'What does it mean?' we says, and behold,
+we see a Boche, two Boches, three Boches, coming out of the ground--the
+gray devils!--and they make signs to us and shout 'Kamarad!' 'We're
+Alsatians,' they says, coming more and more out of their communication
+trench--the International. 'They won't fire on you, up there,' they
+says; 'don't be afraid, friends. Just let us bury our dead.' And behold
+us working aside of each other, and even talking together since they
+were from Alsace. And to tell the truth, they groused about the war and
+about their officers. Our sergeant knew all right that it was forbidden
+to talk with the enemy, and they'd even read it out to us that we were
+only to talk to them with our rifles. But the sergeant he says to
+himself that this is God's own chance to strengthen the wire, and as
+long as they were letting us work against them, we'd just got to take
+advantage of it.
+
+"Then behold one of the Boches that says, 'There isn't perhaps one of
+you that comes from the invaded country and would like news of his
+family?'
+
+"Old chap, that was a bit too much for me. Without thinking if I did
+right or wrong, I went up to him and I said, 'Yes, there's me.' The
+Boche asks me questions. I tell him my wife's at Lens with her
+relations, and the little one, too. He asks where she's staying. I
+explain to him, and he says he can see it from there. 'Listen,' he
+says, 'I'll take her a letter, and not only that, but I'll bring you an
+answer.' Then all of a sudden he taps his forehead, the Boche, and
+comes close to me--'Listen, my friend, to a lot better still. If you
+like to do what I say, you shall see your wife, and your kids as well,
+and all the lot, sure as I see you.' He tells me, to do it, I've only
+got to go with him at a certain time with a Boche greatcoat and a shako
+that he'll have for me. He'd mix me up in a coal-fatigue in Lens, and
+we'd go to our house. I could go and have a look on condition that I
+laid low and didn't show myself, and he'd be responsible for the chaps
+of the fatigue, but there were non-coms. in the house that he wouldn't
+answer for--and, old chap, I agreed!"
+
+"That was serious."
+
+"Yes, for sure, it was serious. I decided all at once, without thinking
+and without wishing to think, seeing I was dazzled with the idea of
+seeing my people again; and if I got shot afterwards, well, so much the
+worse--but give and take. The supply of law and demand they call it,
+don't they?
+
+"My boy, it all went swimmingly. The only hitch was they had such hard
+work to find a shako big enough, for, as you know, I'm well off for
+head. But even that was fixed up. They raked me out in the end a
+lousebox big enough to hold my head. I've already some Boche
+boots--those that were Caron's, you know. So, behold us setting off in
+the Boche trenches--and they're most damnably like ours--with these
+good sorts of Boche comrades, who told me in very good French--same as
+I'm speaking--not to fret myself.
+
+"There was no alarm, nothing. Getting there came off all right.
+Everything went off so sweet and simple that I fancied I must be a
+defaulting Boche. We got to Lens at nightfall. I remember we passed in
+front of La Perche and went down the Rue du Quatorze-Juillet. I saw
+some of the townsfolk walking about in the streets like they do in our
+quarters. I didn't recognize them because of the evening, nor them me,
+because of the evening too, and because of the seriousness of things.
+It was so dark you couldn't put your finger into your eye when I
+reached my folk's garden.
+
+"My heart was going top speed. I was all trembling from head to foot as
+if I were only a sort of heart myself. And I had to hold myself back
+from carrying on aloud, and in French too, I was so happy and upset.
+The Kamarad says to me, 'You go, pass once, then another time, and look
+in at the door and the window. Don't look as if you were looking. Be
+careful.' So I get hold of myself again, and swallow my feelings all at
+a gulp. Not a bad sort, that devil, seeing he'd have had a hell of a
+time if I'd got nailed.
+
+"At our place, you know, same as everywhere in the Pas de Calais, the
+outside doors of the houses are cut in two. At the bottom, it's a sort
+of barrier, half-way up your body; and above, you might call it a
+shutter. So you can shut the bottom half and be one-half private.
+
+"The top half was open, and the room, that's the dining-room, and the
+kitchen as well, of course, was lighted up and I heard voices.
+
+"I went by with my neck twisted sideways. There were heads of men and
+women with a rosy light on them, round the round table and the lamp. My
+eyes fell on her, on Clotilde. I saw her plainly. She was sitting
+between two chaps, non-coms., I believe, and they were talking to her.
+And what was she doing? Nothing; she was smiling, and her face was
+prettily bent forward and surrounded with a light little framework of
+fair hair, and the lamp gave it a bit of a golden look.
+
+"She was smiling. She was contented. She had a look of being well off,
+by the side of the Boche officer, and the lamp, and the fire that
+puffed an unfamiliar warmth out on me. I passed, and then I turned
+round, and passed again. I saw her again, and she was always smiling.
+Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came
+from her, that she gave. And during that time of illumination that I
+passed in two senses, I could see my baby as well, stretching her hands
+out to a great striped simpleton and trying to climb on his knee; and
+then, just by, who do you think I recognized? Madeleine Vandaert,
+Vandaert's wife, my pal of the 19th, that was killed at the Maine, at
+Montyon.
+
+"She knew he'd been killed because she was in mourning. And she, she
+was having good fun, and laughing outright, I tell you--and she looked
+at one and the other as much as to say, 'I'm all right here!'
+
+"Ah, my boy, I cleared out of that, and butted into the Kamarads that
+were waiting to take me back. How I got back I couldn't tell you. I was
+knocked out. I went stumbling like a man under a curse, and if any-body
+had said a wrong word to me just then--! I should have shouted out
+loud; I should have made a row, so as to get killed and be done with
+this filthy life!
+
+"Do you catch on? She was smiling, my wife, my Clotilde, at this time
+in the war! And why? Have we only got to be away for a time for us not
+to count any more? You take your damned hook from home to go to the
+war, and everything seems finished with; and they worry for a while
+that you're gone, but bit by bit you become as if you didn't exist,
+they can do without you to be as happy as they were before, and to
+smile. Ah, Christ! I'm not talking of the other woman that was
+laughing, but my Clotilde, mine, who at that chance moment when I saw
+her, whatever you may say, was getting on damned well without me!
+
+"And then, if she'd been with friends or relations; but no, actually
+with Boche officers! Tell me, shouldn't I have had good reason to jump
+into the room, fetch her a couple of swipes, and wring the neck of the
+other old hen in mourning?
+
+"Yes, yes; I thought of doing it. I know all right I was getting
+violent, I was getting out of control.
+
+"Mark me. I don't want to say more about it than I have said. She's a
+good lass, Clotilde. I know her, and I've confidence in her. I'm not
+far wrong, you know. If I were done in, she'd cry all the tears in her
+body to begin with. She thinks I'm alive, I admit, but that isn't the
+point. She can't prevent herself from being; well off, and contented,
+and letting herself go, when she's a good fire, a good lamp, and
+company, whether I'm there or not--"
+
+I led Poterloo away: "You exaggerate, old chap; you're getting absurd
+notions, come." We had walked very slowly and were still at the foot of
+the hill. The fog was becoming like silver as it prepared for
+departure. Sunshine was very near.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Poterloo looked up and said, "We'll go round by the Carency road and go
+in at the back." We struck off at an angle into the fields. At the end
+of a few minutes he said to me, "I exaggerate, you think? You say that
+I exaggerate?" He reflected. "Ah!" Then he added, with the shaking of
+the head that had hardly left him all the morning, "What about it? All
+the same, it's a fact--"
+
+We climbed the slope. The cold had become tepidity. Arrived on a little
+plateau--"Let's sit here again before going in," he proposed. He sat
+down, heavy with the world of thought that entangled him. His forehead
+was wrinkled. Then he turned towards me with an awkward air, as if he
+were going to beg some favor: "Tell me, mate, I'm wondering if I'm
+right."
+
+But after looking at me, he looked at everything else, as though he
+would rather consult them than me.
+
+A transformation was taking place in the sky and on the earth. The fog
+was hardly more than a fancy. Distances revealed themselves. The narrow
+plain, gloomy and gray, was getting bigger, chasing its shadows away,
+and assuming color. The light was passing over it from east to west
+like sails.
+
+And down there at our very feet, by the grace of distance and of light,
+we saw Souchez among the trees--the little place arose again before our
+eyes, new-born in the sunshine!
+
+"Am I right?" repeated Poterloo, more faltering, more dubious.
+
+Before I could speak he replied to himself, at first almost in a
+whisper, as the light fell on him--"She's quite young, you know; she's
+twenty-six. She can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of her all
+over, and when she's resting in the lamp-light and the warmth, she's
+got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply
+be her youth, singing in her throat. It isn't on account of others, if
+truth were told; it's on account of herself. It's life. She lives. Ah,
+yes, she lives, and that's all. It isn't her fault if she lives. You
+wouldn't have her die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all
+day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One can't cry all the
+time, nor grouse for eighteen months. Can't be done. It's too long, I
+tell you. That's all there is to it."
+
+He stops speaking to look at the view of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, now
+wholly illuminated.
+
+"Same with the kid; when she found herself alongside a simpleton that
+doesn't tell her to go and play with herself, she ends by wanting to
+get on his knee. Perhaps she'd prefer that it was her uncle or a friend
+or her father--perhaps--but she tries it on all the same with the only
+man that's always there, even if it's a great hog in spectacles.
+
+"Ah," he cries, as he gets up and comes gesticulating before me.
+"There's a good answer one could give me. If I didn't come back from
+the war, I should say, 'My lad, you've gone to smash, no more Clotilde,
+no more love! You'll be replaced in her heart sooner or later; no
+getting round it; your memory, the portrait of you that she carries in
+her, that'll fade bit by bit and another'll come on top of it, and
+she'll begin another life again.' Ah, if I didn't come back!"
+
+He laughs heartily. "But I mean to come back. Ah, yes! One must be
+there. Otherwise--I must be there, look you," he says again more
+seriously; "otherwise, if you're not there, even if you're dealing with
+saints and angels, you'll be at fault in the end. That's life. But I am
+there." He laughs. "Well, I'm a little there, as one might say!"
+
+I get up too, and tap him on the shoulder. "You're right, old pal,
+it'll all come to an end."
+
+He rubs his hands and goes on talking. "Yes, by God! it'll all finish,
+don't worry. Oh, I know well there'll be hard graft before it's
+finished, and still more after. We've got to work, and I don't only
+mean work with the arms.
+
+"It'll be necessary to make everything over again. Very well, we'll do
+it. The house? Gone. The garden? Nowhere. All right, we'll rebuild the
+house, we'll remake the garden. The less there is the more we'll make
+over again. After all, it's life, and we're made to remake, eh? And
+we'll remake our life together, and happiness. We'll make the days
+again; we'll remake the nights.
+
+"And the other side, too. They'll make their world again. Do you know
+what I say?--perhaps it won't be as long as one thinks--"
+
+"Tiens! I can see Madeleine Vandaert marrying another chap. She's a
+widow; but, old man, she's been a widow eighteen months. Do you think
+it's not a big slice, that, eighteen months? They even leave off
+wearing mourning, I believe, about that time! People don't remember
+that when they say 'What a strumpet she is,' and when, in effect, they
+ask her to commit suicide. But mon vieux, one forgets. One is forced to
+forget. It isn't the people that make you forget; you do it yourself;
+it's just forgetfulness, mind you. I find Madeleine again all of a
+sudden, and to see her frivvling there it broke me up as much as if her
+husband had been killed yesterday--it's natural. But it's a devil of a
+long time since he got spiked, poor lad. It's a long time since, it's
+too long since. People are no longer the same. But, mark you, one must
+come back, one must be there! We shall be there, and we shall be busy
+with beginning again!"
+
+On the way, he looks and winks, cheered up by finding a peg on which to
+hang his ideas. He says--"I can see it from here, after the war, all
+the Souchez people setting themselves again to work and to life--what a
+business! Tiens, Papa Ponce, for example, the back-number! He was so
+pernickety that you could see him sweeping the grass in his garden with
+a horsehair brush, or kneeling on his lawn and trimming the turf with a
+pair of scissors. Very well, he'll treat himself to that again! And
+Madame Imaginaire, that lived in one of the last houses towards the
+Chateau de Carleul, a large woman who seemed to roll along the ground
+as if she'd got casters under her big circular petticoats. She had a
+child every year, regular, punctual--a proper machine-gun of kids. Very
+well, she'll take that occupation up again with all her might."
+
+He stops and ponders, and smiles a very little--almost within himself:
+"Tiens, I'll tell you; I noticed--it isn't very important, this," he
+insists, as though suddenly embarrassed by the triviality of this
+parenthesis--"but I noticed (you notice it in a glance when you're
+noticing something else) that it was cleaner in our house than in my
+time--"
+
+We come on some little rails in the ground, climbing almost hidden in
+the withered grass underfoot. Poterloo points out with his foot this
+bit of abandoned track, and smiles; "That, that's our railway. It was a
+cripple, as you may say; that means something that doesn't move. It
+didn't work very quickly. A snail could have kept pace with it. We
+shall remake it. But certainly it won't go any quicker. That can't be
+allowed!"
+
+When we reached the top of the hill, Poterloo turned round and threw a
+last look over the slaughtered places that we had just visited. Even
+more than a minute ago, distance recreated the village across the
+remains of trees shortened and sliced that now looked like young
+saplings. Better even than just now, the sun shed on that white and red
+accumulation of mingled material an appearance of life and even an
+illusion of meditation. Its very stones seemed to feel the vernal
+revival. The beauty of sunshine heralded what would be, and revealed
+the future. The face of the watching soldier, too, shone with a glamour
+of reincarnation, and the smile on it was born of the springtime and of
+hope. His rosy cheeks and blue eyes seemed brighter than ever.
+
+We go down into the communication trench and there is sunshine there.
+The trench is yellow, dry, and resounding. I admire its finely
+geometrical depth, its shovel-smoothed and shining flanks; and I find
+it enjoyable to hear the clean sharp sound of our feet on the hard
+ground or on the caillebotis--little gratings of wood, placed end to
+end and forming a plankway.
+
+I look at my watch. It tells me that it is nine o'clock, and it shows
+me, too, a dial of delicate color where the sky is reflected in
+rose-pink and blue, and the fine fret-work of bushes that are planted
+there above the marges of the trench.
+
+And Poterloo and I look at each other with a kind of confused delight.
+We are glad to see each other, as though we were meeting after absence!
+He speaks to me, and though I am quite familiar with the singsong
+accent of the North, I discover that he is singing.
+
+We have had bad days and tragic nights in the cold and the rain and the
+mud. Now, although it is still winter, the first fine morning shows and
+convinces us that it will soon be spring once more. Already the top of
+the trench is graced by green young grass, and amid its new-born
+quivering some flowers are awakening. It means the end of contracted
+and constricted days. Spring is coming from above and from below. We
+inhale with joyful hearts; we are uplifted.
+
+Yes, the bad days are ending. The war will end, too, que diable! And no
+doubt it will end in the beautiful season that is coming, that already
+illumines us, whose zephyrs already caress us.
+
+A whistling sound--tiens, a spent bullet! A bullet? Nonsense--it's a
+blackbird! Curious how similar the sound was! The blackbirds and the
+birds of softer song, the countryside and the pageant of the seasons,
+the intimacy of dwelling-rooms, arrayed in light--Oh! the war will end
+soon; we shall go back for good to our own; wife, children, or to her
+who is at once wife and child, and we smile towards them in this young
+glory that already unites us again.
+
+At the forking of the two trenches, in the open and on the edge, here
+is something like a doorway. Two posts lean one upon the other, with a
+confusion of electric wires between them, hanging down like tropical
+creepers. It looks well. You would say it was a theatrical contrivance
+or scene. A slender climbing plant twines round one of the posts, and
+as you follow it with your glance, you see that it already dares to
+pass from one to the other.
+
+Soon, passing along this trench whose grassy slopes quiver like the
+flanks of a fine horse, we come out into our own trench on the Bethune
+road, and here is our place. Our comrades are there, in clusters. They
+are eating, and enjoying the goodly temperature.
+
+The meal finished, we clean our aluminium mess-tins or plates with a
+morsel of bread. "Tiens, the sun's going!" It is true; a cloud has
+passed over and hidden it. "It's going to splash, my little lads," says
+Lamuse "that's our luck all over! Just as we are going off!"
+
+"A damned country!" says Fouillade. In truth this Northern climate is
+not worth much. It drizzles and mizzles, reeks and rains. And when
+there is any sun it soon disappears in the middle of this great damp
+sky.
+
+Our four days in the trenches are finished, and the relief will
+commence at nightfall. Leisurely we get ready for leaving. We fill and
+put aside the knapsacks and bags. We give a rub to the rifles and wrap
+them up.
+
+It is already four o'clock. Darkness is falling quickly, and we grow
+indistinct to each other. "Damnation. Here's the rain!" A few drops and
+then the downpour. Oh, la, la, la! We don our capes and tent-cloths. We
+go back unto the dug-out, dabbling, and gathering mud on our knees,
+hands, and elbows, for the bottom of the trench is getting sticky. Once
+inside, we have hardly time to light a candle, stuck on a bit of stone,
+and to shiver all round--"Come on, en route!"
+
+We hoist ourselves into the wet and windy darkness outside. I can dimly
+see Poterloo's powerful shoulders; in the ranks we are always side by
+side. When we get going I call to him, "Are you there, old
+chap?"--"Yes, in front of you," he cries to me, turning round. As he
+turns he gets a buffet in the face from wind and rain, but he laughs.
+His happy face of the morning abides with him. No downpour shall rob
+him of the content that he carries in his strong and steadfast heart;
+no evil night put out the sunshine that I saw possess his thoughts some
+hours ago.
+
+We march, and jostle each other, and stumble. The rain is continuous,
+and water runs in the bottom of the trench. The floor-gratings yield as
+the soil becomes soaked; some of them slope to right or left and we
+skid on them. In the dark, too, one cannot see them, so we miss them at
+the turnings and put our feet into holes full of water.
+
+Even in the grayness of the night I will not lose sight of the slaty
+shine of Poterloo's helmet, which streams like a roof under the
+torrent, nor of the broad back that is adorned with a square of
+glistening oilskin. I lock my step in his, and from time to time I
+question him and he answers me--always in good humor, always serene and
+strong.
+
+When there are no more of the wooden floor-gratings, we tramp in the
+thick mud. It is dark now. There is a sudden halt and I am thrown on
+Poterloo. Up higher we hear half-angry reproaches--"What the devil,
+will you get on? We shall get broken up!"
+
+"I can't get my trotters unstuck!" replies a pitiful voice.
+
+The engulfed one gets clear at last, and we have to run to overtake the
+rest of the company. We begin to pant and complain, and bluster against
+those who are leading. Our feet go down haphazard; we stumble and hold
+ourselves up by the walls, so that our hands are plastered with mud.
+The march becomes a stampede, full of the noise of metal things and of
+oaths.
+
+In redoubled rain there is a second halt; some one has fallen, and the
+hubbub is general. He picks himself up and we are off again. I exert
+myself to follow Poterloo's helmet closely that gleams feebly in the
+night before my eyes, and I shout from time to time, "All
+right?"--"Yes, yes, all right," he replies, puffing and blowing, and
+his voice always singsong and resonant.
+
+Our knapsacks, tossed in this rolling race under the assault of the
+elements, drag and hurt our shoulders.
+
+The trench is blocked by a recent landslide, and we plunge unto it. We
+have to tear our feet out of the soft and clinging earth, lifting them
+high at each step. Then, when this crossing is laboriously
+accomplished, we topple down again into the slippery stream, in the
+bottom of which are two narrow ruts, boot-worn, which hold one's foot
+like a vice, and there are pools into which it goes with a great
+splash. In one place we must stoop very low to pass under a heavy and
+glutinous bridge that crosses the trench, and we only get through with
+difficulty. It obliges us to kneel in the mud, to flatten ourselves on
+the ground, and to crawl on all fours for a few paces. A little farther
+there are evolutions to perform as we grasp a post that the sinking of
+the ground has set aslope across the middle of the fairway.
+
+We come to a trench-crossing. "Allons, forward! Look out for
+yourselves, boys!" says the adjutant, who has flattened himself in a
+corner to let us pass and to speak to us. "This is a bad spot."
+
+"We're done up," shouts a voice so hoarse that I cannot identify the
+speaker.
+
+"Damn! I've enough of it, I'm stopping here," groans another, at the
+end of his wind and his muscle.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" replies the adjutant, "No fault of mine,
+eh? Allons, get a move on, it's a bad spot--it was shelled at the last
+relief!"
+
+We go on through the tempest of wind and water. We seem to be going
+ever down and down, as in a pit. We slip and tumble, butt into the wall
+of the trench, into which we drive our elbows hard, so as to throw
+ourselves upright again. Our going is a sort of long slide, on which we
+keep up just how and where we can. What matters is to stumble only
+forward, and as straight as possible.
+
+Where are we? I lift my head, in spite of the billows of rain, out of
+this gulf where we are struggling. Against the hardly discernible
+background of the buried sky, I can make out the rim of the trench; and
+there, rising before my eyes all at once and towering over that rim, is
+something like a sinister doorway, made of two black posts that lean
+one upon the other, with something hanging from the middle like a
+torn-off scalp. It is the doorway.
+
+"Forward! Forward!"
+
+I lower my head and see no more; but again I hear the feet that sink in
+the mud and come out again, the rattle of the bayonets, the heavy
+exclamations, and the rapid breathing.
+
+Once more there is a violent back-eddy. We pull up sharply, and again I
+am thrown upon Poterloo and lean on his back, his strong back and
+solid, like the trunk of a tree, like healthfulness and like hope. He
+cries to me, "Cheer up, old man, we're there!"
+
+We are standing still. It is necessary to go back a little--<i>Nom de
+Dieu!</i>--no, we are moving on again!
+
+Suddenly a fearful explosion falls on us. I tremble to my skull; a
+metallic reverberation fills my head; a scorching and suffocating smell
+of sulphur pierces my nostrils. The earth has opened in front of me. I
+feel myself lifted and hurled aside--doubled up, choked, and half
+blinded by this lightning and thunder. But still my recollection is
+clear; and in that moment when I looked wildly and desperately for my
+comrade-in-arms, I saw his body go up, erect and black, both his arms
+outstretched to their limit, and a flame in the place of his head!
+
+------------
+
+[note 1:] All these high roads are stone-paved, and traffic is
+noisy.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The Big Words
+
+
+BARQUE notices that I am writing. He comes towards me on all fours
+through the straw and lifts his intelligent face to me, with its
+reddish forelock and the little quick eyes over which circumflex
+accents fold and unfold them-selves. His mouth is twisting in all
+directions, by reason of a tablet of chocolate that he crunches and
+chews, while he holds the moist stump of it in his fist.
+
+With his mouth full, and wafting me the odor of a sweetshop, he
+stammers--"Tell me, you writing chap, you'll be writing later about
+soldiers, you'll be speaking of us, eh?"
+
+"Why yes, sonny, I shall talk about you, and about the boys, and about
+our life."
+
+"Tell me, then"--he indicates with a nod the papers on which I have
+been making notes. With hovering pencil I watch and listen to him. He
+has a question to put to me--"Tell me, then, though you needn't if you
+don't want--there's something I want to ask you. This is it; if you
+make the common soldiers talk in your book, are you going to make them
+talk like they do talk, or shall you put it all straight--into pretty
+talk? It's about the big words that we use. For after all, now, besides
+falling out sometimes and blackguarding each other, you'll never hear
+two poilus open their heads for a minute without saying and repeating
+things that the printers wouldn't much like to print. Then what? If you
+don't say 'em, your portrait won't be a lifelike one it's as if you
+were going to paint them and then left out one of the gaudiest colors
+wherever you found it. All the same, it isn't usually done."
+
+"I shall put the big words in their place, dadda, for they're the
+truth."
+
+"But tell me, if you put 'em in, won't the people of your sort say
+you're swine, without worrying about the truth?"
+
+"Very likely, but I shall do it all the same, without worrying about
+those people."
+
+"Do you want my opinion? Although I know nothing about books, it's
+brave to do that, because it isn't usually done, and it'll be spicy if
+you dare do it--but you'll find it hard when it comes to it, you're too
+polite. That's just one of the faults I've found in you since we've
+known each other; that, and also that dirty habit you've got, when
+they're serving brandy out to us, you pretend it'll do you harm, and
+instead of giving your share to a pal, you go and pour it on your head
+to wash your scalp."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Of Burdens
+
+
+AT the end of the yard of the Muets farm, among the outbuildings, the
+barn gapes like a cavern. It is always caverns for us, even in houses!
+When you have crossed the yard, where the manure yields underfoot with
+a spongy sound or have gone round it instead on the narrow paved path
+of difficult equilibrium, and when you have arrived at the entrance to
+the barn, you can see nothing at all.
+
+Then, if you persist, you make out a misty hollow where equally misty
+and dark lumps are asquat or prone or wandering from one corner to
+another. At the back, on the right and on the left, the pale gleams of
+two candles, each with the round halo of a distant moon allow you at
+last to make out the human shape of these masses, whose mouths emit
+either steam or thick smoke.
+
+Our hazy retreat, which I allow carefully to swallow me whole, is a
+scene of excitement this evening. We leave for the trenches to-morrow
+morning, and the nebulous tenants of the barn are beginning to pack up.
+
+Although darkness falls on my eyes and chokes them as I come in from
+the pallid evening, I still dodge the snares spread over the ground by
+water-bottles, mess-tins and weapons, but I butt full into the loaves
+that are packed together exactly in the middle, like the paving of a
+yard. I reach my corner. Something alive is there with a huge back,
+fleecy and rounded, squatting and stooping over a collection of little
+things that glitter on the ground, and I tap the shoulder upholstered
+in sheepskin. The being turns round, and by the dull and fitful gleam
+of a candle which a bayonet stuck in the ground upholds, I see one half
+of a face, an eye, the end of a mustache, and the corner of a half-open
+mouth. It growls in a friendly way, and resumes the inspection of its
+possessions.
+
+"What are you doing there?"
+
+"I'm fixing things, and clearing up."
+
+The quasi-brigand who appears to be checking his booty, is my comrade
+Volpatte. He has folded his tent-cloth in four and placed it on his
+bed--that is, on the truss of straw assigned to him--and on this carpet
+he has emptied and displayed the contents of his pockets.
+
+And it is quite a shop that he broods over with a housewife's
+solicitous eyes, watchful and jealous, lest some one walks over him.
+With my eye I tick off his copious exhibition.
+
+Alongside his handkerchief, pipe, tobacco-pouch (which also contains a
+note-book), knife, purse, and pocket pipe-lighter, which comprise the
+necessary and indispensable groundwork, here are two leather laces
+twisted like earthworms round a watch enclosed in a case of transparent
+celluloid, which has curiously dulled and blanched with age. Then a
+little round mirror, and another square one; this last, though broken,
+is of better quality, and bevel-edged. A flask of essence of
+turpentine, a flask of mineral oil nearly empty, and a third flask,
+empty. A German belt-plate, bearing the device, "Gott mit uns"; a
+dragoon's tassel of similar origin; half wrapped in paper, an aviator's
+arrow in the form of a steel pencil and pointed like a needle; folding
+scissors and a combined knife and fork of similar pliancy; a stump of
+pencil and one of candle; a tube of aspirin, also containing opium
+tablets, and several tin boxes.
+
+Observing that my inspection of his personal possessions is detailed,
+Volpatte helps me to identify certain items--
+
+"That, that's a leather officer's glove. I cut the fingers off to stop
+up the mouth of my blunderbuss with; that, that's telephone wire, the
+only thing to fasten buttons on your greatcoat with if you want 'em to
+stay there; and here, inside here, d'you know what that is? White
+thread, good stuff, not what you're put off with when they give you new
+things, a sort of macaroni au fromage that you pull out with a fork;
+and there's a set of needles on a post-card. The safety-pins, they're
+there, separate."
+
+"And here, that's the paper department. Quite a library."
+
+There is indeed a surprising collection of papers among the things
+disgorged by Volpatte's pockets--the violet packet of writing-paper,
+whose unworthy printed envelope is out at heels; an Army squad-book, of
+which the dirty and desiccated binding, like the skin of an old tramp,
+has perished and shrunk all over: a note-book with a chafed moleskin
+cover, and packed with papers and photographs, those of his wife and
+children enthroned in the middle.
+
+Out of this bundle of yellowed and darkened papers Volpatte extracts
+this photograph and shows it to me once more. I renew acquaintance with
+Madame Volpatte and her generous bosom, her mild and mellow features;
+and with the two little boys in white collars, the elder slender, the
+younger round as a ball.
+
+"I've only got photos of old people," says Biquet, who is twenty years
+old. He shows us a portrait holding it close to the candle, of two aged
+people who look at us with the same well-behaved air as Volpatte's
+children.
+
+"I've got mine with me, too," says another; "I always stick to the
+photo of the nestlings."
+
+"Course! Every man carries his crowd along," adds another.
+
+"It's funny," Barque declares, "a portrait wears itself out just with
+being looked at. You haven't got to gape at it too often, or be too
+long about it; in the long run, I don't know what happens, but the
+likeness mizzles."
+
+"You're right," says Blaire, "I've found it like that too, exactly.''
+
+"I've got a map of the district as well, among my papers," Volpatte
+continues. He unfolds it to the light. Illegible and transparent at the
+creases, it looks like one of those window-blinds made of squares sewn
+together.
+
+"I've some newspaper too"--he unfolds a newspaper article upon
+poilus--"and a book"--a twopence-half-penny novel, called Twice a
+Maid--"Tiens, another newspaper cutting from the Etampes Bee. Don't
+know why I've kept that, but there must be a reason somewhere. I'll
+think about it when I have time. And then, my pack of cards, and a set
+of draughts, with a paper board and the pieces made of sealing-wax."
+
+Barque comes up, regards the scene, and says, "I've a lot more things
+than that in my pockets." He addresses himself to Volpatte. "Have you
+got a Boche pay-book, louse-head, some phials of iodine, and a
+Browning? I've all that, and two knives."
+
+"I've no revolver," says Volpatte, "nor a Boche pay-book, but I could
+have had two knives or even ten knives; but I only need one."
+
+"That depends," says Barque. "And have you any mechanical buttons,
+fathead?"
+
+"I haven't any," cries Becuwe.
+
+"The private can't do without 'em," Lamuse asserts. "Without them, to
+make your braces stick to your breeches, the game's up."
+
+"And I've always got in my pocket," says Blaire, "so's they're within
+reach, my case of rings." He brings it cut, wrapped up in a gas-mask
+bag, and shakes it. The files ring inside, and we hear the jingle of
+aluminium rings in the rough.
+
+"I've always got string," says Biquet, "that's the useful stuff!"
+
+"Not so useful as nails," says Pepin, and he shows three in his hand,
+big, little, and average.
+
+One by one the others come to join in the conversation, to chaffer and
+cadge. We are getting used to the half-darkness. But Corporal Salavert,
+who has a well-earned reputation for dexterity, makes a hanging lamp
+with a candle and a tray, the latter contrived from a Camembert box and
+some wire. We light up, and around its illumination each man tells what
+he has in his pockets, with parental preferences and bias.
+
+"To begin with, how many have we?"
+
+"How many pockets? Eighteen," says some one--Cocon, of course, the man
+of figures.
+
+"Eighteen pockets! You're codding, rat-nose," says big Lamuse.
+
+"Exactly eighteen," replies Cocon. "Count them, if you're as clever as
+all that."
+
+Lamuse is willing to be guided by reason in the matter, and putting his
+two hands near the light so as to count accurately, he tells off his
+great brick-red fingers: Two pockets in the back of the greatcoat; one
+for the first-aid packet, which is used for tobacco; two inside the
+greatcoat in front; two outside it on each side, with flaps; three in
+the trousers, and even three and a half, counting the little one in
+front.
+
+"I'll bet a compass on it," says Farfadet.
+
+"And I, my bits of tinder."
+
+"I," says Tirloir, "I'll bet a teeny whistle that my wife sent me when
+she said, 'If you're wounded in the battle you must whistle, so that
+your comrades will come and save your life.'"
+
+We laugh at the artless words. Tulacque intervenes, and says
+indulgently to Tiloir, "They don't know what war is back there; and if
+you started talking about the rear, it'd be you that'd talk rot."
+
+"We won't count that pocket," says Salavert, "it's too small. That
+makes ten."
+
+"In the jacket, four. That only makes fourteen after all."
+
+"There are the two cartridge pockets, the two new ones that fasten with
+straps."
+
+"Sixteen," says Salavert.
+
+"Now, blockhead and son of misery, turn my jacket back. You haven't
+counted those two pockets. Now then, what more do you want? And yet
+they're just in the usual place. They're your civilian pockets, where
+you shoved your nose-rag, your tobacco, and the address where you'd got
+to deliver your parcel when you were a messenger."
+
+"Eighteen!" says Salavert, as grave as a judge. "There are eighteen,
+and no mistake; that's done it."
+
+At this point in the conversation, some one makes a series of noisy
+stumbles on the stones of the threshold with the sound of a horse
+pawing the ground--and blaspheming. Then, after a silence, the barking
+of a sonorous and authoritative voice--"Hey, inside there! Getting
+ready? Everything must be fixed up this evening and packed tight and
+solid, you know. Going into the first line this time, and we may have a
+hot time of it."
+
+"Right you are, right you are, mon adjutant," heedless voices answer.
+
+"How do you write 'Arnesse'?" asks Benech, who is on all fours, at work
+with a pencil and an envelope. While Cocon spells "Ernest" for him and
+the voice of the vanished adjutant is heard afar repeating his
+harangue, Blaire picks up the thread, and says--
+
+"You should always, my children--listen to what I'm telling you--put
+your drinking-cup in your pocket. I've tried to stick it everywhere
+else, but only the pocket's really practical, you take my word. If
+you're in marching order, or if you've doffed your kit to navigate the
+trenches either, you've always got it under your fist when chances
+come, like when a pal who's got some gargle, and feels good towards you
+says, 'Lend us your cup,' or a peddling wine-seller, either. My young
+bucks, listen to what I tell you; you'll always find it good--put your
+cup in your pocket."
+
+"No fear," says Lamuse, "you won't see me put my cup in my pocket;
+damned silly idea, no more or less. I'd a sight sooner sling it on a
+strap with a hook."
+
+"Fasten it on a greatcoat button, like the gas-helmet bag, that's a lot
+better; for suppose you take off your accouterments and there's any
+wine passing, you look soft."
+
+"I've got a Boche drinking-cup," says Barque; "it's flat, so it goes
+into a side pocket if you like, or it goes very well into a
+cartridge-pouch, once you've fired the damn things off or pitched them
+into a bag."
+
+"A Boche cup's nothing special," says Pepin; "it won't stand up, it's
+just lumber."
+
+"You wait and see, maggot-snout," says Tirette, who is something of a
+psychologist. "If we attack this time, same as the adjutant seemed to
+hint, perhaps you'll find a Boche cup, and then it'll be something
+special!"
+
+"The adjutant may have said that," Eudore observes, "but he doesn't
+know."
+
+"It holds more than a half-pint, the Boche cup," remarks Cocon, "seeing
+that the exact capacity of the half-pint is marked in the cup
+three-quarters way up; and it's always good for you to have a big one,
+for if you've got a cup that only just holds a half-pint, then so that
+you can get your half-pint of coffee or wine or holy water or what not,
+it's get to be filled right up, and they don't ever do it at
+serving-out, and if they do, you spill it."
+
+"I believe you that they don't fill it," says Paradis, exasperated by
+the recollection of that ceremony. "The quartermaster-sergeant, he
+pours it with his blasted finger in your cup and gives it two raps on
+its bottom. Result, you get a third, and your cup's in mourning with
+three black bands on top of each other."
+
+"Yes," says Barque, "that's true; but you shouldn't have a cup too big
+either, because the chap that's pouring it out for you, he suspects
+you, and let's it go in damned drops, and so as not to give you more
+than your measure he gives you less, and you can whistle for it, with
+your tureen in your fists."
+
+Volpatte puts back in his pockets, one by one, the items of his
+display. When he came to the purse, he looked at it with an air of deep
+compassion.
+
+"He's damnably flat, poor chap!" He counted the contents. "Three
+francs! My boy, I must set about feathering this nest again or I shall
+be stony when we get back."
+
+"You're not the only one that's broken-backed in the treasury."
+
+"The soldier spends more than he earns, and don't you forget it. I
+wonder what'd become of a man that only had his pay?"
+
+Paradis replies with concise simplicity, "He'd kick the bucket."
+
+"And see here, look what I've got in my pocket and never let go
+of"--Pepin, with merry eyes, shows us some silver table-things. "They
+belonged," he says, "to the ugly trollop where we were quartered at
+Grand-Rozoy."
+
+"Perhaps they still belong to her?"
+
+Pepin made an uncertain gesture, in which pride mingled with modesty;
+then, growing bolder, he smiled and said, "I knew her, the old sneak.
+Certainly, she'll spend the rest of her life looking in every corner
+for her silver things."
+
+"For my part," says Volpatte, "I've never been able to rake in more
+than a pair of scissors. Some people have the luck. I haven't. So
+naturally I watch 'em close, though I admit I've no use for 'em."
+
+"I've pinched a few bits of things here and there, but what of it? The
+sappers have always left me behind in the matter of pinching; so what
+about it?"
+
+"You can do what you like, you're always got at by some one in your
+turn, eh, my boy? Don't fret about it."
+
+"I keep my wife's letters," says Blaire.
+
+"And I send mine back to her."
+
+"And I keep them, too. Here they are." Eudore exposes a packet of worn
+and shiny paper, whose grimy condition the twilight modestly veils. "I
+keep them. Sometimes I read them again. When I'm cold and humpy, I read
+'em again. It doesn't actually warm you up, but it seems to."
+
+There must be a deep significance in the curious expression, for
+several men raise their heads and say, "Yes, that's so."
+
+By fits and starts the conversation goes on in the bosom of this
+fantastic barn and the great moving shadows that cross it; night is
+heaped up in its corners, and pointed by a few scattered and sickly
+candles.
+
+I watch these busy and burdened flitters come and go, outline
+themselves strangely, then stoop and slide down to the ground; they
+talk to themselves and to each other, their feet are encumbered by the
+litter. They are showing their riches to each other. "Tiens,
+look!"--"Great!" they reply enviously.
+
+What they have not got they want. There are treasures among the squad
+long coveted by all; the two-liter water-bottle, for instance,
+preserved by Barque, that a skillful rifle-shot with a blank cartridge
+has stretched to the capacity of two and a half liters; and Bertrand's
+famous great knife with the horn handle.
+
+Among the heaving swarm there are sidelong glances that skim these
+curiosities, and then each man resumes "eyes right," devotes himself to
+his belongings, and concentrates upon getting it in order.
+
+They are mournful belongings, indeed. Everything made for the soldier
+is commonplace, ugly, and of bad quality; from his cardboard boots,
+attached to the uppers by a criss-cross of worthless thread, to his
+badly cut, badly shaped, and badly sewn clothes, made of shoddy and
+transparent cloth--blotting-paper--that one day of sunshine fades and
+an hour of rain wets through, to his emaciated leathers, brittle as
+shavings and torn by the buckle spikes, to his flannel underwear that
+is thinner than cotton, to his straw-like tobacco.
+
+Marthereau is beside me, and he points to our comrades: "Look at them,
+these poor chaps gaping into their bags o' tricks. You'd say it was a
+mothers' meeting, ogling their kids. Hark to 'em. They're calling for
+their knick-knacks. Tiens, that one, the times he says 'My knife!' same
+as if he was calling 'Lon,' or 'Charles,' or 'Dolphus.' And you know
+it's impossible for them to make their load any less. Can't be did. It
+isn't that they don't want--our job isn't one that makes us any
+stronger, eh? But they can't. Too proud of 'em."
+
+The burdens to be borne are formidable, and one knows well enough,
+parbleu, that every item makes them more severe, each little addition
+is one bruise more.
+
+For it is not merely a matter of what one buries in his pockets and
+pouches. To complete the burden there is what one carries on his back.
+The knapsack is the trunk and even the cupboard; and the old soldier is
+familiar with the art of enlarging it almost miraculously by the
+judicious disposal of his household goods and provisions. Besides the
+regulation and obligatory contents--two tins of pressed beef, a dozen
+biscuits, two tablets of coffee and two packets of dried soup, the bag
+of sugar, fatigue smock, and spare boots--we find a way of getting in
+some pots of jam, tobacco, chocolate, candles, soft-soled shoes; and
+even soap, a spirit lamp, some solidified spirit, and some woolen
+things. With the blanket, sheet, tentcloth, trenching-tool,
+water-bottle, and an item of the field-cooking kit, [note 1] the burden
+gets heavier and taller and wider, monumental and crushing. And my
+neighbor says truly that every time he reaches his goal after some
+miles of highway and communication trenches, the poilu swears hard that
+the next time he'll leave a heap of things behind and give his
+shoulders a little relief from the yoke of the knapsack. But every time
+he is preparing for departure, he assumes again the same overbearing
+and almost superhuman load; he never lets it go, though he curses it
+always.
+
+"There are some bad boys," says Lamuse, "among the shirkers, that find
+a way of keeping something in the company wagon or the medical van. I
+know one that's got two shirts and a pair of drawers in an adjutant's
+canteen [note 2]--but, you see, there's two hundred and fifty chaps in
+the company, and they're all up to the dodge and not many of 'em can
+profit by it; it's chiefly the non-coms.; the more stripes they've got,
+the easier it is to plant their luggage, not forgetting that the
+commandant visits the wagons sometimes without warning and fires your
+things into the middle of the road if he finds 'em in a horse-box where
+they've no business--Be off with you!--not to mention the bully-ragging
+and the clink."
+
+"In the early days it was all right, my boy. There were some
+chaps--I've seen 'em--who stuck their bags and even their knapsacks in
+baby-carts and pushed 'em along the road."
+
+"Ah, not half! Those were the good times of the war. But all that's
+changed."
+
+Volpatte, deaf to all the talk, muffled in his blanket as if in a shawl
+which makes him look like an old witch, revolves round an object that
+lies on the ground. "I'm wondering," he says, addressing no one,
+"whether to take away this damned tin stove. It's the only one in the
+squad and I've always carried it. Oui, but it leaks like a cullender."
+He cannot decide, and makes a really pathetic picture of separation.
+
+Barque watches him obliquely, and makes fun of him. We hear him say,
+"Senile dodderer!" But he pauses in his chaffing to say, "After all, if
+we were in his shoes we should be equally fatheaded."
+
+Volpatte postpones his decision till later. "I'll see about it in the
+morning, when I'm loading the camel's back."
+
+After the inspection and recharging of pockets, it is the turn of the
+bags, and then of the cartridge-pouches, and Barque holds forth on the
+way to make the regulation two hundred cartridges go into the three
+pouches. In the lump it is impossible. They must be unpacked and placed
+side by side upright, head against foot. Thus can one cram each pouch
+without leaving any space, and make himself a waistband that weighs
+over twelve pounds.
+
+Rifles have been cleaned already. One looks to the swathing of the
+breech and the plugging of the muzzle, precautions which trench-dirt
+renders indispensable.
+
+How every rifle can easily be recognized is discussed. "I've made some
+nicks in the sling. See, I've cut into the edge."
+
+"I've twisted a bootlace round the top of the sling, and that way, I
+can tell it by touch as well as seeing."
+
+"I use a mechanical button. No mistake about that. In the dark I can
+find it at once and say, 'That's my pea-shooter. Because, you know,
+there are some boys that don't bother themselves; they just roll around
+while the pals are cleaning theirs, and then they're devilish quick at
+putting a quiet fist on a popgun that's been cleaned; and then after
+they've even the cheek to go and say, 'Mon capitaine, I've got a rifle
+that's a bit of all right.' I'm not on in that act. It's the D system,
+my old wonder--a damned dirty dodge, and there are times when I'm fed
+up with it, and more."
+
+And thus, though their rifles are all alike, they are as different as
+their handwriting.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"It's curious and funny," says Marthereau to me "we're going up to the
+trenches to-morrow, and there's nobody drunk yet, nor that way
+inclined. Ah, I don't say," he concedes at once, "but what those two
+there aren't a bit fresh, nor a little elevated; without being
+absolutely blind, they're somewhat boozed, pr'aps--"
+
+"It's Poitron and Poilpot, of Broyer's squad."
+
+They are lying down and talking in a low voice. We can make out the
+round nose of one, which stands out equally with his mouth, close by a
+candle, and with his hand, whose lifted finger makes little explanatory
+signs, faithfully followed by the shadow it casts.
+
+"I know how to light a fire, but I don't know how to light it again
+when it's gone out," declares Poitron.
+
+"Ass!" says Poilpot, "if you know how to light it you know how to
+relight it, seeing that if you light it, it's because it's gone out,
+and you might say that you're relighting it when you're lighting it."
+
+"That's all rot. I'm not mathematical, and to hell with the gibberish
+you talk. I tell you and I tell you again that when it comes to
+lighting a fire, I'm there, but to light it again when it's gone out,
+I'm no good. I can't speak any straighter than that."
+
+I do not catch the insistent retort of Poilpot, but--"But, you damned
+numskull," gurgles Poitron, "haven't I told you thirty times that I
+can't? You must have a pig's head, anyway!"
+
+Marthereau confides to me, "I've heard about enough of that." Obviously
+he spoke too soon just now.
+
+A sort of fever, provoked by farewell libations, prevails in the
+wretched straw-spread hole where our tribe--some upright and hesitant,
+others kneeling and hammering like colliers--is mending, stacking, and
+subduing its provisions, clothes, and tools. There is a wordy growling,
+a riot of gesture. From the smoky glimmers, rubicund faces start forth
+in relief, and dark hands move about in the shadows like marionettes.
+In the barn next to ours, and separated from it only by a wall of a
+man's height, arise tipsy shouts. Two men in there have fallen upon
+each other with fierce violence and anger. The air is vibrant with the
+coarsest expressions the human ear ever hears. But one of the
+disputants, a stranger from another squad, is ejected by the tenants,
+and the flow of curses from the other grows feebler and expires.
+
+"Same as us," says Marthereau with a certain pride, "they hold
+themselves in!"
+
+It is true. Thanks to Bertrand, who is possessed by a hatred of
+drunkenness, of the fatal poison that gambles with multitudes, our
+squad is one of the least befouled by wine and brandy.
+
+They are shouting and singing and talking all around. And they laugh
+endlessly, for in the human mechanism laughter is the sound of wheels
+that work, of deeds that are done.
+
+One tries to fathom certain faces that show up in provocative relief
+among this menagerie of shadows, this aviary of reflections. But one
+cannot. They are visible, but you can see nothing in the depth of them.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Ten o'clock already, friends," says Bertrand. "We'll finish the
+camel's humps off to-morrow. Time for by-by." Each one then slowly
+retires to rest, but the jabbering hardly pauses. Man takes all things
+easily when he is under no obligation to hurry. The men go to and fro,
+each with some object in his hand, and along the wall I watch Eudore's
+huge shadow gliding, as he passes in front of a candle with two little
+bags of camphor hanging from the end of his fingers.
+
+Lamuse is throwing himself about in search of a good position; he seems
+ill at ease. To-day, obviously, and whatever his capacity may be, he
+has eaten too much.
+
+"Some of us want to sleep! Shut them up, you lot of louts!" cries
+Mesnil Joseph from his litter.
+
+This entreaty has a subduing effect for a moment, but does not stop the
+burble of voices nor the passing to and fro.
+
+"We're going up to-morrow, it's true," says Paradis, "and in the
+evening we shall go into the first line. But nobody's thinking about
+it. We know it, and that's all."
+
+Gradually each has regained his place. I have stretched myself on the
+straw, and Marthereau wraps himself up by my side.
+
+Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise. It is
+the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded simpleton
+in spectacles. When he has taken off his greatcoat and appears in his
+jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about showing his legs.
+We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette of a bearded
+hippopotamus. He blows, sighs, and mutters.
+
+Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his head, and says to me, "Look
+at him. Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge. When we ask
+him what he does in civil life, he won't say 'I'm a school teacher' he
+says, leering at you from under his specs with the half of his eyes,
+'I'm a professor.' When he gets up very early to go to mass, he says,
+'I've got belly-ache, I must go and take a turn round the corner and no
+mistake.'"
+
+A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland: "Where I
+live, it's just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes. There's my old man
+there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he's working or resting,
+he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the stove."
+
+I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialized and
+technical character: "That's why he makes a paillon. D'you know what a
+paillon is? You take a stalk of green corn and peel it. You split it in
+two and then in two again, and you have different sizes. Then with a
+thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the stem of his
+pipe--"
+
+The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.
+
+There are only two candles alight. A wide wing of darkness overspreads
+the prostrate collection of men.
+
+Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory, and
+some fragments of it reach my ears. Just now, Papa Ramure is abusing
+the commandant.
+
+"The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I've
+noticed he don't know how to smoke. He sucks all out at his pipes, and
+he burns 'em. It isn't a mouth he's got in his head, it's a snout. The
+wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it's coal. Clay
+pipes, they'll stick it better, but he roasts 'em brown all the same.
+Talk about a snout! So, old man, mind what I'm telling you, he'll come
+to what doesn't ever happen often; through being forced to get
+white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe'll explode in his nose
+before everybody. You'll see."
+
+Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of the
+barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The lines
+of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by side in
+their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth diversified
+snoring.
+
+With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to me
+about himself: "I'm a buyer of rags, you know," he says, "or to put it
+better, a rag merchant. But me, I'm wholesale; I buy from the little
+rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop--a warehouse mind
+you!--which I use as a depot. I deal in all kinds of rags, from linen
+to jam-pots, but principally brush-handles, sacks, and old shoes; and
+naturally, I make a specialty of rabbit-skins."
+
+And a little later I still hear him: "As for me, little and
+queer-shaped as I am, all the same I can carry a bin of two hundred
+pounds' weight to the warehouse, up the steps, and my feet in sabots.
+Once I had a to-do with a person--"
+
+"What I can't abide," cries Fouillade, all of a sudden, "is the
+exercises and marches they give us when we're resting. My back's
+mincemeat, and I can't get a snooze even, I'm that cramped."
+
+There is a metallic noise in Volpatte's direction. He has decided to
+take the stove, though he chides it constantly for the fatal fault of
+its perforations.
+
+One who is but half asleep groans, "Oh, la, la! When will this war
+finish!"
+
+A cry of stubborn and mysterious rebellion bursts forth--"They'd take
+the very skin off us!"
+
+There follows a single, "Don't fret yourself!" as darkly inconsequent
+as the cry of revolt.
+
+I wake up a long time afterwards, as two o'clock is striking; and in a
+pallor of light which doubtless comes from the moon, I see the agitated
+silhouette of Pinegal. A cock has crowed afar. Pinegal raises himself
+halfway to a sitting position, and I hear his husky voice: "Well now,
+it's the middle of the night, and there's a cock loosing his jaw. He's
+blind drunk, that cock." He laughs, and repeats, "He's blind, that
+cock," and he twists himself again into the woolens, and resumes his
+slumber with a gurgle in which snores are mingled with merriment.
+
+Cocon has been wakened by Pinegal. The man of figures therefore thinks
+aloud, and says: "The squad had seventeen men when it set off for the
+war. It has seventeen also at present, with the stop-gaps. Each man has
+already worn out four greatcoats, one of the original blue, and three
+cigar-smoke blue, two pairs of trousers and six pairs of boots. One
+must count two rifles to each man, but one can't count the overalls.
+Our emergency rations have been renewed twenty-three times. Among us
+seventeen, we've been mentioned fourteen times in Army Orders, of which
+two were to the Brigade, four to the Division, and one to the Army.
+Once we stayed sixteen days in the trenches without relief. We've been
+quartered and lodged in forty-seven different villages up to now. Since
+the beginning of the campaign, twelve thousand men have passed through
+the regiment, which consists of two thousand."
+
+A strange lisping noise interrupts him. It comes from Blaire, whose new
+ivories prevent him from talking as they also prevent him from eating.
+But he puts them in every evening, and retains them all night with
+fierce determination, for he was promised that in the end he would grow
+accustomed to the object they have put into his head.
+
+I raise myself on my elbow, as on a battlefield, and look once more on
+the beings whom the scenes and happenings of the times have rolled up
+all together. I look at them all, plunged in the abyss of passive
+oblivion, some of them seeming still to be absorbed in their pitiful
+anxieties, their childish instincts, and their slave-like ignorance.
+
+The intoxication of sleep masters me. But I recall what they have done
+and what they will do; and with that consummate picture of a sorry
+human night before me, a shroud that fills our cavern with darkness, I
+dream of some great unknown light.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1] There is a complete set for each squad--stoves, canvas
+buckets, coffee-mill, pan, etc--and each man carries some item on
+march.--Tr.
+
+[note 2] Cantine vivres, chest containing two days' rations and cooking
+utensils for four or five officers.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+The Egg
+
+
+WE were badly off, hungry and thirsty; and in these wretched quarters
+there was nothing!
+
+Something had gone wrong with the revictualing department and our wants
+were becoming acute. Where the sorry place surrounded them, with its
+empty doors, its bones of houses, and its bald-headed telegraph posts,
+a crowd of hungry men were grinding their teeth and confirming the
+absence of everything:--"The juice has sloped and the wine's up the
+spout, and the bully's zero. Cheese? Nix. Napoo jam, napoo butter on
+skewers."
+
+"We've nothing, and no error, nothing; and play hell as you like, it
+doesn't help."
+
+"Talk about rotten quarters! Three houses with nothing inside but
+draughts and damp."
+
+"No good having any of the filthy here, you might as well have only the
+skin of a bob in your purse, as long as there's nothing to buy."
+
+"You might be a Rothschild, or even a military tailor, but what use'd
+your brass be?"
+
+"Yesterday there was a bit of a cat mewing round where the 7th are. I
+feel sure they've eaten it."
+
+"Yes, there was; you could see its ribs like rocks on the sea-shore."
+
+"There were some chaps," says Blaire, "who bustled about when they got
+here and managed to find a few bottles of common wine at the bacca-shop
+at the corner of the street."
+
+"Ah, the swine! Lucky devils to be sliding that down their necks."
+
+"It was muck, all the same, it'd make your cup as black as your
+baccy-pipe."
+
+"There are some, they say, who've swallowed a fowl."
+
+"Damn," says Fouillade.
+
+"I've hardly had a bite. I had a sardine left, and a little tea in the
+bottom of a bag that I chewed up with some sugar."
+
+"You can't even have a bit of a drunk--it's off the map."
+
+"And that isn't enough either, even when you're not a big eater and
+you're got a communication trench as flat as a pancake."
+
+"One meal in two days--a yellow mess, shining like gold, no broth and
+no meat--everything left behind."
+
+"And worst of all we've nothing to light a pipe with."
+
+"True, and that's misery. I haven't a single match. I had several bits
+of ends, but they've gone. I've hunted in vain through all the pockets
+of my flea-case--nix. As for buying them it's hopeless, as you say."
+
+"I've got the head of a match that I'm keeping." It is a real hardship
+indeed, and the sight is pitiful of the poilus who cannot light pipe or
+cigarette but put them away in their pockets and stroll in resignation.
+By good fortune, Tirloir has his petrol pipe-lighter and it still
+contains a little spirit. Those who are aware of it gather round him,
+bringing their pipes packed and cold. There is not even any paper to
+light, and the flame itself must be used until the remaining spirit in
+its tiny insect's belly is burned.
+
+As for me, I've been lucky, and I see Paradis wandering about, his
+kindly face to the wind, grumbling and chewing a bit of wood. "Tiens,"
+I say to him, "take this."
+
+"A box of matches!" he exclaims amazed, looking at it as one looks at a
+jewel. "Egad! That's capital! Matches!"
+
+A moment later we see him lighting his pipe, his face saucily sideways
+and splendidly crimsoned by the reflected flame, and everybody shouts,
+"Paradis' got some matches!"
+
+Towards evening I meet Paradis near the ruined triangle of a
+house-front at the corner of the two streets of this most miserable
+among villages.
+
+He beckons to me. "Hist!" He has a curious and rather awkward air.
+
+"I say," he says to me affectionately, but looking at his feet, "a bit
+since, you chucked me a box of flamers. Well, you're going to get a bit
+of your own back for it. Here!"
+
+He puts something in my hand. "Be careful!" he whispers, "it's fragile!"
+
+Dazzled by the resplendent purity of his present, hardly even daring to
+believe my eyes, I see--an egg!
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+An Idyll
+
+
+"REALLY and truly," said Paradis, my neighbor in the ranks, "believe me
+or not, I'm knocked out--I've never before been so paid on a march as I
+have been with this one, this evening."
+
+His feet were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the burden
+of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline seemed almost
+fantastic. Twice he tripped and stumbled.
+
+Paradis is tough. But he had been running up and down the trench all
+night as liaison man while the others were sleeping, so he had good
+reason to be exhausted and to growl "Quoi? These kilometers must be
+made of india-rubber, there's no way out of it."
+
+Every three steps he hoisted his knapsack roughly up with a hitch of
+his hips, and panted under its dragging; and all the heap that he made
+with his bundles tossed and creaked like an overloaded wagon.
+
+"We're there," said a non-com.
+
+Non-coms. always say that, on every occasion. But--in spite of the
+non-com.'s declaration--we were really arriving in a twilight village
+which seemed to be drawn in white chalk and heavy strokes of black upon
+the blue paper of the sky, where the sable silhouette of the church--a
+pointed tower flanked by two turrets more slender and more sharp--was
+that of a tall cypress.
+
+But the soldier, even when he enters the village where he is to be
+quartered, has not reached the end of his troubles. It rarely happens
+that either the squad or the section actually lodges in the place
+assigned to them, and this by reason of misunderstandings and cross
+purposes which tangle and disentangle themselves on the spot; and it is
+only after several quarter-hours of tribulation that each man is led to
+his actual shelter of the moment.
+
+So after the usual wanderings we were admitted to our night's
+lodging--a roof supported by four posts, and with the four quarters of
+the compass for its walls. But it was a good roof--an advantage which
+we could appreciate. It was already sheltering a cart and a plow, and
+we settled ourselves by them. Paradis, who had fumed and complained
+without ceasing during the hour we had spent in tramping to and fro,
+threw down his knapsack and then himself, and stayed there awhile,
+weary to the utmost, protesting that his limbs were benumbed, that the
+soles of his feet were painful, and indeed all the rest of him.
+
+But now the house to which our hanging roof was subject, the house
+which stood just in front of us, was lighted up. Nothing attracts a
+soldier in the gray monotony of evening so much as a window whence
+beams the star of a lamp.
+
+"Shall we have a squint?" proposed Volpatte.
+
+"So be it," said Paradis. He gets up gradually, and hobbling with
+weariness, steers himself towards the golden window that has appeared
+in the gloom, and then towards the door. Volpatte follows him, and I
+Volpatte.
+
+We enter, and ask the old man who has let us in and whose twinkling
+head is as threadbare as an old hat, if he has any wine to sell.
+
+"No," replies the old man, shaking his head, where a little white fluff
+crops out in places.
+
+"No beer? No coffee? Anything at all--"
+
+"No, mes amis, nothing of anything. We don't belong here; we're
+refugees, you know."
+
+"Then seeing there's nothing, we'll be off." We right-about face. At
+least we have enjoyed for a moment the warmth which pervades the house
+and a sight of the lamp. Already Volpatte has gained the threshold and
+his back is disappearing in the darkness.
+
+But I espy an old woman, sunk in the depths of a chair in the other
+corner of the kitchen, who appears to have some busy occupation.
+
+I pinch Paradis' arm. "There's the belle of the house. Shall we pay our
+addresses to her?"
+
+Paradis makes a gesture of lordly indifference. He has lost interest in
+women--all those he has seen for a year and a half were not for him;
+and moreover, even when they would like to be his, he is equally
+uninterested.
+
+"Young or old--pooh!" he says to me, beginning to yawn. For want of
+something to do and to lengthen the leaving, he goes up to the
+goodwife. "Good-evening, gran'ma," he mumbles, finishing his yawn.
+
+"Good-evening, mes enfants," quavers the old dame. So near, we see her
+in detail. She is shriveled, bent and bowed in her old bones, and the
+whole of her face is white as the dial of a clock.
+
+And what is she doing? Wedged between her chair and the edge of the
+table she is trying to clean some boots. It is a heavy task for her
+infantile hands; their movements are uncertain, and her strokes with
+the brush sometimes go astray. The boots, too, are very dirty indeed.
+
+Seeing that we are watching her, she whispers to us that she must
+polish them well, and this evening too, for they are her little girl's
+boots, who is a dressmaker in the town and goes off first thing in the
+morning.
+
+Paradis has stooped to look at the boots more closely, and suddenly he
+puts his hand out towards them. "Drop it, gran'ma; I'll spruce up your
+lass's trotter-cases for you in three secs."
+
+The old woman lodges an objection by shaking her head and her
+shoulders. But Paradis takes the boots with authority, while the
+grandmother, paralyzed by her weakness, argues the question and opposes
+us with shadowy protest.
+
+Paradis has taken a boot in each hand; he holds them gingerly and looks
+at them for a moment, and you would even say that he was squeezing them
+a little.
+
+"Aren't they small!" he says in a voice which is not what we hear in
+the usual way.
+
+He has secured the brushes as well, and sets himself to wielding them
+with zealous carefulness. I notice that he is smiling, with his eyes
+fixed on his work.
+
+Then, when the mud has gone from the boots, he takes some polish on the
+end of the double-pointed brush and caresses them with it intently.
+
+They are dainty boots--quite those of a stylish young lady; rows of
+little buttons shine on them.
+
+"Not a single button missing," he whispers to me, and there is pride in
+his tone.
+
+He is no longer sleepy; he yawns no more. On the contrary, his lips are
+tightly closed; a gleam of youth and spring-time lights up his face;
+and he who was on the point of going to sleep seems just to have woke
+up.
+
+And where the polish has bestowed a beautiful black his fingers move
+over the body of the boot, which opens widely in the upper part and
+betrays--ever such a little--the lower curves of the leg. His fingers,
+so skilled in polishing, are rather awkward all the same as they turn
+the boots over and turn them again, as he smiles at them and
+ponders--profoundly and afar--while the old woman lifts her arms in the
+air and calls me to witness "What a very kind soldier!" he is.
+
+It is finished. The boots are cleaned and finished off in style; they
+are like mirrors. Nothing is left to do.
+
+He puts them on the edge of the table, very carefully, as if they were
+saintly relics; then at last his hands let them go. But his eyes do not
+at once leave them. He looks at them, and then lowering his head, he
+looks at his own boots. I remember that while he made this comparison
+the great lad--a hero by destiny, a Bohemian, a monk--smiled once more
+with all his heart.
+
+The old woman was showing signs of activity in the depths of her chair;
+she had an idea. "I'll tell her! She shall thank you herself, monsieur!
+Hey, Josephine!" she cried, turning towards a door.
+
+But Paradis stopped her with an expansive gesture which I thought
+magnificent. "No, it's not worth while, gran'ma; leave her where she
+is. We're going. We won't trouble her, allez!"
+
+Such decision sounded in his voice that it carried authority, and the
+old woman obediently sank into inactivity and held her peace.
+
+We went away to our bed under the wall-less roof, between the arms of
+the plow that was waiting for us. And then Paradis began again to yawn;
+but by the light of the candle in our crib, a full minute later, I saw
+that the happy smile remained yet on his face.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+In the Sap
+
+
+IN the excitement of a distribution of letters from which the squad
+were returning--some with the delight of a letter, some with the
+semi-delight of a postcard, and others with a new load (speedily
+reassumed) of expectation and hope--a comrade comes with a brandished
+newspaper to tell us an amazing story--"Tu sais, the weasel-faced
+ancient at Gauchin?"
+
+"The old boy who was treasure-seeking?"
+
+"Well, he's found it!"
+
+"Gerraway!"
+
+"It's just as I tell you, you great lump! What would you like me to say
+to you? Mass? Don't know it. Anyway, the yard of his place has been
+bombed, and a chest full of money was turned up out of the ground near
+a wall. He got his treasure full on the back. And now the parson's
+quietly cut in and talks about claiming credit for the miracle."
+
+We listen open-mouthed. "A treasure--well! well! The old bald-head!"
+
+The sudden revelation plunges us in an abyss of reflection. "And to
+think how damned sick we were of the old cackler when he made such a
+song about his treasure and dinned it into our ears!"
+
+"We were right enough down there, you remember, when we were saying
+'One never knows.' Didn't guess how near we were to being right,
+either."
+
+"All the same, there are some things you can be sure of," says
+Farfadet, who as soon as Gauchin was mentioned had remained dreaming
+and distant, as though a lovely face was smiling on him. "But as for
+this," he added, "I'd never have believed it either! Shan't I find him
+stuck up, the old ruin, when I go back there after the war!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"They want a willing man to help the sappers with a job," says the big
+adjutant.
+
+"Not likely!" growl the men, without moving.
+
+"It'll be of use in relieving the boys," the adjutant goes on.
+
+With that the grumbling ceases, and several heads are raised. "Here!"
+says Lamuse.
+
+"Get into your harness, big 'un, and come with me." Lamuse buckles on
+his knapsack, rolls up his blanket, and fetters his pouches. Since his
+seizure of unlucky affection was allayed, he has become more melancholy
+than before, and although a sort of fatality makes him continually
+stouter, he has become engrossed and isolated, and rarely speaks.
+
+In the evening something comes along the trench, rising and falling
+according to the lumps and holes in the ground; a shape that seems in
+the shadows to be swimming, that outspreads its arms sometimes, as
+though appealing for help. It is Lamuse.
+
+He is among us again, covered with mold and mud. He trembles and
+streams with sweat, as one who is afraid. His lips stir, and he gasps,
+before they can shape a word.
+
+"Well, what is there?" we ask him vainly.
+
+He collapses in a corner among us and prostrates himself. We offer him
+wine, and he refuses it with a sign. Then he turns towards me and
+beckons me with a movement of his head.
+
+When I am by him he whispers to me, very low, and as if in church, "I
+have seen Eudoxie again." He gasps for breath, his chest wheezes, and
+with his eyeballs fast fixed upon a nightmare, he says, "She was
+putrid."
+
+"It was the place we'd lost," Lamuse went on, "and that the Colonials
+took again with the bayonet ten days ago.
+
+"First we made a hole for the sap, and I was in at it, since I was
+scooping more than the others I found myself in front. The others were
+widening and making solid behind. But behold I find a jumble of beams.
+I'd lit on an old trench, caved in, 'vidently; half caved in--there was
+some space and room. In the middle of those stumps of wood all mixed
+together that I was lifting away one by one from in front of me, there
+was something like a big sandbag in height, upright, and something on
+the top of it hanging down.
+
+"And behold a plank gives way, and the queer sack falls on me, with its
+weight on top. I was pegged down, and the smell of a corpse filled my
+throat--on the top of the bundle there was a head, and it was the hair
+that I'd seen hanging down.
+
+"You understand, one couldn't see very well; but I recognized the hair
+'cause there isn't any other like it in the world, and then the rest of
+the face, all stove in and moldy, the neck pulped, and all the lot dead
+for a month perhaps. It was Eudoxie, I tell you.
+
+"Yes, it was the woman I could never go near before, you know--that I
+only saw a long way off and couldn't ever touch, same as diamonds. She
+used to run about everywhere, you know. She used even to wander in the
+lines. One day she must have stopped a bullet, and stayed there, dead
+and lost, until the chance of this sap.
+
+"You clinch the position? I was forced to hold her up with one arm as
+well as I could, and work with the other. She was trying to fall on me
+with all her weight. Old man, she wanted to kiss me, and I didn't
+want--it was terrible. She seemed to be saying to me, 'You wanted to
+kiss me, well then, come, come now!' She had on her--she had there,
+fastened on, the remains of a bunch of flowers, and that was rotten,
+too, and the posy stank in my nose like the corpse of some little beast.
+
+"I had to take her in my arms, in both of them, and turn gently round
+so that I could put her down on the other side. The place was so narrow
+and pinched that as we turned, for a moment, I hugged her to my breast
+and couldn't help it. With all my strength, old chap, as I should have
+hugged her once on a time if she'd have let me.
+
+"I've been half an hour cleaning myself from the touch of her and the
+smell that she breathed on me in spite of me and in spite of herself.
+Ah, lucky for me that I'm as done up as a wretched cart-horse!"
+
+He turns over on his belly, clenches his fists, and slumbers, with his
+face buried in the ground and his dubious dream of passion and
+corruption.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+A Box of Matches
+
+
+IT is five o'clock in the evening. Three men are seen moving in the
+bottom of the gloomy trench. Around their extinguished fire in the
+dirty excavation they are frightful to see, black and sinister. Rain
+and negligence have put their fire out, and the four cooks are looking
+at the corpses of brands that are shrouded in ashes and the stumps of
+wood whence the flame has flown.
+
+Volpatte staggers up to the group and throws down the black mass that
+he had on his shoulder. "I've pulled it out of a dug-out where it won't
+show much."
+
+"We have wood," says Blaire, "but we've got to light it. Otherwise, how
+are we going to cook this cab-horse?"
+
+"It's a fine piece," wails a dark-faced man, "thin flank. In my belief,
+that's the best bit of the beast, the flank."
+
+"Fire?" Volpatte objects, "there are no more matches, no more anything."
+
+"We must have fire," growls Poupardin, whose indistinct bulk has the
+proportions of a bear as he rolls and sways in the dark depths of our
+cage.
+
+"No two ways about it, we've got to have it," Pepin agrees. He is
+coming out of a dug-out like a sweep out of a chimney. His gray mass
+emerges and appears, like night upon evening.
+
+"Don't worry; I shall get some," declares Blaire in a concentrated tone
+of angry decision. He has not been cook long, and is keen to show
+himself quite equal to adverse conditions in the exercise of his
+functions.
+
+He spoke as Martin Cesar used to speak when he was alive. His aim is to
+resemble the great legendary figure of the cook who always found ways
+for a fire, just as others, among the non-coms., would fain imitate
+Napoleon.
+
+"I shall go if it's necessary and fetch every bit of wood there is at
+Battalion H.Q. I shall go and requisition the colonel's matches--I
+shall go--"
+
+"Let's go and forage." Poupardin leads the way. His face is like the
+bottom of a saucepan that the fire has gradually befouled. As it is
+cruelly cold, he is wrapped up all over. He wears a cape which is half
+goatskin and half sheepskin, half brown and half whitish, and this
+twofold skin of tints geometrically cut makes him like some strange
+occult animal.
+
+Pepin has a cotton cap so soiled and so shiny with grease that it might
+be made of black silk. Volpatte, inside his Balaklava and his fleeces,
+resembles a walking tree-trunk. A square opening betrays a yellow face
+at the top of the thick and heavy bark of the mass he makes, which is
+bifurcated by a couple of legs.
+
+"Let's look up the 10th. They've always got the needful. They're on the
+Pylones road, beyond the Boyau-Neuf."
+
+The four alarming objects get under way, cloud-shape, in the trench
+that unwinds itself sinuously before them like a blind alley, unsafe,
+unlighted, and unpaved. It is uninhabited, too, in this part, being a
+gangway between the second lines and the first lines.
+
+In the dusty twilight two Moroccans meet the fire-questing cooks. One
+has the skin of a black boot and the other of a yellow shoe. Hope
+gleams in the depths of the cooks' hearts.
+
+"Matches, boys?"
+
+"Napoo," replies the black one, and his smile reveals his long
+crockery-like teeth in his cigar-colored mouth of moroccan leather.
+
+In his turn the yellow one advances and asks, "Tobacco? A bit of
+tobacco?" And he holds out his greenish sleeve and his great hard paw,
+in which the cracks are full of brown dirt, and the nails purplish.
+
+Pepin growls, rummages in his clothes, and pulls out a pinch of
+tobacco, mixed with dust, which he hands to the sharpshooter.
+
+A little farther they meet a sentry who is half asleep--in the middle
+of the evening--on a heap of loose earth. The drowsy soldier says,
+"It's to the right, and then again to the right, and then straight
+forward. Don't go wrong about it."
+
+They march--for a long time. "We must have come a long way," says
+Volpatte, after half an hour of fruitless paces and encloistered
+loneliness.
+
+"I say, we're going downhill a hell of a lot, don't you think?" asks
+Blaire.
+
+"Don't worry, old duffer," scoffs Pepin, "but if you've got cold feet
+you can leave us to it."
+
+Still we tramp on in the falling night. The ever-empty trench--a desert
+of terrible length--has taken a shabby and singular appearance. The
+parapets are in ruins; earthslides have made the ground undulate in
+hillocks.
+
+An indefinite uneasiness lays hold of the four huge fire-hunters, and
+increases as night overwhelms them in this monstrous road.
+
+Pepin, who is leading just now, stands fast and holds up his hand as a
+signal to halt. "Footsteps," they say in a sobered tone.
+
+Then, and in the heart of them, they are afraid. It was a mistake for
+them all to leave their shelter for so long. They are to blame. And one
+never knows.
+
+"Get in there, quick, quick!" says Pepin, pointing to a right-angled
+cranny on the ground level.
+
+By the test of a hand, the rectangular shadow is proved to be the entry
+to a funk-hole. They crawl in singly; and the last one, impatient,
+pushes the others; they become an involuntary carpet in the dense
+darkness of the hole.
+
+A sound of steps and of voices becomes distinct and draws nearer. From
+the mass of the four men who tightly hung up the burrow, tentative
+hands are put out at a venture. All at once Pepin murmurs in a stifled
+voice, "What's this?"
+
+"What?" ask the others, pressed and wedged against him.
+
+"Clips!" says Pepin under his breath, "Boche cartridge-clips on the
+shelf! We're in the Boche trench!"
+
+"Let's hop it." Three men make a jump to get out.
+
+"Look out, bon Dieu! Don't stir!--footsteps--"
+
+They hear some one walking, with the quick step of a solitary man. They
+keep still and hold their breath. With their eyes fixed on the ground
+level, they see the darkness moving on the right, and then a shadow
+with legs detaches itself, approaches, and passes. The shadow assumes
+an outline. It is topped by a helmet covered with a cloth and rising to
+a point. There is no other sound than that of his passing feet.
+
+Hardly has the German gone by when the four cooks, with no concerted
+plan and with a single movement, burst forth, jostling each other, run
+like madmen, and hurl themselves on him.
+
+"Kamerad, messieurs!" he says.
+
+But the blade of a knife gleams and disappears. The man collapses as if
+he would plunge into the ground. Pepin seizes the helmet as the Boche
+is failing and keeps it in his hand.
+
+"Let's leg it," growls the voice of Poupardin.
+
+"Got to search him first!"
+
+They lift him and turn him over, and set the soft, damp and warm body
+up again. Suddenly he coughs.
+
+"He isn't dead!"--"Yes, he is dead; that's the air."
+
+They shake him by the pockets; with hasty breathing the four black men
+stoop over their task. "The helmet's mine," says Pepin. "It was me that
+knifed him, I want the helmet."
+
+They tear from the body its pocket-book of still warm papers, its
+field-glass, purse, and leggings.
+
+"Matches!" shouts Blaire, shaking a box, "he's got some!"
+
+"Ah, the fool that you are!" hisses Volpatte.
+
+"Now let's be off like hell." They pile the body in a corner and break
+into a run, prey to a sort of panic, and regardless of the row their
+disordered flight makes.
+
+"It's this way!--This way!--Hurry, lads--for all you're worth!"
+
+Without speaking they dash across the maze of the strangely empty
+trench that seems to have no end.
+
+"My wind's gone," says Blaire, "I'm--" He staggers and stops.
+
+"Come on, buck up, old chap," gasps Pepin, hoarse and breathless. He
+takes him by the sleeve and drags him forward like a stubborn
+shaft-horse.
+
+"We're right!" says Poupardin suddenly. "Yes, I remember that tree.
+It's the Pylones road!"
+
+"Ah!" wails Blaire, whose breathing is shaking him like an engine. He
+throws himself forward with a last impulse--and sits down on the ground.
+
+"Halt!" cries a sentry--"Good Lord!" he stammers as he sees the four
+poilus. "Where the--where are you coming from, that way?"
+
+They laugh, jump about like puppets, full-blooded and streaming with
+perspiration, blacker than ever in the night. The German officer's
+helmet is gleaming in the hands of Pepin. "Oh, Christ!" murmurs the
+sentry, with gaping mouth, "but what's been up?"
+
+An exuberant reaction excites and bewitches them. All talk at once. In
+haste and confusion they act again the drama which hardly yet they
+realize is over. They had gone wrong when they left the sleepy sentry
+and had taken the International Trench, of which a part is ours and
+another part German. Between the French and German sections there is no
+barricade or division. There is merely a sort of neutral zone, at the
+two ends of which sentries watch ceaselessly. No doubt the German
+watcher was not at his post, or likely he hid himself when he saw the
+four shadows, or perhaps be doubled back and had not time to bring up
+reinforcements. Or perhaps, too, the German officer had strayed too far
+ahead in the neutral zone. In short, one understands what happened
+without understanding it.
+
+"The funny part of it," says Pepin, "is that we knew all about that,
+and never thought to be careful about it when we set off."
+
+"We were looking for matches," says Volpatte.
+
+"And we've got some!" cries Pepin. "You've not lost the flamers, old
+broomstick?"
+
+"No damned fear!" says Blaire; "Boche matches are better stuff than
+ours. Besides, they're all we've got to light our fire! Lose my box?
+Let any one try to pinch it off me!"
+
+"We're behind time--the soup-water'll be freezing. Hurry up, so far.
+Afterwards there'll be a good yarn to tell in the sewer where the boys
+are, about what we did to the Boches."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Bombardment
+
+
+WE are in the flat country, a vast mistiness, but above it is dark
+blue. The end of the night is marked by a little falling snow which
+powders our shoulders and the folds in our sleeves. We are marching in
+fours, hooded. We seem in the turbid twilight to be the wandering
+survivors of one Northern district who are trekking to another.
+
+We have followed a road and have crossed the ruins of
+Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. We have had confused glimpses of its whitish
+heaps of houses and the dim spider-webs of its suspended roofs. The
+village is so long that although full night buried us in it we saw its
+last buildings beginning to pale in the frost of dawn. Through the
+grating of a cellar on the edge of this petrified ocean's waves, we
+made out the fire kept going by the custodians of the dead town. We
+have paddled in swampy fields, lost ourselves in silent places where
+the mud seized us by the feet, we have dubiously regained our balance
+and our bearings again on another road, the one which leads from
+Carency to Souchez. The tall bordering poplars are shivered and their
+trunks mangled; in one place the road is an enormous colonnade of trees
+destroyed. Then, marching with us on both sides, we see through the
+shadows ghostly dwarfs of trees, wide-cloven like spreading palms;
+botched and jumbled into round blocks or long strips; doubled upon
+themselves, as if they knelt. From time to time our march is disordered
+and bustled by the yielding of a swamp. The road becomes a marsh which
+we cross on our heels, while our feet make the sound of sculling.
+Planks have been laid in it here and there. Where they have so far sunk
+in the mud as to proffer their edges to us we slip on them. Sometimes
+there is enough water to float them, and then under the weight of a man
+they splash and go under, and the man stumbles or falls, with frenzied
+imprecations.
+
+It must be five o'clock. The stark and affrighting scene unfolds itself
+to our eyes, but it is still encircled by a great fantastic ring of
+mist and of darkness. We go on and on without pause, and come to a
+place where we can make out a dark hillock, at the foot of which there
+seems to be some lively movement of human beings.
+
+"Advance by twos," says the leader of the detachment. "Let each team of
+two take alternately a plank and a hurdle." We load ourselves up. One
+of the two in each couple assumes the rifle of his partner as well as
+his own. The other with difficulty shifts and pulls out from the pile a
+long plank, muddy and slippery, which weighs full eighty pounds, or a
+hurdle of leafy branches as big as a door, which he can only just keep
+on his back as he bends forward with his hands aloft and grips its
+edges.
+
+We resume our march, very slowly and very ponderously, scattered over
+the now graying road, with complaints and heavy curses which the effort
+strangles in our throats. After about a hundred yards, the two men of
+each team exchange loads, so that after two hundred yards, in spite of
+the bitter blenching breeze of early morning, all but the non-coms. are
+running with sweat.
+
+Suddenly a vivid star expands down yonder in the uncertain direction
+that we are taking--a rocket. Widely it lights a part of the sky with
+its milky nimbus, blots out the stars, and then falls gracefully,
+fairy-like.
+
+There is a swift light opposite us over there; a flash and a
+detonation. It is a shell! By the flat reflection that the explosion
+instantaneously spreads over the lower sky we see a ridge clearly
+outlined in front of us from east to west, perhaps half a mile away.
+
+That ridge is ours--so much of it as we can see from here and up to the
+top of it, where our troops are. On the other slope, a hundred yards
+from our first line, is the first German line. The shell fell on the
+summit, in our lines; it is the others who are firing. Another shell
+another and yet another plant trees of faintly violet light on the top
+of the rise, and each of them dully illumines the whole of the horizon.
+
+Soon there is a sparkling of brilliant stars and a sudden jungle of
+fiery plumes on the hill; and a fairy mirage of blue and white hangs
+lightly before our eyes in the full gulf of night.
+
+Those among us who must devote the whole buttressed power of their arms
+and legs to prevent their greasy loads from sliding off their backs and
+to prevent themselves from sliding to the ground, these neither see nor
+hear anything. The others, sniffing and shivering with cold, wiping
+their noses with limp and sodden handkerchiefs, watch and remark,
+cursing the obstacles in the way with fragments of profanity. "It's
+like watching fireworks," they say.
+
+And to complete the illusion of a great operatic scene, fairy-like but
+sinister, before which our bent and black party crawls and splashes,
+behold a red star, and then a green; then a sheaf of red fire, very
+much tardier. In our ranks, as the available half of our pairs of eyes
+watch the display, we cannot help murmuring in idle tones of popular
+admiration, "Ah, a red one!"--"Look, a green one!" It is the Germans
+who are sending up signals, and our men as well who are asking for
+artillery support.
+
+Our road turns and climbs again as the day at last decides to appear.
+Everything looks dirty. A layer of stickiness, pearl-gray and white,
+covers the road, and around it the real world makes a mournful
+appearance. Behind us we leave ruined Souchez, whose houses are only
+flat heaps of rubbish and her trees but humps of bramble-like slivers.
+We plunge into a hole on our left, the entrance to the communication
+trench. We let our loads fall in a circular enclosure prepared for
+them, and both hot and frozen we settled in the trench and wait our
+hands abraded, wet, and stiff with cramp.
+
+Buried in our holes up to the chin, our chests heaving against the
+solid bulk of the ground that protects us, we watch the dazzling and
+deepening drama develop. The bombardment is redoubled. The trees of
+light on the ridge have melted into hazy parachutes in the pallor of
+dawn, sickly heads of Medusae with points of fire; then, more sharply
+defined as the day expands, they become bunches of smoke-feathers,
+ostrich feathers white and gray, which come suddenly to life on the
+jumbled and melancholy soil of Hill 119, five or six hundred yards in
+front of us, and then slowly fade away. They are truly the pillar of
+fire and the pillar of cloud, circling as one and thundering together.
+On the flank of the hill we see a party of men running to earth. One by
+one they disappear, swallowed up in the adjoining anthills.
+
+Now, one can better make out the form of our "guests." At each shot a
+tuft of sulphurous white underlined in black forms sixty yards up in
+the air, unfolds and mottles itself, and we catch in the explosion the
+whistling of the charge of bullets that the yellow cloud hurls angrily
+to the ground. It bursts in sixfold squalls, one after another--bang,
+bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It is the 77 mm. gun.
+
+We disdain the 77 mm. shrapnel, in spite of the fact that Blesbois was
+killed by one of them three days ago. They nearly always burst too
+high. Barque explains it to us, although we know it well: "One's
+chamber-pot protects one's nut well enough against the bullets. So they
+can destroy your shoulder and damn well knock you down, but they don't
+spread you about. Naturally, you've got to be fly, all the same. Got to
+be careful you don't lift your neb in the air as long as they're
+buzzing about, nor put your hand out to see if it's raining. Now, our
+75 mm.--"
+
+"There aren't only the 77's," Mesnil Andre broke in, "there's all
+damned sorts. Spell those out for me--" Those are shrill and cutting
+whistles, trembling or rattling; and clouds of all shapes gather on the
+slopes yonder whose vastness shows through them, slopes where our men
+are in the depths of the dug-outs. Gigantic plumes of faint fire mingle
+with huge tassels of steam, tufts that throw out straight filaments,
+smoky feathers that expand as they fall--quite white or greenish-gray,
+black or copper with gleams of gold, or as if blotched with ink.
+
+The two last explosions are quite near. Above the battered ground they
+take shape like vast balls of black and tawny dust; and as they deploy
+and leisurely depart at the wind's will, having finished their task,
+they have the outline of fabled dragons.
+
+Our line of faces on the level of the ground turns that way, and we
+follow them with our eyes from the bottom of the trench in the middle
+of this country peopled by blazing and ferocious apparitions, these
+fields that the sky has crushed.
+
+"Those, they're the 150 mm. howitzers."--"They're the 210's,
+calf-head."--"There go the regular guns, too; the hogs! Look at that
+one!" It was a shell that burst on the ground and threw up earth and
+debris in a fan-shaped cloud of darkness. Across the cloven land it
+looked like the frightful spitting of some volcano, piled up in the
+bowels of the earth.
+
+A diabolical uproar surrounds us. We are conscious of a sustained
+crescendo, an incessant multiplication of the universal frenzy. A
+hurricane of hoarse and hollow banging, of raging clamor, of piercing
+and beast-like screams, fastens furiously with tatters of smoke upon
+the earth where we are buried up to our necks, and the wind of the
+shells seems to set it heaving and pitching.
+
+"Look at that," bawls Barque, "and me that said they were short of
+munitions!"
+
+"Oh, la, la! We know all about that! That and the other fudge the
+newspapers squirt all over us!"
+
+A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That
+slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens the
+heart.
+
+"The coffee-mill! [note 1] One of ours, listen. The shots come
+regularly, while the Boches' haven't got the same length of time
+between the shots; they go
+crack--crack-crack-crack--crack-crack--crack--"
+
+"Don't cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn't an unsewing-machine at all;
+it's a motor-cycle on the road to 31 dugout, away yonder."
+
+"Well, I think it's a chap up aloft there, having a look round from his
+broomstick," chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and sweeps the
+firmament in search of an aeroplane.
+
+A discussion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and that's
+all. One tries in vain to become familiar with all those diverse
+disturbances. It even happened the other day in the wood that a whole
+section mistook for the hoarse howl of a shell the first notes of a
+neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray.
+
+"I say, there's a good show of sausages in the air this morning," says
+Lamuse. Lifting our eyes, we count them.
+
+"There are eight sausages on our side and eight on the Boches'," says
+Cocon, who has already counted them.
+
+There are, in fact, at regular intervals along the horizon, opposite
+the distance-dwindled group of captive enemy balloons, the eight long
+hovering eyes of the army, buoyant and sensitive, and joined to the
+various headquarters by living threads.
+
+"They see us as we see them. How the devil can one escape from that row
+of God Almighties up there?"
+
+There's our reply!
+
+Suddenly, behind our backs, there bursts the sharp and deafening
+stridor of the 75's. Their increasing crackling thunder arouses and
+elates us. We shout with our guns, and look at each other without
+hearing our shouts--except for the curiously piercing voice that comes
+from Barque's great mouth--amid the rolling of that fantastic drum
+whose every note is the report of a cannon.
+
+Then we turn our eyes ahead and outstretch our necks, and on the top of
+the hill we see the still higher silhouette of a row of black infernal
+trees whose terrible roots are striking down into the invisible slope
+where the enemy cowers.
+
+While the "75" battery continues its barking a hundred yards behind
+us--the sharp anvil-blows of a huge hammer, followed by a dizzy scream
+of force and fury--a gigantic gurgling dominates the devilish oratorio;
+that, also, is coming from our side. "It's a gran'pa, that one!"
+
+The shell cleaves the air at perhaps a thousand yards above us; the
+voice of its gun covers all as with a pavilion of resonance. The sound
+of its travel is sluggish, and one divines a projectile bigger-boweled,
+more enormous than the others. We can hear it passing and declining in
+front with the ponderous and increasing vibration of a train that
+enters a station under brakes; then, its heavy whine sounds fainter. We
+watch the hill opposite, and after several seconds it is covered by a
+salmon-pink cloud that the wind spreads over one-half of the horizon.
+"It's a 220 mm."
+
+"One can see them," declares Volpatte, "those shells, when they come
+out of the gun. If you're in the right line, you can even see them a
+good long away from the gun."
+
+Another follows: "There! Look, look! Did you see that one? You didn't
+look quick enough, you missed it. Get a move on! Look, another! Did you
+see it?"
+
+"I did not see it."--"Ass! Got to be a bedstead for you to see it!
+Look, quick, that one, there! Did you see it, unlucky
+good-for-nothing?"--"I saw it; is that all?"
+
+Some have made out a small black object, slender and pointed as a
+blackbird with folded wings, pricking a wide curve down from the zenith.
+
+"That weighs 240 lb., that one, my old bug," says Volpatte proudly,
+"and when that drops on a funk-hole it kills everybody inside it. Those
+that aren't picked off by the explosion are struck dead by the wind of
+it, or they're gas-poisoned before they can say 'ouf!'"
+
+"The 270 mm. shell can be seen very well, too--talk about a bit of
+iron--when the howitzer sends it up--allez, off you go!"
+
+"And the 155 Rimailho, too; but you can't see that one because it goes
+too straight and too far; the more you look for it the more it vanishes
+before your eyes."
+
+In a stench of sulphur amid black powder, of burned stuffs and calcined
+earth which roams in sheets about the country, all the menagerie is let
+loose and gives battle. Bellowings, roarings, growlings, strange and
+savage; feline caterwaulings that fiercely rend your ears and search
+your belly, or the long-drawn piercing hoot like the siren of a ship in
+distress. At times, even, something like shouts cross each other in the
+air-currents, with curious variation of tone that make the sound human.
+The country is bodily lifted in places and falls back again. From one
+end of the horizon to the other it seems to us that the earth itself is
+raging with storm and tempest.
+
+And the greatest guns, far away and still farther, diffuse growls much
+subdued and smothered, but you know the strength of them by the
+displacement of air which comes and raps you on the ear.
+
+Now, behold a heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers over
+the bombarded region and draws out in every direction. This touch of
+strangely incongruous color in the picture summons attention, and all
+we encaged prisoners turn our faces towards the hideous outcrop.
+
+"Gas, probably. Let's have our masks ready."--"The hogs!"
+
+"They're unfair tricks, those," says Farfadet.
+
+"They're what?" asks Barque jeeringly.
+
+"Why, yes, they're dirty dodges, those gases--"
+
+"You make me tired," retorts Barque, "with your fair ways and your
+unfair ways. When you've seen men squashed, cut in two, or divided from
+top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned
+inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as
+if by a blow with a club, and in place of the head a bit of neck,
+oozing currant jam of brains all over the chest and back--you've seen
+that and yet you can say 'There are clean ways!'"
+
+"Doesn't alter the fact that the shell is allowed, it's recognized--"
+
+"Ah, la, la! I'll tell you what--you make me blubber just as much as
+you make me laugh!" And he turns his back.
+
+"Hey, look out, boys!"
+
+We strain our eyes, and one of us has thrown himself flat on the
+ground; others look instinctively and frowning towards the shelter that
+we have not time to reach, and during these two seconds each one bends
+his head. It is a grating noise as of huge scissors which comes near
+and nearer to us, and ends at last with a ringing crash of unloaded
+iron.
+
+That ore fell not far from us--two hundred yards away, perhaps. We
+crouch in the bottom of the trench and remain doubled up while the
+place where we are is lashed by a shower of little fragments.
+
+"Don't want this in my tummy, even from that distance," says Paradis,
+extracting from the earth of the trench wall a morsel that has just
+lodged there. It is like a bit of coke, bristling with edged and
+pointed facets, and he dances it in his hand so as not to burn himself.
+
+There is a hissing noise. Paradis sharply bows his head and we follow
+suit. "The fuse!--it has gone over." The shrapnel fuse goes up and then
+comes down vertically; but that of the percussion shell detaches itself
+from the broken mass after the explosion and usually abides buried at
+the point of contact, but at other times it flies off at random like a
+big red-hot pebble. One must beware of it. It may hurl itself on you a
+very long time after the detonation and by incredible paths, passing
+over the embankment and plunging into the cavities.
+
+"Nothing so piggish as a fuse. It happened to me once--"
+
+"There's worse things," broke in Bags of the 11th, "The Austrian
+shells, the 130's and the 74's. I'm afraid of them. They're
+nickel-plated, they say, but what I do know, seeing I've been there, is
+they come so quick you can't do anything to dodge them. You no sooner
+hear em snoring than they burst on you.
+
+"The German 105's, neither, you haven't hardly the time to flatten
+yourself. I once got the gunners to tell me all about them."
+
+"I tell you, the shells from the naval guns, you haven't the time to
+hear 'em. Got to pack yourself up before they come."
+
+"And there's that new shell, a dirty devil, that breaks wind after it's
+dodged into the earth and out of it again two or three times in the
+space of six yards. When I know there's one of them about, I want to go
+round the corner. I remember one time--"
+
+"That's all nothing, my lads," said the new sergeant, stopping on his
+way past, "you ought to see what they chucked us at Verdun, where I've
+come from. Nothing but whoppers, 380's and 420's and 244's. When you've
+been shelled down there you know all about it--the woods are sliced
+down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when
+they've three thicknesses of beams, all the road-crossings sprinkled,
+the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed
+convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shoveled
+up. You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the cross-roads;
+you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about
+fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the
+trees that were left. You could see one of these 380's go into a house
+at Verdun by the roof, bore through two or three floors, and burst at
+the bottom, and all the damn lot's got to go aloft; and in the fields
+whole battalions would scatter and lie flat under the shower like poor
+little defenseless rabbits. At every step on the ground in the fields
+you'd got lumps as thick as your arm and as wide as that, and it'd take
+four poilus to lift the lump of iron. The fields looked as if they were
+full of rocks. And that went on without a halt for months on end,
+months on end!" the sergeant repeated as he passed on, no doubt to tell
+again the story of his souvenirs somewhere else.
+
+"Look, look, corporal, those chaps over there--are they soft in the
+head?" On the bombarded position we saw dots of human beings emerge
+hurriedly and run towards the explosions.
+
+"They're gunners," said Bertrand; "as soon as a shell's burst they
+sprint and rummage for the fuse in the hole, for the position of the
+fuse gives the direction of its battery, you see, by the way it's dug
+itself in; and as for the distance, you've only got to read it--it's
+shown on the range-figures cut on the time-fuse which is set just
+before firing."
+
+"No matter--they're off their onions to go out under such shelling."
+
+"Gunners, my boy," says a man of another company who was strolling in
+the trench, "are either quite good or quite bad. Either they're trumps
+or they're trash. I tell you--"
+
+"That's true of all privates, what you're saying."
+
+"Possibly; but I'm not talking to you about all privates; I'm talking
+to you about gunners, and I tell you too that--"
+
+"Hey, my lads! Better find a hole to dump yourselves in, before you get
+one on the snitch!"
+
+The strolling stranger carried his story away, and Cocon, who was in a
+perverse mood, declared: "We can be doing our hair in the dug-out,
+seeing it's rather boring outside."
+
+"Look, they're sending torpedoes over there!" said Paradis, pointing.
+Torpedoes go straight up, or very nearly so, like larks, fluttering and
+rustling; then they stop, hesitate, and come straight down again,
+heralding their fall in its last seconds by a "baby-cry" that we know
+well. From here, the inhabitants of the ridge seem like invisible
+players, lined up for a game with a ball.
+
+"In the Argonne," says Lamuse, "my brother says in a letter that they
+get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They're big heavy things, fired off
+very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says, and when they
+break wind they don't half make a shindy, he says."
+
+"There's nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase after
+you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very trench,
+just scraping over the bank."
+
+"Tiens, tiens, did you hear it?" A whistling was approaching us when
+suddenly it ceased. The contrivance has not burst. "It's a shell that
+cried off," Paradis asserts. And we strain our ears for the
+satisfaction of hearing--or of not hearing--others.
+
+Lamuse says: "All the fields and the roads and the villages about here,
+they're covered with dud shells of all sizes--ours as well, to say
+truth. The ground must be full of 'em, that you can't see. I wonder how
+they'll go on, later, when the time comes to say, 'That's enough of it,
+let's start work again.'"
+
+And all the time, in a monotony of madness, the avalanche of fire and
+iron goes on; shrapnel with its whistling explosion and its overcharged
+heart of furious metal and the great percussion shells, whose thunder
+is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly into a wall, the
+thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling down a declivity. The
+air is now glutted and viewless, it is crossed and recrossed by heavy
+blasts, and the murder of the earth continues all around, deeply and
+more deeply, to the limit of completion.
+
+There are even other guns which now join in--they are ours. Their
+report is like that of the 75's, but louder, and it has a prolonged and
+resounding echo, like thunder reverberating among mountains.
+
+"They're the long 120's. They're on the edge of the wood half a mile
+away. Fine guns, old man, like gray-hounds. They're slender and
+fine-nosed, those guns--you want to call them 'Madame.' They're not
+like the 220's--they're all snout, like coal-scuttles, and spit their
+shells out from the bottom upwards. The 120's get there just the same,
+but among the teams of artillery they look like kids in bassinettes."
+
+Conversation languishes; here and there are yawns. The dimensions and
+weight of this outbreak of the guns fatigue the mind. Our voices
+flounder in it and are drowned.
+
+"I've never seen anything like this for a bombardment," shouts Barque.
+
+"We always say that," replies Paradis.
+
+"Just so," bawls Volpatte. "There's been talk of an attack lately; I
+should say this is the beginning of something."
+
+The others say simply, "Ah!"
+
+Volpatte displays an intention of snatching a wink of sleep. He settles
+himself on the ground with his back against one wall of the trench and
+his feet buttressed against the other wall.
+
+We converse together on divers subjects. Biquet tells the story of a
+rat he has seen: "He was cheeky and comical, you know. I'd taken off my
+trotter-cases, and that rat, he chewed all the edge of the uppers into
+embroidery. Of course, I'd greased 'em."
+
+Volpatte, who is now definitely out of action, moves and says, "I can't
+get to sleep for your gabbling."
+
+"You can't make me believe, old fraud," says Marthereau, "that you can
+raise a single snore with a shindy like this all round you."
+
+Volpatte replies with one.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Fall in! March!
+
+We are changing our spot. Where are they taking us to? We have no idea.
+The most we know is that we are in reserve, and that they may take us
+round to strengthen certain points in succession, or to clear the
+communication trenches, in which the regulation of passing troops is as
+complicated a job, if blocks and collisions are to be avoided, as it is
+of the trains in a busy station. It is impossible to make out the
+meaning of the immense maneuver in which the rolling of our regiment is
+only that of a little wheel, nor what is going on in all the huge area
+of the sector. But, lost in the network of deeps where we go and come
+without end, weary, harassed and stiff-jointed by prolonged halts,
+stupefied by noise and delay, poisoned by smoke, we make out that our
+artillery is becoming more and more active; the offensive seems to have
+changed places.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Halt! A fire of intense and incredible fury was threshing the parapets
+of the trench where we were halted at the moment: "Fritz is going it
+strong; he's afraid of an attack, he's going dotty. Ah, isn't he
+letting fly!"
+
+A heavy hail was pouring over us, hacking terribly at atmosphere and
+sky, scraping and skimming all the plain.
+
+I looked through a loophole and saw a swift and strange vision. In
+front of us, a dozen yards away at most, there were motionless forms
+outstretched side by side--a row of mown-down soldiers--and the
+countless projectiles that hurtled from all sides were riddling this
+rank of the dead!
+
+The bullets that flayed the soil in straight streaks amid raised
+slender stems of cloud were perforating and ripping the bodies so
+rigidly close to the ground, breaking the stiffened limbs, plunging
+into the wan and vacant faces, bursting and bespattering the liquefied
+eyes; and even did that file of corpses stir and budge out of line
+under the avalanche.
+
+We could hear the blunt sound of the dizzy copper points as they
+pierced cloth and flesh, the sound of a furious stroke with a knife,
+the harsh blow of a stick upon clothing. Above us rushed jets of shrill
+whistling, with the declining and far more serious hum of ricochets.
+And we bent our heads under the enormous flight of noises and voices.
+
+"Trench must be cleared--Gee up!" We leave this most infamous corner of
+the battlefield where even the dead are torn, wounded, and slain anew.
+
+We turn towards the right and towards the rear. The communication
+trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a
+telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners. Here
+there is a further halt. We mark time, and hear the artillery observer
+shout his commands, which the telephonist buried beside him picks up
+and repeats: "First gun, same sight; two-tenths to left; three a
+minute!"
+
+Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have
+glimpsed for the space of the lightning's flash all the field of battle
+round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning. I
+saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be
+driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more
+pointed billow of smoke.
+
+Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white, the
+immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our batteries
+are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with short-lived
+flashes. Another minute, part of the field grew dark under a steamy and
+whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.
+
+Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like
+cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of torn
+paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim rows of
+vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the straight
+strokes of a written page--these are the roads and their trees.
+Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and forward and
+rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with men.
+
+We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points
+who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plain
+in the horrible face of the flying firmament. It is difficult to
+believe that each of those tiny spots is a living thing with fragile
+and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full of deep
+thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. One is fascinated
+by this scattered dust of men as small as the stars in the sky.
+
+Poor unknowns, poor fellow-men, it is your turn to give battle. Another
+time it will be ours. Perhaps to-morrow it will be ours to feel the
+heavens burst over our heads or the earth open under our feet, to be
+assailed by the prodigious plague of projectiles, to be swept away by
+the blasts of a tornado a hundred thousand times stronger than the
+tornado.
+
+They urge us into the rearward shelters. For our eyes the field of
+death vanishes. To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great anvil
+of the clouds. The sound of universal destruction is still. The squad
+surrounds itself with the familiar noises of life, and sinks into the
+fondling littleness of the dug-outs.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1] Military slang for machine-gun--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+Under Fire
+
+
+RUDELY awakened in the dark, I open my eyes: "What? What's up?"
+
+"Your turn on guard--it's two o'clock in the morning," says Corporal
+Bertrand at the opening into the hole where I am prostrate on the
+floor. I hear him without seeing him.
+
+"I'm coming," I growl, and shake myself, and yawn in the little
+sepulchral shelter. I stretch my arms, and my hands touch the soft and
+cold clay. Then I cleave the heavy odor that fills the dug-out and
+crawl out in the middle of the dense gloom between the collapsed bodies
+of the sleepers. After several stumbles and entanglements among
+accouterments, knapsacks and limbs stretched out in all directions, I
+put my hand on my rifle and find myself upright in the open air, half
+awake and dubiously balanced, assailed by the black and bitter breeze.
+
+Shivering, I follow the corporal; he plunges in between the dark
+embankments whose lower ends press strangely and closely on our march.
+He stops; the place is here. I make out a heavy mass half-way up the
+ghostly wall which comes loose and descends from it with a whinnying
+yawn, and I hoist myself into the niche which it had occupied.
+
+The moon is hidden by mist, but a very weak and uncertain light
+overspreads the scene, and one's sight gropes its way. Then a wide
+strip of darkness, hovering and gliding up aloft, puts it out. Even
+after touching the breastwork and the loophole in front of my face I
+can hardly make them out, and my inquiring hand discovers, among an
+ordered deposit of things, a mass of grenade handles.
+
+"Keep your eye skinned, old chap," says Bertrand in a low voice. "Don't
+forget that our listening-post is in front there on the left. Allons,
+so long." His steps die away, followed by those of the sleepy sentry
+whom I am relieving.
+
+Rifle-shots crackle all round. Abruptly a bullet smacks the earth of
+the wall against which I am leaning. I peer through the loophole. Our
+line runs along the top of the ravine, and the land slopes downward in
+front of me, plunging into an abyss of darkness where one can see
+nothing. One's sight ends always by picking out the regular lines of
+the stakes of our wire entanglements, planted on the shore of the waves
+of night, and here and there the circular funnel-like wounds of shells,
+little, larger, or enormous, and some of the nearest occupied by
+mysterious lumber. The wind blows in my face, and nothing else is
+stirring save the vast moisture that drain from it. It is cold enough
+to set one shivering in perpetual motion. I look upwards, this way and
+that; everything is borne down by dreadful gloom. I might be derelict
+and alone in the middle of a world destroyed by a cataclysm.
+
+There is a swift illumination up above--a rocket. The scene in which I
+am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The crest of
+our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to
+the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows
+of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots
+of light. The trench is shored with sandbags. It is widened everywhere,
+and in many places ripped up by landslides. The sandbags, piled up and
+dislodged, appear in the starlike light of the rocket like the great
+dismantled stones of ancient ruined buildings. I look through the
+loophole, and discern in the misty and pallid atmosphere expanded by
+the meteor the rows of stakes and even the thin lines of barbed wire
+which cross and recross between the posts. To my seeing they are like
+strokes of a pen scratched upon the pale and perforated ground. Lower
+down, the ravine is filled with the motionless silence of the ocean of
+night.
+
+I come down from my look-out and steer at a guess towards my neighbor
+in vigil, and come upon him with outstretched hand. "Is that you?" I
+say to him in a subdued voice, though I don't know him.
+
+"Yes," he replies, equally ignorant who I am, blind like myself. "It's
+quiet at this time," he adds "A bit since I thought they were going to
+attack, and they may have tried it on, on the right, where they chucked
+over a lot of bombs. There's been a barrage of 75's--vrrrran,
+vrrrran--Old man, I said to myself, 'Those 75's, p'raps they've good
+reason for firing. If they did come out, the Boches, they must have
+found something.' Tiens, listen, down there, the bullets buffing
+themselves!"
+
+He opens his flask and takes a draught, and his last words, still
+subdued, smell of wine: "Ah, la, la! Talk about a filthy war! Don't you
+think we should be a lot better at home!--Hullo! What's the matter with
+the ass?" A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief and sudden
+flash of phosphorescence. Others go off here and there along our line.
+Rifle-shots are catching after dark.
+
+We go to inquire of one of the shooters, guessing our way through the
+solid blackness that has fallen again upon us like a roof. Stumbling,
+and thrown anon on each other, we reach the man and touch him--"Well,
+what's up?"
+
+He thought he saw something moving, but there is nothing more. We
+return through the density, my unknown neighbor and I, unsteady, and
+laboring along the narrow way of slippery mud, doubled up as if we each
+carried a crushing burden. At one point of the horizon and then at
+another all around, a gun sounds, and its heavy din blends with the
+volleys of rifle-fire, redoubled one minute and dying out the next, and
+with the clusters of grenade-reports, of deeper sound than the crack of
+Lebel or Mauser, and nearly like the voice of the old classical rifles.
+The wind has again increased; it is so strong that one must protect
+himself against it in the darkness; masses of huge cloud are passing in
+front of the moon.
+
+So there we are, this man and I, jostling without knowing each other,
+revealed and then hidden from each other in sudden jerks by the flashes
+of the guns, oppressed by the opacity, the center of a huge circle of
+fires that appear and disappear in the devilish landscape.
+
+"We're under a curse," says the man.
+
+We separate, and go each to his own loophole, to weary our eyes upon
+invisibility. Is some frightful and dismal storm about to break? But
+that night it did not. At the end of my long wait, with the first
+streaks of day, there was even a lull.
+
+Again I saw, when the dawn came down on us like a stormy evening, the
+steep banks of our crumbling trench as they came to life again under
+the sooty scarf of the low-hanging clouds, a trench dismal and dirty,
+infinitely dirty, humped with debris and filthiness. Under the livid
+sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their vaguely shining and
+rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera of giants, nakedly
+exposed upon the earth.
+
+In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap of
+horizontal things like logs. Tree-trunks? No, they are corpses.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the shadowy
+fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each blade of
+grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening field and its
+high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the bristling of
+stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and in front of the
+opposite slope a wall of night still stands.
+
+Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is
+gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms. There
+are four of them. They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque, Biquet, and
+little Eudore. They rot there quite near us, blocking one half of the
+wide, twisting, and muddy furrow that the living must still defend.
+
+They have been laid there as well as may be, supporting and crushing
+each other. The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth. Handkerchiefs had
+been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against them in
+the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without noticing
+them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face to face
+with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was four nights ago that they were all killed together. I remember
+the night myself indistinctly--it is like a dream. We were on
+patrol--they, I, Mesnil Andre, and Corporal Bertrand; and our business
+was to identify a new German listening-post marked by the artillery
+observers. We left the trench towards midnight and crept down the slope
+in line, three or four paces from each other. Thus we descended far
+into the ravine, and saw, lying before our eyes, the embankment of
+their International Trench. After we had verified that there was no
+listening-post in this slice of the ground we climbed back, with
+infinite care. Dimly I saw my neighbors to right and left, like sacks
+of shadow, crawling, slowly sliding, undulating and rocking in the mud
+and the murk, with the projecting needle in front of a rifle. Some
+bullets whistled above us, but they did not know we were there, they
+were not looking for us. When we got within sight of the mound of our
+line, we took a breather for a moment; one of us let a sigh go, another
+spoke. Another turned round bodily, and the sheath of his bayonet rang
+out against a stone. Instantly a rocket shot redly up from the
+International Trench. We threw ourselves flat on the ground, closely,
+desperately, and waited there motionless, with the terrible star
+hanging over us and flooding us with daylight, twenty-five or thirty
+yards from our trench. Then a machine-gun on the other side of the
+ravine swept the zone where we were. Corporal Bertrand and I had had
+the luck to find in front of us, just as the red rocket went up and
+before it burst into light, a shell-hole, where a broken trestle was
+steeped in the mud. We flattened ourselves against the edge of the
+hole, buried ourselves in the mud as much as possible, and the poor
+skeleton of rotten wood concealed us. The jet of the machine-gun
+crossed several times. We heard a piercing whistle in the middle of
+each report, the sharp and violent sound of bullets that went into the
+earth, and dull and soft blows as well, followed by groans, by a little
+cry, and suddenly by a sound like the heavy snoring of a sleeper, a
+sound which slowly ebbed. Bertrand and I waited, grazed by the
+horizontal hail of bullets that traced a network of death an inch or so
+above us and sometimes scraped our clothes, driving us still deeper
+into the mud, nor dared we risk a movement which might have lifted a
+little some part of our bodies. The machine-gun at last held its peace
+in an enormous silence. A quarter of an hour later we two slid out of
+the shell-hole, and crawling on our elbows we fell at last like bundles
+into our listening-post. It was high time, too, for at that moment the
+moon shone out. We were obliged to stay in the bottom of the trench
+till morning, and then till evening, for the machine-gun swept the
+approaches without pause. We could not see the prostrate bodies through
+the loop-holes of the post, by reason of the steepness of the
+ground--except, just on the level of our field of vision, a lump which
+appeared to be the back of one of them. In the evening, a sap was dug
+to reach the place where they had fallen. The work could not be
+finished in one night and was resumed by the pioneers the following
+night, for, overwhelmed with fatigue, we could no longer keep from
+falling asleep.
+
+Awaking from a leaden sleep, I saw the four corpses that the sappers
+had reached from underneath, hooking and then hauling them into the sap
+with ropes. Each of them had several adjoining wounds, bullet-holes an
+inch or so apart--the mitrailleuse had fired fast. The body of Mesnil
+Andre was not found, and his brother Joseph did some mad escapades in
+search of it. He went out quite alone into No Man's Land, where the
+crossed fire of machine-guns swept it three ways at once and
+constantly. In the morning, dragging himself along like a slug, he
+showed over the bank a face black with mud and horribly wasted. They
+pulled him in again, with his face scratched by barbed wire, his hands
+bleeding, with heavy clods of mud in the folds of his clothes, and
+stinking of death. Like an idiot be kept on saying, "He's nowhere." He
+buried himself in a corner with his rifle, which he set himself to
+clean without hearing what was said to him, and only repeating "He's
+nowhere."
+
+It is four nights ago since that night, and as the dawn comes once
+again to cleanse the earthly Gehenna, the bodies are becoming
+definitely distinct.
+
+Barque in his rigidity seems immoderately long, his arms lie closely to
+the body, his chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin. With his
+head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at those who
+come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the clammy stains
+of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are heavily encrusted
+with blackened blood. Eudore seems very small by contrast, and his
+little face is completely white, so white as to remind you of the
+be-flowered face of a pierrot, and it is touching to see that little
+circle of white paper among the gray and bluish tints of the corpses.
+The Breton Biquet, squat and square as a flagstone, appears to be under
+the stress of a huge effort; he might be trying to uplift the misty
+darkness; and the extreme exertion overflows upon the protruding
+cheek-bones and forehead of his grimacing face, contorts it hideously,
+sets the dried and dusty hair bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral
+cry, and spreads wide the eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his
+flinty eyes; and his hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.
+
+Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat. In the
+dragging and carrying they were further injured. Big Lamuse, at last
+bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were gradually
+sinking in their sockets, one more than the other. They have wrapped
+him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where the neck is. His
+right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets, and the arm is held
+on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads that they have put in
+since. The first night he was placed there, this arm hung outside the
+heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled up on a lump of earth,
+touched passers-by in the face; so they pinned the arm to the greatcoat.
+
+A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these beings
+with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.
+
+When we see them we say, "They are dead, all four"; but they are too
+far disfigured for us to say truly, "It is they," and one must turn
+away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left among
+us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.
+
+Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by
+day--by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of the
+hand, dead or alive-give a start when faced by these corpses flattened
+one on the other in the open trench. Sometimes they are angry--"What
+are they thinking about to leave those stiffs there?"--"It's shameful."
+Then they add, "It's true they can't be taken away from there." And
+they were only buried in the night.
+
+Morning has come. Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine,
+Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped, and scratched, veined with
+shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal
+the clay and the chalky soil. Nothing is stirring there; and our shells
+that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge billows seem to
+deliver their resounding blows upon a great breakwater, ruined and
+abandoned.
+
+My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in
+damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of mud
+and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein they
+are molded, bestir themselves, and come down. For us, it is rest until
+evening.
+
+We yawn and stroll. We see a comrade pass and then another. Officers go
+to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes. We feel our feet
+again, and begin once more to live. The customary remarks cross and
+clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken lines of
+the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on our voices,
+we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines. But lassitude weighs upon
+all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the eyelids reddened; through
+long watching we look as if we had been weeping. For several days now
+we have all of us been sagging and growing old.
+
+One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a curve
+in the trench. They pile themselves where the soil is only chalky, and
+where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots, the
+excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain in the
+darkness for over a hundred thousand years.
+
+There in the widened fairway, Bertrand's squad beaches itself. It is
+much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we no
+longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac, wounded in the
+leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirioir nor
+Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the other
+for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn--as he says in the
+postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital where
+he is vegetating.
+
+Once more I see gathered and grouped, soiled by contact with the earth
+and dirty smoke, the familiar faces and poses of those who have not
+been separated since the beginning, chained and riveted together in
+fraternity. But there is less dissimilarity than at the beginning in
+the appearance of the cave-men.
+
+Papa Blaire displays in his well-worn mouth a set of new teeth, so
+resplendent that one can see nothing in all his poor face except those
+gayly-dight jaws. The great event of these foreign teeth's
+establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for
+eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners. He is
+rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly. Now that he has
+become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant. For the moment
+he is dejected, because--a miracle--he cannot wash himself. Deeply sunk
+in a corner, he half opens a lack-luster eye, bites and masticates his
+old soldier's mustache--not long ago the only ornament on his face--and
+from time to time spits out a hair.
+
+Fouillade is shivering, cold-smitten, or yawns, depressed and shabby.
+Marthereau has not changed at all. He is still as always well-bearded,
+his eye round and blue, and his legs so short that his trousers seem to
+be slipping continually from his waist and dropping to his feet. Cocon
+is always Cocon by the dried and parchment-like head wherein sums are
+working; but a recurrence of lice, the ravages of which we see
+overflowing on to his neck and wrists, has isolated him for a week now
+in protracted tussles which leave him surly when he returns among us.
+Paradis retains unimpaired the same quantum of good color and good
+temper; he is unchanging, perennial. We smile when he appears in the
+distance, placarded on the background of sandbags like a new poster.
+Nothing has changed in Pepin either, whom we can just see taking a
+stroll--we can tell him behind by his red-and-white squares of an
+oilcloth draught-board, and in front by his blade-like face and the
+gleam of a knife in his cold gray look. Nor has Volpatte changed, with
+his leggings, his shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian
+tatooed with dirt; nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some
+time by blood-red streaks in his eyes--for some unknown and mysterious
+reason. Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the
+post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and
+then retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and
+careful postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie's end. Lamuse said no
+more to any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped
+her body. He regretted--I knew it--his whispered confidence to me that
+evening, and up to his death he kept the horrible affair sacred to
+himself, with tenacious bashfulness. So we see Farfadet continuing to
+live his airy existence with the living likeness of that fair hair,
+which he only leaves for the scarce monosyllables of his contact with
+us. Corporal Bertrand has still the same soldierly and serious mien
+among us; he is always ready with his tranquil smile to answer all
+questions with lucid explanations, to help each of us to do his duty.
+
+We are chatting as of yore, as not long since. But the necessity of
+speaking in low tones distinguishes our remarks and imposes on them a
+lugubrious tranquillity.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Something unusual has happened. For the last three months the sojourn
+of each unit in the first-line trenches has been four days. Yet we have
+now been five days here and there is no mention of relief. Some rumors
+of early attack are going about, brought by the liaison men and those
+of the fatigue-party that renews our rations every other night--without
+regularity or guarantee. Other portents are adding themselves to the
+whispers of offensive--the stopping of leave, the failure of the post,
+the obvious change in the officers, who are serious and closer to us.
+But talk on this subject always ends with a shrug of the shoulders; the
+soldier is never warned what is to be done with him; they put a bandage
+on his eyes, and only remove it at the last minute. So, "We shall
+see."--"We can only wait."
+
+We detach ourselves from the tragic event foreboded. Is this because of
+the impossibility of a complete understanding, or a despondent
+unwillingness to decipher those orders that are sealed letters to us,
+or a lively faith that one will pass through the peril once more?
+Always, in spite of the premonitory signs and the prophecies that seem
+to be coming true, we fall back automatically upon the cares of the
+moment and absorb ourselves in them--hunger, thirst, the lice whose
+crushing ensanguines all our nails, the great weariness that saps us
+all.
+
+"Seen Joseph this morning?" says Volpatte. "He doesn't look very grand,
+poor lad."
+
+"He'll do something daft, certain sure. He's as good as a goner, that
+lad, mind you. First chance he has he'll jump in front of a bullet. I
+can see he will."
+
+"It'd give any one the pip for the rest of his natural. There were six
+brothers of 'em, you know; four of 'em killed; two in Alsace, one in
+Champagne, one in Argonne. If Andre's killed he's the fifth."
+
+"If he'd been killed they'd have found his body--they'd have seen it
+from the observation-post; you can't lose the rump and the thighs. My
+idea is that the night they went on patrol he went astray coming
+back--crawled right round, poor devil, and fell right into the Boche
+lines."
+
+"Perhaps he got sewn up in their wire."
+
+"I tell you they'd have found him if he'd been done in; you know jolly
+well the Boches wouldn't have brought the body in. And we looked
+everywhere. As long as he's not been found you can take it from me that
+he's got away somewhere on his feet, wounded or unwounded."
+
+This so logical theory finds favor, and now it is known that Mesnil
+Andre is a prisoner there is less interest in him. But his brother
+continues to be a pitiable object--"Poor old chap, he's so young!" And
+the men of the squad look at him secretly.
+
+"I've got a twist!" says Cocon suddenly. The hour of dinner has gone
+past and we are demanding it. There appears to be only the remains of
+what was brought the night before.
+
+"What's the corporal thinking of to starve us? There he is--I'll go and
+get hold of him. Hey, corporal! Why can't you get us something to
+eat?"--"Yes, yes--something to eat!" re-echoes the destiny of these
+eternally hungry men.
+
+"I'm coming," says bustling Bertrand, who keeps going both day and
+night.
+
+"What then?" says Pepin, always hot-headed. "I don't feel like chewing
+macaroni again; I shall open a tin of meat in less than two secs?" The
+daily comedy of dinner steps to the front again in this drama.
+
+"Don't touch your reserve rations!" says Bertrand; "as soon as I'm back
+from seeing the captain I'll get you something."
+
+When he returns he brings and distributes a salad of potatoes and
+onions, and as mastication proceeds our features relax and our eyes
+become composed.
+
+For the ceremony of eating, Paradis has hoisted a policeman's hat. It
+is hardly the right place or time for it, but the hat is quite new, and
+the tailor, who promised it for three months ago, only delivered it the
+day we came up. The pliant two-cornered hat of bright blue cloth on his
+flourishing round head gives him the look of a pasteboard gendarme with
+red-painted cheeks. Nevertheless, all the while he is eating, Paradis
+looks at me steadily. I go up to him. "You've a funny old face."
+
+"Don't worry about it," he replies. "I want a chat with you. Come with
+me and see something."
+
+His hand goes out to his half-full cup placed beside his dinner things;
+he hesitates, and then decides to put his wine in a safe place down his
+gullet, and the cup in his pocket. He moves off and I follow him.
+
+In passing he picks up his helmet that gapes on the earthen bench.
+After a dozen paces he comes close to me and says in a low voice and
+with a queer air, without looking at me--as he does when he is
+upset--"I know where Mesnil Andre is. Would you like to see him? Come,
+then."
+
+So saying, he takes off his police hat, folds and pockets it. and puts
+on his helmet. He sets off again and I follow him without a word.
+
+He leads me fifty yards farther, towards the place where our common
+dug-out is, and the footbridge of sandbags under which one always
+slides with the impression that the muddy arch will collapse on one's
+back. After the footbridge, a hollow appears in the wall of the trench,
+with a step made of a hurdle stuck fast in the clay. Paradis climbs
+there, and motions to me to follow him on to the narrow and slippery
+platform. There was recently a sentry's loophole here, and it has been
+destroyed and made again lower down with a couple of bullet-screens.
+One is obliged to stoop low lest his head rise above the contrivance.
+
+Paradis says to me, still in the same low voice, "It's me that fixed up
+those two shields, so as to see--for I'd got an idea, and I wanted to
+see. Put your eye to this--"
+
+"I don't see anything; the hole's stopped up. What's that lump of
+cloth?"
+
+"It's him," says Paradis.
+
+Ah! It was a corpse, a corpse sitting in a hole, and horribly near--
+
+Having flattened my face against the steel plate and glued my eye to
+the hole in the bullet-screen, I saw all of it. He was squatting, the
+head hanging forward between the legs, both arms placed on his knees,
+his hands hooked and half closed. He was easily identifiable--so near,
+so near!--in spite of his squinting and lightless eyes, by the mass of
+his muddy beard and the distorted mouth that revealed the teeth. He
+looked as if he were both smiling and grimacing at his rifle, stuck
+straight up in the mud before him. His outstretched hands were quite
+blue above and scarlet underneath, crimsoned by a damp and hellish
+reflection.
+
+It was he, rain-washed and besmeared with a sort of scum, polluted and
+dreadfully pale, four days dead, and close up to our embankment into
+which the shell-hole where he had burrowed had bitten. We had not found
+him because he was too near!
+
+Between this derelict dead in its unnatural solitude and the men who
+inhabited the dug-out there was only a slender partition of earth, and
+I realize that the place in it where I lay my head corresponds to the
+spot buttressed by this dreadful body.
+
+I withdraw my face from the peep-hole and Paradis and I exchange
+glances. "Mustn't tell him yet," my companion whispers. "No, we
+mustn't, not at once--" "I spoke to the captain about rooting him out,
+and he said, too, 'we mustn't mention it now to the lad.'" A light
+breath of wind goes by. "I can smell it!"--"Rather!" The odor enters
+our thoughts and capsizes our very hearts.
+
+"So now," says Paradis, "Joseph's left alone, out of six brothers. And
+I'll tell you what--I don't think he'll stop long. The lad won't take
+care of himself--he'll get himself done in. A lucky wound's got to drop
+on him from the sky, otherwise he's corpsed. Six brothers--it's too
+bad, that! Don't you think it's too bad?" He added, "It's astonishing
+that he was so near us."
+
+"His arm's just against the spot where I put my head."
+
+"Yes," says Paradis, "his right arm, where there's a wrist-watch."
+
+The watch--I stop short--is it a fancy, a dream? It seems to me--yes, I
+am sure now--that three days ago, the night when we were so tired out,
+before I went to sleep I heard what sounded like the ticking of a watch
+and even wondered where it could come from.
+
+"It was very likely that watch you heard all the same, through the
+earth," says Paradis, whom I have told some of my thoughts; "they go on
+thinking and turning round even when the chap stops. Damn, your own
+ticker doesn't know you--it just goes quietly on making little circles."
+
+I asked, "There's blood on his hands; but where was he hit?"
+
+"Don't know; in the belly, I think; I thought there was something dark
+underneath him. Or perhaps in the face--did you notice the little stain
+on the cheek?"
+
+I recall the hairy and greenish face of the dead man. "Yes, there was
+something on the cheek. Yes, perhaps it went in there--"
+
+"Look out!" says Paradis hurriedly, "there he is! We ought not to have
+stayed here."
+
+But we stay all the same, irresolutely wavering, as Mesnil Joseph comes
+straight up to us. Never did he seem so frail to us. We can see his
+pallor afar off, his oppressed and unnatural expression; he is bowed as
+he walks, and goes slowly, borne down by endless fatigue and his
+immovable notion.
+
+"What's the matter with your face?" he asks me--he has seen me point
+out to Paradis the possible entry of the bullet. I pretend not to
+understand and then make some kind of evasive reply. All at once I have
+a torturing idea--the smell! It is there, and there is no mistaking it.
+It reveals a corpse; and perhaps he will guess rightly.
+
+It seems to me that he has suddenly smelt the sign--the pathetic,
+lamentable appeal of the dead. But he says nothing, continues his
+solitary walk, and disappears round the corner.
+
+"Yesterday," says Paradis to me, "he came just here, with his mess-tin
+full of rice that he didn't want to eat. Just as if he knew what he was
+doing, the fool stops here and talks of pitching the rest of his food
+over the bank, just on the spot where--where the other was. I couldn't
+stick that, old chap. I grabbed his arm just as he chucked the rice
+into the air, and it flopped down here in the trench. Old man, he
+turned round on me in a rage and all red in the face, 'What the hell's
+up with you now?' he says. I looked as fat-headed as I could, and
+mumbled some rot about not doing it on purpose. He shrugs his
+shoulders, and looks at me same as if I was dirt. He goes off, saying
+to himself, 'Did you see him, the blockhead?' He's bad-tempered, you
+know, the poor chap, and I couldn't complain. 'All right, all right,'
+he kept saying; and I didn't like it, you know, because I did wrong all
+the time, although I was right."
+
+We go back together in silence and re-enter the dugout where the others
+are gathered. It is an old headquarters post, and spacious. Just as we
+slide in, Paradis listens. "Our batteries have been playing extra hell
+for the last hour, don't you think?"
+
+I know what he means, and reply with an empty gesture, "We shall see,
+old man, we shall see all right!"
+
+In the dug-out, to an audience of three, Tirette is again pouring out
+his barrack-life tales. Marthereau is snoring in a corner; he is close
+to the entry, and to get down we have to stride over his short legs,
+which seem to have gone back into his trunk. A group of kneeling men
+around a folded blanket are playing with cards--
+
+"My turn!"--"40, 42--48--49!--Good!"
+
+"Isn't he lucky, that game-bird; it's imposs', I've got stumped three
+times I want nothing more to do with you. You're skinning me this
+evening, and you robbed me the other day, too, you infernal
+fritter!"--"What did you revoke for, mugwump?"--"I'd only the king,
+nothing else."
+
+"All the same," murmurs some one who is eating in a corner, "this
+Camembert, it cost twenty-five sous, but you talk about muck! Outside
+there's a layer of sticky glue, and inside it's plaster that breaks."
+
+Meanwhile Tirette relates the outrages inflicted on him during his
+twenty-one days of training owing to the quarrelsome temper of a
+certain major: "A great hog he was, my boy, everything rotten on this
+earth. All the lot of us looked foul when he went by or when we saw him
+in the officers' room spread out on a chair that you couldn't see
+underneath him, with his vast belly and huge cap, and circled round
+with stripes from top to bottom, like a barrel--he was hard on the
+private! They called him Loeb--a Boche, you see!"
+
+"I knew him!" cried Paradis; "when war started he was declared unfit
+for active service, naturally. While I was doing my term he was a
+dodger already--but he dodged round all the street corners to pinch
+you--you got a day's clink for an unbuttoned button, and he gave it you
+over and above if there was some bit of a thing about you that wasn't
+quite O.K.--and everybody laughed. He thought they were laughing at
+you, and you knew they were laughing at him, but you knew it in vain,
+you were in it up to your head for the clink."
+
+"He had a wife," Tirette goes on, "the old--"
+
+"I remember her, too," Paradis exclaimed. "You talk about a bitch!"
+
+"Some of 'em drag a little pug-dog about with 'em, but him, he trailed
+that yellow minx about everywhere, with her broom-handle hips and her
+wicked look. It was her that worked the old sod up against us. He was
+more stupid than wicked, but as soon as she was there he got more
+wicked than stupid. So you bet they were some nuisance--"
+
+Just then, Marthereau wakes up from his sleep by the entry with a
+half-groan. He straightens himself up, sitting on his straw like a
+gaol-bird, and we see his bearded silhouette take the vague outline of
+a Chinese, while his round eye rolls and turns in the shadows. He is
+looking at his dreams of a moment ago. Then he passes his hand over his
+eyes and--as if it had some connection with his dream--recalls the
+scene that night when we came up to the trenches--"For all that," he
+says, in a voice weighty with slumber and reflection, "there were some
+half-seas-over that night! Ah, what a night! All those troops,
+companies and whole regiments, yelling and surging all the way up the
+road! In the thinnest of the dark you could see the jumble of poilus
+that went on and up--like the sea itself, you'd say--and carrying on
+across all the convoys of artillery and ambulance wagons that we met
+that night. I've never seen so many, so many convoys in the night,
+never!" Then he deals himself a thump on the chest, settles down again
+in self-possession, groans, and says no more.
+
+Blaire's voice rises, giving expression to the haunting thought that
+wakes in the depths of the men: "It's four o'clock. It's too late for
+there to be anything from our side."
+
+One of the gamesters in the other corner yelps a question at another:
+"Now then? Are you going to play or aren't you, worm-face?"
+
+Tirette continues the story of his major: "Behold one day they'd served
+us at the barracks with some suetty soup. Old man, a disease, it was!
+So a chap asks to speak to the captain, and holds his mess-tin up to
+his nose."
+
+"Numskull!" some one shouts in the other corner. "Why didn't you trump,
+then?"
+
+"'Ah, damn it,' said the captain, 'take it away from my nose, it
+positively stinks.'"
+
+"It wasn't my game," quavers a discontented but unconvinced voice.
+
+"And the captain, he makes a report to the major. But behold the major,
+mad as the devil, he butts in shaking the paper in his paw: 'What's
+this?' he says. 'Where's the soup that has caused this rebellion, that
+I may taste it?' They bring him some in a clean mess-tin and he sniffs
+it. 'What now!' he says, 'it smells good. They damned well shan't have
+it then, rich soup like this!'"
+
+"Not your game! And he was leading, too! Bungler! It's unlucky, you
+know."
+
+"Then at five o'clock as we were coming out of barracks, our two
+marvels butt in again and plank themselves in front of the swaddies
+coming out, trying to spot some little thing not quite so, and he said,
+'Ah, my bucks, you thought you'd score off me by complaining of this
+excellent soup that I have consumed myself along with my partner here;
+just wait and see if I don't get even with you. Hey, you with the long
+hair, the tall artist, come here a minute!' And all the time the beast
+was jawing, his bag-o'-bones--as straight and thin as a post--went
+'oui, oui' with her head."
+
+"That depends; if he hadn't a trump, it's another matter."
+
+"But all of a sudden we see her go white as a sheet, she puts her fist
+on her tummy and she shakes like all that, and then suddenly, in front
+of all the fellows that filled the square, she drops her umbrella and
+starts spewing!"
+
+"Hey, listen!" says Paradis, sharply, "they're shouting in the trench.
+Don't you hear? Isn't it 'alarm!' they're shouting?"
+
+"Alarm? Are you mad?"
+
+The words were hardly said when a shadow comes in through the low
+doorway of our dug-out and cries--"Alarm, 22nd! Stand to arms!"
+
+A moment of silence and then several exclamations. "I knew it," murmurs
+Paradis between his teeth, and he goes on his knees towards the opening
+into the molehill that shelters us. Speech then ceases and we seem to
+be struck dumb. Stooping or kneeling we bestir ourselves; we buckle on
+our waist-belts; shadowy arms dart from one side to another; pockets
+are rummaged. And we issue forth pell-mell, dragging our knapsacks
+behind us by the straps, our blankets and pouches.
+
+Outside we are deafened. The roar of gunfire has increased a
+hundredfold, to left, to right, and in front of us. Our batteries give
+voice without ceasing.
+
+"Do you think they're attacking?" ventures a man. "How should I know?"
+replies another voice with irritated brevity.
+
+Our jaws are set and we swallow our thoughts, hurrying, bustling,
+colliding, and grumbling without words.
+
+A command goes forth--"Shoulder your packs."--"There's a
+counter-command--" shouts an officer who runs down the trench with
+great strides, working his elbows, and the rest of his sentence
+disappears with him. A counter-command! A visible tremor has run
+through the files, a start which uplifts our heads and holds us all in
+extreme expectation.
+
+But no; the counter-order only concerns the knapsacks. No pack; but the
+blanket rolled round the body, and the trenching-tool at the waist. We
+unbuckle our blankets, tear them open and roll them up. Still no word
+is spoken; each has a steadfast eye and the mouth forcefully shut. The
+corporals and sergeants go here and there, feverishly spurring the
+silent haste in which the men are bowed: "Now then, hurry up! Come,
+come, what the hell are you doing? Will you hurry, yes or no?"
+
+A detachment of soldiers with a badge of crossed axes on their sleeves
+clear themselves a fairway and swiftly delve holes in the wall of the
+trench. We watch them sideways as we don our equipment.
+
+"What are they doing, those chaps?"--"It's to climb up by."
+
+We are ready. The men marshal themselves, still silently, their
+blankets crosswise, the helmet-strap on the chin, leaning on their
+rifles. I look at their pale, contracted, and reflective faces. They
+are not soldiers, they are men. They are not adventurers, or warriors,
+or made for human slaughter, neither butchers nor cattle. They are
+laborers and artisans whom one recognizes in their uniforms. They are
+civilians uprooted, and they are ready. They await the signal for death
+or murder; but you may see, looking at their faces between the vertical
+gleams of their bayonets, that they are simply men.
+
+Each one knows that he is going to take his head, his chest, his belly,
+his whole body, and all naked, up to the rifles pointed forward, to the
+shells, to the bombs piled and ready, and above all to the methodical
+and almost infallible machine-guns--to all that is waiting for him
+yonder and is now so frightfully silent--before he reaches the other
+soldiers that he must kill. They are not careless of their lives, like
+brigands, nor blinded by passion like savages. In spite of the
+doctrines with which they have been cultivated they are not inflamed.
+They are above instinctive excesses. They are not drunk, either
+physically or morally. It is in full consciousness, as in full health
+and full strength, that they are massed there to hurl themselves once
+more into that sort of madman's part imposed on all men by the madness
+of the human race. One sees the thought and the fear and the farewell
+that there is in their silence, their stillness, in the mask of
+tranquillity which unnaturally grips their faces. They are not the kind
+of hero one thinks of, but their sacrifice has greater worth than they
+who have not seen them will ever be able to understand.
+
+They are waiting; a waiting that extends and seems eternal. Now and
+then one or another starts a little when a bullet, fired from the other
+side, skims the forward embankment that shields us and plunges into the
+flabby flesh of the rear wall.
+
+The end of the day is spreading a sublime but melancholy light on that
+strong unbroken mass of beings of whom some only will live to see the
+night. It is raining--there is always rain in my memories of all the
+tragedies of the great war. The evening is making ready, along with a
+vague and chilling menace; it is about to set for men that snare that
+is as wide as the world.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+New orders are peddled from mouth to mouth. Bombs strung on wire hoops
+are distributed--"Let each man take two bombs!"
+
+The major goes by. He is restrained in his gestures, in undress,
+girded, undecorated. We hear him say, "There's something good, mes
+enfants, the Boches are clearing out. You'll get along all right, eh?"
+
+News passes among us like a breeze. "The Moroccans and the 21st Company
+are in front of us. The attack is launched on our right."
+
+The corporals are summoned to the captain, and return with armsful of
+steel things. Bertrand is fingering me; he hooks something on to a
+button of my greatcoat. It is a kitchen knife. "I'm putting this on to
+your coat," he says.
+
+"Me too!" says Pepin.
+
+"No," says Bertrand, "it's forbidden to take volunteers for these
+things."
+
+"Be damned to you!" growls Pepin.
+
+We wait, in the great rainy and shot-hammered space that has no other
+boundary than the distant and tremendous cannonade. Bertrand has
+finished his distribution and returns. Several soldiers have sat down,
+and some of them are yawning.
+
+The cyclist Billette slips through in front of us, carrying an
+officer's waterproof on his arm and obviously averting his face.
+"Hullo, aren't you going too?" Cocon cries to him.
+
+"No, I'm not going," says the other. "I'm in the 17th. The Fifth
+Battalion's not attacking!"
+
+"Ah, they've always got the luck, the Fifth. They've never got to fight
+like we have!" Billette is already in the distance, and a few grimaces
+follow his disappearance.
+
+A man arrives running, and speaks to Bertrand, and then Bertrand turns
+to us--
+
+"Up you go," he says, "it's our turn."
+
+All move at once. We put our feet on the steps made by the sappers,
+raise ourselves, elbow to elbow, beyond the shelter of the trench, and
+climb on to the parapet.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Bertrand is out on the sloping ground. He covers us with a quick
+glance, and when we are all there he says, "Allons, forward!"
+
+Our voices have a curious resonance. The start has been made very
+quickly, unexpectedly almost, as in a dream. There is no whistling
+sound in the air. Among the vast uproar of the guns we discern very
+clearly this surprising silence of bullets around us--
+
+We descend over the rough and slippery ground with involuntary
+gestures, helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle. Mechanically the
+eye fastens on some detail of the declivity, of the ruined ground, on
+the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up, at the wreckage in the
+holes. It is unbelievable that we are upright in full daylight on this
+slope where several survivors remember sliding along in the darkness
+with such care, and where the others have only hazarded furtive glances
+through the loopholes. No, there is no firing against us. The wide
+exodus of the battalion out of the ground seems to have passed
+unnoticed! This truce is full of an increasing menace, increasing. The
+pale light confuses us.
+
+On all sides the slope is covered by men who, like us, are bent on the
+descent. On the right the outline is defined of a company that is
+reaching the ravine by Trench 97--an old German work in ruins. We cross
+our wire by openings. Still no one fires on us. Some awkward ones who
+have made false steps are getting up again. We form up on the farther
+side of the entanglements and then set ourselves to topple down the
+slope rather faster--there is an instinctive acceleration in the
+movement. Several bullets arrive at last among us. Bertrand shouts to
+us to reserve our bombs and wait till the last moment.
+
+But the sound of his voice is carried away. Abruptly, across all the
+width of the opposite slope, lurid flames burst forth that strike the
+air with terrible detonations. In line from left to right fires emerge
+from the sky and explosions from the ground. It is a frightful curtain
+which divides us from the world, which divides us from the past and
+from the future. We stop, fixed to the ground, stupefied by the sudden
+host that thunders from every side; then a simultaneous effort uplifts
+our mass again and throws it swiftly forward. We stumble and impede
+each other in the great waves of smoke. With harsh crashes and
+whirlwinds of pulverized earth, towards the profundity into which we
+hurl ourselves pell-mell, we see craters opened here and there, side by
+side, and merging in each other. Then one knows no longer where the
+discharges fall. Volleys are let loose so monstrously resounding that
+one feels himself annihilated by the mere sound of the downpoured
+thunder of these great constellations of destruction that form in the
+sky. One sees and one feels the fragments passing close to one's head
+with their hiss of red-hot iron plunged in water. The blast of one
+explosion so burns my hands that I let my rifle fall. I pick it up
+again, reeling, and set off in the tawny-gleaming tempest with lowered
+head, lashed by spirits of dust and soot in a crushing downpour like
+volcanic lava. The stridor of the bursting shells hurts your ears,
+beats you on the neck, goes through your temples, and you cannot endure
+it without a cry. The gusts of death drive us on, lift us up, rock us
+to and fro. We leap, and do not know whither we go. Our eyes are
+blinking and weeping and obscured. The view before us is blocked by a
+flashing avalanche that fills space.
+
+It is the barrage fire. We have to go through that whirlwind of fire
+and those fearful showers that vertically fall. We are passing through.
+We are through it, by chance. Here and there I have seen forms that
+spun round and were lifted up and laid down, illumined by a brief
+reflection from over yonder. I have glimpsed strange faces that uttered
+some sort of cry--you could see them without hearing them in the roar
+of annihilation. A brasier full of red and black masses huge and
+furious fell about me, excavating the ground, tearing it from under my
+feet, throwing me aside like a bouncing toy. I remember that I strode
+over a smoldering corpse, quite black, with a tissue of rosy blood
+shriveling on him; and I remember, too, that the skirts of the
+greatcoat flying next to me had caught fire, and left a trail of smoke
+behind. On our right, all along Trench 97, our glances were drawn and
+dazzled by a rank of frightful flames, closely crowded against each
+other like men.
+
+Forward!
+
+Now, we are nearly running. I see some who fall solidly flat, face
+forward, and others who founder meekly, as though they would sit down
+on the ground. We step aside abruptly to avoid the prostrate dead,
+quiet and rigid, or else offensive, and also--more perilous
+snares!--the wounded that hook on to you, struggling.
+
+The International Trench! We are there. The wire entanglements have
+been torn up into long roots and creepers, thrown afar and coiled up,
+swept away and piled in great drifts by the guns. Between these big
+bushes of rain-damped steel the ground is open and free.
+
+The trench is not defended. The Germans have abandoned it, or else a
+first wave has already passed over it. Its interior bristles with
+rifles placed against the bank. In the bottom are scattered corpses.
+From the jumbled litter of the long trench, hands emerge that protrude
+from gray sleeves with red facings, and booted legs. In places the
+embankment is destroyed and its woodwork splintered--all the flank of
+the trench collapsed and fallen into an indescribable mixture. In other
+places, round pits are yawning. And of all that moment I have best
+retained the vision of a whimsical trench covered with many-colored
+rags and tatters. For the making of their sandbags the Germans had used
+cotton and woolen stuffs of motley design pillaged from some
+house-furnisher's shop; and all this hotch-potch of colored remnants,
+mangled and frayed, floats and flaps and dances in our faces.
+
+We have spread out in the trench. The lieutenant, who has jumped to the
+other side, is stooping and summoning us with signs and shouts--"Don't
+stay there; forward, forward!"
+
+We climb the wall of the trench with the help of the sacks, of weapons,
+and of the backs that are piled up there. In the bottom of the ravine
+the soil is shot-churned, crowded with jetsam, swarming with prostrate
+bodies. Some are motionless as blocks of wood; others move slowly or
+convulsively. The barrage fire continues to increase its infernal
+discharge behind us on the ground that we have crossed. But where we
+are at the foot of the rise it is a dead point for the artillery.
+
+A short and uncertain calm follows. We are less deafened and look at
+each other. There is fever in the eyes, and the cheek-bones are
+blood-red. Our breathing snores and our hearts drum in our bodies.
+
+In haste and confusion we recognize each other, as if we had met again
+face to face in a nightmare on the uttermost shores of death. Some
+hurried words are cast upon this glade in hell--"It's you! "--"Where's
+Cocon?"--"Don't know."--"Have you seen the captain? "--"No."--"Going
+strong?"--"Yes."
+
+The bottom of the ravine is crossed and the other slope rises opposite.
+We climb in Indian file by a stairway rough-hewn in the ground: "Look
+out!" The shout means that a soldier half-way up the steps has been
+struck in the loins by a shell-fragment; he falls with his arms
+forward, bareheaded, like the diving swimmer. We can see the shapeless
+silhouette of the mass as it plunges into the gulf. I can almost see
+the detail of his blown hair over the black profile of his face.
+
+We debouch upon the height. A great colorless emptiness is outspread
+before us. At first one can see nothing but a chalky and stony plain,
+yellow and gray to the limit of sight. No human wave is preceding ours;
+in front of us there is no living soul, but the ground is peopled with
+dead--recent corpses that still mimic agony or sleep, and old remains
+already bleached and scattered to the wind, half assimilated by the
+earth.
+
+As soon as our pushing and jolted file emerges, two men close to me are
+hit, two shadows are hurled to the ground and roll under our feet, one
+with a sharp cry, and the other silently, as a felled ox. Another
+disappears with the caper of a lunatic, as if he had been snatched
+away. Instinctively we close up as we hustle forward--always
+forward--and the wound in our line closes of its own accord. The
+adjutant stops, raises his sword, lets it fall, and drops to his knees.
+His kneeling body slopes backward in jerks, his helmet drops on his
+heels, and he remains there, bareheaded, face to the sky. Hurriedly the
+rush of the rank has split open to respect his immobility.
+
+But we cannot see the lieutenant. No more leaders then--Hesitation
+checks the wave of humanity that begins to beat on the plateau. Above
+the trampling one hears the hoarse effort of our lungs. "Forward!"
+cries some soldier, and then all resume the onward race to perdition
+with increasing speed.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Where's Bertrand?" comes the laborious complaint of one of the
+foremost runners. "There! Here!" He had stooped in passing over a
+wounded man, but he leaves him quickly, and the man extends his arms
+towards him and seems to sob.
+
+It is just at the moment when he rejoins us that we hear in front of
+us, coming from a sort of ground swelling, the crackle of a
+machine-gun. It is a moment of agony--more serious even than when we
+were passing through the flaming earthquake of the barrage. That
+familiar voice speaks to us across the plain, sharp and horrible. But
+we no longer stop. "Go on, go on!"
+
+Our panting becomes hoarse groaning, yet still we hurl ourselves toward
+the horizon.
+
+"The Boches! I see them!" a man says suddenly. "Yes--their heads,
+there--above the trench--it's there, the trench, that line. It's close,
+Ah, the hogs!"
+
+We can indeed make out little round gray caps which rise and then drop
+on the ground level, fifty yards away, beyond a belt of dark earth,
+furrowed and humped. Encouraged they spring forward, they who now form
+the group where I am. So near the goal, so far unscathed, shall we not
+reach it? Yes, we will reach it! We make great strides and no longer
+hear anything. Each man plunges straight ahead, fascinated by the
+terrible trench, bent rigidly forward, almost incapable of turning his
+head to right or to left. I have a notion that many of us missed their
+footing and fell to the ground. I jump sideways to miss the suddenly
+erect bayonet of a toppling rifle. Quite close to me, Farfadet jostles
+me with his face bleeding, throws himself on Volpatte who is beside me
+and clings to him. Volpatte doubles up without slackening his rush and
+drags him along some paces, then shakes him off without looking at him
+and without knowing who he is, and shouts at him in a breaking voice
+almost choked with exertion: "Let me go, let me go, nom de Dieu!
+They'll pick you up directly--don't worry."
+
+The other man sinks to the ground, and his face, plastered with a
+scarlet mask and void of all expression, turns in every direction;
+while Volpatte, already in the distance, automatically repeats between
+his teeth, "Don't worry," with a steady forward gaze on the line.
+
+A shower of bullets spirts around me, increasing the number of those
+who suddenly halt, who collapse slowly, defiant and gesticulating, of
+those who dive forward solidly with all the body's burden, of the
+shouts, deep, furious, and desperate, and even of that hollow and
+terrible gasp when a man's life goes bodily forth in a breath. And we
+who are not yet stricken, we look ahead, we walk and we run, among the
+frolics of the death that strikes at random into our flesh.
+
+The wire entanglements--and there is one stretch of them intact. We go
+along to where it has been gutted into a wide and deep opening. This is
+a colossal funnel-hole, formed of smaller funnels placed together, a
+fantastic volcanic crater, scooped there by the guns.
+
+The sight of this convulsion is stupefying; truly it seems that it must
+have come from the center of the earth. Such a rending of virgin strata
+puts new edge on our attacking fury, and none of us can keep from
+shouting with a solemn shake of the head--even just now when words are
+but painfully torn from our throats--"Ah, Christ! Look what hell we've
+given 'em there! Ah, look!"
+
+Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the
+hollows and the earthy mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and blackened
+and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet and we tear
+them out angrily. The accouterments and stuffs that cover the soft
+soil, the linen that is scattered about from sundered knapsacks,
+prevent us from sticking fast in it, and we are careful to plant our
+feet in this debris when we jump into the holes or climb the hillocks.
+
+Behind us voices urge us--"Forward, boys, forward, nome de Dieu!"
+
+"All the regiment is behind us!" they cry. We do not turn round to see,
+but the assurance electrifies our rush once more.
+
+No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are
+nearing. Some German dead are crumbling in front of it, in pinnacled
+heaps or extended lines. We are there. The parapet takes definite and
+sinister shape and detail; the loopholes--we are prodigiously,
+incredibly close!
+
+Something falls in front of us. It is a bomb. With a kick Corporal
+Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the
+trench.
+
+With that fortunate deed the squad reaches the trench.
+
+Pepin has hurled himself flat on the ground and is involved with a
+corpse. He reaches the edge and plunges in--the first to enter.
+Fouillade, with great gestures and shouts, jumps into the pit almost at
+the same moment that Pepin rolls down it. Indistinctly I see--in the
+time of the lightning's flash--a whole row of black demons stooping and
+squatting for the descent, on the ridge of the embankment, on the edge
+of the dark ambush.
+
+A terrible volley bursts point-blank in our faces, flinging in front of
+us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earthen verge. After
+the stunning shock we shake ourselves and burst into devilish
+laughter--the discharge has passed too high. And at once, with shouts
+and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into the belly
+of the trench!
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We are submerged in a mysterious smoke, and at first I can only see
+blue uniforms in the stifling gulf. We go one way and then another,
+driven by each other, snarling and searching. We turn about, and with
+our hands encumbered by knife, bombs, and rifle, we do not know at
+first what to do.
+
+"They're in their funk-holes, the swine!" is the cry. Heavy explosions
+are shaking the earth--underground, in the dug-outs. We are all at once
+divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see
+nothing more. We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness
+of a fallen fragment of night. One stumbles against barriers of
+cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom. Hardly can
+one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made of white
+sandbags, which are everywhere torn like paper. At one time the heavy
+adhesive reek sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of
+the attackers. Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a
+hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and sinks
+to the bottom. I hear several shrill cries of "Kamarad!" proceeding
+from a pale-faced and gray-clad group in the huge corner made by a
+rending shell. Under the inky cloud the tempest of men flows back,
+climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling, along the dark
+and ruined mole.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and understand
+that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has not
+encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our approach.
+The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender curtain of
+defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are caught like rats
+or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void, a great void. We
+advance in crowds like a terrible array of spectators.
+
+And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled white
+walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a vanished river
+that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the flat round hole of
+a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the sloping banks and in
+the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of corpses--a dead river
+that is filled again to overflowing by the new tide and the breaking
+wave of our company. In the smoke vomited by dug-outs and the shaking
+wind of subterranean explosions, I come upon a compact mass of men
+hooked onto each other who are describing a wide circle. Just as we
+reach them the entire mass breaks up to make a residue of furious
+battle. I see Blaire break away, his helmet hanging on his neck by the
+chin-strap and his face flayed, and uttering a savage yell. I stumble
+upon a man who is crouching at the entry to a dug-out. Drawing back
+from the black hatchway, yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself
+with his left hand on a beam. In his right hand and for several seconds
+he holds a bomb which is on the point of exploding. It disappears in
+the hole, bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him
+from the bowels of the earth. The man seizes another bomb.
+
+Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another
+dug-out with a pickax he has found there, causing a landslide, and the
+entry is blocked. I see several shadows trampling and gesticulating
+over the tomb.
+
+Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this
+long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible shells
+and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognize those whom I
+know, just as though all that had gone before of our lives had suddenly
+become very distant. There is some change working in them. A frenzied
+excitement is driving them all out of themselves.
+
+"What are we stopping here for?" says one, grinding his teeth.
+
+"Why don't we go on to the next?" a second asks me in fury. "Now we're
+here, we'd be there in a few jumps!'
+
+"I, too, I want to go on."--"Me, too. Ah, the hogs!" They shake
+themselves like banners. They carry the luck of their survival as it
+were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with
+themselves.
+
+We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange demolished
+way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown to the unknown.
+
+Advance to the right!
+
+We begin to flow again in one direction. No doubt it is a movement
+planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs. We trample soft bodies
+underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their position;
+rivulets and cries come from them. Like posts and heaps of rubbish,
+corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them down, suffocate
+them, strangle them. So that I can get by, I must push at a slaughtered
+trunk of which the neck is a spring of gurgling blood.
+
+In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown
+out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together, athwart
+the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in all its
+environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed, blood-red
+with sweat, eyes flashing. Some groups seem to be dancing as they
+brandish their knives. They are elated, immensely confident, ferocious.
+
+The battle dies down imperceptibly. A soldier says, "Well, what's to be
+done now?" it flares up again suddenly at one point. Twenty yards away
+in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the gray embankment
+makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its scattered
+missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits intermittently and
+seems to be in difficulties.
+
+Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see men
+encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it. Near to me I make
+out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight and with
+no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking explosions
+come in jerky sequence.
+
+A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two. Joseph
+halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee. I run to him and he
+watches me coming. "It's nothing--my thigh. I can crawl along by
+myself." He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways
+slowly towards the trench.
+
+I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit
+him, and I slip round there by the left, making a detour. No one there.
+I only meet another of our squad on the same errand--Paradis.
+
+We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of
+iron of all shapes. They block up the trench and separate us. "The
+machine-gun's taken by the 7th," they shout, "it won't bark any more.
+It was a mad devil--filthy beast! Filthy beast!"
+
+"What's there to do now?"--"Nothing."
+
+We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down. The living have ceased
+to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last, surrounded by
+smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to all the ends of
+the earth. We no longer know where we are. There is neither earth nor
+sky--nothing but a sort of cloud. The first period of inaction is
+forming in the chaotic drama, and there is a general slackening in the
+movement and the uproar. The cannonade grows less; it still shakes the
+sky as a cough shakes a man, but it is farther off now. Enthusiasm is
+allayed, and there remains only the infinite fatigue that rises and
+overwhelms us, and the infinite waiting that begins over again.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Where is the enemy? He has left his dead everywhere, and we have seen
+rows of prisoners. Yonder again there is one, drab, ill-defined and
+smoky, outlined against the dirty sky. But the bulk seem to have
+dispersed afar. A few shells come to us here and there blunderingly,
+and we ridicule them. We are saved, we are quiet, we are alone, in this
+desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins a line of the living.
+
+Night has come. The dust has flown away, but has yielded place to
+shadow and darkness over the long-drawn multitude's disorder. Men
+approach each other, sit down, get up again and walk about, leaning on
+each other or hooked together. Between the dug-outs, which are blocked
+by the mingled dead, we gather in groups and squat. Some have laid
+their rifles on the ground and wander on the rim of the trench with
+their arms balancing; and when they come near we can see that they are
+blackened and scorched, their eyes are red and slashed with mud. We
+speak seldom, but are beginning to think.
+
+We see the stretcher-bearers, whose sharp silhouettes stoop and grope;
+they advance linked two and two together by their long burdens. Yonder
+on our right one hears the blows of pick and shovel.
+
+I wander into the middle of this gloomy turmoil. In a place where the
+bombardment has crushed the embankment of the trench into a gentle
+slope, some one is seated. A faint light still prevails. The tranquil
+attitude of this man as he looks reflectively in front of him is
+sculptural and striking. Stooping, I recognize him as Corporal
+Bertrand. He turns his face towards me, and I feel that he is looking
+at me through the shadows with his thoughtful smile.
+
+"I was coming to look for you," he says; "they're organizing a guard
+for the trench until we've got news of what the others have done and
+what's going on in front. I'm going to put you on double sentry with
+Paradis, in a listening-post that the sappers have just dug."
+
+We watch the shadows of the passers-by and of those who are seated,
+outlined in inky blots, bowed and bent in diverse attitudes under the
+gray sky, all along the ruined parapet. Dwarfed to the size of insects
+and worms, they make a strange and secret stirring among these
+shadow-hidden lands where for two years war has caused cities of
+soldiers to wander or stagnate over deep and boundless cemeteries.
+
+Two obscure forms pass in the dark, several paces from us; they are
+talking together in low voices--"You bet, old chap, instead of
+listening to him, I shoved my bayonet into his belly so that I couldn't
+haul it out."
+
+"There were four in the bottom of the hole. I called to 'em to come
+out, and as soon as one came out I stuck him. Blood ran down me up to
+the elbow and stuck up my sleeves."
+
+"Ah!" the first speaker went on, "when we are telling all about it
+later, if we get back, to the other people at home, by the stove and
+the candle, who's going to believe it? It's a pity, isn't it?"
+
+"I don't care a damn about that, as long as we do get back," said the
+other; "I want the end quickly, and only that."
+
+Bertrand was used to speak very little ordinarily, and never of
+himself. But he said, "I've got three of them on my hands. I struck
+like a madman. Ah, we were all like beasts when we got here!"
+
+He raised his voice and there was a restrained tremor in it: "it was
+necessary," he said, "it was necessary, for the future's sake."
+
+He crossed his arms and tossed his head: "The future!" he cried all at
+once as a prophet might. "How will they regard this slaughter, they
+who'll live after us, to whom progress--which comes as sure as
+fate--will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will they
+regard these exploits which even we who perform them don't know whether
+one should compare them with those of Plutarch's and Corneille's heroes
+or with those of hooligans and apaches?
+
+"And for all that, mind you," Bertrand went on, "there is one figure
+that has risen above the war and will blaze with the beauty and
+strength of his courage--"
+
+I listened, leaning on a stick and towards him, drinking in the voice
+that came in the twilight silence from the lips that so rarely spoke.
+He cried with a clear voice--"Liebknecht!"
+
+He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly
+serious as a statue's, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once
+again from his marble muteness to repeat, "The future, the future! The
+work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more
+than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and
+shameful. And yet--this present--it had to be, it had to be! Shame on
+military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's calling, that
+changes men by turns into stupid victims or ignoble brutes. Yes, shame.
+That's the true word, but it's too true; it's true in eternity, but
+it's not yet true for us. It will be true when there is a Bible that is
+entirely true, when it is found written among the other truths that a
+purified mind will at the same time let us understand. We are still
+lost, still exiled far from that time. In our time of to-day, in these
+moments, this truth is hardly more than a fallacy, this sacred saying
+is only blasphemy!"
+
+A kind of laugh came from him, full of echoing dreams--"To think I once
+told them I believed in prophecies, just to kid them!"
+
+I sat down by Bertrand's side. This soldier who had always done more
+than was required of him and survived notwithstanding, stood at that
+moment in my eyes for those who incarnate a lofty moral conception, who
+have the strength to detach themselves from the hustle of
+circumstances, and who are destined, however little their path may run
+through a splendor of events, to dominate their time.
+
+"I have always thought all those things," I murmured.
+
+"Ah!" said Bertrand. We looked at each other without a word, with a
+little surprised self-communion. After this full silence he spoke
+again. "It's time to start duty; take your rifle and come."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+From our listening-post we see towards the east a light spreading like
+a conflagration, but bluer and sadder than buildings on fire. It
+streaks the sky above a long black cloud which extends suspended like
+the smoke of an extinguished fire, like an immense stain on the world.
+It is the returning morning.
+
+It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering
+fatigue. We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth chatter.
+Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes from the sky
+into the slender framework of the black clouds. All is frozen,
+colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere. There is rime
+and snow under a burden of mist. Everything is white. Paradis moves--a
+heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white. I had placed my
+shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and it looks as if
+wrapped in paper. In the bottom of the hole a little snow floats,
+fretted and gray in the black foot-bath. Outside the hole, on the
+piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded dead, snow rests
+like muslin.
+
+Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow
+darker as they approach and hail us. They are the men who come to
+relieve us. Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their
+cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not
+snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.
+
+Paradis hoists himself out. Over the plain I follow his Father
+Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up
+white-felted soles. Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the
+footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty
+whiteness that covers the ground.
+
+Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which tarpaulins
+are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white velvet or
+mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and between the
+watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to fight against the
+cold, to exclude it from the meager fireside of their own chests, or
+who are simply frozen. A dead man has slid down, upright and hardly
+askew, with his feet in the trench and his chest and arms resting on
+the bank. He was clasping the earth when life left him. His face is
+turned skyward and is covered with a leprosy of ice, the eyelids are
+white as the eyes, the mustache caked with hard slime. Other bodies are
+sleeping, less white than that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on
+lifeless things.
+
+"We must sleep." Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where we
+may hide ourselves and shut our eyes. "It can't be helped if there are
+stiffs in the dugouts," mutters Paradis; "in a cold like this they'll
+keep, they won't be too bad." We go forward, so weary that we can only
+see the ground.
+
+I am alone. Where is Paradis? He must have lain down in some hole, and
+perhaps I did not hear his call. I meet Marthereau. "I'm looking where
+I can sleep, I've been on guard," he says.
+
+"I, too; let's look together."
+
+"What's all the row and to-do?" says Marthereau. A mingled hubbub of
+trampling and voices overflows from the communication trench that goes
+off here. "The communication trenches are full of men. Who are you?"
+
+One of those with whom we are suddenly mixed up replies, "We're the
+Fifth Battalion." The newcomers stop. They are in marching order. The
+one that spoke sits down for a breathing space on the curves of a
+sand-bag that protrudes from the line. He wipes his nose with the back
+of his sleeve.
+
+"What are you doing here? Have they told you to come?"
+
+"Not half they haven't told us. We're coming to attack. We're going
+yonder, right up." With his head he indicates the north. The curiosity
+with which we look at them fastens on to a detail. "You've carried
+everything with you?"--"We chose to keep it, that's all."
+
+"Forward!" they are ordered. They rise and proceed, incompletely awake,
+their eyes puffy, their wrinkles underlined. There are young men among
+them with thin necks and vacuous eyes, and old men; and in the middle,
+ordinary ones. They march with a commonplace and pacific step. What
+they are going to do seems to us, who did it last night, beyond human
+strength. But still they go away towards the north.
+
+"The revally of the damned," says Marthereau.
+
+We make way for them with a sort of admiration and a sort of terror.
+When they have passed, Marthereau wags his head and murmurs, "There are
+some getting ready, too, on the other side, with their gray uniforms.
+Do you think those chaps are feeling it about the attack? Then why have
+they come? It's not their doing, I know, but it's theirs all the same,
+seeing they're here.--I know, I know, but it's odd, all of it."
+
+The sight of a passer-by alters the course of his ideas: "Tiens,
+there's Truc, the big one, d'you know him? Isn't he immense and
+pointed, that chap! As for me, I know I'm not quite hardly big enough;
+but him, he goes too far. He always knows what's going on, that
+two-yarder! For savvying everything, there's nobody going to give him
+the go-by! I'll go and chivvy him about a funk-hole."
+
+"If there's a rabbit-hole anywhere?" replies the elongated passer-by,
+leaning on Marthereau like a poplar tree, "for sure, my old Caparthe,
+certainly. Tiens, there"--and unbending his elbow he makes an
+indicative gesture like a flag-signaler--"'Villa von Hindenburg.' and
+there, 'Villa Glucks auf.' If that doesn't satisfy you, you gentlemen
+are hard to please. P'raps there's a few lodgers in the basement, but
+not noisy lodgers, and you can talk out aloud in front of them, you
+know!"
+
+"Ah, nom de Dieu!" cried Marthereau a quarter of an hour after we had
+established ourselves in one of these square-cut graves, "there's
+lodgers he didn't tell us about, that frightful great lightning-rod,
+that infinity!" His eyelids were just closing, but they opened again
+and he scratched his arms and thighs: "I want a snooze! It appears it's
+out of the question. Can't resist these things."
+
+We settled ourselves to yawning and sighing, and finally we lighted a
+stump of candle, wet enough to resist us although covered with our
+hands; and we watched each other yawn.
+
+The German dug-out consisted of several rooms. We were against a
+partition of ill-fitting planks; and on the other side, in Cave No. 2,
+some men were also awake. We saw light trickle through the crannies
+between the planks and heard rumbling voices. "It's the other section,"
+said Marthereau.
+
+Then we listened, mechanically. "When I was off on leave," boomed an
+invisible talker, "we had the hump at first, because we were thinking
+of my poor brother who was missing in March--dead, no doubt--and of my
+poor little Julien, of Class 1915, killed in the October attacks. And
+then bit by bit, her and me, we settled down to be happy at being
+together again, you see. Our little kid, the last, a five-year-old,
+entertained us a treat. He wanted to play soldiers with me, and I made
+a little gun for him. I explained the trenches to him; and he, all
+fluttering with delight like a bird, he was shooting at me and yelling.
+Ah, the damned young gentleman, he did it properly! He'll make a famous
+poilu later! I tell you, he's quite got the military spirit!"
+
+A silence; then an obscure murmur of talk, in the midst of which we
+catch the name of Napoleon; then another voice, or the same, saying,
+"Wilhelm, he's a stinking beast to have brought this war on. But
+Napoleon, he was a great man!"
+
+Marthereau is kneeling in front of me in the feeble and scanty rays of
+our candle, in the bottom of this dark ill-enclosed hole where the cold
+shudders through at intervals, where vermin swarm and where the sorry
+crowd of living men endures the faint but musty savor of a tomb; and
+Marthereau looks at me. He still hears, as I do, the unknown soldier
+who said, "Wilhelm is a stinking beast, but Napoleon was a great man,"
+and who extolled the martial ardor of the little boy still left to him.
+Marthereau droops his arms and wags his weary head--and the shadow of
+the double gesture is thrown on the partition by the lean light in a
+sudden caricature.
+
+"Ah!" says my humble companion, "we're all of us not bad sorts, and
+we're unlucky, and we're poor devils as well. But we're too stupid,
+we're too stupid!"
+
+Again he turns his eyes on me. In his bewhiskered and poodle-like face
+I see his fine eyes shining in wondering and still confused
+contemplation of things which he is setting himself to understand in
+the innocence of his obscurity.
+
+We come out of the uninhabitable shelter; the weather has bettered a
+little; the snow has melted, and all is soiled anew. "The wind's licked
+up the sugar," says Marthereau.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I am deputed to accompany Mesnil Joseph to the refuge on the Pylones
+road. Sergeant Henriot gives me charge of the wounded man and hands me
+his clearing order. "If you meet Bertrand on the way," says Henriot,
+"tell him to look sharp and get busy, will you?" Bertrand went away on
+liaison duty last night and they have been waiting for him for an hour;
+the captain is getting impatient and threatens to lose his temper.
+
+I get under way with Joseph, who walks very slowly, a little paler than
+usual, and still taciturn. Now and again he halts, and his face
+twitches. We follow the communication trenches, and a comrade appears
+suddenly. It is Volpatte, and he says, "I'm going with you to the foot
+of the hill." As he is off duty, he is wielding a magnificent twisted
+walking-stick, and he shakes in his hand like castanets the precious
+pair of scissors that never leaves him.
+
+All three of us come out of the communication trench when the slope of
+the land allows us to do it without danger of bullets--the guns are not
+firing. As soon as we are outside we stumble upon a gathering of men.
+It is raining. Between the heavy legs planted there like little trees
+on the gray plain in the mist we see a dead man. Volpatte edges his way
+in to the horizontal form upon which these upright ones are waiting;
+then he turns round violently and shouts to us, "It's Pepin!"
+
+"Ah!" says Joseph, who is already almost fainting. He leans on me and
+we draw near. Pepin is full length, his feet and hands bent and
+shriveled, and his rain-washed face is swollen and horribly gray.
+
+A man who holds a pickax and whose sweating face is full of little
+black trenches, recounts to us the death of Pepin: "He'd gone into a
+funk-hole where the Boches had planked themselves, and behold no one
+knew he was there and they smoked the hole to make sure of cleaning it
+out, and the poor lad, they found him after the operation, corpsed, and
+all pulled out like a cat's innards in the middle of the Boche cold
+meat that he'd stuck--and very nicely stuck too, I may say, seeing I
+was in business as a butcher in the suburbs of Paris."
+
+"One less to the squad!" says Volpatte as we go away.
+
+We are now on the edge of the ravine at the spot where the plateau
+begins that our desperate charge traversed last evening, and we cannot
+recognize it. This plain, which had then seemed to me quite level,
+though it really slopes, is an amazing charnel-house. It swarms with
+corpses, and might be a cemetery of which the top has been taken away.
+
+Groups of men are moving about it, identifying the dead of last evening
+and last night, turning the remains over, recognizing them by some
+detail in spite of their faces. One of these searchers, kneeling, draws
+from a dead hand an effaced and mangled photograph--a portrait killed.
+
+In the distance, black shell-smoke goes up in scrolls, then detonates
+over the horizon. The wide and stippled flight of an army of crows
+sweeps the sky.
+
+Down below among the motionless multitude, and identifiable by their
+wasting and disfigurement, there are zouaves, tirailleurs, and Foreign
+Legionaries from the May attack. The extreme end of our lines was then
+on Berthonval Wood, five or six kilometers from here. In that attack,
+which was one of the most terrible of the war or of any war, those men
+got here in a single rush. They thus formed a point too far advanced in
+the wave of attack, and were caught on the flanks between the
+machine-guns posted to right and to left on the lines they had
+overshot. It is some months now since death hollowed their eyes and
+consumed their cheeks, but even in those storm-scattered and dissolving
+remains one can identify the havoc of the machine-guns that destroyed
+them, piercing their backs and loins and severing them in the middle.
+By the side of heads black and waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with
+grubs and the wreckage of insects, where white teeth still gleam in
+some cavities, by the side of poor darkening stumps that abound like a
+field of old roots laid bare, one discovers naked yellow skulls wearing
+the red cloth fez, whose gray cover has crumbled like paper. Some
+thigh-bones protrude from the heaps of rags stuck together with reddish
+mud; and from the holes filled with clothes shredded and daubed with a
+sort of tar, a spinal fragment emerges. Some ribs are scattered on the
+soil like old cages broken; and close by, blackened leathers are
+afloat, with water-bottles and drinking-cups pierced and flattened.
+About a cloven knapsack, on the top of some bones and a cluster of bits
+of cloth and accouterments, some white points are evenly scattered; by
+stooping one can see that they are the finger and toe constructions of
+what was once a corpse.
+
+Sometimes only a rag emerges from long mounds to indicate that some
+human being was there destroyed, for all these unburied dead end by
+entering the soil.
+
+The Germans, who were here yesterday, abandoned their soldiers by the
+side of ours without interring them--as witness these three putrefied
+corpses on the top of each other, in each other, with their round gray
+caps whose red edge is hidden with a gray band, their yellow-gray
+jackets, and their green faces. I look for the features of one of them.
+From the depth of his neck up to the tufts of hair that stick to the
+brim of his cap is just an earthy mass, the face become an anthill, and
+two rotten berries in place of the eyes. Another is a dried emptiness
+flat on its belly, the back in tatters that almost flutter, the hands,
+feet, and face enrooted in the soil.
+
+"Look! It's a new one, this--"
+
+In the middle of the plateau and in the depth of the rainy and bitter
+air, on the ghastly morrow of this debauch of slaughter, there is a
+head planted in the ground, a wet and bloodless head, with a heavy
+beard.
+
+It is one of ours, and the helmet is beside it. The distended eyelids
+permit a little to be seen of the dull porcelain of his eyes, and one
+lip shines like a slug in the shapeless beard. No doubt he fell into a
+shell-hole, which was filled up by another shell, burying him up to the
+neck like the cat's-head German of the Red Tavern at Souchez.
+
+"I don't know him," says Joseph, who has come up very slowly and speaks
+with difficulty.
+
+"I recognize him," replies Volpatte.
+
+"That bearded man?" says Joseph.
+
+"He has no beard. Look--" Stooping, Volpatte passes the end of his
+stick under the chin of the corpse and breaks off a sort of slab of mud
+in which the head was set, a slab that looked like a beard. Then he
+picks up the dead man's helmet and puts it on his head, and for a
+moment holds before the eyes the round handles of his famous scissors
+so as to imitate spectacles.
+
+"Ah!" we all cried together, "it's Cocon!"
+
+When you hear of or see the death of one of those who fought by your
+side and lived exactly the same life, you receive a direct blow in the
+flesh before even understanding. It is truly as if one heard of his own
+destruction. It is only later that one begins to mourn.
+
+We look at the hideous head that is murder's jest, the murdered head
+already and cruelly effacing our memories of Cocon. Another comrade
+less. We remain there around him, afraid.
+
+"He was--"
+
+We should like to speak a little, but do not know what to say that
+would be sufficiently serious or telling or true.
+
+"Come," says Joseph, with an effort, wholly engrossed by his severe
+suffering, "I haven't strength enough to be stopping all the time."
+
+We leave poor Cocon, the ex-statistician, with a last look, a look too
+short and almost vacant.
+
+"One cannot imagine--" says Volpatte.
+
+No, one cannot imagine. All these disappearances at once surpass the
+imagination. There are not enough survivors now. But we have vague idea
+of the grandeur of these dead. They have given all; by degrees they
+have given all their strength, and finally they have given themselves,
+en bloc. They have outpaced life, and their effort has something of
+superhuman perfection.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Tiens, he's just been wounded, that one, and yet--" A fresh wound is
+moistening the neck of a body that is almost a skeleton.
+
+"It's a rat," says Volpatte. "The stiffs are old ones, but the rats
+talk to 'em. You see some rats laid out--poisoned, p'raps--near every
+body or under it. Tiens, this poor old chap shall show us his." He
+lifts up the foot of the collapsed remains and reveals two dead rats.
+
+"I should like to find Farfadet again," says Volpatte. "I told him to
+wait just when we started running and he clipped hold of me. Poor lad,
+let's hope he waited!"
+
+So he goes to and fro, attracted towards the dead by a strange
+curiosity; and these, indifferent, bandy him about from one to another,
+and at each step he looks on the ground. Suddenly he utters a cry of
+distress. With his hand he beckons us as he kneels to a dead man.
+
+Bertrand!
+
+Acute emotion grips us. He has been killed; he, too, like the rest, he
+who most towered over us by his energy and intelligence. By virtue of
+always doing his duty, he has at last got killed. He has at last found
+death where indeed it was.
+
+We look at him, and then turn away from the sight and look upon each
+other.
+
+The shock of his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his remains
+present, for they are abominable to see. Death has bestowed a grotesque
+look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so tranquil. With
+his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache trailing in his mouth,
+and his face swollen--he is laughing. One eye is widely open, the other
+shut, and the tongue lolls out. His arms are outstretched in the form
+of a cross: the hands open, the fingers separated. The right leg is
+straight. The left, whence flowed the hemorrhage that made him die, has
+been broken by a shell; it is twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack,
+invertebrate. A mournful irony has invested the last writhe of his
+agony with the appearance of a clown's antic.
+
+We arrange him, and lay him straight, and tranquillize the horrible
+masks. Volpatte has taken a pocket-book from him and places it
+reverently among his own papers, by the side of the portrait of his own
+wife and children. That done, he shakes his head: "He--he was truly a
+good sort, old man. When he said anything, that was the proof that it
+was true. Ah, we needed him badly!"
+
+"Yes," I said, "we had need of him always."
+
+"Ah, la, la!" murmurs Volpatte, and he trembles. Joseph repeats in a
+weak voice, "Ah, nom de Dieu! Ah, nom de Dieu!"
+
+The plateau is as covered with people as a public square;
+fatigue-parties in detachments, and isolated men. Here and there, the
+stretcher-bearers are beginning (patiently and in a small way) their
+huge and endless task.
+
+Volpatte leaves us, to return to the trench and announce our new
+losses, and above all the great gap left by Bertrand. He says to
+Joseph, "We shan't lose sight of you, eh? Write us a line now and
+again--just, 'All goes well; signed, Camembert,' eh?" He disappears
+among the people who cross each other's path in the expanse now
+completely possessed by a mournful and endless rain.
+
+Joseph leans on me and we go down into the ravine. The slope by which
+we descend is known as the Zouaves' Cells. In the May attack, the
+Zouaves had all begun to dig themselves individual shelters, and round
+these they were exterminated. Some are still seen, prone on the brim of
+an incipient hole, with their trenching-tools in their fleshless hands
+or looking at them with the cavernous hollows where shrivel the
+entrails of eyes. The ground is so full of dead that the earth-falls
+uncover places that bristle with feet, with half-clothed skeletons, and
+with ossuaries of skulls placed side by side on the steep slope like
+porcelain globe-jars.
+
+In the ground here there are several strata of dead and in many places
+the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set them out
+in display on the top of the new ones. The bottom of the ravine is
+completely carpeted with debris of weapons, clothing, and implements.
+One tramples shell fragments, old iron, loaves and even biscuits that
+have fallen from knapsacks and are not yet dissolved by the rain.
+Mess-tins, pots of jam, and helmets are pierced and riddled by
+bullets--the scrapings and scum of a hell-broth; and the dislocated
+posts that survive are stippled with holes.
+
+The trenches that run in this valley have a look of earthquake
+crevasses, and as if whole tombs of uncouth things had been emptied on
+the ruins of the earth's convulsion. And there, where no dead are, the
+very earth is cadaverous.
+
+We follow the International Trench, still fluttering with rainbow
+rags--a shapeless trench which the confusion of torn stuffs invests
+with an air of a trench assassinated--to a place where the irregular
+and winding ditch forms an elbow. All the way along, as far as an
+earthwork barricade that blocks the way, German corpses are entangled
+and knotted as in a torrent of the damned, some of them emerging from
+muddy caves in the middle of a bewildering conglomerate of beams,
+ropes, creepers of iron, trench-rollers, hurdles, and bullet-screens.
+At the barrier itself, one corpse stands upright, fixed in the other
+dead, while another, planted in the same spot, stands obliquely in the
+dismal place, the whole arrangement looking like part of a big wheel
+embedded in the mud, or the shattered sail of a windmill. And over all
+this, this catastrophe of flesh and filthiness, religious images are
+broadcast, post-cards, pious pamphlets, leaflets on which prayers are
+written in Gothic lettering--they have scattered themselves in waves
+from gutted clothing. The paper words seem to bedeck with blossom these
+shores of pestilence, this Valley of Death, with their countless
+pallors of barren lies.
+
+I seek a solid footway to guide Joseph in--his wound is paralyzing him
+by degrees, and he feels it extending throughout his body. While I
+support him, and he is looking at nothing, I look upon the ghastly
+upheaval through which we are escaping.
+
+A German sergeant is seated, here where we tread, supported by the
+riven timbers that once formed the shelter of a sentry. There is a
+little hole under his eye; the thrust of a bayonet has nailed him to
+the planks through his face. In front of him, also sitting, with his
+elbows on his knees and his fists on his chin, there is a man who has
+all the top of his skull taken off like a boiled egg. Beside them--an
+awful watchman!--the half of a man is standing, a man sliced in two
+from scalp to stomach, upright against the earthen wall. I do not know
+where the other half of this human post may be, whose eye hangs down
+above and whose bluish viscera curl spirally round his leg.
+
+Down below, one's foot detaches itself from a matrix of blood,
+stiffened with French bayonets that have been bent, doubled, and
+twisted by the force of the blow. Through a gap in the mutilated wall
+one espies a recess where the bodies of soldiers of the Prussian Guard
+seem to kneel in the pose of suppliants, run through from behind, with
+blood-stained gaps, impaled. Out of this group they have pulled to its
+edge a huge Senegalese tirailleur, who, petrified in the contorted
+position where death seized him, leans upon empty air and holds fast by
+his feet, staring at his two severed wrists. No doubt a bomb had
+exploded in his hands; and since all his face is alive, he seems to be
+gnawing maggots.
+
+"It was here," says a passing soldier of an Alpine regiment, "that they
+did the white flag trick; and as they'd got Africans to deal with, you
+bet they got it hot!--Tiens, there's the white flag itself that these
+dunghills used."
+
+He seizes and shakes a long handle that lies there. A square of white
+stuff is nailed to it, and unfolds itself innocently.
+
+A procession of shovel-bearers advances along the battered trench. They
+have an order to shovel the earth into the relics of the trenches, to
+stop everything up, so that the bodies may be buried on the spot. Thus
+these helmeted warriors will here perform the work of the redresser of
+wrongs as they restore their full shape to the fields and make level
+the cavities already half filled by cargoes of invaders.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Some one calls me from the other side of the trench, a man sitting on
+the ground and leaning against a stake. It is Papa Ramure. Through his
+unbuttoned greatcoat and jacket I see bandages around his chest. "The
+ambulance men have been to tuck me up," he says, in a weak and
+stertorous voice, "but they can't take me away from here before
+evening. But I know all right that I'm petering out every minute."
+
+He jerks his head. "Stay a bit," he asks me. He is much moved, and the
+tears are flowing. He offers his hand and holds mine. He wants to say a
+lot of things to me and almost to make confession. "I was a straight
+man before the war," he says, with trickling tears; "I worked from
+morning to night to feed my little lot. And then I came here to kill
+Boches. And now, I've got killed. Listen, listen, listen, don't go
+away, listen to me--"
+
+"I must take Joseph back--he's at the end of his strength. I'll come
+back afterwards."
+
+Ramure lifted his streaming eyes to the wounded man. "Not only living,
+but wounded! Escaped from death! Ah, some women and children are lucky!
+All right, take him, take him, and come back--I hope I shall be waiting
+for you--"
+
+Now we must climb the other slope of the ravine, and we enter the
+deformed and maltreated ditch of the old Trench 97.
+
+Suddenly a frantic whistling tears the air and there is a shower of
+shrapnel above us. Meteorites flash and scatter in fearful flight in
+the heart of the yellow clouds. Revolving missiles rush through the
+heavens to break and burn upon the bill, to ransack it and exhume the
+old bones of men; and the thundering flames multiply themselves along
+an even line.
+
+It is the barrage fire beginning again. Like children we cry, "Enough,
+enough!"
+
+In this fury of fatal engines, this mechanical cataclysm that pursues
+us through space, there is something that surpasses human strength and
+will, something supernatural. Joseph, standing with his hand in mine,
+looks over his shoulder at the storm of rending explosions. He bows his
+head like an imprisoned beast, distracted: "What, again! Always, then!"
+he growls; "after all we've done and all we've seen--and now it begins
+again! Ah, non, non!"
+
+He falls on his knees, gasps for breath, and throws a futile look of
+full hatred before him and behind him. He repeats, "It's never
+finished, never!"
+
+I take him by the arm and raise him. "Come; it'll be finished for you."
+
+We must dally there awhile before climbing, so I will go and bring back
+Ramure in extremis, who is waiting for me. But Joseph clings to me, and
+then I notice a movement of men about the spot where I left the dying
+man. I can guess what it means; it is no longer worth while to go there.
+
+The ground of the ravine where we two are closely clustered to abide
+the tempest is quivering, and at each shot we feel the deep simoom of
+the shells. But in the hole where we are there is scarcely any risk of
+being hit. At the first lull, some of the men who were also waiting
+detach themselves and begin to go up; stretcher-bearers redouble their
+huge efforts to carry a body and climb, making one think of stubborn
+ants pushed back by successive grains of sand; wounded men and liaison
+men move again.
+
+"Let's go on," says Joseph, with sagging shoulders, as he measures the
+hill with his eye--the last stage of his Gethsemane.
+
+There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of wide
+countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on end. The
+scene through which we are struggling is rent and convulsed, with hills
+and chasms, and with such somber swellings as if all the clouds of
+storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured earth, this stampeded
+file of trunks stands forth against a striped brown sky, milky in
+places and obscurely sparkling--a sky of agate.
+
+Across the entry to Trench 97 a felled oak twists his great body, and a
+corpse stops up the trench. Its head and legs are buried in the ground.
+The dirty water that trickles in the trench has covered it with a sandy
+glaze, and through the moist deposit the chest and belly bulge forth,
+clad in a shirt. We stride over the frigid remains, slimy and pale,
+that suggest the belly of a stranded crocodile; and it is difficult to
+do so, by reason of the soft and slippery ground. We have to plunge our
+hands up to the wrists in the mud of the wall.
+
+At this moment an infernal whistle falls on us and we bend like bushes.
+The shell bursts in the air in front of us, deafening and blinding, and
+buries us under a horribly sibilant mountain of dark smoke. A climbing
+soldier has churned the air with his arms and disappeared, hurled into
+some hole. Shouts have gone up and fallen again like rubbish. While we
+are looking, through the great black veil that the wind tears from the
+ground and dismisses into the sky, at the bearers who are putting down
+a stretcher, running to the place of the explosion and picking up
+something inert--I recall the unforgettable scene when my
+brother-in-arms, Poterloo, whose heart was so full of hope, vanished
+with his arms outstretched in the flame of a shell.
+
+We arrive at last on the summit, which is marked as with a signal by a
+wounded and frightful man. He is upright in the wind, shaken but
+upright, enrooted there. In his uplifted and wind-tossed cape we see a
+yelling and convulsive face. We pass by him, and he is like a sort of
+screaming tree.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We have arrived at our old first line, the one from which we set off
+for the attack. We sit down on a firing-step with our backs to the
+holes cut for our exodus at the last minute by the sappers. Euterpe,
+the cyclist, passes and gives us good-day. Then he turns in his tracks
+and draws from the cuff of his coat-sleeve an envelope, whose
+protruding edge had conferred a white stripe on him.
+
+"It's you, isn't it," he says to me, "that takes Biquet's letters
+that's dead?"--"Yes."--"Here's a returned one; the address has hopped
+it."
+
+The envelope was exposed, no doubt, to rain on the top of a packet, and
+the address is no longer legible among the violet mottlings on the
+dried and frayed paper. Alone there survives in a corner the address of
+the sender. I pull the letter out gently--"My dear mother"--Ah, I
+remember! Biquet, now lying in the open air in the very trench where we
+are halted, wrote that letter not long ago in our quarters at
+Gauchin-l'Abbe, one flaming and splendid afternoon, in reply to a
+letter from his mother, whose fears for him had proved groundless and
+made him laugh--"You think I'm in the cold and rain and danger. Not at
+all; on the contrary, all that's finished. It's hot, we're sweating,
+and we've nothing to do only to stroll about in the sunshine. I laughed
+to read your letter--"
+
+I return to the frail and damaged envelope the letter which, if chance
+had not averted this new irony, would have been read by the old peasant
+woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet nothing in the
+cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows like a dark
+spring on the wall of the trench.
+
+Joseph has leaned his head backwards. His eyes close for a moment, his
+mouth half opens, and his breathing is fitful.
+
+"Courage!" I say to him, and he opens his eyes again.
+
+"Ah!" he replies, "it isn't to me you should say that. Look at those
+chaps, there, they're going back yonder, and you too, you're going
+back. It all has to go on for you others. Ah, one must be really strong
+to go on, to go on!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+The Refuge
+
+
+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!"
+
+The other man looks at him, and repeats, "Ah, nome de Dieu!"
+
+Without being noticed by the two men I leave the drama narrowly
+developing in this lamentable corner and its jostling and traffic and
+hubbub.
+
+Now I touch the composed and convalescent chat of two poor
+wretches--"Ah, my boy, the affection he had for that vine of his! You
+couldn't find anything wrong among the branches of it--"
+
+"That little nipper, that wee little kid, when I went out with him,
+holding his tiny fist, it felt as if I'd got hold of the little warm
+neck of a swallow, you know."
+
+And alongside this sentimental avowal, here is the passing revelation
+of another mind: "Don't I know the 547th! Rather! Listen, it's a funny
+regiment. They've got a poilu in it who's called Petitjean, another
+called Petitpierre, and another called Petitlouis. Old man, it's as I'm
+telling you; that's the kind of regiment it is."
+
+As I begin to pick out a way with a view to leaving the cavern, there
+is a great noise down yonder of a fall and a chorus of exclamations. It
+is the hospital sergeant who has fallen. Through the breach that he was
+clearing of its soft and bloody relics, a bullet has taken him in the
+throat, and he is spread out full length on the ground. His great
+bewildered eyes are rolling and his breath comes foaming. His mouth and
+the lower part of his face are quickly covered with a cloud of rosy
+bubbles. They place his head on a bag of bandages, and the bag is
+instantly soaked with blood. An attendant cries that the packets of
+lint will be spoiled, and they are needed. Something else is sought on
+which to put the head that ceaselessly makes a light and discolored
+froth. Only a loaf can be found, and it is slid under the spongy hair.
+
+While they hold the sergeant's hand and question him, he only slavers
+new heaps of bubbles, and we see his great black-bearded head across
+this rosy cloud. Laid out like that, he might be a deep-breathing
+marine monster, and the transparent red foam gathers and creeps up to
+his great hazy eyes, no longer spectacled.
+
+Then his throat rattles. It is a childish rattle, and he dies moving
+his head to right and to left as though he were trying very gently to
+say "No."
+
+Looking on the enormous inert mass, I reflect that he was a good man.
+He had an innocent and impressionable heart. How I reproach myself that
+I sometimes abused him for the ingenuous narrowness of his views, and
+for a certain clerical impertinence that he always had! And how glad I
+am in this distressing scene--yes, happy enough to tremble with
+joy--that I restrained myself from an angry protest when I found him
+stealthily reading a letter I was writing, a protest that would
+unjustly have wounded him! I remember the time when he exasperated me
+so much by his dissertation on France and the Virgin Mary. It seemed
+impossible to me that he could utter those thoughts sincerely. Why
+should he not have been sincere? Has he not been really killed today? I
+remember, too, certain deeds of devotion, the kindly patience of the
+great man, exiled in war as in life--and the rest does not matter. His
+ideas themselves are only trivial details compared with his
+heart--which is there on the ground in ruins in this corner of Hell.
+With what intensity I lamented this man who was so far asunder from me
+in everything!
+
+Then fell the thunder on us! We were thrown violently on each other by
+the frightful shaking of the ground and the walls. It was as if the
+overhanging earth had burst and hurled itself down. Part of the
+armor-plate of beams collapsed, enlarging the hole that already pierced
+the cavern. Another shock--another pulverized span fell in roaring
+destruction. The corpse of the great Red Cross sergeant went rolling
+against the wall like the trunk of a tree. All the timber in the long
+frame-work of the cave, those heavy black vertebrae, cracked with an
+ear-splitting noise, and all the prisoners in the dungeon shouted
+together in horror.
+
+Blow after blow, the explosions resound and drive us in all directions
+as the bombardment mangles and devours the sanctuary of pierced and
+diminished refuge. As the hissing flight of shells hammers and crushes
+the gaping end of the cave with its thunderbolts, daylight streams in
+through the clefts. More sharply now, and more unnaturally, one sees
+the flushed faces and those pallid with death, the eyes which fade in
+agony or burn with fever, the patched-up white-bound bodies, the
+monstrous bandages. All that was hidden rises again into daylight.
+Haggard, blinking and distorted, in face of the flood of iron and
+embers that the hurricanes of light bring with them, the wounded arise
+and scatter and try to take flight. All the terror-struck inhabitants
+roll about in compact masses across the miserable tunnel, as if in the
+pitching hold of a great ship that strikes the rocks.
+
+The aviator, as upright as he can get and with his neck on the ceiling,
+waves his arms and appeals to God, asks Him what He is called, what is
+His real name. Overthrown by the blast and cast upon the others, I see
+him who, bare of breast and his clothes gaping like a wound, reveals
+the heart of a Christ. The greatcoat of the man who still monotonously
+repeats, "What's the use of worrying?" now shows itself all green,
+bright green, the effect of the picric acid no doubt released by the
+explosion that has staggered his brain. Others--the rest,
+indeed--helpless and maimed, move and creep and cringe, worm themselves
+into the corners. They are like moles, poor, defenseless beasts, hunted
+by the hellish hounds of the guns.
+
+The bombardment slackens, and ends in a cloud of smoke that still
+echoes the crashes, in a quivering and burning after-damp. I pass out
+through the breach; and still surrounded and entwined in the clamor of
+despair, I arrive under the free sky, in the soft earth where mingled
+planks and legs are sunk. I catch myself on some wreckage; it is the
+embankment of the trench. At the moment when I plunge into the
+communication trenches they are visible a long way; they are still
+gloomily stirring, still filled by the crowd that overflows from the
+trenches and flows without end towards the refuges. For whole days, for
+whole nights, you will see the long rolling streams of men plucked from
+the fields of battle, from the plain over there that also has feelings
+of its own, though it bleeds and rots without end.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Going About
+
+
+WE have been along the Boulevard de la Republique and then the Avenue
+Gambetta, and now we are debouching into the Place du Commerce. The
+nails in our polished boots ring on the pavements of the capital. It is
+fine weather, and the shining sky glistens and flashes as if we saw it
+through the frames of a greenhouse; it sets a-sparkle all the
+shop-fronts in the square. The skirts of our well-brushed greatcoats
+have been let down, and as they are usually fastened back, you can see
+two squares on the floating lappets where the cloth is bluer.
+
+Our sauntering party halts and hesitates for a moment in front of the
+Cafe de la Sous-Prefecture, also called the Grand-Cafe.
+
+"We have the right to go in!" says Volpatte.
+
+"Too many officers in there," replies Blaire, who has lifted his chin
+over the guipure curtains in which the establishment is dressed up and
+risked a glance through the window between its golden letters.
+
+"Besides," says Paradis, "we haven't seen enough yet."
+
+We resume our walk and, simple soldiers that we are, we survey the
+sumptuous shops that encircle the Place du Commerce; the drapers, the
+stationers, the chemists, and--like a General's decorated uniform--the
+display of the jeweler. We have put forth our smiles like ornaments,
+for we are exempt from all duty until the evening, we are free, we are
+masters of our own time. Our steps are gentle and sedate; our empty and
+swinging hands are also promenading, to and fro.
+
+"No doubt about it, you get some good out of this rest," remarks
+Paradis.
+
+It is an abundantly impressive city which expands before our steps. One
+is in touch with life, with the life of the people, the life of the
+Rear, the normal life. How we used to think, down yonder, that we
+should never get here!
+
+We see gentlemen, ladies, English officers, aviators-recognizable afar
+by their slim elegance and their decorations--soldiers who are parading
+their scraped clothes and scrubbed skins and the solitary ornament of
+their engraved identity discs, flashing in the sunshine on their
+greatcoats; and these last risk themselves carefully in the beautiful
+scene that is clear of all nightmares.
+
+We make exclamations as they do who come from afar: "Talk about a
+crowd!" says Tirette in wonder. "Ah, it's a wealthy town!" says Blaire.
+
+A work-girl passes and looks at us. Volpatte gives me a jog with his
+elbow and swallows her with his eyes, then points out to me two other
+women farther away who are coming up, and with beaming eye he certifies
+that the town is rich in femininity--"Old man, they are plump!" A
+moment ago Paradis had a certain timidity to overcome before he could
+approach a cluster of cakes of luxurious lodging, and touch and eat
+them; and every minute we are obliged to halt in the middle of the
+pavement and wait for Blaire, who is attracted and detained by the
+displays of fancy jumpers and caps, neck-ties in pale blue drill,
+slippers as red and shiny as mahogany. Blaire has reached the final
+height of his transformation. He who held the record for negligence and
+grime is certainly the best groomed of us all, especially since the
+further complication of his ivories, which were broken in the attack
+and had to be remade. He affects an off-hand demeanor. "He looks young
+and youthful," says Marthereau.
+
+We find ourselves suddenly face to face with a toothless creature who
+smiles to the depth of her throat. Some black hair bristles round her
+hat. Her big, unpleasant features, riddled with pock-marks, recalls the
+ill-painted faces that one sees on the coarse canvas of a traveling
+show. 'She's beautiful,' says Volpatte. Marthereau, at whom she smiled,
+is dumb with shock.
+
+Thus do the poilus converse who are suddenly placed under the spell of
+a town. More and more they rejoice in the beautiful scene, so neat and
+incredibly clean. They resume possession of life tranquil and peaceful,
+of that conception of comfort and even of happiness for which in the
+main houses were built.
+
+"We should easily get used to it again, you know, old man, after all!"
+
+Meanwhile a crowd is gathered around an outfitter's shop-window where
+the proprietor has contrived, with the aid of mannikins in wood and
+wax, a ridiculous tableau. On a groundwork of little pebbles like those
+in an aquarium, there is a kneeling German, in a suit so new that the
+creases are definite, and punctuated with an Iron Cross in cardboard.
+He holds up his two wooden pink hands to a French officer, whose curly
+wig makes a cushion for a juvenile cap, who has bulging, crimson
+cheeks, and whose infantile eye of adamant looks somewhere else. Beside
+the two personages lies a rifle barrowed from the odd trophies of a
+box of toys. A card gives the title of the animated group--"Kamarad!"
+
+"Ah, damn it, look!"
+
+We shrug our shoulders at sight of the puerile contrivance, the only
+thing here that recalls to us the gigantic war raging somewhere under
+the sky. We begin to laugh bitterly, offended and even wounded to the
+quick in our new impressions. Tirette collects himself, and some
+abusive sarcasm rises to his lips; but the protest lingers and is mute
+by reason of our total transportation, the amazement of being somewhere
+else.
+
+Our group is then espied by a very stylish and rustling lady, radiant
+in violet and black silk and enveloped in perfumes. She puts out her
+little gloved hand and touches Volpatte's sleeve and then Blaire's
+shoulder, and they instantly halt, gorgonized by this direct contact
+with the fairy-like being.
+
+"Tell me, messieurs, you who are real soldiers from the front, you have
+seen that in the trenches, haven't you?"
+
+"Er--yes--yes," reply the two poor fellows, horribly frightened and
+gloriously gratified.
+
+"Ah!" the crowd murmurs, "did you hear? And they've been there, they
+have!"
+
+When we find ourselves alone again on the flagged perfection of the
+pavement, Volpatte and Blaire look at each other and shake their heads.
+
+"After all," says Volpatte, "it is pretty much like that you know!"
+
+"Why, yes, of course!"
+
+And these were their first words of false swearing that day.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We go into the Cafe de l'Industrie et des Fleurs. A roadway of matting
+clothes the middle of the floor. Painted all the way along the walls,
+all the way up the square pillars that support the roof, and on the
+front of the counter, there is purple convolvulus among great scarlet
+poppies and roses like red cabbages.
+
+"No doubt about it, we've got good taste in France," says Tirette.
+
+"The chap that did all that had a cartload of patience," Blaire
+declares as he looks at the rainbow embellishments.
+
+"In these places," Volpatte adds, "the pleasure of drinking isn't the
+only one."
+
+Paradis informs us that he knows all about cafes. On Sundays formerly,
+he frequented cafes as beautiful as this one and even more beautiful.
+Only, he explains, that was a long time ago, and he has lost the flavor
+that they've got. He indicates a little enameled wash-hand basin
+hanging on the wall and decorated with flowers: "There's where one can
+wash his hands." We steer politely towards the basin. Volpatte signs to
+Paradis to turn the tap, and says, "Set the waterworks going!"
+
+Then all six of us enter the saloon, whose circumference is already
+adorned with customers, and install ourselves at a table.
+
+"We'll have six currant-vermouths, shall we?"
+
+"We could very easily get used to it again, after all," they repeat.
+
+Some civilians leave their places and come near us. They whisper,
+"They've all got the Croix de Guerre, Adolphe, you see---"--"Those are
+real poilus!"
+
+Our comrades overhear, and now they only talk among themselves
+abstractedly, with their ears elsewhere, and an unconscious air of
+importance appears.
+
+A moment later, the man and woman from whom the remarks proceeded lean
+towards us with their elbows on the white marble and question us: "Life
+in the trenches, it's very rough, isn't it?"
+
+"Er--yes--well, of course, it isn't always pleasant."
+
+"What splendid physical and moral endurance you have! In the end you
+get used to the life, don't you?"
+
+"Why, yes, of course, one gets used to it--one gets used to it all
+right."
+
+"All the same, it's a terrible existence--and the suffering!" murmurs
+the lady, turning over the leaves of an illustrated paper which
+displays gloomy pictures of destruction. "They ought not to publish
+these things, Adolphe, about the dirt and the vermin and the fatigues!
+Brave as you are, you must be unhappy?"
+
+Volpatte, to whom she speaks, blushes. He is ashamed of the misery
+whence he comes, whither he must return. He lowers his head and lies,
+perhaps without realizing the extent of his mendacity: "No, after all,
+we're not unhappy, it isn't so terrible as all that!"
+
+The lady is of the same opinion. "I know," she says, "there are
+compensations! How superb a charge must be, eh? All those masses of men
+advancing like they do in a holiday procession, and the trumpets
+playing a rousing air in the fields! And the dear little soldiers that
+can't be held back and shouting, 'Vive la France!' and even laughing as
+they die! Ah! we others, we're not in honor's way like you are. My
+husband is a clerk at the Prefecture, and just now he's got a holiday
+to treat his rheumatism."
+
+"I should very much have liked to be a soldier," said the gentleman,
+"but I've no luck. The head of my office can't get on without me."
+
+People go and come, elbowing and disappearing behind each other. The
+waiters worm their way through with their fragile and sparkling
+burdens--green, red or bright yellow, with a white border. The grating
+of feet on the sanded floor mingles with the exclamations of the
+regular customers as they recognize each other, some standing, others
+leaning on their elbows, amid the sound of glasses and dominoes pushed
+along the tables. In the background, around the seductive shock of
+ivory balls, a crowding circle of spectators emits classical
+pleasantries.
+
+"Every man to his trade, mon brave," says a man at the other end of the
+table whose face is adorned with powerful colors, addressing Tirette
+directly; "you are heroes. On our side, we are working in the economic
+life of the country. It is a struggle like yours. I am useful--I don't
+say more useful than you, but equally so."
+
+And I see Tirette through the cigar-smoke making round eyes, and in the
+hubbub I can hardly hear the reply of his humble and dumbfounded
+voice--Tirette, the funny man of the squad!--"Yes, that's true; every
+man to his trade."
+
+Furtively we stole away.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We are almost silent as we leave the Cafe des Fleurs. It seems as if we
+no longer know how to talk. Something like discontent irritates my
+comrades and knits their brows. They look as if they are becoming aware
+that they have not done their duty at an important juncture.
+
+"Fine lot of gibberish they've talked to us, the beasts!" Tirette
+growls at last with a rancor that gathers strength the more we unite
+and collect ourselves again.
+
+"We ought to have got beastly drunk to-day!" replies Paradis brutally.
+
+We walk without a word spoken. Then, after a time, "They're a lot of
+idiots, filthy idiots," Tirette goes on; "they tried to cod us, but I'm
+not on; if I see them again," he says, with a crescendo of anger, "I
+shall know what to say to them!"
+
+"We shan't see them again," says Blaire.
+
+"In eight days from now, p'raps we shall be laid out," says Volpatte.
+
+In the approaches to the square we run into a mob of people flowing out
+from the Hotel de Ville and from another big public building which
+displays the columns of a temple supporting a pediment. Offices are
+closing, and pouring forth civilians of all sorts and all ages, and
+military men both young and old, who seem at a distance to be dressed
+pretty much like us; but when nearer they stand revealed as the
+shirkers and deserters of the war, in spite of being disguised as
+soldiers, in spite of their brisques. [note 1]
+
+Women and children are waiting for them, in pretty and happy clusters.
+The commercial people are shutting up their shops with complacent
+content and a smile for both the day ended and for the morrow, elated
+by the lively and constant thrills of profits increased, by the growing
+jingle of the cash-box. They have stayed behind in the heart of their
+own firesides; they have only to stoop to caress their children. We see
+them beaming in the first starlights of the street, all these rich folk
+who are becoming richer, all these tranquil people whose tranquillity
+increases every day, people who are full, you feel, and in spite of
+all, of an unconfessable prayer. They all go slowly, by grace of the
+fine evening, and settle themselves in perfected homes, or in cafes
+where they are waited upon. Couples are forming, too, young women and
+young men, civilians or soldiers, with some badge of their preservation
+embroidered on their collars. They make haste into the shadows of
+security where the others go, where the dawn of lighted rooms awaits
+them; they hurry towards the night of rest and caresses.
+
+And as we pass quite close to a ground-floor window which is half open,
+we see the breeze gently inflate the lace curtain and lend it the light
+and delicious form of lingerie--and the advancing throng drives us
+back, poor strangers that we are!
+
+We wander along the pavement, all through the twilight that begins to
+glow with gold--for in towns Night adorns herself with jewels. The
+sight of this world has revealed a great truth to us at last, nor could
+we avoid it: a Difference which becomes evident between human beings, a
+Difference far deeper than that of nations and with defensive trenches
+more impregnable; the clean-cut and truly unpardonable division that
+there is in a country's inhabitants between those who gain and those
+who grieve, those who are required to sacrifice all, all, to give their
+numbers and strength and suffering to the last limit, those upon whom
+the others walk and advance, smile and succeed.
+
+Some items of mourning attire make blots in the crowd and have their
+message for us, but the rest is of merriment, not mourning.
+
+"It isn't one single country, that's not possible," suddenly says
+Volpatte with singular precision, "there are two. We're divided into
+two foreign countries. The Front, over there, where there are too many
+unhappy, and the Rear, here, where there are too many happy."
+
+"How can you help it? It serves its end--it's the background--but
+afterwards--"
+
+"Yes, I know; but all the same, all the same, there are too many of
+them, and they're too happy, and they're always the same ones, and
+there's no reason--"
+
+"What can you do?" says Tirette.
+
+"So much the worse," adds Blaire, still more simply.
+
+"In eight days from now p'raps we shall have snuffed it!" Volpatte is
+content to repeat as we go away with lowered heads.
+
+------------
+
+[note 1] See p. 117.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+The Fatigue-Party
+
+
+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.
+
+We murmur, "Yes, yes--all right; it's not worth saying. Go easy."
+
+But everybody applies himself to the job courageously, except for some
+invincible sleepers whose nap will involve them later in superhuman
+efforts.
+
+We attack the first layer of the new line--little mounds of earth,
+stringy with grass. The ease and speed with which the work begins--like
+all entrenching work in free soil--foster the illusion that it will
+soon be finished, that we shall be able to sleep in the cavities we
+have scooped: and thus a certain eagerness revives.
+
+But whether by reason of the noise of the shovels, or because some men
+are chatting almost aloud, in spite of reproofs, our activity wakes up
+a rocket, whose flaming vertical line rattles suddenly on our right.
+
+"Lie down!" Every man flattens himself, and the rocket balances and
+parades its huge pallor over a sort of field of the dead.
+
+As soon as it is out one hears the men, in places and then all along,
+detach themselves from their secretive stillness, get up, and resume
+the task with more discretion.
+
+Soon another star-shell tosses aloft its long golden stalk, and still
+more brightly illuminates the flat and motionless line of trenchmakers.
+Then another and another.
+
+Bullets rend the air around us, and we hear a cry, "Some one wounded!"
+He passes, supported by comrades. We can just see the group of men who
+are going away, dragging one of their number.
+
+The place becomes unwholesome. We stoop and crouch, and some are
+scratching at the earth on their knees. Others are working full length;
+they toil, and turn, and turn again, like men in nightmares. The earth,
+whose first layer was light to lift, becomes muddy and sticky; it is
+hard to handle, and clings to the tool like glue. After every shovelful
+the blade must be scraped.
+
+Already a thin heap of earth is winding along, and each man has the
+idea of reinforcing the incipient breastwork with his pouch and his
+rolled-up greatcoat, and he hoods himself behind the slender pile of
+shadow when a volley comes--
+
+While we work we sweat, and as soon as we stop working we are pierced
+through by the cold. A spell seems to be cast on us, paralyzing our
+arms. The rockets torment and pursue us, and allow us but little
+movement. After every one of them that petrifies us with its light we
+have to struggle against a task still more stubborn. The hole only
+deepens into the darkness with painful and despairing tardiness.
+
+The ground gets softer; each shovelful drips and flows, and spreads
+from the blade with a flabby sound. At last some one cries, "Water!"
+The repeated cry travels all along the row of diggers--"Water--that's
+done it!"
+
+"Melusson's team's dug deeper, and there's water. They've struck a
+swamp."--"No help for it."
+
+We stop in confusion. In the bosom of the night we hear the sound of
+shovels and picks thrown down like empty weapons. The non-coms. go
+gropingly after the officer to get instructions. Here and there, with
+no desire for anything better, some men are going deliciously to sleep
+under the caress of the rain, under the radiant rockets.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was very nearly at this minute, as far as I can remember, that the
+bombardment began again. The first shell fell with a terrible splitting
+of the air, which seemed to tear itself in two; and other whistles were
+already converging upon us when its explosion uplifted the ground at
+the head of the detachment in the heart of the magnitude of night and
+rain, revealing gesticulations upon a sudden screen of red.
+
+No doubt they had seen us, thanks to the rockets, and had trained their
+fire on us.
+
+The men hurled and rolled themselves towards the little flooded ditch
+that they had dug, wedging, burying, and immersing themselves in it,
+and placed the blades of the shovels over their heads. To right, to
+left, in front and behind, shells burst so near that every one of them
+shook us in our bed of clay; and it became soon one continuous quaking
+that seized the wretched gutter, crowded with men and scaly with
+shovels, under the strata of smoke and the falling fire. The splinters
+and debris crossed in all directions with a network of noise over the
+dazzling field. No second passed but we all thought what some stammered
+with their faces in the earth, "We're done, this time!"
+
+A little in front of the place where I am, a shape has arisen and
+cried, "Let's be off!" Prone bodies half rose out of the shroud of mud
+that dripped in tails and liquid rags from their limbs, and these
+deathful apparitions cried also, "Let's go!" They were on their knees,
+on all-fours, crawling towards the way of retreat: "Get on, allez, get
+on!"
+
+But the long file stayed motionless, and the frenzied complaints were
+in vain. They who were down there at the end would not budge, and their
+inactivity immobilized the rest. Some wounded passed over the others,
+crawling over them as over debris, and sprinkling the whole company
+with their blood.
+
+We discovered at last the cause of the maddening inactivity of the
+detachment's tail--"There's a barrage fire beyond."
+
+A weird imprisoned panic seized upon the men with cries inarticulate
+and gestures stillborn. They writhed upon the spot. But little shelter
+as the incipient trench afforded, no one dared leave the ditch that
+saved us from protruding above the level of the ground, no one dared
+fly from death towards the traverse that should be down there. Great
+were the risks of the wounded who had managed to crawl over the others,
+and every moment some were struck and went down again.
+
+Fire and water fell blended everywhere. Profoundly entangled in the
+supernatural din, we shook from neck to heels. The most hideous of
+deaths was falling and bounding and plunging all around us in waves of
+light, its crashing snatched our fearfulness in all directions--our
+flesh prepared itself for the monstrous sacrifice! In that tense moment
+of imminent destruction, we could only remember just then how often we
+had already experienced it, how often undergone this outpouring of
+iron, and the burning roar of it, and the stench. It is only during a
+bombardment that one really recalls those he has already endured.
+
+And still, without ceasing, newly-wounded men crept over us, fleeing at
+any price. In the fear that their contact evoked we groaned again, "We
+shan't get out of this; nobody will get out of it."
+
+Suddenly a gap appeared in the compressed humanity, and those behind
+breathed again, for we were on the move.
+
+We began by crawling, then we ran, bowed low in the mud and water that
+mirrored the flashes and the crimson gleams, stumbling and falling over
+submerged obstructions, ourselves resembling heavy splashing
+projectiles, thunder-hurled along the ground. We arrive at the
+starting-place of the trench we had begun to dig.
+
+"There's no trench--there's nothing."
+
+In truth the eye could discern no shelter in the plain where our work
+had begun. Even by the stormy flash of the rockets we could only see
+the plain, a huge and raging desert. The trench could not be far away,
+for it had brought us here. But which way must we steer to find it?
+
+The rain redoubled. We lingered a moment in mournful disappointment,
+gathered on a lightning-smitten and unknown shore--and then the
+stampede.
+
+Some bore to the left, some to the right, some went straight
+forward--tiny groups that one only saw for a second in the heart of the
+thundering rain before they were separated by sable avalanches and
+curtains of flaming smoke.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The bombardment over our heads grew less; it was chiefly over the place
+where we had been that it was increasing. But it might any minute
+isolate everything and destroy it.
+
+The rain became more and more torrential--a deluge in the night. The
+darkness was so deep that the star-shells only lit up slices of
+water-seamed obscurity, in the depths of which fleeing phantoms came
+and went and ran round in circles.
+
+I cannot say how long I wandered with the group with which I had
+remained. We went into morasses. We strained our sight forward in quest
+of the embankment and the trench of salvation, towards the ditch that
+was somewhere there, as towards a harbor.
+
+A cry of consolation was heard at last through the vapors of war and
+the elements--"A trench!" But the embankment of that trench was moving;
+it was made of men mingled in confusion, who seemed to be coming out
+and abandoning it.
+
+"Don't stay there, mates!" cried the fugitives; "clear off, don't come
+near. It's hell--everything's collapsing--the trenches are legging it
+and the dug-outs are bunged up--the mud's pouring in everywhere. There
+won't be any trenches by the morning--it's all up with them about here!"
+
+They disappeared. Where? We forgot to ask for some little direction
+from these men whose streaming shapes had no sooner appeared than they
+were swallowed up in the dark.
+
+Even our little group crumbled away among the devastation, no longer
+knowing where they were. Now one, now another, faded into the night,
+disappearing towards his chance of escape.
+
+We climbed slopes and descended them. I saw dimly in front of me men
+bowed and hunchbacked, mounting a slippery incline where mud held them
+back, and the wind and rain repelled them under a dome of cloudy lights.
+
+Then we flowed back, and plunged into a marsh up to our knees. So high
+must we lift our feet that we walked with a sound of swimming. Each
+forward stride was an enormous effort which slackened in agony.
+
+It was there that we felt death drawing near. But we beached ourselves
+at last on a sort of clay embankment that divided the swamp. As we
+followed the slippery back of this slender island along, I remember
+that once we had to stoop and steer ourselves by touching some
+half-buried corpses, so that we should not be thrown down from the soft
+and sinuous ridge. My hand discovered shoulders and hard backs, a face
+cold as a helmet, and a pipe still desperately bitten by dead jaws.
+
+As we emerged and raised our heads at a venture we heard the sound of
+voices not far away. "Voices! Ah, voices!" They sounded tranquil to us,
+as though they called us by our names, and we all came close together
+to approach this fraternal murmuring of men.
+
+The words became distinct. They were quite near--in the hillock that we
+could dimly see like an oasis: and yet we could not hear what they
+said. The sounds were muddled, and we did not understand them.
+
+"What are they saying?" asked one of us in a curious tone.
+
+Instinctively we stopped trying to find a way in. A doubt, a painful
+idea was seizing us. Then, clearly enunciated, there rang out these
+words--"Achtung!--Zweites Geschutz--Schuss--" Farther back, the report
+of a gun answered the telephonic command.
+
+Horror and stupefaction nailed us to the spot at first--"Where are we?
+Oh, Christ, where are we?" Turning right about face, slowly in spite of
+all, borne down anew by exhaustion and dismay, we took flight, as
+overwhelmed by weariness as if we had many wounds, pulled back by the
+mud towards the enemy country, and retaining only just enough energy to
+repel the thought of the sweetness it would have been to let ourselves
+die.
+
+We came to a sort of great plain. We halted and threw ourselves on the
+ground on the side of a mound, and leaned back upon it, unable to make
+another step.
+
+And we moved no more, my shadowy comrades nor I. The rain splashed in
+our faces, streamed down our backs and chests, ran down from our knees
+and filled our boots.
+
+We should perhaps be killed or taken prisoners when day came. But we
+thought no more of anything. We could do no more; we knew no more.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The Dawn
+
+
+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.
+
+Paradis says to me, "That's war."
+
+"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?"
+
+Two there were who replied together, "No!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+At this moment there was a dull noise; cries broke out around us, and
+we shuddered. A length of earth had detached itself from the hillock on
+which--after a fashion--we were leaning back, and had completely
+exhumed in the middle of us a sitting corpse, with its legs out full
+length. The collapse burst a pool that had gathered on the top of the
+mound, and the water spread like a cascade over the body and laved it
+as we looked.
+
+Some one cried, "His face is all black!"
+
+"What is that face?" gasped a voice.
+
+Those who were able drew near in a circle, like frogs. We could not
+gaze upon the head that showed in low relief upon the trench-wall that
+the landslide had laid bare. "His face? It isn't his face!" In place of
+the face we found the hair, and then we saw that the corpse which had
+seemed to be sitting was broken, and folded the wrong way. In dreadful
+silence we looked on the vertical back of the dislocated dead, upon the
+hanging arms, backward curved, and the two outstretched legs that
+rested on the sinking soil by the points of the toes. Then the
+discussion began again, revived by this fearful sleeper. As though the
+corpse was listening they clamored--"No! To win isn't the object. It
+isn't those others we've got to get at--it's war."
+
+"Can't you see that we've got to finish with war? If we've got to begin
+again some day, all that's been done is no good. Look at it there!--and
+it would be in vain. It would be two or three years or more of wasted
+catastrophe."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Ah, my boy, if all we've gone through wasn't the end of this great
+calamity! I value my life; I've got my wife, my family, my home around
+them; I've got schemes for my life afterwards, mind you. Well, all the
+same, if this wasn't the end of it, I'd rather die."
+
+"I'm going to die." The echo came at that moment exactly from Paradis'
+neighbor, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly. "I'm sorry
+on account of my children."
+
+"It's on account of my children that I'm not sorry," came a murmur from
+somewhere else. "I'm dying, so I know what I'm saying, and I say to
+myself, 'They'll have peace.'"
+
+"Perhaps I shan't die," said another, with a quiver of hope that he
+could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, "but I shall
+suffer. Well, I say, 'more's the pity,' and I even say 'that's all
+right'; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it's for
+something."
+
+"Then we'll have to go on fighting after the war?"
+
+"Yes, p'raps--"
+
+"You want more of it, do you?"
+
+"Yes, because I want no more of it," the voice grunted. "And p'raps
+it'll not be foreigners that we've got to fight?"
+
+"P'raps, yes--"
+
+A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When it
+had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain, seizing
+and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the long
+gaping trenches--long as the grave of an army--we began again.
+
+"After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?"
+
+"It's the mass of the people."
+
+"But the people--that's us!"
+
+He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.
+
+"Yes," I said to him, "yes, old boy, that's true! It's with us only
+that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is
+made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we
+who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and
+each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our
+numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a
+wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us
+together."
+
+"Yes, that's true. It's the people who are war; without them, there
+would be nothing, nothing but some wrangling, a long way off. But it
+isn't they who decide on it; it's the masters who steer them."
+
+"The people are struggling to-day to have no more masters that steer
+them. This war, it's like the French Revolution continuing."
+
+"Well then, if that's so, we're working for the Prussians too?"
+
+"It's to be hoped so," said one of the wretches of the plain.
+
+"Oh, hell!" said the chasseur, grinding his teeth. But he shook his
+head and added no more.
+
+"We want to look after ourselves! You shouldn't meddle in other
+people's business," mumbled the obstinate snarler.
+
+"Yes, you should! Because what you call 'other people,' that's just
+what they're not--they're the same!"
+
+"Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?"
+
+"That's it!" said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a moment
+before. "More's the pity, or so much the better."
+
+"The people--they're nothing, though they ought to be everything," then
+said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did not know
+it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but investing it
+at last with its great universal significance. Escaped from torment, on
+all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he lifted his leper-like
+face and looked hungrily before him into infinity.
+
+He looked and looked. He was trying to open the gates of heaven.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through
+the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or
+another. All the masses ought to agree together."
+
+"All men ought to be equal."
+
+The word seems to come to us like a rescue.
+
+"Equal--yes--yes--there are some great meanings for justice and truth.
+There are some things one believes in, that one turns to and clings to
+as if they were a sort of light. There's equality, above all."
+
+"There's liberty and fraternity, too."
+
+"But principally equality!"
+
+I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain
+sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he
+does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him. You can build
+nothing on fraternity. Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a
+thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by force.
+
+But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words while
+equality is a fact. Equality should be the great human formula--social
+equality, for while individuals have varying values, each must have an
+equal share in the social life; and that is only just, because the life
+of one human being is equal to the life of another. That formula is of
+prodigious importance. The principle of the equal rights of every
+living being and the sacred will of the majority is infallible and must
+be invincible; all progress will be brought about by it, all, with a
+force truly divine. It will bring first the smooth bed-rock of all
+progress--the settling of quarrels by that justice which is exactly the
+same thing as the general advantage.
+
+And these men of the people, dimly seeing some unknown Revolution
+greater than the other, a revolution springing from themselves and
+already rising, rising in their throats, repeat "Equality!"
+
+It seems as if they were spelling the word and then reading it
+distinctly on all sides--that there is not upon the earth any
+privilege, prejudice or injustice that does not collapse in contact
+with it. It is an answer to all, a word of sublimity. They revolve the
+idea over and over, and find a kind of perfection in it. They see
+errors and abuses burning in a brilliant light.
+
+"That would be fine!" said one.
+
+"Too fine to be true!" said another.
+
+But the third said, "It's because it's true that it's fine. It has no
+other beauty, mind! And it's not because it's fine that it will come.
+Fineness is not in vogue, any more than love is. It's because it's true
+that it has to be."
+
+"Then, since justice is wanted by the people, and the people have the
+power, let them do it."
+
+"They're beginning already!" said some obscure lips.
+
+"It's the way things are running," declared another.
+
+"When all men have made themselves equal, we shall be forced to unite."
+
+"And there'll no longer be appalling things done in the face of heaven
+by thirty million men who don't wish them."
+
+It is true, and there is nothing to reply to it. What pretended
+argument or shadow of an answer dare one oppose to it--"There'll no
+longer be the things done in the face of heaven by thirty millions of
+men who don't want to do them!"
+
+Such is the logic that I hear and follow of the words, spoken by these
+pitiful fellows cast upon the field of affliction, the words which
+spring from their bruises and pains, the words which bleed from them.
+
+Now, the sky is all overcast. Low down it is armored in steely blue by
+great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by
+enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening, and more rain
+on the way. The end of the tempest and the long trouble is not yet.
+
+"We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make
+war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We
+shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh
+bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated,
+it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count;
+that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that
+the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so
+that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business,
+and expand in the way of employees and shops--and we shall see, as soon
+as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we
+thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions."
+
+"Listen!" some one broke in suddenly.
+
+We hold our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns. Yonder, the
+growling is agitating the gray strata of the sky, and the distant
+violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters
+continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.
+
+"It's beginning again."
+
+Then one of us says, "Ah, look what we've got against us!"
+
+Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of
+their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly
+sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment,
+whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity of
+circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of
+privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken
+sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the
+tangled lines.
+
+And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in
+which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand
+forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above
+the crests of the storm that beglooms the world--a cavalcade of
+warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and
+plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with
+weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The
+antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the
+painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.
+
+And far above the fevered gaze of them who are upon the ground, whose
+bodies are layered with the dregs of the earth and the wasted fields,
+the phantom cohort flows from the four corners of the horizon, drives
+back the sky's infinity and hides its blue deeps.
+
+And they are legion. They are not only the warrior caste who shout as
+they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal slavery
+has clothed in magic power, the mighty by birth, who tower here and
+there above the prostration of the human race and will take their
+sudden stand by the scales of justice when they think they see great
+profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who minister
+consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.
+
+"There are those who say," now cries one of the somber and compelling
+talkers, extending his hand as though he could see the pageant, "there
+are those who say, 'How fine they are!'"
+
+"And those who say, 'The nations hate each other!'"
+
+"And those who say, 'I get fat on war, and my belly matures on it!'"
+
+"And those who say, 'There has always been war, so there always will
+be!'"
+
+"There are those who say, 'I can't see farther than the end of my nose,
+and I forbid others to see farther!'"
+
+"There are those who say, 'Babies come into the world with either red
+or blue breeches on!'"
+
+"There are those," growled a hoarse voice, "who say, 'Bow your head and
+trust in God!'"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Ah, you are right, poor countless workmen of the battles, you who have
+made with your hands all of the Great War, you whose omnipotence is not
+yet used for well-doing, you human host whose every face is a world of
+sorrows, you who dream bowed under the yoke of a thought beneath that
+sky where long black clouds rend themselves and expand in disheveled
+lengths like evil angels--yes, you are right. There are all those
+things against you. Against you and your great common interests which
+as you dimly saw are the same thing in effect as justice, there are not
+only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.
+
+There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested
+parties--financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in their
+banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with
+their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut
+up like safes.
+
+There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail
+like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and
+the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy;
+the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.
+
+There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the
+sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice
+has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by
+the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all
+their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.
+
+With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you
+to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may
+change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians--and how
+many more?--who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the
+inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity
+possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines
+of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of
+races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the
+ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and
+imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is
+short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who
+lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with
+formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from
+books, not the great ones.
+
+And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are
+doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and
+the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each behind his
+shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability
+and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a country they
+make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism--which can
+be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art
+on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all
+equally sacred--out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable
+idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the
+living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer
+which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and
+suffocation of armed peace.
+
+They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the
+crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the
+word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is
+eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many
+nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.
+
+Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously
+ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you--"It wasn't me that
+began, it was you!"--"No, it wasn't me, it was you!"--"Hit me
+then!"--"No, you hit me!"--those puerilities that perpetuate the
+world's huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly
+concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with
+it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all
+those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of
+things and find or invent excuses for it--they are your enemies!
+
+They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who
+are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes
+hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are your
+enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names,
+whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven
+and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all,
+and be mindful for ever!
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"They will say to you," growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two
+hands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, 'My friend,
+you have been a wonderful hero!' I don't want them to say it!
+
+"Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We've been
+murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We shall
+do it again with all our might, because it's of great importance to
+follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it. The act of
+slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble.
+Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that's what we've been. But don't
+talk to me about military virtue because I've killed Germans."
+
+"Nor to me," cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have
+replied to him even had he dared; "nor to me, because I've saved the
+lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the
+sake of the excellence of life-saving!"
+
+"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there
+were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.
+
+The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of
+paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't
+done. But military glory--it isn't even true for us common soldiers.
+It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie,
+like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's
+sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves
+of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful
+inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor
+little names of nobodies."
+
+"To hell with it all," replies a man, "we've got other things to think
+about."
+
+"But all that," hiccupped a face which the mud concealed like a hideous
+hand, "may you even say it? You'd be cursed, and 'shot at dawn'!
+They've made around a Marshal's plumes a religion as bad and stupid and
+malignant as the other!"
+
+The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he
+had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had
+spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given
+for the healing of the world.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling
+more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is
+full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of men
+are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of clouds,
+round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles, churches, royal
+and military palaces and temples. They seem to multiply there, shutting
+out the stars that are fewer than mankind; it seems even as if these
+apparitions are moving in all directions in the excavated ground, here,
+there, among the real beings who are thrown there at random, half
+buried in the earth like grains of corn.
+
+My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with
+difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb, laid
+out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge simplicity
+out of the earth's depths--a profoundity like that of ignorance--they
+move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and their fists extended
+towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm. They are struggling
+against victorious specters, like the Cyranos and Don Quixotes that
+they still are.
+
+One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the
+plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old
+trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and
+purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.
+
+But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the boundless
+simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with a dawn of
+hope, but raises on it a renewal of strength and courage.
+
+"That's enough talk about those others!" one of the men commanded; "all
+the worse for them!--Us! Us all!" The understanding between
+democracies, the entente among the multitudes, the uplifting of the
+people of the world, the bluntly simple faith! All the rest, aye, all
+the rest, in the past, the present and the future, matters nothing at
+all.
+
+And a soldier ventures to add this sentence, though he begins it with
+lowered voice, "If the present war has advanced progress by one step,
+its miseries and slaughter will count for little."
+
+And while we get ready to rejoin the others and begin war again, the
+dark and storm-choked sky slowly opens above our heads. Between two
+masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of
+light, so blackedged and beset, brings even so its proof that the sun
+is there.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse
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