Under Fire: The Story of a Squad — Under Fire part 3

* * * * * 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.