“All that,” 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, ‘Captain’——”
“And I,” says Barque, “shall make myself look sick, and I shall say, ‘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!”
“Rotten!”
“There’s the grub!” announces a poilu* 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 Pépère 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 Pépère 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.”
“Oh, Christ!” 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 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 clamour 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 moustache. Even the corrugations of Cocon’s poor little face are lighted up.
Bécuwe 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, à propos of a letter to Marthereau from his wife, they discuss produce.
“Ma 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 Pépin 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 up 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 axe, 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: “Chuck it, now! 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. Pépin 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! No, 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, now!” 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 armour 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 neighbour 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 levelled; 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 kilometres’ width that form the army front, one must count on a thousand kilometres 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 kilometres* 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 neighbour, “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 André. 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.”
“Yes, yes, 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, 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, f—it!”
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, by God! 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 flavour of chicken and rabbit.
“There were things that we paid for, too. The spondulicks just danced about. We held all the aces in those days.”
“A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops.”
“Millions, yes. 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, my lad, 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 César. He was the man for finding wood!”
“Rather! 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 the
y 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 André. “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 Pépin. “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 axe? 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?”
Under Fire Page 3
