Under Fire

by Barbusse, Henri; Wray, William Fitzwater;

  “Great Scot! 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 manœuvring 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 endeavours, 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 grey.

  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-modelled, 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 grey 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 glow-worms and carrying strange instruments, come out and then disappear.

  “That’s the searchlight section,” says Cocon.

  “You’ve got your considering cap on, mate; 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 à 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*), 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 periods 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 kilometres round about. All the departments of the Army Corps will first set off, and the E.N.E.—éléments non endivisionnés,” 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 armoured 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 horse-back; 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,* 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 Staff blokes, 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 Corps’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. Look! 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?”

  “By God!” 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 thi
s time turns round on him: “What are you doing there, dung-guts, numskull?”

  “No, 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 organised pretty much like an Army Corps——”

  “Yes, 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 organised, 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—Good God, 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 armoured train that moves in the distance, with fire in the sky behind it.

  * Non-combatant details—Tr.

  * Akin to the British R.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 moustache 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 gipsies’ 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 woollen 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, what?”

  In single file they went down the embankment of the road; arm in arm they crossed the field of grey 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 café, 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, kid.”

  “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 recognised 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 everywh
ere 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.