Under Fire

by Barbusse, Henri; Wray, William Fitzwater;

  “‘Where are they going, these men?’ asked Mariette.

  “‘We are going to Vauvelles.’

  “Jésus!’ 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. Ta-ta.’

  “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?’

  We meet a shadow in a big black cloak, with a lantern.

  “‘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, an 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 moustache 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 as 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 café 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 herself 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, little mother,’ 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-bye. 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?’

  “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 litre of good wine. But, oh, help! 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 ANGE
R 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, by God!”

  “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 armour, 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 moustaches 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 armour-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, good Lord! 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, mind!”

  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 centres 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, my lads,” 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 neighbour 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 cess-pools?”

  “Exactly, sir,” the neighbour replied; “I tell you that you play hell with them and yet you’d damn well like to be in the rotters’ place.”

  “Very likely—but what does that prove, arse-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, villain? 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?”

  “F—— them, I——”

  “But you wish it was you, eh?” chaffed the invisible neighbour, 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. “Listen! 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 com
ing 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. Old man, 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 chanted at school. Never, I tell you, had he been sent to the front, although he was Class 1903,* 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, yes. 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 mad as hell 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 scrimshanker 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. F——them, he says, that take their grub on the ground, and f——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 neighbours, ‘Here I am safe and sound,’ and his pals’ll be glad, because he’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.