“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 Defence, 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 colours.”—“The baggage-masters.”—“The drivers, the labourers, 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 nodded, “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.”
“Ay, ay; 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 moustache, and he only sees her moustache, so he bullyrags her—‘Why aren’t you at the front, you?’”
“For my part,” says Pépin, “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 engagés,* for instance——”
“That depends on the engagés. 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 engagés 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, my lady, I’m built like that!’ Eh, get out of it, humbug!”
“Yes, it’s always the same tale. They wouldn’t be able to say in the drawing-rooms afterwards, ‘Look, here I am; look at me for a voluntary engagé!’”
“I know a gentleman who enlisted in the aerodromes. He had a fine uniform—he’d have done better to offer for the Opéra-Comique. What am I saying—‘he’d have done better?’ He’d have done a damn sight better, he would. 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? Listen! 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 and demand a law that everybody should take their turn in the trenches. 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, ‘Say! 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.”
* Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.—Tr.
* ^-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the duration of service at the front.—Tr.
* Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three, four or five years. Those enlisted for four or five years 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 realises 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.
“Hullo!” 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,* 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 spot the soldiers had scrawled inscriptions and protests. A croix de guerre, cut clumsily of wood, was nailed to it, and read: “A. Cajard, mobilised in August 1914; France’s Gratitude.”
Returning to quarters I met Volpatte, still surrounded and talking. He was relating some new anecdotes of his journey among the happy ones.
* 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 downpour 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 centre, 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 cited, 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 discolours 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 re-enters 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 fleshless 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 vapours 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.
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