He comes up to me and laughs nervously: “It’s out of the common, that, eh? I’m sure you’ve never seen yourself like it—can’t find the house where you’ve always lived since—since always——”
He turns about, and it is he who leads me away: “Well, let’s leg it, since there is nothing. Why spend a whole hour looking at places where things were? Let’s be off, old man.”
We depart—the only two living beings to be seen in that unreal and miasmal place, that village which bestrews the earth and lies under our feet.
We climb again. The weather is clearing and the fog scattering quickly. My silent comrade, who is making great strides with lowered head, points out a field: “The cemetery,” he says; “it was there before it was everywhere, before it laid hold on everything without end, like a plague.”
Half-way, we go more slowly, and Poterloo comes close to me—“You know, it’s too much, all that. It’s wiped out too much—all my life up to now. It makes me afraid—it is so completely wiped out.”
“Come; your wife’s in good health, you know; your little girl, too.”
He looks at me comically: “My wife—I’ll tell you something; my wife——”
“Well?”
“Well, old chap, I’ve seen her again.”
“You’ve seen her? I thought she was in the occupied country?”
“Yes, she’s at Lens, with my relations. Well, I’ve seen her—ah, and then, after all, hang it!—I’ll tell you all about it. Well, I was at Lens, three weeks ago. It was the eleventh; that’s twenty days since.”
I look at him, astounded. But he looks like one who is speaking the truth. He talks in sputters at my side, as we walk in the increasing light—
“They told us—you remember, perhaps—but you weren’t there, I believe—they told us the wire had got to be strengthened in front of the Billard Trench. You know what that means, eh? They hadn’t been able to do it till then. As soon as one gets out of the trench he’s on a downward slope, that’s got a funny name.”
“The Toboggan.”
“Yes, that’s it; and the place is as bad by night or in fog as in broad daylight, because of the rifles trained on it beforehand on trestles, and the machine-guns that they point during the day. When they can’t see any more, the Boches sprinkle the lot.
“They took the pioneers of the C.H.R., but there were some missing, and they replaced ’em with a few poilus. I was one of ’em. Good. We climb out. Not a single rifle-shot! ‘What does it mean?’ we says, and behold, we see a Boche, two Boches, three Boches, coming out of the ground—the grey devils!—and they make signs to us and shout ‘Kamarad!’ ‘We’re Alsatians,’ they says, coming more and more out of their communication trench—the International. ‘They won’t fire on you, up there,’ they says; ‘don’t be afraid, friends. Just let us bury our dead.’ And behold us working aside of each other, and even talking together since they were from Alsace. And to tell the truth, they groused about the war and about their officers. Our sergeant knew all right that it was forbidden to talk with the enemy, and they’d even read it out to us that we were only to talk to them with our rifles. But the sergeant he says to himself that this is God’s own chance to strengthen the wire, and as long as they were letting us work against them, we’d just got to take advantage of it.
“Then behold one of the Boches that says, ‘There isn’t perhaps one of you that comes from the invaded country and would like news of his family?’
“Old chap, that was a bit too much for me. Without thinking if I did right or wrong, I went up to him and I said, ‘Yes, there’s me.’ The Boche asks me questions. I tell him my wife’s at Lens with her relations, and the little one, too. He asks where she’s staying. I explain to him, and he says he can see it from there. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I’ll take her a letter, and not only that, but I’ll bring you an answer.’ Then all of a sudden he taps his forehead, the Boche, and comes close to me—‘Listen, my friend, to a lot better still. If you like to do what I say, you shall see your wife, and your kids as well, and all the lot, sure as I see you.’ He tells me, to do it, I’ve only got to go with him at a certain time with a Boche greatcoat and a shako that he’ll have for me. He’d mix me up in a coal-fatigue in Lens, and we’d go to our house. I could go and have a look on condition that I laid low and didn’t show myself, and he’d be responsible for the chaps of the fatigue, but there were non-coms. in the house that he wouldn’t answer for—and, old chap, I agreed!”
“That was serious.”
“Yes, for sure, it was serious. I decided all at once, without thinking and without wishing to think, seeing I was dazzled with the idea of seeing my people again; and if I got shot afterwards, well, so much the worse—but give and take. The supply of law and demand they call it, don’t they?
“My boy, it all went swimmingly. The only hitch was they had such hard work to find a shako big enough, for, as you know, I’m well off for head. But even that was fixed up. They raked me out in the end a louse-box big enough to hold my head. I’ve already some Boche boots—those that were Caron’s, you know. So, behold us setting off in the Boche trenches—and they’re most damnably like ours—with these good sorts of Boche comrades, who told me in very good French—same as I’m speaking—not to fret myself.
“There was no alarm, nothing. Getting there came off all right. Everything went off so sweet and simple that I fancied I must be a defaulting Boche. We got to Lens at nightfall. I remember we passed in front of La Perche and went down the Rue du Quatorze-Juillet. I saw some of the townsfolk walking about in the streets like they do in our quarters. I didn’t recognise them because of the evening, nor them me, because of the evening too, and because of the seriousness of things. It was so dark you couldn’t put your finger into your eye when I reached my folk’s garden.
“My heart was going top speed. I was all trembling from head to foot as if I were only a sort of heart myself. And I had to hold myself back from carrying on aloud, and in French too, I was so happy and upset. The Kamarad says to me, ‘You go, pass once, then another time, and look in at the door and the window. Don’t look as if you were looking. Be careful.’ So I get hold of myself again, and swallow my feelings all at a gulp. Not a bad sort, that devil, seeing he’d have had a hell of a time if I’d got nailed.
“At our place, you know, same as everywhere in the Pas de Calais, the outside doors of the houses are cut in two. At the bottom, it’s a sort of barrier, half-way up your body; and above, you might call it a shutter. So you can shut the bottom half and be one-half private.
“The top half was open, and the room, that’s the dining-room, and the kitchen as well, of course, was lighted up and I heard voices.
“I went by with my neck twisted sideways. There were heads of men and women with a rosy light on them, round the round table and the lamp. My eyes fell on her, on Clotilde. I saw her plainly. She was sitting between two chaps, non-coms., I believe, and they were talking to her. And what was she doing? Nothing; she was smiling, and her face was prettily bent forward and surrounded with a light little framework of fair hair, and the lamp gave it a bit of a golden look.
“She was smiling. She was contented. She had a look of being well off, by the side of the Boche non-com., and the lamp, and the fire that puffed an unfamiliar warmth out on me. I passed, and then I turned round, and passed again. I saw her again, and she was always smiling. Not a forced smile, not a debtor’s smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave. And during that time of illumination that I passed in two senses, I could see my baby as well, stretching her hands out to a great striped simpleton and trying to climb on his knee; and then, just by, who do you think I recognised? Madeleine Vandaërt, Vandaërt’s wife, my pal of the 19th, that was killed at the Marne, at Montyon.
“She knew he’d been killed because she was in mourning. And she, she was having good fun, and laughing outright, I tell you—and she looked at one and the other as much as to say, ‘I’m all right here!’
I saw h
er plainly.
“Ah, my boy, I cleared out of that, and butted into the Kamarads that were waiting to take me back. How I got back I couldn’t tell you. I was knocked out. I went stumbling like a man under a curse, and if anybody had said a wrong word to me just then——! I should have shouted out loud; I should have made a row, so as to get killed and be done with this filthy life!
“Do you catch on? She was smiling, my wife, my Clotilde, at this time in the war! And why? Have we only got to be away for a time for us not to count any more? You take your damned hook from home to go to the war, and everything seems finished with; and they worry for a while that you’re gone, but bit by bit you become as if you didn’t exist, they can do without you to be as happy as they were before, and to smile. Ah, Christ! I’m not talking of the other woman that was laughing, but my Clotilde, mine, who at that chance moment when I saw her, whatever you may say, was getting on damned well without me!
“And then, if she’d been with friends or relations; but no, actually with Boche non-coms.! Tell me, shouldn’t I have had good reason to jump into the room, fetch her a couple of swipes, and wring the neck of the other old hen in mourning?
“Yes, yes; I thought of doing it. I know all right I was getting violent, I was getting out of control.
“Mark me. I don’t want to say more about it than I have said. She’s a good lass, Clotilde. I know her, and I’ve confidence in her. I’m not far wrong, you know. If I were done in, she’d cry all the tears in her body to begin with. She thinks I’m alive, I admit, but that isn’t the point. She can’t prevent herself from being well off, and contented, and letting herself go, when she’s a good fire, a good lamp, and company, whether I’m there or not——”
I led Poterloo away: “You exaggerate, old chap; you’re getting absurd notions, come.” We had walked very slowly and were still at the foot of the hill. The fog was becoming like silver as it prepared for departure. Sunshine was very near.
Poterloo looked up and said, “We’ll go round by the Carency road and go in at the back.” We struck off at an angle into the fields. At the end of a few minutes he said to me, “I exaggerate, you think? You say that I exaggerate?” He reflected. “Ah!” Then he added, with the shaking of the head that had hardly left him all the morning, “What about it? All the same, it’s a fact——”
We climbed the slope. The cold had become tepidity. Arrived on a little plateau—“Let’s sit here again before going in,” he proposed. He sat down, heavy with the world of thought that entangled him. His forehead was wrinkled. Then he turned towards me with an awkward air, as if he were going to beg some favour: “Tell me, mate, I’m wondering if I’m right.”
But after looking at me, he looked at everything else, as though he would rather consult them than me.
A transformation was taking place in the sky and on the earth. The fog was hardly more than a fancy. Distances revealed themselves. The narrow plain, gloomy and grey, was getting bigger, chasing its shadows away, and assuming colour. The light was passing over it from east to west like sails.
And down there at our very feet, by the grace of distance and of light, we saw Souchez among the trees—the little place arose again before our eyes, new-born in the sunshine!
“Am I right?” repeated Poterloo, more faltering, more dubious.
Before I could speak he replied to himself, at first almost in a whisper, as the light fell on him—
“She’s quite young, you know; she’s twenty-six. She can’t hold her youth in, it’s coming out of her all over, and when she’s resting in the lamp-light and the warmth, she’s got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply be her youth, singing in her throat. It isn’t on account of others, if truth were told; it’s on account of herself. It’s life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives, and that’s all. It isn’t her fault if she lives. You wouldn’t have her die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One can’t cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months. Can’t be done. It’s too long, I tell you. That’s all there is to it.”
He stops speaking to look at the view of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, now wholly illuminated.
“Same with the kid; when she found herself alongside a simpleton that doesn’t tell her to go and play with herself, she ends by wanting to get on his knee. Perhaps she’d prefer that it was her uncle or a friend or her father—perhaps—but she tries it on all the same with the only man that’s always there, even if it’s a great hog in spectacles.
“Ah,” he cries, as he gets up and comes gesticulating before me. “There’s a good answer one could give me. If I didn’t come back from the war, I should say, ‘My lad, you’ve gone to smash, no more Clotilde, no more love! You’ll be replaced in her heart sooner or later; no getting round it; your memory, the portrait of you that she carries in her, that’ll fade bit by bit and another’ll come on top of it, and she’ll begin another life again.’ Ah, if I didn’t come back!”
He laughs heartily. “But I mean to come back. Ah, yes! One must be there. Otherwise—I must be there, look you,” he says again more seriously; “otherwise, if you’re not there, even if you’re dealing with saints and angels, you’ll be at fault in the end. That’s life. But I am there.” He laughs. “Well, I’m a little there, as one might say!”
I get up too, and tap him on the shoulder. “You’re right, old pal, it’ll all come to an end.”
He rubs his hands and goes on talking. “Yes, by God! It’ll all finish, don’t worry. Oh, I know well there’ll be hard graft before it’s finished, and still more after. We’ve got to work, and I don’t only mean work with the arms.
“It’ll be necessary to make everything over again. Very well, we’ll do it. The house? Gone. The garden? Nowhere. All right, we’ll rebuild the house, we’ll remake the garden. The less there is the more we’ll make over again. After all, it’s life, and we’re made to remake, eh? And we’ll remake our life together, and happiness. We’ll make the days again; we’ll remake the nights.
“And the other side, too. They’ll make their world again. Do you know what I say?—perhaps it won’t be as long as one thinks——
“Listen! I can see Madeleine Vandaërt marrying another chap. She’s a widow; but, old man, she’s been a widow eighteen months. Do you think it’s not a big slice, that, eighteen months? They even leave off wearing mourning, I believe, about that time! People don’t remember that when they say ‘What a strumpet she is,’ and when, in effect, they ask her to commit suicide. But, old chap, one forgets. One is forced to forget. It isn’t the people that make you forget; you do it yourself; it’s just forgetfulness, mind you. I find Madeleine again all of a sudden, and to see her frivvling there it broke me up as much as if her husband had been killed yesterday—it’s natural. But it’s a devil of a long time since he got spiked, poor lad. It’s a long time since, it’s too long since. People are no longer the same. But, mark you, one must come back, one must be there! We shall be there, and we shall be busy with beginning again!”
On the way he looks and winks, cheered up by finding a peg on which to hang his ideas. He says—
“I can see it from here, after the war, all the Souchez people setting themselves again to work and to life—what a business! There’s Papa Ponce, for example, the back-number! He was so pernicketty that you could see him sweeping the grass in his garden with a horse-hair brush, or kneeling on his lawn and trimming the turf with a pair of scissors. Very well, he’ll treat himself to that again! And Madame Imaginaire, that lived in one of the last houses towards the Château de Carleul, a large woman who seemed to roll along the ground as if she’d got casters under her big circular petticoats. She had a child every year, regular, punctual—a proper machine-gun of kids. Very well, she’ll take that occupation up again with all her might.”
He stops and ponders, and smiles a very little—almost within himself: “Listen, I’ll tell you; I noticed—it isn’t very important, this,” he insists,
as though suddenly embarrassed by the triviality of this parenthesis—“but I noticed (you notice it in a glance when you’re noticing something else) that it was cleaner in our house than in my time——”
We come on some little rails in the ground, climbing almost hidden in the withered grass underfoot. Poterloo points out with his foot this bit of abandoned track, and smiles: “That, that’s our railway. It was a cripple, as you may say; that means something that doesn’t move. It didn’t work very quickly. A snail could have kept pace with it. We shall remake it. But certainly it won’t go any quicker. That can’t be allowed!”
When we reached the top of the hill, Poterloo turned round and threw a last look over the slaughtered places that we had just visited. Even more than a minute ago, distance recreated the village across the remains of trees shortened and sliced that now looked like young saplings. Better even than just now, the sun shed on that white and red accumulation of mingled material an appearance of life and even an illusion of meditation. Its very stones seemed to feel the vernal revival. The beauty of sunshine heralded what would be, and revealed the future. The face of the watching soldier, too, shone with a glamour of reincarnation, and the smile on it was born of the spring-time and of hope. His rosy cheeks and blue eyes seemed brighter than ever.
We go down into the communication trench and there is sunshine there. The trench is yellow, dry, and resounding. I admire its finely geometrical depth, its shovel-smoothed and shining flanks; and I find it enjoyable to hear the clean sharp sound of our feet on the hard ground or on the duckboards—little gratings of wood, placed end to end and forming a plankway.
I look at my watch. It tells me that it is nine o’clock, and it shows me, too, a dial of delicate colour where the sky is reflected in rose-pink and blue, and the fine fretwork of bushes that are planted there above the marges of the trench.
And Poterloo and I look at each other with a kind of confused delight. We are glad to see each other, as though we were meeting after absence! He speaks to me, and though I am quite familiar with the singsong accent of the North, I discover that he is singing.
Under Fire Page 16
