Under Fire

by Barbusse, Henri; Wray, William Fitzwater;

  “In the Argonne,” says Lamuse, “my brother says in a letter that they get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They’re big heavy things, fired off very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says, and when they fart they don’t half make a shindy, he says.”

  “There’s nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase after you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very trench, just scraping over the bank.”

  “There, there, did you hear it?” A whistling was approaching us when suddenly it ceased. The contrivance has not burst. “It’s a shell that cried off,” Paradis asserts. And we strain our ears for the satisfaction of hearing—or of not hearing—others.

  Lamuse says: “All the fields and the roads and the villages about here, they’re covered with dud shells of all sizes—ours as well, to say truth. The ground must be full of ’em, that you can’t see. I wonder how they’ll go on, later, when the time comes to say, ‘That’s enough of it, let’s start work again.’”

  And all the time, in a monotony of madness, the avalanche of fire and iron goes on; shrapnel with its whistling explosion and its overcharged heart of furious metal, and the great percussion shells, whose thunder is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly into a wall, the thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling down a declivity. The air is now glutted and viewless, it is crossed and recrossed by heavy blasts, and the murder of the earth continues all around, deeply and more deeply, to the limit of completion.

  There are even other guns which now join in—they are ours. Their report is like that of the 75’s, but louder, and it has a prolonged and resounding echo, like thunder reverberating among mountains.

  “They’re the long 120s. They’re on the edge of the wood half a mile away. Fine guns, old man, like greyhounds. They’re slender and fine-nosed, those guns—you want to call them ‘Madame.’ They’re not like the 220s—they’re all snout, like coal-scuttles, and spit their shells out from the bottom upwards. The 120’s get there just the same, but among the teams of artillery they look like kids in bassinettes.”

  Conversation languishes; here and there are yawns. The dimensions and weight of this outbreak of the guns fatigues the mind. Our voices flounder in it and are drowned.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this for a bombardment,” shouts Barque.

  “We always say that,” replies Paradis.

  “Just so,” bawls Volpatte. “There’s been talk of an attack lately; I should say this is the beginning of something.”

  The others say simply, “Ah!”

  Volpatte displays an intention of snatching a wink of sleep. He settles himself on the ground with his back against one wall of the trench and his feet buttressed against the other wall.

  We converse together on divers subjects. Biquet tells the story of a rat he has seen: “He was cheeky and comical, you know. I’d taken off my trotter-cases, and that rat, he chewed all the edge of the uppers into embroidery. Of course, I’d greased ’em.”

  Volpatte, who is now definitely out of action, moves and says, “I can’t get to sleep for your gabbling.”

  “You can’t make me believe, old fraud,” says Marthereau, “that you can raise a single snore with a shindy like this all round you.”

  Volpatte replies with one.

  Fall in! March!

  We are changing our spot. Where are they taking us to? We have no idea. The most we know is that we are in reserve, and that they may take us round to strengthen certain points in succession, or to clear the communication trenches, in which the regulation of passing troops is as complicated a job, if blocks and collisions are to be avoided, as it is of the trains in a busy station. It is impossible to make out the meaning of the immense manœuvre in which the rolling of our regiment is only that of a little wheel, nor what is going on in all the huge area of the sector. But, lost in the network of deeps where we go and come without end, weary, harassed and stiff-jointed by prolonged halts, stupefied by noise and delay, poisoned by smoke, we make out that our artillery is becoming more and more active; the offensive seems to have changed places.

  Halt! A fire of intense and incredible fury was threshing the parapets of the trench where we were halted at the moment: “Fritz is going it strong; he’s afraid of an attack, he’s going dotty. Ah, isn’t he letting fly!”

  A heavy hail was pouring over us, hacking terribly at atmosphere and sky, scraping and skimming all the plain.

  I looked through a loophole and saw a swift and strange vision. In front of us, a dozen yards away at most, there were motionless forms outstretched side by side—a row of mowndown soldiers—and the countless projectiles that hurtled from all sides were riddling this rank of the dead!

  The bullets that flayed the soil in straight streaks and raised slender stems of cloud were perforating and ripping the bodies so rigidly close to the ground, breaking the stiffened limbs, plunging into the wan and vacant faces, bursting and bespattering the liquefied eyes; and even did that file of corpses stir and budge out of line under the avalanche.

  We could hear the blunt sound of the dizzy copper points as they pierced cloth and flesh, the sound of a furious stroke with a knife, the harsh blow of a stick upon clothing. Above us rushed jets of shrill whistling, with the increasing menace of the ricochet’s falling voice. And we bent our heads under the enormous flight of noises and voices.

  “Trench must be cleared—Gee up!” We leave this most infamous corner of the battlefield where even the dead are torn, wounded, and slain anew.

  We turn towards the right and towards the rear. The communication trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners. Here there is a further halt. We tramp about, and hear the artillery observer shout his commands, which the telephonist buried beside him picks up and repeats: “First gun, same sight; two-tenths to left; three a minute!”

  Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have glimpsed for the space of the lightning’s flash all the field of battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning. I saw a limitless grey plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more pointed billow of smoke.

  Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white, the immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our batteries are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with short-lived flashes. Another minute, part of the field grew dark under a steamy and whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.

  Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of torn paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim rows of vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the straight strokes of a written page—these are the roads and their trees. Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and forward and rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with men.

  We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plain in the horrible face of the flying firmament. It is difficult to believe that each of those tiny spots is a living thing with fragile and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full of deep thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. One is fascinated by this scattered dust of men as small as the stars in the sky.

  Poor unknowns, poor fellow-men, it is your turn to give battle. Another time it will be ours. Perhaps to-morrow it will be ours to feel the heavens burst over our heads or the earth open under our feet, to be assailed by the prodigious plague of projectiles, to be swept away by the blasts of a tornado a hundred thousand times stronger than the tornado.

  They urge us into the rearward shelters. For our eyes the field of death vanishes. To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great anvil of the clouds. The sound of universal destruction is still. The squad surrounds itself with the famili
ar noises of life, and sinks into the fondling littleness of the dug-outs.

  * Military slang for machine-gun—Tr.

  XX

  UNDER FIRE

  Rudely awakened in the dark, I open my eyes: “What? What’s up?”

  “Your turn on guard—it’s two o’clock in the morning,” says Corporal Bertrand at the opening into the hole where I am prostrate on the floor. I hear him without seeing him.

  “I’m coming,” I growl, and shake myself, and yawn in the little sepulchral shelter. I stretch my arms, and my hands touch the soft and cold clay. Then I cleave the heavy odour that fills the dug-out and crawl out in the middle of the dense gloom between the collapsed bodies of the sleepers. After several stumbles and entanglements among accoutrements, knapsacks and limbs stretched out in all directions, I put my hand on my rifle and find myself upright in the open air, half awake and dubiously balanced, assailed by the black and bitter breeze.

  Shivering, I follow the corporal; he plunges in between the dark embankments whose lower ends press strangely and closely on our march. He stops; the place is here. I make out a heavy mass half-way up the ghostly wall which comes loose and descends from it with a whinnying yawn, and I hoist myself into the niche which it had occupied.

  The moon is hidden by mist, but a very weak and uncertain light overspreads the scene, and one’s sight gropes its way. Then a wide strip of darkness, hovering and gliding up aloft, puts it out. Even after touching the breastwork and the loophole in front of my face I can hardly make them out, and my inquiring hand discovers, among an ordered deposit of things, a mass of grenade handles.

  “Keep your eye skinned, old chap,” says Bertrand in a low voice. “Don’t forget that our listening-post is in front there on the left. Well, so long.” His steps die away, followed by those of the sleepy sentry whom I am relieving.

  Rifle-shots crackle all round. Abruptly a bullet smacks the earth of the wall against which I am leaning. I peer through the loophole. Our line runs along the top of the ravine, and the land slopes downward in front of me, plunging into an abyss of darkness where one can see nothing. One’s sight ends always by picking out the regular lines of the stakes of our wire entanglements, planted on the shore of the waves of night, and here and there the circular funnel-like wounds of shells, little, larger, or enormous, and some of the nearest occupied by mysterious lumber. The wind blows in my face, and nothing else is stirring save the vast moisture that drains from it. It is cold enough to set one shivering in perpetual motion. I look upwards, this way and that; everything is borne down by dreadful gloom. I might be derelict and alone in the middle of a world destroyed by a cataclysm.

  There is a swift illumination up above—a rocket. The scene in which I am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The crest of our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots of light. The trench is shored with sandbags. It is widened everywhere, and in many places ripped up, by landslides. The sandbags, piled up and dislodged, appear in the starlike light of the rocket like the great dismantled stones of ancient ruined buildings. I look through the loophole, and discern in the misty and pallid atmosphere expanded by the meteor the rows of stakes and even the thin lines of barbed wire which cross and recross between the posts. To my seeing they are like strokes of a pen scratched upon the pale and perforated ground. Lower down, the ravine is filled with the motionless silence of the ocean of night.

  There is a swift illumination up above.

  I come down from my look-out and steer at a guess towards my neighbour in vigil, and come upon him with outstretched hand. “Is that you?” I say to him in a subdued voice, though I don’t know him.

  “Yes,” he replies, equally ignorant who I am, blind like myself. “It’s quiet at this time.” he adds. “A bit since I thought they were going to attack, and they may have tried it on, on the right, where they chucked over a lot of bombs. There’s been a barrage of 75s—vrrrran, vrrrran—Old man, I said to myself, ‘Those 75s, p’raps they’ve good reason for firing. If they did come out, the Boches, they must have found something.’ There, listen, down there, the bullets biffing themselves!”

  He opens his flask and takes a draught, and his last words, still subdued, smell of wine: “Ah, la, la! Talk about a filthy war! Don’t you think we should be a lot better at home!—Hullo! What’s the matter with the ass?” A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief and sudden flash of phosphorescence. Others go off here and there along our line. Rifle-shots are catching after dark.

  We go to inquire of one of the shooters, guessing our way through the solid blackness that has fallen again upon us like a roof. Stumbling, and thrown anon on each other, we reach the man and touch him—“Well, what’s up?”

  He thought he saw something moving, but there is nothing more. We return through the density, my unknown neighbour and I, unsteady, and labouring along the narrow way of slippery mud, doubled up as if we each carried a crushing burden. At one point of the horizon and then at another all around, a gun sounds, and its heavy din blends with the volleys of rifle-fire, redoubled one minute and dying out the next, and with the clusters of grenade-reports, of deeper sound than the crack of Lebel or Mauser, and nearly like the voice of the old classical rifles. The wind has again increased; it is so strong that one must protect himself against it in the darkness; masses of huge cloud are passing in front of the moon.

  So there we are, this man and I, jostling without knowing each other, revealed and then hidden from each other in sudden jerks by the flashes of the guns, oppressed by the opacity, the centre of a huge circle of fires that appear and disappear in the devilish landscape.

  “We’re under a curse,” says the man.

  We separate, and go each to his own loophole, to weary our eyes upon invisibility. Is some frightful and dismal storm about to break? But that night it did not. At the end of my long wait, with the first streaks of day, there was even a lull.

  Again I saw, when the dawn came down on us like a stormy evening, the steep banks of our crumbling trench as they came to life again under the sooty scarf of the low-hanging clouds, a trench dismal and dirty, infinitely dirty, humped with debris and filthiness. Under the livid sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their vaguely shining and rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera of giants, nakedly exposed upon the earth.

  In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap of horizontal things like logs. Tree-trunks? No, they are corpses.

  As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the shadowy fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each blade of grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening field and its high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the bristling of stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and in front of the opposite slope a wall of night still stands.

  Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms. There are four of them. They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque, Biquet and little Eudore. They rot there quite near us, blocking one half of the wide, twisting and muddy furrow that the living must still defend.

  They have been laid there as well as may be, supporting and crushing each other. The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth. Handkerchiefs had been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against them in the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without noticing them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face to face with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.

  It was four nights ago that they were all killed together. I remember the night myself indistinctly—it is like a dream. We were on patrol—they, I, Mesnil André, and Corporal Bertrand; and our business was to identify a new German listening-post marked by the artillery observers. We left the trench towards midnight and crept down the slope in line, three
or four paces from each other. Thus we descended far into the ravine, far enough to see the embankment of their International Trench, lying before our eyes like an animal collapsed and flattened. After we had verified that there was no listening-post in this slice of the ground we climbed back, with infinite care. Dimly I saw my neighbours to right and left, like sacks of shadow, crawling, slowly sliding, undulating and rocking in the mud and the murk, pushing before them the needle-points of their rifles. Some bullets whistled above us, but they did not know we were there, they were not looking for us. When we got within sight of the mound of our line, we took a breather for a moment; one of us let a sigh go, another spoke. Another turned round bodily, and the sheath of his bayonet rang out against a stone. Instantly a rocket shot redly up from the International Trench. We threw ourselves flat on the ground, closely, desperately, and waited there motionless, with the terrible star hanging over us and flooding us with daylight, twenty-five or thirty yards from our trench. Then a machine-gun on the other side of the ravine swept the zone where we were. Corporal Bertrand and I had had the luck to find in front of us, just as the red rocket went up and before it burst into light, a shell-hole, where a broken trestle was steeped in the mud. We flattened ourselves against the edge of the hole, buried ourselves in the mud as much as possible, and the poor skeleton of rotten wood concealed us. The jet of the machine-gun crossed several times. We heard a piercing whistle in the middle of each report, the sharp and violent sound of bullets that went into the earth, and dull and soft blows as well, followed by groans, by a little cry, and suddenly by a sound like the heavy snoring of a sleeper, a sound which slowly ebbed. Bertrand and I waited, grazed by the horizontal hail of bullets that traced a network of death an inch or so above us and sometimes scraped our clothes, driving us still deeper into the mud, nor dared we risk a movement which might have lifted a little some part of our bodies. The machine-gun at last held its peace in an enormous silence. A quarter of an hour later we two slid out of the shell-hole, and crawling on our elbows we fell at last like bundles into our listening-post. It was high time, too, for at that moment the moon shone out. We were obliged to stay in the bottom of the trench till morning, and then till evening, for the machine-gun swept the approaches without pause. We could not see the prostrate bodies through the loopholes of the post, by reason of the steepness of the ground—except, just on the level of our field of vision, a lump which appeared to be the back of one of them. In the evening, a sap was dug to reach the place where they had fallen. The work could not be finished in one night and was resumed by the pioneers the following night, for, overwhelmed with fatigue, we could no longer keep from falling asleep.