Awaking from a leaden sleep, I saw the four corpses that the sappers had reached from underneath, hooking and then hauling them into the sap with ropes. Each of them had several adjoining wounds, bullet holes an inch or so apart—the mitrailleuse had fired fast. The body of Mesnil André was not found, and his brother Joseph did some mad escapades in search of it. He went out quite alone into No Man’s Land, where the crossed fire of machine-guns swept it three ways at once and constantly. In the morning, dragging himself along like a slug, he showed over the bank a face black with mud and horribly wasted. They pulled him in again, with his face scratched by barbed wire, his hands bleeding, with heavy clods of mud in the folds of his clothes, and stinking of death. Like an idiot he kept on saying, “He’s nowhere.” He buried himself in a corner with his rifle, which he set himself to clean without hearing what was said to him, and only repeating “He’s nowhere.”
It is four nights ago since that night, and as the dawn comes once again to cleanse the earthly Gehenna, the bodies are becoming definitely distinct.
Barque in his rigidity seems immoderately long, his arms lie closely to the body, his chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin. With his head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at those who come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the clammy stains of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are heavily encrusted with blackened blood. Eudore seems very small by contrast, and his little face is completely white, so white as to remind you of the befloured face of a pierrot, and it is touching to see that little circle of white paper among the grey and bluish tints of the corpses. Biquet, the Breton, squat and square as a flagstone, appears to be under the stress of a huge effort; he might be trying to uplift the misty darkness; and the extreme exertion overflows upon the protruding cheek-bones and forehead of his grimacing face, contorts it hideously, sets the dried and dusty hair bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral cry, and spreads wide the eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his flinty eyes; and his hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.
Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat. In the dragging and carrying they were further injured. Big Lamuse, at last bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were gradually sinking in their sockets, one more than the other. They have wrapped him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where the neck is. His right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets, and the arm is held on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads that they have put in since. The first night he was placed there, this arm hung outside the heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled up on a lump of earth, touched passers-by in the face; so they pinned the arm to the greatcoat.
A pestilential vapour begins to hover about the remains of these beings with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.
When we see them we say, “They are dead, all four”; but they are too far disfigured for us to say truly, “It is they,” and one must turn away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left among us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.
Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by day—by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of the hand, dead or alive—give a start when faced by these corpses flattened one on the other in the open trench. Sometimes they are angry—“What are they thinking about to leave those stiffs there?”—“It’s shameful.” Then they add, “It’s true they can’t be taken away from there.” And they were only buried in the night.
Morning has come. Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine, Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped and scratched, veined with shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal the clay and the chalky soil. Nothing is stirring there; and our shells that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge billows seem to deliver their resounding blows upon a great breakwater, ruined and abandoned.
My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of mud and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein they are moulded, bestir themselves and come down. For us, it is rest until evening.
We yawn and stroll. We see a comrade pass and then another. Officers go to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes. We feel our feet again, and begin once more to live. The customary remarks cross and clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken lines of the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on our voices, we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines. But lassitude weighs upon all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the eyelids reddened; through long watching we look as if we had been weeping. For several days now we have all of us been sagging and growing old.
One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a curve in the trench. They pile themselves where the soil is only chalky, and where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots, the excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain in the darkness for over a hundred thousand years.
There in the widened fairway, Bertrand’s squad beaches itself. It is much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we no longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac, wounded in the leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirloir nor Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the other for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn—as he says in the postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital where he is vegetating.
Once more I see gathered and grouped, soiled by contact with the earth and dirty smoke, the familiar faces and poses of those who have not been separated since the beginning, chained and riveted together in fraternity. But there is less dissimilarity than at the beginning in the appearance of the cave-men.
Papa Blaire displays in his well-worn mouth a set of new teeth, so resplendent that one can see nothing in all his poor face except those gaily-dight jaws. The great event of these foreign teeth’s establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners. He is rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly. Now that he has become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant. For the moment he is dejected, because—a miracle!—he cannot wash himself. Deeply sunk in a corner, he half opens a lack-lustre eye, bites and masticates his old soldier’s moustache—not long ago the only ornament on his face—and from time to time spits out a hair.
Fouillade is shivering, cold-smitten, or yawns, depressed and shabby. Marthereau has not changed at all. He is still as always well-bearded, his eye round and blue, and his legs so short that his trousers seem to be slipping continually from his waist and dropping to his feet. Cocon is always Cocon by the dried and parchment-like head wherein sums are working; but a recurrence of lice, the ravages of which we see overflowing on to his neck and wrists, has isolated him for a week now in protracted tussles which leave him surly when he returns among us. Paradis retains unimpaired the same quantum of good colour and good temper; he is unchanging, perennial. We smile when he appears in the distance, placarded on the background of sandbags like a new poster. Nothing has changed in Pépin either, whom we can just see taking a stroll—we can tell him behind by his red-and-white squares of an oilcloth draughtboard, and in front by his blade-like face and the gleam of a knife in his cold grey look. Nor has Volpatte changed, with his leggings, his shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian tattooed with dirt; nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some time by blood-red streaks in his eyes—for some unknown and mysterious reason. Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and then retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and careful postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie’s end. Lamuse said no more to any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped her body. He regretted—I knew it—his whispered confidence to me that evening, and up to his death h
e kept the horrible affair sacred to himself, with tenacious bashfulness. So we see Farfadet continuing to live his dreamy existence with the living likeness of that fair hair, which he only leaves for the scarce monosyllables of his contact with us. Corporal Bertrand has still the same soldierly and serious mien among us; he is always ready with his tranquil smile to answer all questions with lucid explanations, to help each of us to do his duty.
We are chatting as of yore, as not long since. But the necessity of speaking in low tones diminishes our remarks and imposes on them a lugubrious tranquillity.
Something unusual has happened. For the last three months the sojourn of each unit in the first-line trenches has been four days. Yet we have now been five days here and there is no mention of relief. Some rumours of early attack are going about, brought by the liaison men and those of the fatigue-party that renews our rations every other night—without regularity or guarantee. Other portents are adding themselves to the whispers of offensive—the stopping of leave, the failure of the post, the obvious change in the officers, who are serious and closer to us. But talk on this subject always ends with a shrug of the shoulders; the soldier is never warned what is to be done with him; they put a bandage on his eyes, and only remove it at the last minute. So, “We shall see.”—“We can only wait.”
We detach ourselves from the tragic event foreboded. Is this because of the impossibility of a complete understanding, or a despondent unwillingness to decipher those orders that are sealed letters to us, or a lively faith that one will pass through the peril once more? Always, in spite of the premonitory signs and the prophecies that seem to be coming true, we fall back automatically upon the cares of the moment and absorb ourselves in them—hunger, thirst, the lice whose crushing ensanguines all our nails, the great weariness that saps us all.
“Seen Joseph this morning?” says Volpatte. “He doesn’t look very grand, poor lad.”
“He’ll do something daft, certain sure. He’s as good as a goner, that lad, mind you. First chance he has he’ll jump in front of a bullet. I can see he will.”
“It’d give any one the pip for the rest of his natural. There were six brothers of ’em, you know; four of ’em killed; two in Alsace, one in Champagne, one in Argonne. If André’s killed he’s the fifth.”
“If he’d been killed they’d have found his body—they’d have seen it from the observation-post; you can’t lose the rump and the thighs. My idea is that the night they went on patrol he went astray coming back—crawled right round, poor devil, and fell right into the Boche lines.”
“Perhaps he got sewn up in their wire.”
“I tell you they’d have found him if he’d been done in; you know jolly well the Boches wouldn’t have brought the body in. And we looked everywhere. As long as he’s not been found you can take it from me that he’s got away somewhere on his feet, wounded or unwounded.”
This so logical theory finds favour, and now it is known that Mesnil André is a prisoner there is less interest in him. But his brother continues to be a pitiable object—“Poor old chap, he’s so young!” And the men of the squad look at him secretly.
“I’ve got a twist!” says Cocon suddenly. The hour of dinner has gone past and we are demanding it. There appears to be only the remains of what was brought the night before.
“What’s the corporal thinking of to starve us? There he is—I’ll go and get hold of him. Hey, corporal! Why can’t you get us something to eat?”—“Yes, yes—something to eat!” re-echoes the destiny of these eternally hungry men.
“I’m coming,” says bustling Bertrand, who keeps going both day and night.
“What then?” says Pépin, always hot-headed. “I don’t feel like chewing macaroni again; I shall open a tin of meat in less than two secs!” The daily comedy of dinner steps to the front again in this drama.
“Don’t touch your reserve rations!” says Bertrand; “as soon as I’m back from seeing the captain I’ll get you something.”
When he returns he brings and distributes a salad of potatoes and onions, and as mastication proceeds our features relax and our eyes become composed.
For the ceremony of eating, Paradis has hoisted a policeman’s hat. It is hardly the right place or time for it, but the hat is quite new, and the tailor, who promised it for three months ago, only delivered it the day we came up. The pliant two-cornered hat of bright blue cloth on his flourishing round head gives him the look of a pasteboard gendarme with red-painted cheeks. Nevertheless, all the while he is eating, Paradis looks at me steadily. I go up to him. “You’ve a funny old face.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he replies. “I want a chat with you. Come with me and see something.”
His hand goes out to his half-full cup placed beside his dinner things; he hesitates, and then decides to put his wine in a safe place down his gullet, and the cup in his pocket. He moves off and I follow him.
In passing he picks up his helmet that gapes on the earthen bench. After a dozen paces he comes close to me and says in a low voice and with a queer air, without looking at me—as he does when he is upset—“I know where Mesnil André is. Would you like to see him? Come, then.”
So saying, he takes off his police hat, folds and pockets it, and puts on his helmet. He sets off again and I follow him without a word.
He leads me fifty yards farther, towards the place where our common dug-out is, and the footbridge of sandbags under which one always slides with the impression that the muddy arch will collapse on one’s back. After the footbridge, a hollow appears in the wall of the trench, with a step made of a hurdle stuck fast in the clay. Paradis climbs there, and motions to me to follow him on to the narrow and slippery platform. There was recently a sentry’s loophole here, and it has been destroyed and made again lower down with a couple of bullet-screens. One is obliged to stoop low lest his head rise above the contrivance.
Paradis says to me, still in the same low voice, “It’s me that fixed up those two shields, so as to see—for I’d got an idea, and I wanted to see. Put your eye to this hole.”
“I don’t see anything; the hole’s stopped up. What’s that lump of cloth?”
“It’s him,” says Paradis.
Ah! It was a corpse, a corpse sitting in a hole, and horribly near——
Having flattened my face against the steel plate and glued my eye to the hole in the screen, I saw all of it. He was squatting, the head hanging forward between the legs, both arms placed on his knees, his hands hooked and half closed. He was easily identifiable—so near, so near!—in spite of his squinting and lightless eyes, by the mass of his muddy beard and the distorted mouth that revealed the teeth. He looked as if he were both smiling and grimacing at his rifle, stuck straight up in the mud before him. His outstretched hands were quite blue above and scarlet underneath, crimsoned by a damp and hellish reflection.
It was he, rain-washed and besmeared with a sort of scum, polluted and dreadfully pale, four days dead, and close up to our embankment into which the shell-hole where he had burrowed had bitten. We had not found him because he was too near!
Between this derelict dead in its unnatural solitude and the men who inhabited the dug-out there was only a slender partition of earth, and I realise that the place in it where I lay my head corresponds to the spot buttressed by this dreadful body.
I withdraw my face from the peep-hole and Paradis and I exchange glances. “Mustn’t tell him yet,” my companion whispers. “No, we mustn’t, not at once——” “I spoke to the captain about rooting him out, and he said, too, ‘We mustn’t mention it now to the lad.’” A light breath of wind goes by. “I can smell it!”—“Rather!” The odour enters our thoughts and capsizes our very hearts.
“So now,” says Paradis, “Joseph’s left alone, out of six brothers. And I’ll tell you what—I don’t think he’ll stop long. The lad won’t take care of himself—he’ll get himself done in. A lucky wound’s got to drop on him from the sky, otherwise he’s corpsed. Six brothers—
it’s too bad, that! Don’t you think it’s too bad?” He added, “It’s astonishing that he was so near us.”
“His arm’s just against the spot where I put my head.”
“Yes,” says Paradis, “his right arm, where there’s a wrist-watch.”
The watch—I stop short—is it a fancy, a dream? It seems to me—yes, I am sure now—that three days ago, the night when we were so tired out, before I went to sleep I heard what sounded like the ticking of a watch and even wondered where it could come from.
“It was very likely that watch you heard all the same, through the earth,” says Paradis, whom I have told some of my thoughts; “they go on thinking and turning round even when the chap stops. Damn, your own ticker doesn’t know you—it just goes quietly on making little circles.”
I asked, “There’s blood on his hands; but where was he hit?”
“Don’t know; in the belly, I think; I thought there was something dark underneath him. Or perhaps in the face—did you notice the little stain on the cheek?”
I recall the hairy and greenish face of the dead man. “Yes, there was something on the cheek. Yes, perhaps it went in there——”
Under Fire Page 23
