Thus do the poilus converse who are suddenly placed under the spell of a town. More and more they rejoice in the beautiful scene, so neat and incredibly clean. They resume possession of life tranquil and peaceful, of that conception of comfort and even of happiness for which in the main houses were built.
“We should easily get used to it again, you know, old man, after all!”
Meanwhile a crowd is gathered around an outfitter’s shopwindow where the proprietor has contrived, with the aid of mannikins in wood and wax, a ridiculous tableau. On a groundwork of little pebbles like those in an aquarium, there is a kneeling German, in a suit so new that the creases are sharp, and punctuated with an Iron Cross in cardboard. He holds up his two wooden pink hands to a French officer, whose curly wig makes a cushion for a juvenile cap, who has bulging crimson cheeks, and whose infantile eye of adamant looks somewhere else. Beside the two personages lies a rifle borrowed from the odd trophies of a box of toys. A card gives the title of the animated group—“Kamarad!”
“Ah, damn it, look!”
We shrug our shoulders at sight of the puerile contrivance, the only thing here that recalls to us the gigantic war raging somewhere under the sky. We begin to laugh bitterly, our vivid memories scandalised and stabbed. Tirette collects himself, and some abusive sarcasm rises to his lips; but the protest lingers and is mute by reason of our total transportation, the amazement of being somewhere else.
Our group is then espied by a very stylish and rustling lady, radiant in violet and black silk and enveloped in perfumes. She puts out her little gloved hand and touches Volpatte’s sleeve and then Blaire’s shoulder, and they instantly halt, gorgonised by this direct contact with the fairy-like being.
“Tell me, sir, you who are real soldiers from the front, you have seen that in the trenches, haven’t you?”
“Er—yes—yes——” reply the two poor fellows, horribly frightened and gloriously gratified.
“Ah!” the crowd murmurs, “did you hear? And they’ve been there, they have!”
When we find ourselves alone again on the flagged perfection of the pavement, Volpatte and Blaire look at each other and shake their heads.
“After all,” says Volpatte, “it is very much like that, you know!”
“Why, yes, of course!”
And these were their first words of false swearing that day.
We go into the Café de l’Industrie et des Fleurs. A roadway of matting clothes the middle of the floor. Painted all the way along the walls, all the way up the square pillars that support the roof, and on the front of the counter, there is purple convolvulus among great scarlet poppies and roses like red cabbages.
“No doubt about it, we’ve got good taste in France,” says Tirette.
“The chap that did all that had a cartload of patience,” Blaire declares as he looks at the rainbow embellishments.
“In these places,” Volpatte adds, “the pleasure of drinking isn’t the only one.”
Paradis informs us that he knows all about cafés. On Sundays formerly, he frequented cafés as beautiful as this one and even more beautiful. Only, he explains, that was a long time ago, and he has lost the flavour that they’ve got. He indicates a little enamelled wash-hand basin hanging on the wall and decorated with flowers: “There’s where you can wash your hands.” We steer politely towards the basin. Volpatte signs to Paradis to turn the tap, and says, “Set the waterworks going!”
Then all six of us enter the saloon, whose circumference is already adorned with customers, and install ourselves at a table.
“We’ll have six currant-vermouths, shall we?”
“We could very easily get used to it again, after all,” they repeat.
Some civilians leave their places and come near us. They whisper, “They’ve all got the Croix de Guerre, Adolphe, you see——”—“Those are real poilus!”
Our comrades overhear, and now they only talk among themselves abstractedly, with their ears elsewhere, and an unconscious air of importance appears.
A moment later, the man and woman from whom the remarks proceeded lean towards us with their elbows on the white marble and question us: “Life in the trenches, it’s very rough, isn’t it?”
“Er—yes—well, of course, it isn’t always pleasant.”
“What splendid physical and moral endurance you have! In the end you get used to the life, don’t you?”
“Why, yes, of course, one gets used to it—one gets used to it all right——”
“All the same, it’s a terrible existence—and the suffering!” murmurs the lady, turning over the leaves of an illustrated paper which displays gloomy pictures of destruction. “They ought not to publish these things, Adolphe, about the dirt and the vermin and the fatigues! Brave as you are, you must be unhappy?”
Volpatte, to whom she speaks, blushes. He is ashamed of the misery whence he comes, whither he must return. He lowers his head and lies, perhaps without realising the extent of his mendacity: “No, after all, we’re not unhappy, it isn’t so terrible as all that!”
The lady is of the same opinion. “I know,” she says, “there are compensations! How superb a charge must be, eh? All those masses of men advancing like they do in a holiday procession, and the trumpets playing a rousing air in the fields! And the dear little soldiers that can’t be held back and shouting, ‘Vive la France!’ and even laughing as they die! Ah! we others, we’re not in honour’s way like you are. My husband is a clerk at the Préfecture, and just now he’s got a holiday to treat his rheumatism.”
“I should very much have liked to be a soldier,” said the gentleman, “but I’ve no luck. The head of my office can’t get on without me.”
People go and come, elbowing and disappearing behind each other. The waiters worm their way through with their fragile and sparkling burdens—green, red, or bright yellow, with a white border. The grating of feet on the sanded floor mingles with the exclamations of the regular customers as they recognise each other, some standing, others leaning on their elbows, amid the sound of glasses and dominoes pushed along the tables. In the background, around the seductive shock of ivory balls, a crowding circle of spectators emits classical pleasantries.
“Every man to his trade, my lad,” says a man at the other end of the table whose face is adorned with powerful colours, addressing Tirette directly; “you are heroes. On our side, we are working in the economic life of the country. It is a struggle like yours. I am useful—I don’t say more useful than you, but equally so.”
And I see Tirette through the cigar-smoke making round eyes, and in the hubbub I can hardly hear the reply of his humble and dumbfounded voice—Tirette, the funny man of the squad!—“Yes, that’s true; every man to his trade.”
Furtively we stole away.
We are almost silent as we leave the Café des Fleurs. It seems as if we no longer know how to talk. Something like discontent irritates my comrades and knits their brows. They look as if they are becoming aware that they have not done their duty at an important juncture.
“Fine lot of gibberish they’ve talked to us, the beasts!” Tirette growls at last with a rancour that gathers strength the more we unite and collect ourselves again.
“We ought to have got beastly drunk to-day!” replies Paradis brutally.
We walk without a word spoken. Then, after a time, “They’re a lot of idiots, filthy idiots,” Tirette goes on; “they tried to cod us, but I’m not on; if I see them again,” he says, with a crescendo of anger, “I shall know what to say to them!”
“We shan’t see them again,” says Blaire.
“In eight days from now, p’raps we shall be laid out,” says Volpatte.
In the approaches to the square we run into a mob of people flowing out from the Hôtel de Ville and from another big public building which displays the columns of a temple supporting a pediment. Offices are closing, and pouring forth civilians of all sorts and all ages, and military men both young and old, who seem at a distance to be dre
ssed pretty much like us; but when nearer they stand revealed as the shirkers and deserters of the war, in spite of being disguised as soldiers, in spite of their brisques.*
Women and children are waiting for them, in pretty and happy clusters. The commercial people are shutting up their shops with complacent content and a smile for both the day ended and for the morrow, elated by the lively and constant thrills of profits increased, by the growing jingle of the cash-box. They have stayed behind in the heart of their own fireside; they have only to stoop to caress their children. We see them beaming in the first starlights of the street, all these rich folk who are becoming richer, all these tranquil people whose tranquillity increases every day, people who are full, you feel, and in spite of all, of an unconfessable prayer. They all go slowly, by grace of the fine evening, and settle themselves in perfected homes, or in cafés where they are waited upon. Couples are forming, too, young women and young men, civilians or soldiers, with some badge of their preservation embroidered on their collars. They make haste into the shadows of security where the others go, where the dawn of lighted room awaits them; they hurry towards the night of rest and caresses.
And as we pass quite close to a ground-floor window which is half open, we see the breeze gently inflate the lace curtain and lend it the light and delicious form of a chemise—and the advancing throng drives us back, poor foreigners that we are!
We wander along the pavement, all through the twilight that begins to glow with gold—for in towns Night adorns herself with jewels. The sight of this world has revealed a great truth to us at last, nor could we avoid it: a Difference which becomes evident between human beings, a Difference far deeper than that of nations and with defensive trenches more impregnable; the clean-cut and truly unpardonable division that there is in a country’s inhabitants between those who gain and those who grieve, those who are required to sacrifice all, all, to give their numbers and strength and suffering to the last limit, those upon whom the others walk and advance, smile and succeed.
Some items of mourning attire make blots in the crowd and have their message for us, but the rest is of merriment, not mourning.
“It isn’t one single country, that’s not possible,” suddenly says Volpatte with singular precision, “there are two. We’re divided into two foreign countries. The Front, over there, where there are too many unhappy, and the Rear, here, where there are too many happy.”
“How can you help it? It serves its end—it’s the background—but afterwards——”
“Yes, I know; but all the same, all the same, there are too many of them, and they’re too happy, and they’re always the same ones, and there’s no reason——”
“What can you do?” says Tirette.
“So much the worse,” adds Blaire, still more simply.
“In eight days from now p’raps we shall have snuffed it!” Volpatte is content to repeat as we go away with lowered heads.
* See p. 133.
XXIII
THE FATIGUE-PARTY
Evening is falling upon the trench. All through the day it has been drawing near, invisible as fate, and now it encroaches on the banks of the long ditches like the lips of a wound infinitely great.
We have talked, eaten, slept, and written in the bottom of the trench since the morning. Now that evening is here, an eddying springs up in the boundless crevice; it stirs and unifies the torpid disorder of the scattered men. It is the hour when we arise and work.
Volpatte and Tirette approach each other. “Another day gone by, another like the rest of ’em,” says Volpatte, looking at the darkening sky.
“You’re off it; our day isn’t finished,” replies Tirette, whose long experience of calamity has taught him that one must not jump to conclusions, where we are, even in regard to the modest future of a commonplace evening that has already begun.
“Come! Muster!” We form up with the laggard inattention of custom. With himself each man brings his rifle, his pouches of cartridges, his water-bottle, and a pouch that contains a lump of bread. Volpatte is still eating, with protruding and palpitating cheek. Paradis, with purple nose and chattering teeth, growls. Fouillade trails his rifle along like a broom. Marthereau looks at a mournful handkerchief, rumpled and stiff, and puts it back in his pocket. A cold drizzle is falling, and everybody shivers.
Down yonder we hear a droning chant—“Two shovels, one pick, two shovels, one pick——” The file trickles along to the tool-store, stagnates at the door, and departs, bristling with implements.
“Everybody here? Gee up!” says the sergeant. Downward and rolling, we go forward. We know not where we go. We know nothing, except that the night and the earth are blending in the same abyss.
As we emerge into the nude twilight from the trench, we see it already black as the crater of a dead volcano. Great grey clouds, storm-charged, hang from the sky. The plain, too, is grey in the pallid light; the grass is muddy, and all slashed with water. The things which here and there seem only distorted limbs are denuded trees. We cannot see far around us in the damp reek; besides, we only look downwards at the mud in which we slide—“Porridge!”
Going across country we knead and pound a sticky paste which spreads out and flows back from every step—“Chocolate cream—coffee creams!”
On the stony parts, the wiped-out ruins of roads that have become barren as the fields, the marching troop breaks through a layer of slime into a flinty conglomerate that grates and gives way under our iron-shod soles—“Seems as if we were walking on buttered toast!”
On the slope of a knoll sometimes the mud is black and thick and deep-rutted, like that which forms around the horse-ponds in villages, and in these ruts there are lakes and puddles and ponds, whose edges seem to be in rags.
The pleasantries of the wags, who in the early freshness of the journey had cried, “Quack, quack,” when they went through the water, are now becoming rare and gloomy; gradually the jokers are damped down. The rain begins to fall heavily. The daylight dwindles, and the confusion that is Space contracts. The last lingering light welters on the ground and in the water.
A steaming silhouette of men like monks appears through the rain in the west. It is a company of the 204th, wrapped in tent-cloths. As we go by we see the pale and shrunken faces and the dark noses of these dripping prowlers before they disappear. The track we are following through the faint grass of the fields is itself a sticky field streaked with countless parallel ruts, all ploughed in the same line by the feet and the wheels of those who go to the front and those who go to the rear.
We have to jump over gaping trenches, and this is not always easy, for the edges have become soft and slippery, and earth-falls have widened them. Fatigue, too, begins to bear upon our shoulders. Vehicles cross our path with a great noise and splashing. Artillery limbers prance by and spray us heavily. The motor lorries are borne on whirling circles of water around the wheels, with spirting tumultuous spokes.
As the darkness increases, the jolted vehicles and the horses’ necks and the profiles of the riders with their floating cloaks and slung carbines stand out still more fantastically against the misty floods from the sky. Here, there is a block of ammunition carts of the artillery. The horses are standing and trampling as we go by. We hear the creaking of axles, shouts, disputes, commands which collide, and the roar of the ocean of rain. Over the confused scuffle we can see steam rising from the buttocks of the teams and the cloaks of the horsemen.
“Look out!” Something is laid out on the ground on our right—a row of dead. As we go by, our feet instinctively avoid them and our eyes search them. We see upright boot-soles, outstretched necks, the hollows of uncertain faces, hands half clenched in the air over the dark medley.
We march and march, over fields still ghostly and foot-worn, under a sky where ragged clouds unfurl themselves upon the blackening expanse—which seems to have befouled itself by prolonged contact with so many multitudes of sorry humanity.
Then we go down again into the commu
nication trenches. To reach them we make a wide circuit, so that the rearguard can see the whole company, a hundred yards away, deployed in the gloom, little obscure figures sticking to the slopes and following each other in loose order, with their tools and their rifles pricking up on each side of their heads, a slender trivial line that plunges in and raises its arms as if in entreaty.
These trenches—still of the second lines—are populous. On the thresholds of the dug-outs, where cart-cloths and skins of animals hang and flap, squatting and bearded men watch our passing with expressionless eyes, as if they were looking at nothing. From beneath other cloths, drawn down to the ground, feet are projected, and snores.
“By God, it’s a long way!” the trampers begin to grumble. There is an eddy and recoil in the flow.
“Halt!” The stop is to let others go by. We pile ourselves up, cursing, on the walls of the trench. It is a company of machine-gunners with their curious burdens.
There seems to be no end to it, and the long halts are wearying. Muscles are beginning to stretch. The everlasting march is overwhelming us. We have hardly got going again when we have to recoil once more into a traverse to let the relief of the telephonists go by. We back like awkward cattle, and restart more heavily.
“Look out for the wire!” The telephone wire undulates above the trench, and crosses it in places between two posts. When it is too slack, its curve sags into the trench and catches the rifles of passing men, and the ensnared ones struggle, and abuse the engineers who don’t know how to fix up their threads.
Then, as the drooping entanglement of precious wires increases, we shoulder our rifles with the butt in the air, carry the shovels under our arms, and go forward with lowered heads.
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