Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember. We return to life and daylight as in a nightmare. In front of us the calamitous plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines with lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and there in the vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe or rot.
Paradis says to me, “That’s war.”
“Yes, that’s it,” he repeats in a far-away voice, “that’s war. It’s not anything else.”
He means—and I am with him in his meaning—“More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken by poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet’s silvery glitter, nor the trumpet’s cock-crow in the sun!
Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and growled, “D’you remember the woman in the town where we went about a bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and said, ‘How beautiful they must be to see!’”
A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a cloak, raised his head out of the filthy background in which it was sunk, and cried, “Beautiful? Oh, hell! It’s just as if an ox were to say, ‘What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle driven forward to the slaughter-house!’” He spat out mud from his besmeared mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast’s.
“Let them say, ‘It must be,’” he sputtered in a strange jerky voice, grating and ragged; “that’s all right. But beautiful! Oh, hell!”
Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, “It’s when they say things like that that they throw our blood in our faces!” He spat again, but exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and laid his head in his spittle.
Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide unspeakable landscape, and looking steadily on it repeated his sentence, “War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps, and what’s all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a speck. You’ve got to remember that this morning there’s three thousand kilometres of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse.”
“And then,” said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognise even by his voice, “to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!”
With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged his body out of the earth where he had moulded a depression like an oozing coffin, and sat in the hole. He blinked his eyes and tried to shake the valance of mud from his face, and said, “We shall come out of it again this time. And who knows, p’raps we shall come out of it again to-morrow! Who knows?”
Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying to convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in terms of time and space. “When one speaks of the whole war,” he said, thinking aloud, “it’s as if you said nothing at all—the words are strangled. We’re here, and we look at it all like blind men.”
A bass voice rolled to us from a little farther away, “No, one cannot imagine it.”
At these words a burst of harsh laughter tore itself from some one. “How could you imagine it, to begin with, if you hadn’t been there?”
“You’d have to be mad,” said the chasseur.
Paradis leaned over a sprawling outspread mass beside him and said, “Are you asleep?”
“No, but I’m not going to budge.” The smothered and terror-struck mutter issued instantly from the mass that was covered with a thick and slimy horse-cloth, so indented that it seemed to have been trampled. “I’ll tell you why. I believe my belly’s shot through. But I’m not sure, and I daren’t find out.”
“Let’s see——”
“No, not yet,” says the man. “I’d rather stop on a bit like this.”
The others, dragging themselves on their elbows, began to make splashing movements, by way of casting off the clammy infernal covering that weighed them down. The paralysis of cold was passing away from the knot of sufferers, though the light no longer made any progress over the great irregular marsh of the lower plain. The desolation proceeded, but not the day.
Then he who spoke sorrowfully, like a bell, said, “It’ll be no good telling about it, eh? They wouldn’t believe you; not out of malice or through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn’t. When you say to ’em later, if you live to say it, ‘We were on a night job and we got shelled and we were very nearly drowned in mud,’ they’ll say, ‘Ah!’ And p’raps they’ll say, ‘You didn’t have a very spicy time on the job.’ And that’s all. No one can know it. Only us.”
“No, not even us, not even us!” some one cried.
“That’s what I say, too. We shall forget—we’re forgetting already, my boy!”
“We’ve seen too much to remember.”
“And everything we’ve seen was too much. We’re not made to hold it all. It takes its bloody hook in all directions. We’re too little to hold it.”
“You’re right, we shall forget! Not only the length of the big misery, which can’t be reckoned, as you say, ever since the beginning, but the marches that turn up the ground and turn it again, lacerating your feet and wearing out your bones under a load that seems to grow bigger in the sky, the exhaustion until you don’t know your own name any more, the tramping and the inaction that grind you, the digging jobs that exceed your strength, the endless vigils when you fight against sleep and watch for an enemy who is everywhere in the night, the pillows of dung and lice—we shall forget not only those, but even the foul wounds of shells and machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the counter-attacks. At those moments you’re full of the excitement of reality, and you’ve some satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don’t know how and you don’t know where, and there’s only the names left, only the words of it, like in a dispatch.”
“That’s true what he says,” remarks a man, without moving his head in its pillory of mud. “When I was on leave, I found I’d already jolly well forgotten what had happened to me before. There were some letters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I was opening. And yet in spite of that, I’ve forgotten also all the pain I’ve had in the war. We’re forgetting-machines. Men are things that think a little but chiefly forget. That’s what we are.”
“Then neither the other side nor us’ll remember! So much misery all wasted!”
This thought increased the abasement of these beings on the shore of the flood, like news of a greater disaster, and humiliated them still more.
“Ah, if one did remember!” cried some one.
“If we remembered,” said another, “there wouldn’t be any more war.”
A third added grandly, “Yes, if we remembered, war would be less useless than it is.”
But suddenly one of the prone survivors rose to his knees, dark as a great bat ensnared, and as the mud dripped from his waving arms he cried in a hollow voice, “There must be no more war after this!”
In that miry corner where, still feeble unto impotence, we were beset by blasts of wind which laid hold on us with such rude strength that the very ground seemed to sway like sea-drift, the cry of the man who looked as if he were trying to fly away evoked other like cries: “There must be no more war after this!”
The sullen or furious exclamations of these men fettered to the earth, incarnate of earth, arose and slid away on the wind like beating wings—
“No more war! No more war! Enough of it!”
“It’s too stupid—it’s too stupid,” they mumbled. “What does it mean, at the bottom of it, all this?—all this that you can’t even give
a name to?”
They snarled and growled like wild beasts on that sort of ice-floe contended for by the elements, in their dismal disguise of ragged mud. So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it choked them.
“We’re made to live, not to be done in like this!”
“Men are made to be husbands, fathers—men, what the devil!—not beasts that hunt each other and cut each other’s throats and make themselves stink like all that.”
“And yet, everywhere—everywhere—there are beasts, savage beasts or smashed beasts. Look, look!”
I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the water had corroded all colour and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like a fit of madness.
I could see them agitated by this idea—that to try to live one’s life on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy the inner life of every one.
“To live!”—“All of us!”—“You!”—“Me!”
“No more war—ah, no!—it’s too stupid—worse than that, it’s too——”
For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to the mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned face that I saw arise from the level of the earth—
“Two armies fighting each other—that’s like one great army committing suicide!”
“And likewise, what have we been for two years now? Incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty devils.”
“Worse than that!” mutters he whose only phrase it is.
“Yes, I admit it!”
In their troubled truce of the morning, these men whom fatigue had tormented, whom ruin had scourged, whom night-long lightning had convulsed, these survivors of volcanoes and flood began not only to see dimly how war, as hideous morally as physically, outrages common sense, debases noble ideas and dictates all kind of crime, but they remembered how it had enlarged in them and about them every evil instinct save none, mischief developed into lustful cruelty, selfishness into ferocity, the hunger for enjoyment into a mania.
They are picturing all this before their eyes as just now they confusedly pictured their misery. They are crammed with a curse which strives to find a way out and to come to light in words, a curse which makes them to groan and wail. It is as if they toiled to emerge from the delusion and ignorance which soil them as the mud soils them; as if they will at last know why they are scourged.
“Well then?” clamours one.
“Ay, what then?” the other repeats, still more grandly.
The wind sets the flooded flats a-tremble to our eyes, and falling furiously on the human masses lying or kneeling and fixed like flagstones and grave-slabs, it wrings new shivering from them.
“There will be no more war,” growls a soldier, “when there is no more Germany.”
“That’s not the right thing to say!” cries another. “It isn’t enough.” The roaring of the wind half smothered his words, so he lifted his head and repeated them.
“Germany and militarism”—some one in his anger precipitately cut in—“they’re the same thing. They wanted the war and they’d planned it beforehand. They are militarism.”
“Militarism——” a soldier began again.
“What is it?” some one asked.
“It’s—it’s to be ruffians.”
“Yes. To-day militarism is called Germany.”
“But what will it be called to-morrow?”
“I don’t know,” said a voice serious as a prophet’s.
“We must—one’s got to——”
“We must fight!” gurgled the hoarse voice of a man who had lain stiff in the devouring mud ever since our awakening; “we’ve got to!” His body turned heavily over. “We’ve got to give all we have, our strength and our skins and our hearts, all our life and what pleasures are left us. The life of prisoners as we are, we’ve got to take it in both hands. You’ve got to endure everything, even injustice—and that’s the king that’s reigning now—and the shameful and disgusting sights we see, so as to come out on top, and win. But if we’ve got to make such a sacrifice,” adds the shapeless man, turning over again, “it’s because we’re fighting for a good thing, not for a country; against error, not against a country.”
“No,” said the first speaker, “war must be killed in Germany’s belly!”
“Anyway,” said one of those who sat enrooted there like a sort of shrub, “anyway, we’re beginning to understand why we’ve got to march away.”
“All the same,” grumbled the squatting chasseur in his turn, “there are some that fight with quite another idea than that in their heads. I’ve seen of ’em, young men, who said, ‘To hell with ideas’; what mattered to them was nationality and nothing else, and the war was a question of fatherlands—let every man make a shine about his own. They were fighting, those chaps, and they were fighting well.”
“They’re young, the lads you’re talking about; they’re young, and we must excuse ’em.”
“You can do a thing well without knowing what you are doing.”
“Men are mad, that’s true. You’ll never say that often enough.”
“The Jingoes—they’re vermin,” growled a shadow.
Several times they repeated, as though feeling their way, “War must be killed; war itself.”
“That’s all silly talk. What diff does it make whether you think this or that? We’ve got to be winners, that’s all.”
But the others had begun to cast about. They wanted to know and to see farther than to-day. They throbbed with the effort to beget in themselves some light of wisdom and of will. Some sparse convictions whirled in their minds, and jumbled scraps of creeds issued from their lips.
“Of course—yes—but we must look at facts—you’ve got to think about the object, old chap.”
“The object? To be winners in this war,” the pillar-man insisted, “isn’t that an object?”
Two there were who replied together, “No!”
At this moment there was a dull noise; cries broke out around us, and we shuddered. A length of earth had detached itself from the hillock on which—after a fashion—we were leaning back, and had completely exhumed in the middle of us a sitting corpse, with its legs out full length. The collapse burst a pool that had gathered on the top of the mound, and the water spread like a cascade over the body and laved it as we looked.
Some one cried, “His face is all black!”
“What is that face?” gasped a voice.
Those who were able drew near in a circle, like frogs. But we we could not stare at the head that showed in low relief upon the trench-wall, laid bare by the landslide. “His face? It isn’t his face!” In place of the face we found the hair, and then we saw that the corpse which had seemed to be sitting was broken, and folded the wrong way. In dreadful silence we looked on the vertical back of the dislocated dead, upon the hanging arms, backward curved, and the two outstretched legs that rested on the sinking soil by the points of the toes.
Then the discussion began again, revived by this fearful sleeper. As though the corpse was listening they clamoured—
“No! It isn’t those others we’ve got to get at—it’s war.”
“Can’t you see that we’ve got to finish with war? If we’ve got to begin again some day, all that’s been done is no good. Look at it there!—and it would be in vain. It would be two or three years or more of wasted catastrophe.”
“Ah, my boy, if all we’ve gone through wasn’t the end of this great calamity! I value my life; I’ve got my wife, my family, my home around them; I’ve got schemes for my life afterwards, mind you. Well, all the same, if this wasn’t the
end of it, I’d rather die.”
“I’m going to die.” The echo came at that moment exactly from Paradis’ neighbour, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly. “I’m sorry on account of my children.”
“It’s on account of my children that I’m not sorry,” came a murmur from somewhere else. “I’m dying, so I know what I’m saying, and I say to myself, ‘They’ll have peace.’”
“Perhaps I shan’t die,” said another, with a quiver of hope that he could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, “but I shall suffer. Well, I say ‘more’s the pity,’ and I even say ‘that’s all right’; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it’s for something.”
“Then we’ll have to go on fighting after the war?”
“Yes, p’raps——”
“You want more of it, do you?”
“Yes, because I want no more of it,” the voice grunted.
“And p’raps it’ll not be foreigners that we’ve got to fight?”
“P’raps, yes——”
A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When it had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain, seizing and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the long gaping trenches—long as the grave of an army—we began again.
“After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?”
“It’s the mass of the people.”
“But the people—that’s us!”
He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.
“Yes,” I said to him, “yes, old boy, that’s true! It’s with us only that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us together.”
“It’s the people who are war; without them, there would be nothing, nothing but some wrangling, a long way off. But it isn’t they who decide on it; it’s the masters who steer them.”
Under Fire Page 33
