“The people are struggling to-day to have no more masters that steer them.”
“Well then, if that’s so, we’re working for the Prussians too?”
“It’s to be hoped so,” said one of the wretches of the plain.
“Oh, hell!” said the chasseur, grinding his teeth. But he shook his head and added no more.
“We want to look after ourselves! You shouldn’t meddle in other people’s business,” mumbled the obstinate snarler.
“Yes, you should! Because what you call ‘other people,’ that’s just what they’re not—they’re the same!”
“Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?”
“That’s it!” said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a moment before. “More’s the pity, or so much the better.”
“The people—they’re nothing, though they ought to be everything,” then said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did not know it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but investing it at last with its great universal significance. Escaped from torment, on all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he lifted his leper-like face and looked hungrily before him into infinity.
He looked and looked. He was trying to open the gates of heaven.
“The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or another. All the masses ought to agree together.”
“All men ought to be equal.”
The word seems to come to us like a rescue.
“Equal—yes—yes—there are some great meanings for justice and truth. There are some things one believes in, that one turns to and clings to as if they were a sort of light. There’s equality, above all.”
“There’s liberty and fraternity, too.”
“But principally equality!”
I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him. You can build nothing on fraternity. Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by force.
But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words, while equality is a fact. Equality is the great human formula; and these men of the people, dimly seeing some unknown Revolution greater than the other, a revolution springing from themselves and already rising, rising in their throats, repeat “Equality!”
It seems as if they were spelling the word and then reading it distinctly on all sides—that there is not upon the earth any privilege, prejudice or injustice that does not collapse in contact with it. It is an answer to all, a word of sublimity. They revolve the idea over and over, and find a kind of perfection in it. They see errors and abuses burning in a brilliant light.
“That would be fine!” said one.
“Too fine to be true!” said another.
But the third said, “It’s because it’s true that it’s fine. And it’s not because it’s fine that it will come. Fineness is not in vogue, any more than love is. It’s because it’s true that it has to be.”
“Then, since justice is wanted by the people, and the people have the power, let them do it.”
“They’re beginning already!” said some obscure lips.
“It’s the way things are running,” declared another.
“When all men have made themselves equal, we shall be forced to unite.”
“And there’ll no longer be appalling things done in the face of heaven by thirty million men who don’t wish them.”
It is true, and there is nothing to reply to it. What pretended argument or shadow of an answer dare one oppose to it—“There’ll no longer be the things done in the face of heaven by thirty millions of men who don’t want to do them!”
Such is the logic that I hear and follow of the words spoken by these pitiful fellows cast upon the field of affliction, the words which spring from their bruises and pains, the words which bleed from them.
Now, the sky is all overcast. Low down it is armoured in steely blue by great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening, and more rain on the way. The end of the tempest and the long suffering is not yet.
“We shall say to ourselves,” says one, “‘After all, why do we make war?’ We don’t know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it’s for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshalled in armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops—and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions.”
“Listen!” some one broke in suddenly.
We held our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns. Yonder, the growling is agitating the grey strata of the sky, and the distant violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.
“It’s beginning again.”
Then one of us says, “Ah, look what we’ve got against us!”
Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways’ discussion of their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment, whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity of circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the tangled lines.
And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in which, everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.
Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above the crests of the storm that beglooms the world—a cavalcade of warriors, prancing and flashing, the chargers that carry armour and plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.
And far above the fevered gaze of them who are upon the ground, whose bodies are layered with the dregs of the earth and the wasted fields, the phantom cohort flows from the four corners of the horizon, drives back the sky’s infinity and hides its blue deeps.
And they are legion. They are not only the warrior caste who shout as they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal slavery has clothed in magic power—the gilded men, who tower here and there above the prostration of the human race and will suddenly weigh down the scales of justice when they think they see great profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who minister consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.
“There are those who say,” now cries one of the sombre and compelling talkers, extending his hand as though he could see the pageant, “there are those who say, ‘How fine they are!’”
“And those who say, ‘The nations hate each other!’”
“And those who say, ‘I get fat on war, and my belly matures on it!’”
“And those who say, ‘There has always been war, so there always will be!’”
“There are those who say, ‘I can’t see farther than the end of my nose, and I forbid others to see farther!’”
“There are those who say, ‘Babies come into the world with either red or blue breeches on!’”
“There are those,” growled a hoarse voice, “who say, ‘Bow your head and trust in God!’”
Ah, you are right, poor countless workmen of the battles
, you who have made with your hands all of the Great War, you whose omnipotence is not yet used for well-doing, you human host whose every face is a world of sorrows, you who dream bowed under the yoke of a thought beneath that sky where long black clouds rend themselves and expand in dishevelled lengths like evil angels—yes, you are right. There are all those things against you. Against you and your great common interests, which are precisely and with sacred logic blended, there are not only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.
There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested parties—financiers, speculators great and small, armour-plated in their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut up like safes.
There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail like women the bright colours of uniforms; those whom military music and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.
There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.
With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change.
They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word “national”? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth. All those people are your enemies.
They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes hatefully deceived and brutalised, domestic beasts. They are your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names, whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all, and be mindful for ever!
“They will say to you,” growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two hands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, “‘My friend, you have been a wonderful hero!’ I don’t want them to say it!
“Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We’ve been murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of murderers. We shall do it again with all our might, if we have to turn murderers again so that the real enemies can be left in peace. The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble. Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that’s what we’ve been. But don’t talk to me about military virtue because I’ve killed Germans.”
“Nor to me,” cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have replied to him even had he dared; “nor to me, because I’ve saved the lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the sake of the excellence of life-saving!”
“It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!” murmured one of the sombre soldiers.
The first man continued. “They’ll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven’t done. But military glory—it isn’t even true for us common soldiers. It’s for some, but outside those elect the soldier’s glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier’s sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies.”
“To hell with it all,” replies a man, “we’ve got other things to think about.”
“But all that,” hicupped a face which the mud concealed like a hideous hand, “may you even say it? You’d be cursed, and ‘shot at dawn’! They’ve made around a Marshal’s plumes a religion as bad and stupid and malignant as the other!”
The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he had under his armour of filth was staining the ground, and when he had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given for the healing of the world.
The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is full of night. It is as if new hostile shapes of men and groups of men are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of clouds, round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles, churches, royal and military palaces, temples and money-markets. They seem to multiply there, shutting out the stars that are fewer than mankind; it seems even as if those apparitions are moving in all directions in the excavated ground, here, there, among the real beings who are thrown there at random, half buried in the earth like grains of corn.
My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb, laid out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge simplicity out of the earth’s depths—a profundity like that of ignorance—they move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and their fists extended towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm. They are struggling against victorious spectres, like the Cyranos and Don Quixotes that they still are.
One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and purifies, in the centre of a polar desert whose horizons fume.
But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the boundless simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with a dawn of hope, but raises on it a renewal of strength and courage.
“That’s enough talk about those others!” one of the men commanded; “all the worse for them!—Us! Us all!” The understanding between democracies, the entente among the multitudes, the uplifting of the people of the world, the bluntly simple faith! All the rest, aye, all the rest, in the past, the present and the future, matters nothing at all.
And a soldier ventures to add this sentence, though he begins it with lowered voice, “If the present war has advanced progress by one step, its miseries and slaughter will count for little.”
And while we get ready to rejoin the others and begin war again, the dark and storm-choked sky slowly opens above our heads. Between two masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of light, so black-edged and beset, brings even so its proof that the sun is there.
Glossary
Anchylosis: stiffness of joints
Bassinette: bassinet, basket used as a baby’s cradle
Bedight (dirt-bedight): adorned
Besom: broom
Bully: bully beef, corned beef
Bullyrag: bully
Carcase: carcass, dead body of an animal
Chaplet: garland
Chasseurs: French light infantry units
Cotillons: dance, ball, parade
Cullender: colander
Debouch: emerge from an confined space into an open area
Declivity: a downward slope
Demi-poils: reservists, part-time soldiers (from poilu)
Dight (gaily-dight): equipped, clothed
Dinner-fatigue: dinner dress
Divers: several
Funk-hole: dugout or similar place of refuge or shelter
Gabion: a cage filled with rocks or soil used to protect against enemy fire
Gehenna: hell (from the New Testament, a place near Jerusalem where children were sacrificed to Baal)
Gethsemane: a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the scene of Jesus’s agony and betrayal
Goldbeater’s skin: parchment, made from the outer membrane of calf’s intestine,
traditionally used in the process of making gold leaf
Gridiron: a metal frame used for grilling over an open fire
Guipure: a heavy lace
‘Have the pip’: be depressed
Immortelle: an everlasting flower, especially Xeranthemum annum
Jellygraph: printing device (also known as a hectograph) that uses a pan of gelatin, or gelatin pad pulled tight on a metal frame to copy original documents.
Jingo, pl. Jingoes: bellicose person, loudly supporting war, especially in the name of patriotism
Lave: wash
Louse-box: hat, helmet (slang)
Lug: ear
Manille: card game
Mantilla: a lace or silk scarf
Marge: edge, margin
Miry: very swampy or muddy
Napoo: British WWI era army slang meaning ‘finished’, ‘gone’
Neb: nose
Nonsuch: something regarded as excellent or perfect
Phizog: face (archaic English slang)
Picon bitters: a bitter, alcoholic aperitif that traditionally accompanies beer in the east and north of France.
Picric acid: an explosive compound used in WWI artillery shells
Plumbago: graphite
Poilu: French soldier – see footnote
Puttee: a long strip of cloth, wound round the leg from ankle to knee for protection
Rime: frost
Rubicund: having a ruddy complexion
Sap: deep, narrow trench
Scrimshanker: shirker
Shako: a cylindrical or conical military hat with a peak or plume
Shallop: light sailing boat
Skull-stuffing: brain washing
Sous-intendance: deputy supply corps officer
Spondulicks: money
Tirailleurs: light infantry units recruited from French colonial territories in North Africa
Virago: a loud-voiced, bad-tempered woman
Zouaves: French light infantry units; famous for their distinctive dress, they saw extensive service on the Western Front
About the Author
Under Fire Page 34
