by Pete Ayrton
Then the moving cliff down which the captain plunges slopes gradually off and shoots him, uninjured, onto a hard floor, where he lies for a time on his back while across his face the lightward- and airwardseeking blast of death and dissolution rushes. He has fetched up against something; it tumbles down upon him lightly, with a muffled clatter as if it had come to pieces.
Then he begins to see the light, the jagged shape of the cavern mouth high overhead, and then the sergeant is bending over him with a pocket torch. ‘McKie?’ the captain says. For reply the sergeant turns the flash upon his own face. ‘Where’s Mr. McKie?’ the captain says.
‘A’s gone, sir-r,’ the sergeant says in a husky whisper. The captain sits up.
‘How many are left?’
‘Fourteen, sir-r,’ the sergeant whispers.
‘Fourteen. Twelve missing. We’ll have to dig fast.’ He gets to his feet. The faint light from above falls coldly upon the heaped avalanche, upon the thirteen helmets and the white bandage of the wounded man huddled about the foot of the cliff. ‘Where are we?’
For answer the sergeant moves the torch. It streaks laterally into the darkness, along a wall, a tunnel, into yawning blackness, the walls faceted with pale glints of chalk. About the tunnel, sitting or leaning upright against the walls, are skeletons in dark tunics and bagging Zouave trousers, their moldering arms beside them; the captain recognizes them as Senegalese troops of the May fighting of 1915, surprised and killed by gas probably in the attitudes in which they had taken refuge in the chalk caverns. He takes the torch from the sergeant.
‘We’ll see if there’s anyone else,’ he says. ‘Have out the trenching tools.’ He flashes the light upon the precipice. It rises into gloom, darkness, then into the faint rumor of daylight overhead. With the sergeant behind him he climbs the shifting heap, the earth sighing beneath him and shaling downward. The injured man begins to wail again, ‘A’m no dead! A’m no dead!’ until his voice goes into a high sustained screaming. Someone lays a hand over his mouth. His voice is muffled, then it becomes laughter on a rising note, becomes screaming again, is choked again.
The captain and the sergeant mount as high as they dare, prodding at the earth while the earth shifts beneath them in long hushed sighs. At the foot of the precipice the men huddle, their faces lifted faint, white, and patient into the light. The captain sweeps the torch up and down the cliff. There is nothing, no arm, no hand, in sight. The air is clearing slowly. ‘We’ll get on,’ the captain says.
‘Ay, sir-r,’ the sergeant says.
In both directions the cavern fades into darkness, plumbless and profound, filled with the quiet skeletons sitting and leaning against the walls, their arms beside them.
‘The cave-in threw us forward,’ the captain says.
‘Ay, sir-r,’ the sergeant whispers.
‘Speak out,’the captain says. ‘It’s but a bit of a cave. If men got into it, we can get out.’
‘Ay, sir-r,’ the sergeant whispers.
‘If it threw us forward, the entrance will be yonder.’
‘Ay, sir-r,’ the sergeant whispers.
The captain flashes the torch ahead. The men rise and huddle quietly behind him, the wounded man among them. He whimpers. The cavern goes on, unrolling its glinted walls out of the darkness; the sitting shapes grin quietly into the light as they pass. The air grows heavier; soon they are trotting, gasping, then the air grows lighter and the torch sweeps up another slope of earth, closing the tunnel. The men halt and huddle. The captain mounts the slope. He snaps off the light and crawls slowly along the crest of the slide, where it joins the ceiling of the cavern, sniffing. The light flashes on again. ‘Two men with trenching tools,’ he says.
Two men mount to him. He shows them the fissure through which air seeps in small, steady breaths. They begin to dig, furiously, hurling the dirt back. Presently they are relieved by two others; presently the fissure becomes a tunnel and four men can work at once. The air becomes fresher. They burrow furiously, with whimpering cries like dogs. The wounded man, hearing them perhaps, catching the excitement perhaps, begins to laugh again, meaningless and high. Then the man at the head of the tunnel bursts through. Light rushes in around him like water; he burrows madly; in silhouette they see his wallowing buttocks lunge from sight and a burst of daylight surges in.
The others leave the wounded man and surge up the slope, fighting and snarling at the opening. The sergeant springs after them and beats them away from the opening with a trenching spade, cursing in his hoarse whisper.
‘Let them go, Sergeant,’ the captain says. The sergeant desists. He stands aside and watches the men scramble into the tunnel. Then he descends, and he and the captain help the wounded man up the slope. At the mouth of the tunnel the wounded man rebels.
‘A’m no dead! A’m no dead!’ he wails, struggling. By cajolery and force they thrust him, still wailing and struggling, into the tunnel, where he becomes docile again and scuttles through.
‘Out with you, Sergeant,’ the captain says.
‘After you, sir-r,’ the sergeant whispers.
‘Out wi ye, man!’ the captain says. The sergeant enters the tunnel. The captain follows. He emerges onto the outer slope of the avalanche which had closed the cave, at the foot of which the fourteen men are kneeling in a group. On his hands and knees like a beast, the captain breathes, his breath making a hoarse sound. ‘Soon it will be summer,’ he thinks, dragging the air into his lungs faster than he can empty them to respire again. ‘Soon it will be summer, and the long days.’At the foot of the slope the fourteen men kneel. The one in the center has a Bible in his hand, from which he is intoning monotonously. Above his voice the wounded man’s gibberish rises, meaningless and unemphatic and sustained.
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Canada in July 1918 but the war ended before he completed his training. Crevasse, the story included here, was first published in 1931 in These 13, Faulkner’s first collection of short stories. In 1926, Faulkner had published his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, a powerful account of a wounded aviator’s return home to a small town in Georgia at the end of the war. His writings on the war already show Faulkner’s brilliance at setting a scene and capturing a mood through dialogue. One of the great writers of the 20th century, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Winning the prize brought him worldwide recognition and put Yoknapatawpha County, his fictional rendering of Lafayette County where he grew up, on the literary map. Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississipi, in 1962.
FREDERIC MANNING
CUSHY AVEC MADEMOISELLE
from Her Privates We
But thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly-falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one.
Shakespeare
BOURNE NEVER SLEPT MUCH: as soon as he put out his cigarette and rolled himself up in his blankets, he would sleep like a log for an hour or two perhaps, and then so lightly that the least sound would wake him. It was a legend among the other men, that nobody ever woke, during the night, without finding Bourne sitting up and smoking a cigarette. Company guard didn’t bother him in the least. It was a cushy guard, without formality; and he liked the solitude and emptiness of the night. One bathed one’s soul in that silence, as in a deep, cold pool. Earth seemed to breathe, even if it were only with his own breathing, giving consciousness a kind of rhythm, which was neither of sound nor of motion, but might become either at any moment. The slagheaps, huge against the luminous sky, might have been watchtowers in Babylon, or pyramids in Egypt; night with its enchantments, changing even this flat and unlovely land into a place haunted by fantastic imaginings. Morning gave again to life, its sordid realities. He got himself some tea at the cooker, yarned to Abbot while he drank it, and was washed and shaved before the rest of his hut were fully awake.
The battalion fell in on the road, at about twenty minutes past nine; and five minutes later the commanding officer and the
adjutant rode down the line of men; perhaps less with the object of making a cursory inspection, than for the purpose of advertising the fact, that they had both been awarded the Military Cross for their services on the Somme.
‘Wonder they ’ave the front to put ’em up,’ said Martlow, unimpressed.
Major Shadwell and Captain Malet had no distinctions.
‘I don’t want no medals meself,’ added Martlow, disinterestedly.
Bourne was struck by the adjutant’s horsemanship; when the grey he rode trotted, you saw plenty of daylight between his seat and the saddle; and the exaggerated action made it seem as if, instead of the horse carrying the adjutant, the adjutant were really propelling the horse. However, he brought to the business the same serious attention which he gave to less arduous duties at other times. The men were forbidden to drink from their water-bottles on the march until permission were given. They moved off, and, by ten o’clock, were marching through Noeux-les-Mines again; and presently word was passed along that they were going to Bruay. There was no doubt about it this time: Captain Malet had told Sergeant-Major Robinson, and the men swung forward cheerfully, in spite of dust and heat, opening out a bit, so that the air could move freely between them. On the whole their march discipline was pretty good. They arrived at their new billets at about one o’clock.
Bruay was built on two sides of a valley, and their billets were naturally in the poorer part of the town; in one of the uniform streets which always seem to lay stress on the monotony of modern industrial life. It was a quarter given up to miners. The street, in which A Company had billets, was only about a hundred yards long, led nowhere, and ended abruptly, as though the builders had suddenly tired of their senseless repetition. But it was all very clean; dull and dingy, but clean. Some of the houses were empty, and Bourne, Shem, and Martlow, with the rest of their section, were in one of these empty houses. The town, however, was for the most part earlier than the days when towns came to be planned. You could see that the wisdom of cattle, which in such matters is greater than the wisdom of man, had determined the course of many of its sinuous streets, as they picked their way to and from their grazing, guided only by the feel of the ground beneath them, and the gradients with which they were confronted. So the town still possessed a little charm and character. It had its Place, its sides all very unequal, and all of it on the slope. Even the direction of the slope was diagonally across it, and not merely from side to side or end to end. Perhaps the cattle had determined that too, for the poor fool man has long since lost his nature. Houses in the older parts of the town, though modest and discreet, still contrived to have a little air of distinction and individuality. They refused to be confounded with each other. They ignored that silly assumption that men are equal. They believed in private property.
It was obviously the intention of authority that the men should be given an opportunity to have a bon time. They were to be paid at two o’clock, and then were free to amuse themselves.
‘You’re comin’ out with me tonight,’ said Martlow to Bourne decisively.
‘Very well,’ said Bourne, dumping his pack on the floor of the room they occupied, and opening the window. They were upstairs; and he looked out and down, into the street. There were five or six corporals, and lance-corporals, standing just outside; and both Corporal Greenstreet and Lance-Corporal Jakes spotted him immediately, and shouted for him to come. He went, a little reluctantly, wondering what they wanted.
‘You’re the man we was lookin’ for,’ said Corporal Greenstreet. ‘The sergeants are runnin’ a sergeants’ mess for the couple of days we’ll be ’ere; an’ we don’t see why we can’t run a corporals’ mess.’
‘Well, run one, Corporal,’ said Bourne distinterestedly. ‘There’s nothing in King’s Regs. against it, so far as I know.’
‘Well, we can’t run it ourselves. That’s where you come in, you know the lingo a bit, an’ you always seem able to get round the old women. A corporal don’t get a sergeant’s pay, you know, but we want to do it as well as we can. There’ll be eight of us; Jakes, Evans, an’ Marshall are in billets ’ere, an’ we could ’ave the mess ’ere, if she’d do the cookin’. You ’ave a talk to ’er.’
‘This is all very well,’ said Bourne reasonably; ‘but now we’re in a decent town I want to have a good time myself. I’ve just told Martlow I should go out with him tonight.’
‘Well, I’ve got ’im down for company guard tonight.’
‘Have you, Corporal? Well, you just take him off company guard, or there’s absolutely nothing doing. Every time we arrange to go out on a bit of a spree together, he, or Shem, or myself are put on company guard. I was on last night.’
‘Well, Sergeant-Major Robinson told me to put you on guard last night, ’e said it would do you good, you were gettin’ a bit fresh.’
‘I guessed that,’ said Bourne. ‘He didn’t want to be nasty, of course, but he thought he would give me a reminder. I don’t mind taking my share of guards. But, if you put one of us on, you might just as well put us all on together, and make a family party of it. I don’t mind helping you to run a mess, but I want to have a good time, too.’
‘Well, you muck in with us,’ said Corporal Greenstreet.
‘An’ you needn’t put anythin’ in the kitty,’ added Lance-Corporal Jakes.
‘Oh, thanks all the same, but I like to pay my own way,’ said Bourne coolly. ‘I don’t mind going in and asking madame what can be done in the matter; and then, if we can come to some arrangement, I shall see about buying the grub; but before things go any further, it has got to be clearly understood that neither Shem, nor Martlow, is on any guard tonight. We three are going out on a spree together. I shall muck in with you tomorrow night.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Corporal Greenstreet hastily. ‘I’ll get some other bugger for the bloody guard, if there is a guard. I’ve ’ad no orders yet.’
‘It’s just as well to take the possibility into consideration,’ said Bourne; ‘but mind you, you would do it just as well on your own, without me.’
‘Come on. You parlez-vous to the old woman,’ said Corporal Greenstreet, and hurried him through the house into the forefront of the battle, which was the kitchen. Madame was a very neat and competent-looking woman, and she faced Bourne with her two daughters acting as supports immediately behind her. Bourne got through the preliminary politesses with a certain amount of credit. She had already understood that the corporals required her assistance in some way, but they had failed apparently to make matters clear.
‘Qu’est-ce que ces messieurs désirent?’ she inquired of Bourne, coming to the point with admirable promptitude, and when he explained matters they launched into a discussion on ways and means. Then Bourne turned to Corporal Greenstreet.
‘I suppose it is pukka that we stay here two nights, is it?’
‘That’s accordin’ to present plans. Of course you can’t be certain of anything in the bloody army. Does it make any differ to ’er?’
‘Not much,’ said Bourne. ‘You can have grilled fillet of steak with fried onions, and chips and beans, or you can have a couple of chickens. I am wondering what sort of sweet you can have.’
‘Could we ’ave a suet puddin’ wi’ treacle?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Bourne reflectively. ‘I don’t think the French use suet much in cooking, and anyway I don’t know the French for suet, if they do. Suif is lard, I think. Could you pinch a tin of pozzy out of stores? Then you might have a sweet omelette with jam in it. Perhaps it would be better to buy some decent jam, you don’t want plum and apple, do you? Only I want to make the money go as far as possible. I like those little red currants in syrup which used to come from Bar-le-Duc.’
‘Get ’em. I don’t care a fuck where they come from. We don’t want any bloody plum an’ apple when we can get better. An’ don’t you worry about the money, not in reason anyway. They’ve only let us come ’ere for a couple of days to ’ave a bon time before they send us up
into the shit again. Might just as well get all we can, while we can.’
Bourne turned to Madame again, and asked her if she would do the marketing for them, and the upshot of it was that they both agreed to go together. Bourne turned to Corporal Greenstreet and asked him about money.
‘Will it do if we all put twenty francs into the kitty to start with?’
‘I don’t think I shall want so much: give me ten each, and if that isn’t enough, then you can each give me up to another ten. I am going to let her buy the wine because she knows somebody in the trade, and says she can get us good sound wine, which you don’t get in estaminets, fairly cheap.’
‘Dinner’s up, Corporal,’ said Corporal Marshall, putting his head in the door; and thanking Madame, they left to get their meal rather hurriedly.
‘Where’ve you bin?’ said Martlow indignantly to Bourne, and Shem burst out laughing at the way in which the question was put.
‘What the bloody ’ell is ’e laughin’ at?’ said Martlow, his face all in a pucker.
‘I have been doing my best to get you off company guard tonight.’
‘Me!’ exclaimed Martlow. ‘Me, on bloody company guard tonight, an’ the only cushy town we’ve been in! It’s a bugger, ain’t it? D’you mean to say they ’ad me on bloody guard?’
‘Well, I have taken on the job of rationing officer to the corporals’ mess, on condition they find someone else in your place: that is if they should mount a guard tonight; they may give it a miss. It isn’t a bad stew today, is it? Seems to me a long time since we had any fresh meat, except for a few weevils in the biscuits. As soon as I have had dinner, I shall go off with Corporal Greenstreet, and make the other corporals ante up. Then I shall be back in time to get my pay; and afterwards I shall go out and do the marketing with Madame. When we have had tea, the three of us had better hop it to the other side of the town right away, in case they come along and pinch us for any fatigues. There’s a cinema, up there. And look here, Martlow, you’re not going to pay for everything tonight, see? We shall have to make the most of our opportunity to have a bon time, as it may be our last chance. I hate the thought of dying young.’
