Light

They plant us in subterranean files, facing a wide plain of gentle gradient which dips from the horizon towards us, a plain with a rolling jumble of thorn-brakes and trees, which the gale is seizing by the hair. Squalls charged with rain and cold are passing over and immensifying it; and there are rivers and cataclysms of clamor along the trajectories of the shells. Yonder, under the mass of the rust-red sky and its sullen flames, there opens a yellow rift where trees stand forth like gallows. The soil is dismembered. The earth's covering has been blown a lot in slabs, and its heart is seen reddish and lined white—butchery as far as the eye can see.

There is nothing now but to sit down and recline one's back as conveniently as possible. We stay there and breathe and live a little; we are calm, thanks to that faculty we have of never seeing either the past or the future.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XIII
WHITHER GOEST THOU?

But soon a shiver has seized all of us.

"Listen! It's stopped! Listen!"

The whistle of bullets has completely ceased, and the artillery also. The lull is fantastic. The longer it lasts the more it pierces us with the uneasiness of beasts. We lived in eternal noise; and now that it is hiding, it shakes and rouses us, and would drive us mad.

"What's that?"

We rub our eyelids and open wide our eyes. We hoist our heads with no precaution above the crumbled parapet. We question each other—"D'you see?"

No doubt about it; the shadows are moving along the ground wherever one looks. There is no point in the distance where they are not moving.

Some one says at last:—

"Why, it's the Boches, to be sure!"

And then we recognize on the sloping plain the immense geographical form of the army that is coming upon us!

* * * * * *

Behind and in front of us together, a terrible crackle bursts forth and makes somber captives of us in the depth of a valley of flames, and flames which illuminate the plain of men marching over the plain. They reveal them afar, in incalculable number, with the first ranks detaching themselves, wavering a little, and forming again, the chalky soil a series of points and lines like something written!

Gloomy stupefaction makes us dumb in face of that living immensity. Then we understand that this host whose fountain-head is out of sight is being frightfully cannonaded by our 75's; the shells set off behind us and arrive in front of us. In the middle of the lilliputian ranks the giant smoke-clouds leap like hellish gods. We see the flashes of the shells which are entering that flesh scattered over the earth. It is smashed and burned entirely in places, and that nation advances like a brazier.

Without a stop it overflows towards us. Continually the horizon produces new waves. We hear a vast and gentle murmur rise. With their tearing lights and their dull glimmers they resemble in the distance a whole town making festival in the evening.

We can do nothing against the magnitude of that attack, the greatness of that sum total. When a gun has fired short, we see more clearly the littleness of each shot. Fire and steel are drowned in all that life; it closes up and re-forms like the sea.

"Rapid fire!"

We fire desperately. But we have not many cartridges. Since we came into the first line they have ceased to inspect our load of ammunition; and many men, especially these last days, have got rid of a part of the burden which bruises hips and belly and tears away the skin. They who are coming do not fire; and above the long burning thicket of our line one can see them still flowing from the east. They are closely massed in ranks. One would say they clung to each other as though welded. They are not using their rifles. Their only weapon is the infinity of their number. They are coming to bury us under their feet.

Suddenly a shift in the wind brings us the smell of ether. The divisions advancing on us are drunk! We declare it, we tell it to ourselves frantically.

"They're on fire! They're on fire!" cries the trembling voice of the man beside me, whose shoulders are shaken by the shots he is hurling.

They draw near. They are lighted from below along the descent by the flashing footlights of our fire; they grow bigger, and already we can make out the forms of soldiers. They are at the same time in order and in disorder. Their outlines are rigid, and one divines faces of stone. Their rifles are slung and they have nothing in their hands. They come on like sleep-walkers, only knowing how to put one foot before the other, and surely they are singing. Yonder, in the bulk of the invasion, the guns continue to destroy whole walls and whole structures of life at will. On the edges of it we can clearly see isolated silhouettes and groups as they fall, with an extended line of figures like torchlights.

Now they are there, fifty paces away, breathing their ether into our faces. We do not know what to do. We have no more cartridges. We fix bayonets, our ears filled with that endless, undefined murmur which comes from their mouths and the hollow rolling of the flood that marches.

A shout spreads behind us:

"Orders to fall back!"

We bow down and evacuate the trench by openings at the back. There are not a lot of us, we who thought we were so many. The trench is soon empty, and we climb the hill that we descended in coming. We go up towards our 75's, which are in lines behind the ridge and still thundering. We climb at a venture, in the open, by vague paths and tracks of mud; there are no trenches. During the gray ascent it is a little clearer than a while ago: they do not fire on us. If they fired on us, we should be killed. We climb in flagging jumps, in jerks, pounded by the panting of the following waves that push us before them, closely beset by their clattering, nor turning round to look again. We hoist ourselves up the trembling flanks of the volcano that clamors up yonder. Along with us are emptied batteries also climbing, and horses and clouds of steam and all the horror of modern war. Each man pushes this retreat on, and is pushed by it; and as our panting becomes one long voice, we go up and up, baffled by our own weight which tries to fall back, deformed by our knapsacks, bent and silent as beasts.

From the summit we see the trembling inundation, murmuring and confused, filling the trenches we have just left, and seeming already to overflow them. But our eyes and ears are violently monopolized by the two batteries between which we are passing; they are firing into the infinity of the attackers, and each shot plunges into life. Never have I been so affected by the harrowing sight of artillery fire. The tubes bark and scream in crashes that can hardly be borne; they go and come on their brakes in starts of fantastic distinctness and violence.

In the hollows where the batteries lie hid, in the middle of a fan-shaped phosphorescence, we see the silhouettes of the gunners as they thrust in the shells. Every time they maneuver the breeches, their chests and arms are scorched by a tawny reflection. They are like the implacable workers of blast furnace; the breeches are reddened by the heat of the explosions, the steel of the guns is on fire in the evening.

For some minutes now they have fired more slowly—as if they were becoming exhausted. A few far-apart shots—the batteries fire no more; and now that the salvos are extinguished, we see the fire in the steel go out.

In the abysmal silence we hear a gunner groan:—

"There's no more shell."

The shadow of twilight resumes its place in the sky—henceforward empty. It grows cold. There is a mysterious and terrible mourning. Around me, springing from the obscurity, are groans and gasps for breath, loaded backs which disappear, stupefied eyes, and the gestures of men who wipe the sweat from their foreheads. The order to retire is repeated, in a tone that grips us—one would call it a cry of distress. There is a confused and dejected trampling; and then we descend, we go away the way we came, and the host follows itself heavily and makes more steps into the gulf.

* * * * * *

When we have gone again down the slope of the hill, we find ourselves once more in the bottom of a valley, for another height begins. Before ascending it, we stop to take breath, but ready to set off again should the flood-tide appear on the ridge yonder. We find ourselves in the middle of grassy expanses, without trenches or defense, and we are astonished not to see the supports. We are in the midst of a sort of absence.

We sit down here and there; and some one with his forehead bowed almost to his knees, translating the common thought, says:—

"It's none of our fault."

Our lieutenant goes up to the man, puts his hand on his shoulder, and says, gently:—

"No, my lads, it's none of your fault."

Just then some sections join us who say, "We're the rearguard." And some add that the two batteries of 75's up yonder are already captured. A whistle rings out—"Come, march!"

We continue the retreat. There are two battalions of us in all—no soldier in front of us; no French soldier behind us. I have neighbors who are unknown to me, motley men, routed and stupefied, artillery and engineers; unknown men who come and go away, who seem to be born and seem to die.

At one time we get a glimpse of some confusion in the orders from above. A Staff officer, issuing from no one knew where, throws himself in front of us, bars our way, and questions us in a tragic voice:—

"What are you miserable men doing? Are you running away? Forward in the name of France! I call upon you to return. Forward!"

The soldiers, who would never have thought of retiring without orders, are stunned, and can make nothing of it.

"We're going back because they told us to go back."

But they obey. They turn right about face. Some of them have already begun to march forward, and they call to their comrades:—

"Hey there! This way, it seems!"

But the order to retire returns definitely, and we obey once more, fuming against those who do not know what they say; and the ebb carries away with it the officer who shouted amiss.

The march speeds up, it becomes precipitate and haggard. We are swept along by an impetuosity that we submit to without knowing whence it comes. We begin the ascent of the second hill which appears in the fallen night a mountain.

When fairly on it we hear round us, on all sides and quite close, a terrible pit-pat, and the long low hiss of mown grass. There is a crackling afar in the sky, and they who glance back for a second in the awesome storm see the cloudy ridges catch fire horizontally. It means that the enemy have mounted machine guns on the summit we have just abandoned, and that the place where we are is being hacked by the knives of bullets. On all sides soldiers wheel and rattle down with curses, sighs and cries. We grab and hang on to each other, jostling as if we were fighting.

The rest at last reach the top of the rise; and just at that moment the lieutenant cries in a clear and heartrending voice:

"Good-by, my lads!"

We see him fall, and he is carried away by the survivors around him.

From the summit we go a few steps down the other side, and lie on the ground in silence. Some one asks, "The lieutenant?"

"He's dead."

"Ah," says the soldier, "and how he said good-by to us!"

We breathe a little now. We do not think any more unless it be that we are at last saved, at last lying down.

Some engineers fire star-shells, to reconnoiter the state of things in the ground we have evacuated. Some have the curiosity to risk a glance over it. On the top of the first hill—where our guns were—the big dazzling plummets show a line of bustling excitement. One hears the noises of picks and of mallet blows.

They have stopped their advance and are consolidating there. They are hollowing their trenches and planting their network of wire—which will have to be taken again some day. We watch, outspread on our bellies, or kneeling, or sitting lower down, with our empty rifles beside us.

Margat reflects, shakes his head and says:—

"Wire would have stopped them just now. But we had no wire."

"And machine-guns, too! but where are they, the M.G.s?"

We have a distinct feeling that there has been an enormous blunder in the command. Want of foresight—the reënforcements were not there; they had not thought of supports. There were not enough guns to bar their way, nor enough artillery ammunition; with our own eyes we had seen two batteries cease fire in mid-action—they had not thought of shells. In a wide stretch of country, as one could see, there were no defense work, no trenches; they had not thought of trenches.

It is obvious even to the common eyes of common soldiers.

"What could we do?" says one of us; "it's the chiefs."

We say it and we should repeat it if we were not up again and swept away in the hustle of a fresh departure, and thrown back upon more immediate and important anxieties.

* * * * * *

We do not know where we are.

We have marched all night. More weariness bends our spines again, more obscurity hums in our heads. By following the bed of a valley, we have found trenches again, and then men. These splayed and squelched alleys, with their fat and sinking sandbags, their props which rot like limbs, flow into wider pockets where activity prevails—battalion H.Q., or dressing-stations. About midnight we saw, through the golden line of a dugout's half-open door, some officers seated at a white table—a cloth or a map. Some one cries, "They're lucky!" The company officers are exposed to dangers as we are, but only in attacks and reliefs. We suffer long. They have neither the vigil at the loophole, nor the knapsack, nor the fatigues. What always lasts is greater.

And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves have begun again. Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot. We reach a busy trench-crossing. A stench catches my throat: some cess-pool into which these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage? No, we see rows of stretchers, each one swollen. There is a tent there of gray canvas, which flaps like a flag, and on its fluttering wall the dawn lights up a bloody cross.

* * * * * *

Sometimes, when we are high enough for our eyes to unbury themselves, I can dimly see some geometrical lines, so confused, so desolated by distance, that I do not know if it is our country or the other; even when one sees he does not know. Our looks are worn away in looking. We do not see, we are powerless to people the world. We all have nothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night.

And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go forward endlessly, towing each other. They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them. They are bowed as if they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might rocks in hell. From minute to minute we are filling the places of the obliterated hosts who have passed this way like the wind or have stayed here like the earth.

We halt in a funnel. We lean our backs against the walls, resting the packs on the projections which bristle from them. But we examine these things coming out of the earth, and we smell that they are knees, elbows and heads. They were interred there one day and the following days are disinterring them. At the spot where I am, from which I have roughly and heavily recoiled with all my armory, a foot comes out from a subterranean body and protrudes. I try to put it out of the way, but it is strongly incrusted. One would have to break the corpse of steel, to make it disappear. I look at the morsel of mortality. My thoughts, and I cannot help them, are attracted by the horizontal body that the world bruises; they go into the ground with it and mold a shape for it. Its face—what is the look which rots crushed in the dark depth of the earth at the top of these remains? Ah, one catches sight of what there is under the battlefields! Everywhere in the spacious wall there are limbs, and black and muddy gestures. It is a sepulchral sculptor's great sketch-model, a bas-relief in clay that stands haughtily before our eyes. It is the portal of the earth's interior; yes, it is the gate of hell.

* * * * * *

In order to get here, I slept as I marched; and now I have an illusion that I am hidden in this little cave, cooped up against the curve of the roof. I am no more than this gentle cry of the flesh—Sleep! As I begin to doze and people myself with dreams, a man comes in. He is unarmed, and he ransacks us with the stabbing white point of his flash-lamp. It is the colonel's batman. He says to our adjutant as soon as he finds him:—

"Six fatigue men wanted."

The adjutant's bulk rises and yawns:—

"Butsire, Vindame, Margat, Termite, Paulin, Rémus!" he orders as he goes to sleep again.

We emerge from the cave; and more slowly, from our drowsiness. We find ourselves standing in a village street. But as soon as we touch the open air, dazzling roars precede and follow us, mere handful of men as we are, abruptly revealing us to each other. We hurl ourselves like a pack of hounds into the first door or the first gaping hole, and there are some who cry that: "We are marked. We're given away!"

After the porterage fatigue we go back. I settle myself in my corner, heavier, more exhausted, more buried in the bottom of everything. I was beginning to sleep, to go away from myself, lulled by a voice which sought in vain the number of the days we had been on the move, and was repeating the names of the nights—Thursday, Friday, Saturday—when the man with the pointed light returns, demands a gang, and I set off with the others. It is so again for a third time. As soon as we are outside, the night, which seems to lie in wait for us, sends us a squall, with its thunderous destruction of space; it scatters us; then we are drawn together and joined up. We carry thick planks, two by two; and then piles of sacks which blind the bearers with a plastery dust and make them reel like masts.

Then the last time, the most terrible, it was wire. Each of us takes into his hands a great hoop of coiled wire, as tall as ourselves, and weighing over sixty pounds. When one carries it, the supple wheel stretches out like an animal; it is set dancing by the least movement, it works into the flesh of the shoulder, and strikes one's feet. Mine tries to cling to me and pull me up and throw me to the ground. With this malignantly heavy thing, animated with barbarous and powerful movement, I cross the ruins of a railway station, all stones and beams. We clamber up an embankment which slips away and avoids us, we drag and push the rebellious and implacable burden. It cannot be reached, that receding height. But we reach it, all the same.

Ah, I am a normal man! I cling to life, and I have the consciousness of duty. But at that moment I called from the bottom of my heart for the bullet which would have delivered me from life.

We return, with empty hands, in a sort of sinister comfort. I remember, as we came in, a neighbor said to me—or to some one else:

"Sheets of corrugated iron are worse."

The fatigues have to be stopped at dawn, although the engineers protest against the masses of stores which uselessly fill the depot.

We sleep from six to seven in the morning. In the last traces of night we emigrate from the cave, blinking like owls.

"Where's the juice?"⁸ we ask.

There is none. The cooks are not there, nor the mess people. And they reply:—

"Forward!"

In the dull and pallid morning, on the approaches to a village, there appear gardens, which no longer have human shape. Instead of cultivation there are puddles and mud. All is burned or drowned, and the walls scattered like bones everywhere; and we see the mottled and bedaubed shadows of soldiers. War befouls the country as it does faces and hearts.

Our company gets going, gray and wan, broken down by the infamous weariness. We halt in front of a hangar:—

"Those that are tired can leave their packs," the new sergeant advises; "they'll find them again here."

"If we're leaving our packs, it means we're going to attack," says an ancient.

He says it, but he does not know.

One by one, on the dirty soil of the hangar, the knapsacks fall like bodies. Some men, however, are mistrustful, and prefer to keep their packs. Under all circumstances there are always exceptions.

Forward! The same shouts put us again in movement. Forward! Come, get up! Come on, march! Subdue your refractory flesh; lift yourselves from your slumber as from a coffin, begin yourselves again without ceasing, give all that you can give—Forward! Forward! It has to be. It is a higher concern than yours, a law from above. We do not know what it is. We only know the step we make; and even by day one marches in the night. And then, one cannot help it. The vague thoughts and little wishes that we had in the days when we were concerned with ourselves are ended. There is no way now of escaping from the wheels of fate, no way now of turning aside from fatigue and cold, disgust and pain. Forward! The world's hurricane drives straight before them these terribly blind who grope with their rifles.

We have passed through a wood, and then plunged again into the earth. We are caught in an enfilading fire. It is terrible to pass in broad daylight in these communication trenches, at right angles to the lines, where one is in view all the way. Some soldiers are hit and fall. There are light eddies and brief obstructions in the places where they dive; and then the rest, a moment halted by the barrier, sometimes still living, frown in the wide-open direction of death, and say:—

"Well, if it's got to be, come on. Get on with it!"

They deliver up their bodies wholly—their warm bodies, that the bitter cold and the wind and the sightless death touch as with women's hands. In these contacts between living beings and force, there is something carnal, virginal, divine.

* * * * * *

They have sent me into a listening post. To get there I had to worm myself, bent double, along a low and obstructed sap. In the first steps I was careful not to walk on the obstructions, and then I had to, and I dared. My foot trembled on the hard or supple masses which peopled that sap.

On the edge of the hole—there had been a road above it formerly, or perhaps even a market-place—the trunk of a tree severed near the ground arose, short as a grave-stone. The sight stopped me for a moment, and my heart, weakened no doubt by my physical destitution, kindled with pity for the tree become a tomb!

Two hours later I rejoined the section in its pit. We abide there, while the cannonade increases. The morning goes by, then the afternoon. Then it is evening.

They make us go into a wide dugout. It appears that an attack is developing somewhere. From time to time, through a breach contrived between sandbags so decomposed and oozing that they seem to have lived, we go out to a little winterly and mournful crossing, to look about. We consult the sky to determine the tempest's whereabouts. We can know nothing.

The artillery fire dazzles and then chokes up our sight. The heavens are making a tumult of blades.

Monuments of steel break loose and crash above our heads. Under the sky, which is dark as with threat of deluge, the explosions throw livid sunshine in all directions. From one end to the other of the visible world the fields move and descend and dissolve, and the immense expanse stumbles and falls like the sea. Towering explosions in the east, a squall in the south; in the zenith a file of bursting shrapnel like suspended volcanoes.

The smoke which goes by, and the hours as well, darken the inferno. Two or three of us risk our faces at the earthen cleft and look out, as much for the purpose of propping ourselves against the earth as for seeing. But we see nothing, nothing on the infinite expanse which is full of rain and dusk, nothing but the clouds which tear themselves and blend together in the sky, and the clouds which come out of the earth.

Then, in the slanting rain and the limitless gray, we see a man, one only, who advances with his bayonet forward, like a specter.

We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and going away yonder.

We only see one—perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left.

We do not understand, and then we do. It is the end of the attacking wave.

What can his thoughts be—this man alone in the rain as if under a curse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into a shrieking machine? By the light of a cascade of flashes I thought I saw a strange monk-like face. Then I saw more clearly—the face of an ordinary man, muffled in a comforter.

"It's a chap of the 150th, not the 129th," stammers a voice by my side.

We do not know, except that it is the end of the attacking wave.

When he has disappeared among the eddies, another follows him at a distance, and then another. They pass by, separate and solitary, delegates of death, sacrificers and sacrificed. Their great-coats fly wide; and we, we press close to each other in our corner of night; we push and hoist ourselves with our rusted muscles, to see that void and those great scattered soldiers.

We return to the shelter, which is plunged in darkness. The motor-cyclist's voice obtrudes itself to the point that we think we can see his black armor. He is describing the "carryings on" at Bordeaux in September, when the Government was there. He tells of the festivities, the orgies, the expenditure, and there is almost a tone of pride in the poor creature's voice as he recalls so many pompous pageants all at once.

But the uproar outside silences us. Our funk-hole trembles and cracks. It is the barrage—the barrage which those whom we saw have gone to fight, hand to hand. A thunderbolt falls just at the opening, it casts a bright light on all of us, and reveals the last emotion of all, the belief that all was ended! One man is grimacing like a malefactor caught in the act; another is opening strange, disappointed eyes; another is swinging his doleful head, enslaved by the love of sleep, and another, squatting with his head in his hands, makes a lurid entanglement. We have seen each other—upright, sitting or crucified—in the second of broad daylight which came into the bowels of the earth to resurrect our darkness.

In a moment, when the guns chance to take breath, a voice at the door-hole calls us:

"Forward!"

"We shall be staying there, this time over!" growl the men.

They say this, but they do not know it. We go out, into a chaos of crashing and flames.

"You'd better fix bayonets," says the sergeant; "come, get 'em on."

We stop while we adjust weapon to weapon and then run to overtake the rest.

We go down; we go up; we mark time; we go forward—like the others. We are no longer in the trench.

"Get your heads down—kneel!"

We stop and go on our knees. A star-shell pierces us with its intolerable gaze.

By its light we see, a few steps in front of us, a gaping trench. We were going to fall into it. It is motionless and empty—no, it is occupied—yes, it is empty. It is full of a file of slain watchers. The row of men was no doubt starting out of the earth when the shell burst in their faces; and by the poised white rays we see that the blast has staved them in, has taken away the flesh; and above the level of the monstrous battlefield there is left of them only some fearfully distorted heads. One is broken and blurred; one emerges like a peak, a good half of it fallen into nothing. At the end of the row, the ravages have been less, and only the eyes are smitten. The hollow orbits in those marble heads look outwards with dried darkness. The deep and obscure face-wounds have the look of caverns and funnels, of the shadows in the moon; and stars of mud are clapped on the faces in the place where eyes once shone.

Our strides have passed that trench. We go more quickly and trouble no more now about the star-shells, which, among us who know nothing, say, "I know" and "I will." All is changed, all habits and laws. We march exposed, upright, through the open fields. Then I suddenly understand what they have hidden from us up to the last moment—we are attacking!

Yes, the counter-attack has begun without our knowing it. I apply myself to following the others. May I not be killed like the others; may I be saved like the others! But if I am killed, so much the worse.

I bear myself forward. My eyes are open but I look at nothing; confused pictures are printed on my staring eyes. The men around me form strange surges; shouts cross each other or descend. Upon the fantastic walls of nights the shots make flicks and flashes. Earth and sky are crowded with apparitions; and the golden lace of burning stakes is unfolding.

A man is in front of me, a man whose head is wrapped in linen.

He is coming from the opposite direction. He is coming from the other country! He was seeking me, and I was seeking him. He is quite near—suddenly he is upon me.

The fear that he is killing me or escaping me—I do not know which—makes me throw out a desperate effort. Opening my hands and letting the rifle go, I seize him. My fingers are buried in his shoulder, in his neck, and I find again, with overflowing exultation, the eternal form of the human frame. I hold him by the neck with all my strength, and with more than all my strength, and we quiver with my quivering.

He had not the idea of dropping his rifle so quickly as I. He yields and sinks. I cling to him as if it were salvation. The words in his throat make a lifeless noise. He brandishes a hand which has only three fingers—I saw it clearly outlined against the clouds like a fork.

Just as he totters in my arms, resisting death, a thunderous blow strikes him in the back. His arms drop, and his head also, which is violently doubled back, but his body is hurled against me like a projectile, like a superhuman blast.