But the soldier, all the while hoisting up his knapsack with jerks of his hips, and lowering his voice before the non-com's aggressive excitement, clung to his notion, and murmured between his puffings, "Men—they're humanity. That's not the truth perhaps?"
Marcassin began to hurry through the drizzle along the side of the marching column, shouting and trembling with emotion, "To hell with your humanity, and your truth, too; I don't give a damn for them. I know your ideas—universal justice and 17895—to hell with them, too. There's only one thing that matters in all the earth, and that's the glory of France—to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraine back, and money, that's where they're taking you, and that's all about it. Once that's done, all's over. It's simple enough, even for a blockhead like you. If you don't understand it, it's because you can't lift your pig's head to see an ideal, or because you're only a Socialist and a confiscator!"
Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he went away from the now silent ranks. A moment later, as he passed near me, I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved to see tears in his eyes!
He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficulty restrained, and masked by a contraction of the face. He invokes Déroulède, and says that faith comes at will, like the rest. He lives in perpetual bewilderment and distress that everybody does not think as he does. He exerts real influence, for there are, in the multitudes, whatever they may say, beautiful and profound instincts always near the surface.
The captain, who was a well-balanced man, although severe and prodigal of prison when he found the least gap in our loads, considered the adjutant animated by an excellent spirit, but he himself was not so fiery. I was getting a better opinion of him; he could judge men. He had said that I was a good and conscientious soldier, that many like me were wanted.
Our lieutenant, who was very young, seemed to be an amiable, good-natured fellow. "He's a good little lad," said the grateful men; "there's some that frighten you when you speak to them, and they solder their jaws up. But him, he speaks to you even if you're stupid. When you talk to him about you and your family, which isn't, all the same, very interesting, well, he listens to you, old man."
* * * * * *
St. Martin's summer greatly warmed us as we tramped into a new village. I remember that one of those days I took Margat with me and went with him into a recently shelled house. (Margat was storming against the local grocer, the only one of his kind, the inevitable and implacable robber of his customers.) The framework of the house was laid bare, it was full of light and plaster, and it trembled like a steamboat. We climbed to the drawing-room of this house which had breathed forth all its mystery and was worse than empty. The room still showed remains of luxury and elegance—a disemboweled piano with clusters of protruding strings; a cupboard, dislodged and rotting, as though disinterred; a white-powdered floor, sown with golden stripes and rumpled books, and with fragile débris which cried out when we trod on it. Across the window, which was framed in broken glass, a curtain hung by one corner and fluttered like a bat. Over the sundered fireplace, only a mirror was intact and unsullied, upright in its frame.
Then, become suddenly and profoundly like each other, we were both fascinated by the virginity of that long glass. Its perfect integrity lent it something like a body. Each of us picked up a brick and we broke it with all our might, not knowing why. We ran away down the shaking spiral stairs whose steps were hidden under deep rubbish. At the bottom we looked at each other, still excited and already ashamed of the fit of barbarism which had so suddenly risen in us and urged our arms.
"What about it? It's a natural thing to do—we're becoming men again, that's all," said Margat.
Having nothing to do we sat down there, commanding a view of the dale. The day had been fine.
Margat's looks strayed here and there. He frowned, and disparaged the village because it was not like his own. What a comical idea to have built it like that! He did not like the church, the singular shape of it, the steeple in that position instead of where it should have been.
Orango and Rémus came and sat down by us in the ripening sun of evening.
Far away we saw the explosion of a shell, like a white shrub. We chuckled at the harmless shot in the hazy distance and Rémus made a just observation. "As long as it's not dropped here, you might say as one doesn't mind, eh, s'long as it's dropped somewhere else, eh?"
At that moment a cloud of dirty smoke took shape five hundred yards away at the foot of the village, and a heavy detonation rolled up to where we were.
"They're plugging the bottom of the village," Orango laconically certified.
Margat, still ruminating his grievance, cried, "'Fraid it's not on the grocers it's dropped, that crump, seeing he lives right at the other end. More's the pity. He charges any old price he likes and then he says to you as well, 'If you're not satisfied, my lad, you can go to hell.' Ah, more's the pity!"
He sighed, and resumed. "Ah, grocers, they beat all, they do. You can starve or you can bankrupt, that's their gospel; 'You don't matter to me, I've got to make money!'"
"What do you want to be pasting the grocers for," Orango asked, "as long as they've always been like that? They're Messrs. Thief & Sons."
After a silence, Rémus coughed, to encourage his voice, and said, "I'm a grocer."
Then Margat said to him artlessly, "Well, what about it, old chap? We know well enough, don't we, that here on earth profit's the strongest of all."
"Why, yes, to be sure, old man," Rémus replied.
* * * * * *
One day, while we were carrying our straw to our billets, one of my lowly companions came up and questioned me as he walked. "I'd like you to explain to me why there isn't any justice. I've been to the captain to ask for leave that I'd a right to and I shows him a letter to say my aunt's shortly deceased. 'That's all my eye and Betty Martin,' he says. And I says to myself, that's the blinking limit, that is. Now, then, tell me, you. When the war began, why didn't there begin full justice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no one wouldn't have raised no objection just then. Why is it all just the contrary? And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, but there's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an' all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten times stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven't sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells us!"
I replied that complete justice was impossible, that we had to look at the great mass of things generally. And then, having said this, I became embarrassed in face of the stubborn inquisitiveness, clumsily strict, of this comrade who was seeking the light all by himself!
Following that incident, I often tried, during days of monotony, to collect my ideas on war. I could not. I am sure of certain points, points of which I have always been sure. Farther I cannot go. I rely in the matter on those who guide us, who withhold the policy of the State. But sometimes I regret that I no longer have a spiritual director like Joseph Bonéas.
For the rest, the men around me—except when personal interest is in question and except for a few chatterers who suddenly pour out theories which contain bits taken bodily from the newspapers—the men around me are indifferent to every problem too remote and too profound concerning the succession of inevitable misfortunes which sweep us along. Beyond immediate things, and especially personal matters, they are prudently conscious of their ignorance and impotence.
One evening I was coming in to sleep in our stable bedroom. The men lying along its length and breadth on the bundles of straw had been talking together and were agreed. Some one had just wound it up—"From the moment you start marching, that's enough."
But Termite, coiled up like a marmot on the common litter, was on the watch. He raised his shock of hair, shook himself as though caught in a snare, waved the brass disk on his wrist like a bell and said, "No, that's not enough. You must think, but think with your own idea, not other people's."
Some amused faces were raised while he entered into observations that they foresaw would be endless.
"Pay attention, you fellows, he's going to talk about militarism," announced a wag, called Pinson, whose lively wit I had already noticed.
"There's the question of militarism–" Termite went on.
We laughed to see the hairy mannikin floundering on the dim straw in the middle of his big public-meeting words, and casting fantastic shadows on the spider-web curtain of the skylight.
"Are you going to tell us," asked one of us, "that the Boches aren't militarists?"
"Yes, indeed, and in course they are," Termite consented to admit.
"Ha! That bungs you in the optic!" Pinson hastened to record.
"For my part, old sonny," said a Territorial who was a good soldier, "I'm not seeking as far as you, and I'm not as spiteful. I know that they set about us, and that we only wanted to be quiet and friends with everybody. Why, where I come from, for instance in the Creuse country, I know that–"
"You know?" bawled Termite, angrily; "you know nothing about nothing! You're only a poor little tame animal, like all the millions of pals. They gather us together, but they separate us. They say what they like to us, or they don't say it, and you believe it. They say to you, 'This is what you've got to believe in!' They–"
I found myself growing privately incensed against Termite, by the same instinct which had once thrown me upon his accomplice Brisbille. I interrupted him. "Who are they—your 'they'?"
"Kings," said Termite.
At that moment Marcassin's silhouette appeared in the gray of the alley which ended among us. "Look out—there's Marc'! Shut your jaw," one of the audience benevolently advised.
"I'm not afeared not to say what I think!" declared Termite, instantly lowering his voice and worming his way through the straw that divided the next stall from ours.
We laughed again. But Margat was serious. "Always," he said, "there'll be the two sorts of people there's always been—the grousers and the obeyers."
Some one asked, "What for did you chap 'list?"
"'Cos there was nothing to eat in the house," answered the Territorial, as interpreter of the general opinion.
Having thus spoken, the old soldier yawned, went on all fours, arranged the straw of his claim, and added, "We'll not worry, but just let him be. 'Specially seeing we can't do otherwise."
It was time for slumber. The shed gaped open in front and at the sides, but the air was not cold.
"We've done with the bad days," said Rémus; "shan't see them no more."
"At last!" said Margat.
We stretched ourselves out, elbow to elbow. The one in the dark corner blew out his candle.
"May the war look slippy and get finished!" mumbled Orango.
"If only they'll let me transfer to the cyclists," Margat replied.
We said no more, each forming that same great wandering prayer and some little prayer like Margat's. Gently we wrapped ourselves up on the straw, one with the falling night, and closed our eyes.
* * * * * *
At the bottom of the village, in the long pink farmhouse, there was a charming woman, who smiled at us with twinkling eyes. As the days emerged from the rains and fogs, I looked at her with all my soul, for she was bathed in the youth of the year. She had a little nose and big eyes and slight fair down on her lips and neck, like traces of gold. Her husband was mobilized and we paid attentions to her. She smiled at the soldiers as she went by, and chattered willingly with the non-coms; and the passage of officers brought her to a standstill of vague respect. I used to think about her, and I forgot, through her, to write to Marie.
There were many who inquired, speaking of the farmer's wife, "Any chance?" But there were many who replied, "Nothing doing."
One morning that was bright above all others, my companions were busy holding their sides around a tipsy comrade whom they were catechizing and ragging, and sprinkling now and then with little doses of wine, to entertain him, and benefit more by him. These innocent amusements, like those which Termite provoked when he discoursed on militarism and the universe, did not detain me, and I gained the street.
I went down the paved slope. In gardens and enclosures, the buds were holding out a multitude of lilliputian green hands, all still closed, and the apple-trees had white roses. Spring was hastening everywhere. I came in sight of the pink house. She was alone in the road and she took all the sunshine for herself. I hesitated, I went by—my steps slackened heavily—I stopped, and returned towards the door. Almost in spite of myself I went in.
At first—light! A square of sunshine glowed on the red tiled floor of the kitchen. Casseroles and basins were shining brightly.
She was there! Standing by the sink she was making a streak of silver flow into a gleaming pail, amid the luminous blush of the polished tiles and the gold of the brass pans. The greenish light from the window-glass was moistening her skin. She saw me and she smiled.
I knew that she always smiled at us. But we were alone! I felt a mad longing arise. There was something in me that was stronger than I, that ravished the picture of her. Every second she became more beautiful. Her plump dress proffered her figure to my eyes, and her skirt trembled over her polished sabots. I looked at her neck, at her throat—that extraordinary beginning. A strong perfume that enveloped her shoulders was like the truth of her body. Urged forward, I went towards her, and I could not even speak.
She had lowered her head a little; her eyebrows had come nearer together under the close cluster of her hair; uneasiness passed into her eyes. She was used to the boyish mimicry of infatuated men. But this woman was not for me! She dealt me the blow of an unfeeling laugh, and disappearing, shut the door in my face.
I opened the door. I followed her into an outhouse. Stammering something, I found touch again with her presence, I held out my hand. She slipped away, she was escaping me forever—when a monstrous Terror stopped her!
The walls and roof drew near in a hissing crash of thunder, a dreadful hatch opened in the ceiling and all was filled with black fire. And while I was hurled against the wall by a volcanic blast, with my eyes scorched, my ears rent, and my brain hammered, while around me the stones were pierced and crushed, I saw the woman uplifted in a fantastic shroud of black and red, to fall back in a red and white affray of clothes and linen; and something huge burst and naked, with two legs, sprang at my face and forced into my mouth the taste of blood.
I know that I cried out, hiccoughing. Assaulted by the horrible kiss and by the vile clasp that bruised the hand I had offered to the woman's beauty—a hand still outheld—sunk in whirling smoke and ashes and the dreadful noise now majestically ebbing, I found my way out of the place, between walls that reeled as I did. Bodily, the house collapsed behind me. In my flight over the shifting ground I was brushed by the mass of maddened falling stones and the cry of the ruins, sinking in vast dust-clouds as in a tumult of beating wings.
A veritable squall of shells was falling in this corner of the village. A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a little house which had just been broken in two. They did not go close to it because of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here and there all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow. Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault of smoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest.
"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted.
Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones and broken spine, that human house.
It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down. In a single second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, the geometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on the skeleton of a bed. In the upper story an overhanging floor remained, and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked to their places round the table where they were lunching when the lightning fell—a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and a bottle of champagne.
"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferrière."
One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlarged that his head was half open, he was smiling. One arm was raised aloft in the festive gesture which he had begun forever. The other, his fine fair hair untouched, was seated with his elbows on a cloth now red as a Turkey carpet, hideously attentive, his face besmeared with shining blood and full of foul marks. They seemed like two statues of youth and the joy of life framed in horror.
"There's three!" some one shouted.
This one, whom we had not seen at first, hung in the air with dangling arms against the sheer wall, hooked on to a beam by the bottom of his trousers. A pool of blood which lengthened down the flat plaster looked like a projected shadow. At each fresh explosion splinters were scattered round him and shook him, as though the dead man was still marked and chosen by the blind destruction.
There was something hatefully painful in the doll-like attitude of the hanging corpse.
Then Termite's voice was raised. "Poor lad!" he said.
He went out from the shelter of the wall.
"Are you mad?" we shouted; "he's dead, anyway!"
A ladder was there. Termite seized it and dragged it towards the disemboweled house, which was lashed every minute by broadsides of splinters.
"Termite!" cried the lieutenant, "I forbid you to go there! You're doing no good."
"I'm the owner of my skin, lieutenant," Termite replied, without stopping or looking round.
He placed the ladder, climbed up and unhooked the dead man. Around them, against the plaster of the wall, there broke a surge of deafening shocks and white fire. He descended with the body very skillfully, laid it on the ground, and remaining doubled up he ran back to us—to fall on the captain, who had witnessed the scene.
"My friend," the captain said, "I've been told that you were an anarchist. But I've seen that you're brave, and that's already more than half of a Frenchman."
He held out his hand. Termite took it, pretending to be little impressed by the honor.
When he returned to us he said, while his hand rummaged his hedgehog's beard, "That poor lad—I don't know why—p'raps it's stupid—but I was thinking of his mother."
We looked at him with a sort of respect. First, because he had gone up and then because he had passed through the hail of iron and won. There was no one among us who did not earnestly wish he had tried and succeeded in what Termite had just done. But assuredly we did not a bit understand this strange soldier.
A lull had come in the bombardment. "It's over," we concluded.
As we returned we gathered round Termite and one spoke for the rest.
"You're an anarchist, then?"
"No," said Termite, "I'm an internationalist. That's why I enlisted."
"Ah!"
He tried to throw light on his words. "You understand, I'm against all wars."
"All wars! But there's times when war's good. There's defensive war."
"No," said Termite again, "there's only offensive war; because if there wasn't the offensive there wouldn't be the defensive."
"Ah!" we replied.
We went on chatting, dispassionately and for the sake of talking, strolling in the dubious security of the streets which were sometimes darkened by falls of wreckage, under a sky of formidable surprises.
"All the same, isn't it chaps like you that prevented France from being prepared?"
"There's not enough chaps like me to prevent anything; and if there'd been more, there wouldn't have been any war."
"It's not to us, it's to the Boches and the others that you must say that."
"It's to all the world," said Termite; "that's why I'm an internationalist."
While Termite was slipping away somewhere else his questioner indicated by a gesture that he did not understand. "Never mind," he said to us, "that chap's better than us."
Gradually it came about that we of the squad used to consult Termite on any sort of subject, with a simplicity which made me smile—and sometimes even irritated me. That week, for instance, some one asked him, "All this firing—is it an attack they're getting ready?"
But he knew no more than the rest.