Wooden Crosses

 

By Roland Dorgeles

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

 

 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER..................................... PAGE
1. I.--BROTHERS IN ARMS . . . . 1
2. II.--IN THE SWEAT OF THY BROW . . 23
3. III.--THE RED PENNON . . . . 33
4. IV.--GOOD DAYS . . . . 68
5. V.--VIGIL . . 88
6. VI.--THE MILL WITH NO SAILS . . 117
7. VII.--IN THE CAFÉ DE LA MARINE . . 168
8. VIII.--MOUNT CALVARY . . . 183
9. IX.--MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE . . 206
10. X.--OUR LADY OF THE RAG-PICKERS . 209
11. XI.--VICTORY . . . . . 234
12. XII.--IN THE GARDEN OF THE DEAD . 276
13. XIII.--THE HOUSE WITH THE WHITE BOUQUET . . 297
14. XIV.--LOVE'S OWN WORDS. . . . 310
15. XV.--EN REVENANT DE MONTMARTRE . 322
16. XVI.--THE HERO'S RETURN . . . 375
17. XVII.--AND NOW IT IS OVER . . . 396

 

 

 

Wooden Crosses

 

CHAPTER I

BROTHERS IN ARMS

 

ALTHOUGH flowers were already scarce at this season of the year, none the less there had been found enough to bedeck all the rifles in the company, and, as rich in blossoms as a cemetery, the battalion, drums and fifes at its head, had poured helter-skelter across the town between two mute hedgerows of wide-eyed onlookers.

With songs and tears and laughing and drunkards' quarrellings and heart-rending good-byes they had gone on board their train. All night they had rolled along, had eaten their sardines and emptied their water-bottles by the wretched glimmer of a single candle; then, tired of their loud talk, they had gone to sleep, heaped up one against another, heads on shoulders, their legs intermingled with one another.

Dawn had awakened them. Hanging out their carriage doors, they scanned the villages, from which the early morning smoke was rising, for traces of the recent fighting. Man hailed man from carriage to carriage.

"Talk about a war; not as much as a spire smashed up!"

Then the houses opened their eyes, the roadways came to life, and finding voice once more to shout facetious love-makings, they flung their withered flowers at the women who were on the platform at every station, waiting the unlikely return of their vanished sailormen. At every halt they eased themselves and filled the water-bottles. And at length, about ten o'clock, they detrained at Dormans, stupefied and bruised.

A pause of an hour for soup, and they went off by the road--no drums and fifes, no flowers, no waving handkerchiefs--and reached the village where our regiment was resting, close up behind the lines.

There it was just like a great fair; their weary flock was broken up into little groups--one to a company--and the quartermasters rapidly marked off for each a section or squad, which they must hunt up from farm to farm, like shelterless tramps, reading on every door the big white numbers marked in chalk.

Bréval, the corporal, who was coming out from the grocer's shop, found the three that were for us as they were dragging along in the street, crushed under their overladen packs, in which brand-new camp utensils shone with an insolent brilliancy.

"Third company, fifth squad? I'm the corporal. Come on; we're billeted down at the end of the dear old town."

When they came into the courtyard it was Fouillard, the cook, who gave the warning.

"I say, lads, there's the new chums coming."

And flinging down in front of the blackened ashlar of his rustic fireplace the armful of paper he had just fetched up out of the cellar, he examined the new comrades.

"You've not let yourself be cheated," he said solemnly to Bréval. "They're as fine as new pins."

All of us had got up and were ringing round the three bewildered soldiers with a curious group. They stared at us and we stared at them, without a word spoken. They were arriving from behind, arriving from the towns. Yesterday they had still been walking along real streets seeing women, trains, shops; yesterday they were still living the lives of men. And we took stock of them wonderingly, enviously, as though they had been travellers disembarking from strange legendary lands.

"And so, you lads, they're not bothering themselves too much back there?"

"And dear old Panama," asked Vairon, "what are they up to there?"

They on their side eyed us hard, as though they had fallen among savages. Everything must have astonished them in this first meeting, our baked faces, our widely incongruous get-up; Papa Hamel's imitation otter-skin cap; the filthy, once white neckerchief Fouillard wore knotted about his neck; Vairon's trousers, stiff and shining with grease; the cape Lagny wore, the liaison orderly, who had stitched an astrachan collar on to a zouave's hood; some in a "rag-picker's" round jacket, some in artillery tunics--each and everyone accoutred according to his own fashion; fat Bouffioux, who wore his identification disc in his képi, as Louis XI. wore his medals; a machine gunner with his metal shoulder-pieces and his iron gauntlet that made him look like a man-at-arms from Crécy; little Bélin with his head thrust up to the ears in an old dragoon's cap; and Broucke, "the lad from oop north," who had cut puttees for himself out of green rep curtains.

Sulphart alone had remained aloof out of dignity, perched upon a cask, where he was peeling potatoes with the serious, concentrated air he always assumed to go through the simplest acts of everyday existence. Scratching in his flaming bristle beard, he turned his head with a negligent air, and gazed with affected nonchalance at one of the three newcomers, a quite young fellow with a sullen look, beardless or clean-shaven--impossible to tell which--wearing a fine fancy képi and laden with a broad satchel made of moleskin.

"He's a real dandy lad, with his little cap like a cat's-meat dish!" scoffed Sulphart first of all half to himself.

Then as the other set down his kit, he discovered the satchel. Then he broke out.

"Hi! old boy!" he exclaimed; "did you have your little game-bag made special to order for going up into the trenches? If you had a stray idea that the Boches wouldn't mark you down as much as you wanted, you might perhaps have brought along a little flag and tootled on a trumpet."

The new chum had straightened himself up, annoyed, with a frown making a bar across his obstinate little forehead. But all at once, put out of countenance by the jeering attitude of the old hand, he turned his head away and started to blush. The redhead was quite satisfied with his flattering success for his joke. He descended from his lofty throne, and, just to prove that he had no intention of savaging a comrade who was not responsible, he shifted his strictures higher up to the military powers whose every act and deed, according to him, were dictated by pure foolishness and a manifest desire to harass the soldier-man.

"I'm not saying this for you--you don't know any better yet--but those idiots that make you rub the dixies up with sabre-paste so that they may shine better. Do you fancy they don't all deserve to be shot? . . . Do they think we don't make a good enough target without that? Here, chuck us over your bag. I'll blacken it with burnt cork, and will run your bottles, your dixies, and the whole bag o' tricks through straw smoke--there's nothing better than that."

Lemoine, who was never more than a single pace away from Sulphart, shrugged his shoulders slowly.

"You're never going to drive these poor blighters daft already with your flash patter," said he reproachfully in his slow, dragging voice. "Let them alone, anyway, till they at least get well off the train."

The newcomer of the white satchel had taken his seat on a wheelbarrow. He seemed quite exhausted. Black runnels of sweat had traced bracketing lines from his temples to the lower part of his cheeks. He unrolled his puttees but did not venture to take off his boots--fine shooting-boots with extra wide welts.

"My heel is all skinned," he said to me. "My boot must be full of blood. I'm carrying such a weight."

Lemoine weighed his kit.

"That's a heavy one for sure," said he. "What on earth have you managed to bung into it? . . . Have you been putting in paving-stones?"

"Just what I was told to put in."

"It's the cartridges that weigh heavy," put in the corporal. "How many did they give you?"

"Two hundred and fifty. . . . but I haven't got them in my pack."

"Where are they, then?"

"In my satchel. You see, I like it better like that. Suppose we were attacked all of a sudden."

"Attacked?"

The others stared at him in amazement. Then they all started to laugh with one accord, a huge laugh that they exaggerated still further, stifling, gesticulating, exchanging heavy slaps on the shoulder like caresses delivered with washerwomen's beetles.

"Attacked. . . . that's what he said! There's a bloke that's got them again! . . ."

"No, no. He's got the wind up . . ."

"Attacked, that's what he said. . . . He's crazy. . . . Put the dogs on him! . . ."

This vast candour made us laugh till we were like to choke. Papa Hamel laughed till he cried. Fouillard, for his part, was not laughing. He shrugged his shoulders, hostile all at once, already looking askance at this soldier who was much too clean and who spoke much too politely.

"A lad with dibs who means to come them over us," said he to Sulphart.

The redhead, bent only on talking more than anybody else, was considering the newcomer with compassion.

"But, my poor lad," said he, "you don't really suppose we are fighting that way now? That was all right for the first month. We don't fight any more now--maybe you'll never be fighting."

"Sure enough," said Lemoine, backing him up, "you won't fight; but you'll jabber about it all the same."

"You'll never fire a cartridge," prophesied Broucke, the ch'timi with the child's eyes.

The newcomer made no answer, doubtless thinking that the old hands were trying to pull his leg. But with his ear cocked, instead of listening to Sulphart's discourse, he was hearkening to the big gun shaking the very sky with its big bellow, and he would fain have been over there already, on the far side of the blue line of hills, in the unknown plain where they were playing out the game of war with its fragrance of danger.

. . . . .

The newcomer introduced himself to me. "Gilbert Demachy. . . . I was doing law. . . ."

And I made myself known.

"Jacques Larcher. I am a writer. . . ."

From his first appearance I knew that Gilbert would be my friend; I knew it at once from his voice, his speech, his ways. Before very long I was saying "vous" to him, and we talked of Paris. In short, I was finding someone with whom I could discourse of our books, our theatres, our cafés, of pretty girls breathing perfume. The very names I was pronouncing made me live over again for a moment all that lost happiness. I remember that Gilbert, as he sat on his barrow, had his shoeless feet on a newspaper by way of carpet. We talked on and on excitedly.

"You remember . . . Do you remember? . . ."

The boys gave the newcomers a hand in installing themselves in the stables where the squad had their sleeping-quarters, and piled their kits with ours in the manger. When they had finished, Gilbert held out two five-franc notes to stand drinks.

"That's that coming it over us," growled Fouillard jealous.

The others, full of gratitude, went back to the stable to make ready a place for the new comrade. They tossed up his straw in armfuls to freshen it, and made him a ledge round his feet. Broucke had taken respectful possession of Demachy's rubber pillow, and was amusing himself by inflating it, like a plaything, with a secret fear of wearing it out. Those who must needs change place in order to make room for the others were making the necessary move, and mutually stealing each other's straw.

"Here, you, big belly," said Fouillard to Bouffioux, "you're to sleep up above in the loft. Seeing that I'm sleeping just below you, take care you don't drop down on top of me in the night with your boots on my dial; I don't sleep too sound."

Sulphart never let go of the newcomer, bewildering him with useless advice and ridiculous tips, partly from natural good-nature, partly in return for his standing treat, but most of all to make himself important. Everybody was gay, as if they had already had their drink; Vairon in his shirt started to act the strong man in the fair, calling out his patter in a fat, common voice that had the true smack of the baffler. Ranged all about him, we took the place of the crowd. Jealous of the hit he was making, Sulphart took Lemoine by the sleeve.

"Come with me."

"Why the deuce should I go with you?" said Lemoine, always ready to oppose the redhead before falling in with him.

"Come along!"

Protesting the while, Lemoine followed him to the staircase. The notary's house, the stable of which we were humbly occupying, was a handsome rustic habitation with a high cap of slates, corbels of stucco, and a curiously painted sundial that showed noon precisely on the stroke of ten o'clock.

It stood to receive its guests at the top of a wide stone stair, and its newly painted shutters were of the same green as young leaves. They had remained shut since the beginning of the war. The owners had fled with the advance of the Germans, without having had time to save anything, and they had never come back. The baggage-master had at one time installed his quarters in it, but as a shell one fine morning opened a new bull's-eye window in the front, he had thought it prudent to remove himself to the other side of the district.

We had been definitely and specifically forbidden to set foot inside the house, every door of which was bolted and barred. Morache, the adjutant, who delighted in spoiling us with this kind of compromise, had forthwith announced that whoever transgressed the order would get a dozen bullets in his hide, without counting the coup de grâce to finish him. That put it in Sulphart's mind to pay a visit to the villa. Now he knew it in its every nook and corner, delicately opening the doors with great kicks when an adroit leverage with a bayonet stump proved insufficient.

He brought Lemoine to the first floor, into a large room with light-coloured hangings.

"Here's what we want," said he, opening the wardrobe.

And flinging out linen and dresses pell-mell on to the carpeted floor, rummaging in drawers, clearing the shelves, he took his choice.

"I'm going to get myself up like a girl, and you'll be a man. Do you twig, donkey-face?"

Time to tear a few bodices in unsuccessful tryings-on, and they were able to admire themselves in the long mirror, transformed to a Shrove Tuesday bridal pair. When they made their appearance in the courtyard, arm-in-arm, there was one brief moment of stupefied wonder, and then a wild clamour greeted them.

"Hurrah for the wedding!" yelled Fouillard first of all.

The others yelled and shouted louder, and the whole squad, howling with delight, surrounded the two figures of fun. Sulphart had pulled on over his red trousers a pretty pair of lady's drawers trimmed with lace, that showed his broad crimson behind through its opening. He had donned a kind of white dressing-jacket, and on his bristling collier's head he had set a bridal wreath all awry, made of slightly yellowing orange-blossom--the wreath of the lawyer's wife, that had been reposing under a glass shade. Lemoine, who was not laughing, but had rather the careworn look of a soldier on duty, had been satisfied with a Scotch kilt, a free-and-easy get-up whose regrettable lack of reticence he subdued by a frock-coat with satin lapels, and an orthodox tall hat that had been sedulously brushed the wrong way as a preliminary.

Little Broucke, in a state of happy amaze, was prancing behind them as if he was at a village festival.

"I'm off to the wedding!" he cried.

Singing and shouting, everybody started to dance, accompanied by Fouillard, who fancied he was providing music by banging on the black bottom of his pot with a bayonet hilt.

"Hurrah for the bride!" we all repeated in chorus.

Bréval's thin face was widened by a happy grin. All the same, he was trying to quiet us down.

"Not so loud! Good Lord! one of the officers will hear you."

Vairon had taken Sulphart round the waist, and was dancing a java with all the airs and graces of a village hop; while Lemoine, imagining himself at the local fête, was cutting pigeon's-wings and clapping his hobnailed heels together.

"And the feast goes on. Hurrah for the Mayor!" yelled the cook, who was vainly trying to wash his black hands by rubbing them in his perspiring forehead.

They were hopping one behind the other, like a farandole, and laughing like urchins. The new chum followed at the tail, halting and tripping, holding on to Lagny by the hood. Sulphart, with his mouth dry as ashes, was the first to break away from the ring.

"Good lord, we're choking here! And that other joker who isn't coming back with the wine. So long as he doesn't let Morache grab him."

The thought of such a catastrophe halted the dancers.

"And now would be just the moment for a cherry drink," mourned Vairon.

"But someone else can go and buy more," said Demachy, producing two further notes. "I've laughed too much, I could do very well with a drink."

Respectfully or jealously, all the comrades looked on as the new chum opened his purse of fine leather, and Broucke was so overcome that he said, "Thank you," when he took the money.

Fouillard, who had forgotten all about his stew, had flung himself down on all fours before his blackened fire, and was puffing and blowing with might and main on the ashes, without raising a single spark out of them.

"Go and get some paper," he begged; "this bitch of wet wood won't catch."

Somebody made his way down into the cellar and brought up a pile of many-coloured papers, which he flung down near the fireplace. Stray leaves flew about, white and blue, mostly of the same shape and size. They were the notary's papers. The flame as it flickered up made them flutter, and for a moment it seemed as though there could be deciphered, even in the fire itself, the fine round legal script and the insertions of peasant handwriting.

"I think that's a bit thick, I do," said Lemoine in his simple voice. "Those are things that should be kept. . . . Suppose somebody was burning my old folk's bits of paper for their land; I'd have him behind bars for it."

"Shut your jaw!" coughed Fouillard out of the smoke. "It was you yourself that wouldn't let the door be burned, and made us go and hunt for this filthy rubbish of green wood that won't catch. As if it wasn't wartime!"

"For sure it's wartime," said little Bélin approvingly. He had planned to make himself a waistcoat out of a frock-coat, and was very carefully cutting away the skirts.

"That's true, we are making war," repeated the new chum, clinking glasses with Broucke.

And looking at Sulphart in his drawers of fine lawn, he began to laugh.

"Nobody would think of it," said he. "There's lots of fun up at the front. I was certain I wouldn't be nearly as bored as in barracks."

Bréval, whose hollow face had resumed his two deep lines of anguish down his cheeks, looked at him and shook his head.

"You don't suppose that it's like this every day, do you? You'd be very far out if you did, you know."

His nose buried in his cup, Fouillard was guffawing. Sulphart the sympathetic only shrugged his shoulders.

"That's not so certain," said he.

"If you had struck Charleroi like me," said Lagny to him, Lagny with his shrivelled old woman's face, "you wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get back to the front."

"And all the same you weren't in the retreat, you weren't," interrupted Vairon. "I take my oath that was no rest-camp."

"Aye, that was the stiffest of all, that was," agreed Lemoine.

"And the Marne?" asked Demachy.

"The Marne, that was nothing at all," said Sulphart decidedly. "It was during the retreat that we went through it most. That was where you learnt to know a man."

They were all the same. The retreat, that was the strategic operation they were proudest of, the one action they boasted immoderately of having shared in; it was the starting-point and foundation of all their yarns: the retreat, the terrible forced march from Charleroi to Montmirail, without halts, without food, without objective; the regiments all mixed up together, zouaves and infantry, chasseurs and engineers; wounded men, bewildered and staggering, pallid stragglers that the gendarmes bowled over; the kits and equipments flung into the ditches; one-day battles, always desperate, sometimes victorious; Guise, where the German drew back; sleep deep as a stone snatched on the bank or on the road, in spite of the waggons that thundered by, crushing the sleepers' feet; grocer's shops looted, the poultry-yards they emptied, the machine gunners without mules, dragoons without horses, blacks without chiefs; the mildewed bread that men snatched from one another; the roads blocked with covered carts and bullock-waggons, with women and children all in tears; the native troops dragging goats after them, the villages shooting up in flames, the bridges that were blown up, the comrades that must needs be abandoned all bloody and foundered; and all the time, harassing the tragic column, the Boche cannon that barked without stopping. The retreat. . . . In their mouths it took on all the air and semblance of victory.

"I take my oath that when you read on the milestones, 'Paris, 60 kilomètres,' it gave you a funny feeling."

"Especially the lads of Panama," said long Vairon.

"And then after that," wound up Sulphart carelessly, like the commonplace epilogue of a thrilling story, "after that came the Marne."

"Do you remember the little melons at Tilloy? . . . Nice lot we managed to stuff in!"

"Aye, and the buckets of wine when we came into Gueux."

"I won't forget, for my part, the sausages at Montmirail. . . . You couldn't move but the big shells were on your tracks. . . . Ah! the swine!"

Demachy had resumed his grave look, and was eyeing these men with envy.

"I should have liked well to be there," said he, "to be in a victory."

"Sure it was a victory," conceded Sulphart, who was turning his wreath round and round in his fingers like a cap. "If you had been there you'd have been bowled over like the others, and nothing more. Ask the lads what they got at Escardes. . . . Only you people shouldn't talk without knowing. . . . All the blighters that wrote their muck about it in the papers, they'd have done better to keep their mouths shut. I was there myself--yes, and I know how it all happened. Well, we went more than fifteen days without touching our pay, from the end of August. Then after the last hot time, they paid us the lot in one go: they bunged fifteen sous at every man jack of us. That's the mere truth. And so if you see any blighters that talk to you about the Marne, you've only got to tell them one thing: that the Marne was a show that brought in fifteen sous to the lads that pulled it off. . . ."

. . . . .

Night falls speedily in November. With darkness came the cold, and over there in the trenches rifle-fire had waked up at the hour of the owl's awakening. We had eaten our meal in the stable, crouched and squatting on the straw, some perched up on the mangers with their legs dangling.

The old hands were telling complicated and brutal stories with the appropriate "and so thens" and "you remember nows," essential to the due ordering of a tale. But the newcomers, whose legs they were trying to pull, whom they meant to amaze, were no longer listening: they were half asleep, with wandering eyes and drooping chins.

"Time to go to bed, lads," said Bréval, unlacing his boots. "These boys have spent last night in the train."

Everybody went to his place with the docility of horses that knew their corner. Lemoine hesitated to trample on the fine carpet of fresh straw.

"That's not bad. . . . wheat that hasn't been thrashed. . . ."

Carefully, as he did everything, little Bélin made his bed ready. First he spread out his strip of tent canvas; then by way of a pillow, he thrust his satchel under the straw. To keep his feet warm, he slipped them into the sleeves of his vest; then he rolled himself up into his wide blanket folded in two, and very neatly, like a fisherman casting his drag-net, he threw his overcoat over his legs. By that time there was nothing to be seen but a little patch of a highly satisfied face through the opening of the knitted mountain-helmet. Bélin had retired for the night.

Demachy had watched every move, but not with the same admiration as I had; rather in dismay. Then he looked at the others getting ready for the night, with stupor, a kind of culminating terror. At the third who started to take off his boots, he sat upright on his little corner of straw.

"But you surely won't keep everything shut up here!" he exclaimed. "At least you'll be leaving the door open?"

The others looked at him in astonishment.

"No, indeed; you must be hot stuff," growled Fouillard. "The door open! Do you want us to perish of cold?"

The thought of sleeping there, huddled on straw with these unwashed fellows, disgusted him, terrified him. He dared not say so, but in a panic he watched his next neighbour, Fouillard, who, having methodically and slowly unrolled his muddy puttees, was pulling off his heavy boots.

"But it's really most unwholesome, you know," he insisted; "besides, there's this fresh straw. It ferments. . . . There have been cases of suffocation, often. . . . That's been known. . . ."

"Don't worry about suffocation."

The others were ready to sleep, lying close to keep themselves warm; Sulphart was trying to reach his boot to knock over the candle that was guttering at its last gasp. Overwhelmed, the new chum said no more. On his knees before the manger, as though he were praying to the god of cattle, he fell to hunting for a flask in his satchel.

"'Ware smash!" cried Sulphart, and his big shoe neatly thrown, swept the candle off to the dark.

"Good-night, everybody."

Demachy, feeling and fumbling, rolled himself up awkwardly in his blanket, and with his face entrenched in his handkerchief well sprinkled with eau-de-Cologne, he lay without moving.

The perfume quickly spread throughout the stable. First of all Vairon uttered his astonishment.

"But there's a smell! What on earth is it?"

"It stinks like a barber."

"That's because we're going to be suffocated," jeered Fouillard, who had tumbled to what was happening.

And turning over on his left side, so as not to catch the smell, he grumbled.

"He's got all that goes to a tart, that blighter!"

The new chum made no answer. The others held their tongues, wholly indifferent. Near us sleep was about to spread his brooding wings over everything. Nevertheless, in the darkness there were voices still running on.

"That makes fifteen days now that she hasn't written to me," confided Bréval to a pal. "She's never been so long as that before. . . . That simply torments me, you know."

One of the newcomers was questioning Vairon, whose rich public-house voice I recognized.

"When you go into rest-camp you're well received, eh?"

"Oo, well, they don't prod us with pitchforks, anyway; that's about all there is to it."

Sulphart, to send himself to sleep, was softly blackguarding Lemoine, who had promised to find some rum and had come back empty-handed.

"You'll show me the way to ferret out good places, you with the face fit to crush rice," he was mumbling. "Talk about an egg. . . . a billiard-ball. . . ."

Sleep bore them away, one after another, mingling their breathing, measured or irregular, the even respiration of a child and the outcries of troubled dreaming.

Outside, the night lay in wait, hearkening to the trenches. This evening they were quiet. You could hear neither the dull, all-shaking sound of the cannon, nor the dry cracking of rifle-fire. Only a machine gun was firing, round after round, without hate; you would have said a madhouse wife beating her carpet. Round about the village lay the heavy silence that broods over a freezing countryside. But suddenly, on the roadways, a deep rumbling awoke, increased, thickened, rolled towards us, and the walls began to shake. . . . The service lorries.

They rolled on heavily, with a jolting clamour of ironmongery. How I would have liked to go to sleep with that familiar rolling roar in my ears and in my soul! Not so long ago the motorbusses passed like that under my windows and held me awake, late, late into the night. How I loathed them in those days! And now, without holding any grudge, they had nevertheless come to see me in my exile. As once upon a time, they made me start and quiver, half asleep and half awake, and I felt the walls shiver and tremble. They were coming to cradle me to sleep.

"It's queer, to-night there's no sound of their hard jolting on the pavement, nor rattling windows, nor belated passers-by calling them to stop. Their noise is no more than a snoring purr inside my drowsy head. They grind, they bump, they are gone. . . . Adieu, Paris!"

 

 

CHAPTER II

IN THE SWEAT OF THY BROW

 

WITH a great pile of packets in front of him like a pedlar's pack, the harassed quartermaster was calling out the post in the middle of a regular mob of soldiers, who were all plying their elbows and trampling on one another's feet. It was just at our door, between the the communal washhouse--so tiny that there would hardly have been room for three washerwomen under its sloping shelter roof--and the notary's house, which wore a red scarf of virginia creeper crosswise on its front. We had clambered up on the stone seat and were listening attentively.

"Maurice Duclou, first section."

"Killed at Courcy," cried somebody.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, his mates saw him fall in front of the church. . . . He'd caught a bullet. Now, . . well, I wasn't there myself."

On the corner of the envelope the quartermaster wrote in pencil, "Killed."

"Edouard Marquette."

"He must be killed too," said a voice.

"You're a ninny!" protested another. "The night they said he was dropped he went on a water-party with me."

"Then," asked the quartermaster, "he would be in hospital? But we've not had his papers.

"My idea is that he was evacuated by another regiment."

"No, no, he was wounded; the Boches must have collared him."

"It's a great pity--it's always the ones that have seen nothing have most chat."

Everybody was talking at once in an uproar of opposing statements and insulting contradictions. The quartermaster, hard-pushed and in a hurry, brought them into agreement.

"I don't give a curse. I'll mark him off 'Missing.' André Brunet, thirteenth squad."

"Here for him."

The others were going on disputing in lowered tones; the men in the hindmost ranks were shouting to them to be quiet, and nobody could hear anything. Bréval listened through it all, anxiously listened, and when a name sounded like his, had it repeated.

"Isn't it for me, this time? Corporal Bréval?"

But it was never for him, and turning his poor vexed face to us, he explained.

"She writes so badly that there might be nothing queer about it, eh?"

As the heap lessened his lips tightened. When the last one was called out, he went away, heart and hands empty alike. Just as he was going indoors he turned to us.

"By the way, Demachy, your turn on fatigue. You will take a bag and go to fetch the rations."

"What? The new chum going for rations! . . . You're making game of us."

And Sulphart, all indignant, left his particular group of pals to come up to the corporal.

"A lad that's just come, who fancies that carrots grow at the fruiterer's, that's the best you can find to send for the rations! Ah, you're up to tricks. . . . If every fool could swim you wouldn't need a boat to cross the Seine."

"If you want to go I'm not hindering you," replied Bréval calmly.

"Sure, I'll go," shouted Sulphart. "I'll go because I don't want the squad to get the same food as wooden horses, and because that lad looks to me as if he could choose a bit of beef about as well as I could say a Mass."

Demachy, who ever since he arrived had been overwhelmed by the cries, the noisy demands, and brutal gaities of the redhead, made an attempt to rehabilitate himself.

"I beg your pardon, I assure you that I shall know what to do very well. In barracks . . ."

He was going the wrong way about it. The mere words "active service" or "barracks" was enough to send Sulphart crazy, inasmuch as he had spent his three years in stubbornly defending the cause of right against vindictive Adjutants and officers of malevolent nature, who preferably sent good soldiers to sleep in the police station the night before leave. Anger choked him.

"Barracks! . . . He fancies he's still in barracks, that lark-skull! He's just come out of the depot and he would like to put it all over us again! . . . Well then, get on with it, go to the distribution, see the rations; they'll have a good laugh. The lads of the squad are always sure to be in a nice fix and no mistake. I don't care for myself, I'll manage all right."

And to show quite clearly that he was no longer one with a squad being led to the abyss by an incapable corporal, he sauntered off towards the church, whistling a little tune to himself.

The squads were being mustered when Gilbert came into the courtyard where the quartermaster had had unloaded, a few paces from the manure tank, the quarters of frozen meat which a man was now cutting up with an axe, potatoes, bully-beef, a burst sack from which trickled a thin stream of rice, and biscuits, which the youngsters were carrying off in their aprons to make pig's-meat with.

Stooping over the cask of wine, which they were tapping to make sure that it was properly full, those who were waiting their turn were arguing as to the number of bidons that would fall to each squad, and some of them were already clamouring that that wasn't their proper figure. Lentils were given out, sweet potatoes, coffee in the berry. Taken by surprise, Demachy remarked:

"But we have no coffee-mill."

The others stared at him and laughed. Behind the group someone bellowed:

"You can go on enjoying yourselves! That's the lad they send to get the rations for a whole squad!"

It was Sulphart, who had come out of curiosity, just to look on. Heavily embarrassed, his cap full of sugar, his pockets stuffed with coffee, his bag weighed down full of lentils, Gilbert was at his wit's end, with no notion where he could put his rice. As everybody was laughing round him, and the quartermaster shouting, "Come along, here's your lot; don't you want to have it to eat?" he lost his head and emptied it anywhere he could --into his bag along with the lentils. Then Sulphart burst out:

"Here, that's a bit too much! . . . You see the cookie's phiz if he'll like sorting out his rice and his bugs! . . . Lord, what an army! And they talk. about hoofing the Boches out. What a joke! . . ."

Thoroughly furious, the new chum turned round, red all over.

"Look here, you shut up. All you had to do was to come here yourself."

Sulphart, without turning a hair, waited for the remainder of the distribution. He watched the corporal on duty throwing down great chunks of meat, some of an appetizing fresh redness, others thickly veined with tallow, on a muddied piece of tent canvas.

"We're going to draw lots for them," said the corporal.

"No!" protested several squads, "there will be some faking about it. . . . Share it out according to the number of men."

"There are fourteen of us in the second squad; I want that piece."

"And what about us, in the first . . . ."

All stooping over the stall, hands stretched out, they were disputing in advance over the food, all shouting at once, under the impassive eye of the quartermaster.

"That will do with your howling," he said at last. "I'll distribute it. Third squad. . . . that piece. Fourth squad . . . Fifth squad."

He had not time to finish, nor to point out the piece intended with the end of his stick. With a roar Sulphart hurled himself into the group.

"No!" he shouted, "I'm not having any. . . . You want us all in the squad to die of hunger. They're taking advantage of its being a lad that isn't up to snuff to do us in the eye."

The others hooted him, the quartermaster would fain have driven him away, but clean beyond all restraint, wildly waving his arms, he shouted louder than them all.

"I won't have that piece at all. . . . I'll tell the Captain, and I'll tell the Colonel too, if I have to. . . . It's always the same lot that get the best. . . . I want my proper share. . . . The fifth squad is the one with the most men in it. . . ."

"There are only eleven of you."

"That's a lie! . . . We'll make a complaint. . . . That's nothing but bone!"

He was uttering cry upon cry, now shrill, now hoarse, now terrifying and now plaintive, thrusting one back and jostling others over. Those who had already been served were hugging their share to their hearts, as the mothers of Bethlehem must have held their babes on the night of Herod's slaughter. By good luck the quartermaster held out a chunk to him, taken at random, and at once he shut up completely, his calm recovered immediately, his anger all harmless and disarmed since he was served. He turned then to Demachy, while the distribution went on.

"You see," he said with a friendly air, "you've got the idea all right, but you don't give tongue enough. If you want to be better served than the others you've got to give tongue, even without knowing anything about anything: that's the only way to have your rights."

Gilbert Demachy listened without any answer, amused by this big brawler with his bristle beard; his attentive silence pleased Sulphart.

"Of course that blockhead of a Bréval never told you to fetch the bucket or the bottles for the pinard. What do you think you're going to carry it back in--in your boots? Good joy I thought something about it. There's a bucket, and I brought a can in case there might be brandy. . . . It's no matter, a corporal that doesn't go himself to the distribution; you only see that with the fifth. . . . He stayed behind once more writing to his old woman. . . . Blitherer!"

Sulphart did not deign to have any truck with the distribution of tins of bully-beef, a commodity for which he had nothing but contempt; but all the same he cried, "There's one short!" just to show that he was still on the spot.

"Now for the wine," said the quartermaster.

Sulphart dashed forward first of all, and as long as the distribution lasted he never raised his head; while a bucket was filling he groaned and moaned and uttered little cries of anguish, as if it was his heart's blood that was being run off.

"That'll do! . . . That'll do!" he cried. "It holds more than the proper measure. . . . Thief!"

But the others, who were accustomed to it all, endured the insults and kept the wine. His turn came at length, and he got his bucket filled up to the very brim, swearing that six new chums had turned up, that the corporal was going to lodge a complaint, that they had already been curtailed the day before, that the Captain. . . .

"Here, and bung off," said the exasperated quartermaster, pouring out a last quarter of a litre for him. "Lord, what a life!"

Highly pleased with himself, Sulphart went back like a conqueror, his bucket in one hand and his bag on his shoulder. They passed through the village, where the idle soldiers were roaming in quest of a pub, and on the way he tried to inculcate into the new chum the first principles of cunning and trickery essential for a soldier on campaign.

"Every man for himself, you know. I'd far rather drink other people's drink than have the others drinking mine. . . . It always is the modest folk that lose out."

Halting in a spot where nobody was passing, he dipped his drinking-cup in the bucket and offered it to Gilbert.

"Here," he said, "drink that, you've a right to it."

He had, in a word, drawn up in his own mind, and for his own sole personal guidance, a little treatise on the rights and duties of the soldier, in which it was fully and frankly conceded that the man on ration fatigue had a right to a cup of wine as a perquisite. He drank one too, since he was helping the man on duty, and started off again by so much the lighter. As they walked, he told Gilbert stories, talking in the same breath of his wife, who was a dressmaker; of the battle of Guise; the factory where he had worked in Paris, and of Morache, the Adjutant, a re-enlisted man, our special horror. When they reached cantonments he put down the bucket, taking oath that he had never so much as tasted the wine, and offering to prove it by letting anybody smell his breath; then he went to Demachy again, having taken a fancy to him.

"If I'd had the dibs like you," he said, "and had your education, I swear they wouldn't have seen me coming into the fire like this. I'd have put in for the officers' course, and I'd have gone and spent some months in camp, and then they'd have listed me sub-lieutenant in the middle of 1915. And by that the war'll be over. . . . What I say is, that you didn't know how to swim."

 

 

CHAPTER III

THE RED PENNON

 

FROM break of day the regiment was measuring out the road with its long blue ribbon. There was a thick sound of tramping, voices, and laughter moving forward in the midst of the dust. Untiringly the comrades, elbow to elbow, told one another those hackneyed tales of the regiment, every one like every other one, that you might imagine took place all in the same barracks. They wrangled with one another from rank to rank; head thrown back, they emptied the bidons filled at the halting-place; and as they passed, they challenged the road labourer by the roadside, the peasant in his vineyard, the woman coming back from the field. Now and then they met a gendarme.

"Hi, lad. . . . that's not the way to the trenches."

Nobody gave a thought to the war. Everything breathed devil-may-caredom and gaiety. It was not too hot, the country was bright, and they looked at things with the amused eyes of soldiers on manoeuvres. . . .

Bouffioux' shining face carried black lines, the mark of his fingers and the rills of sweat running down from his cap. He had placed himself alongside Hamel to talk about Havre. They were chumming up over the names of streets and pubs, and for the hundredth time they were astounded not to have known each other as civilians.

"And yet you have a big fat face that nobody could miss," repeated Hamel every time.

Stoutly built, he marched with wide strides; fat Bouffioux, on the contrary, went with little tripping, hurrying steps, and Fouillard, who was marching next behind him, with his dirty neckerchief knotted around his neck, never stopped grumbling.

"Will you walk straight, you fat beast! If only he'd take my mess-pot! . . . Why don't you ever carry it, anyway? . . . You don't mind a bit having a feed. . . . If it was only a scrap of wood he wouldn't carry it, no fear, that pig! . . . You'll be coming looking for soup to-night out of it. . . . We'll see about it. . . ."

The comfortable tallow of the horse-dealer was one of his special hates; Bouffioux was fat and he was thin; was well off, and he a poor man; stayed in the rear while he went up into the trenches.

"No great wonder he has a face like a behind, with all he stuffs into him. . . . The boys don't often get a taste of his parcels. He takes advantage of our being in the trenches to wire into it all by his lonesome. But that won't go on for ever; he's been playing Cuthbert long enough now, he'll have to go up to the trenches."

Bouffioux allowed the insults to pass, but he never went to the trenches. Since the war started, he had plied every trade; there was only one that really went against his grain--ours. He was ready for any mortal thing so as not to get into the trenches. He had only once been fighting, at Charleroi, and he had retained such a terror of it that now he had one idea and only one--to get out of it. He succeeded by dint of as many tricks as he used to employ in old days at the fair to sell a mangy horse. Every twist and turn, he had worn them all out. He had gone through the retreat as cyclist to the paymaster, just knowing enough to stick on the saddle, and constantly running on the flank of the column, shoving his punctured bicycle by hand. He had won the victory of the Marne as telephone operator to the brigade. Since that he had been known as wood-cutter, armourer, army service corps, cobbler. He volunteered for every sort of job, in the most barefaced way, and clung to the place he had usurped until he was hunted out of it. Did anybody want a secretary that only just knew how to read, a carpenter that had never had a plane in his hand, a tailor that couldn't sew, he was on the spot. If a chaplain for the division had been called for, he would have shouted, "Here!" He was determined not to fight, that was the whole thing, and fear taught him every kind of boldness. At the present moment he was standing drinks to all the corporals of the supply train, and sharing his parcels with the sergeant muleteer of the machine guns, who promised to get him attached to the reserve troops. But the Captain would not allow him to leave the company, and Bouffioux bowed a brooding neck beneath the threats of Fouillard.

"Why should you be any more than the others, you big lump! You're going in, I tell you. . . ."

Fouillard, very proud of having been through Montmirail on all fours in a ditch, and very uppish over his title of old soldier, equally hated Demachy, who had too much money and the ways of a toff. So when he was tired of insulting the placid back of Bouffioux, he looked at the new chum, and the thick wrinkle of grease that cut across his cheek hollowed itself in a smile.

"Twig him, if he's not in a lather all right," he grinned.

Gilbert was marching with straining neck, his thumbs passed under the straps, his feet dragging. From halt to halt his pack was getting heavier. And yet he had buckled it on gaily at the start. He had felt a kind of sporting sprightliness under this well-stowed burden. Supple and limber at the knees, he would have liked to sing, to start off at the quick step, with the fifes and drums in front.

But at the end of an hour the pack had already grown heavy. Instead of pushing him forward like at the start, it was turning into a dead weight, and seemed to be holding him, to be plucking him back by the two straps. He jerked his burden back into place with a twist of his shoulder every hundred paces or so, but it soon slipped back again, heavier than ever. His bruised foot had broken out again, his knees had dried up and seized, and now that leaden pack was playing with him, making him stagger like a drunken man. For the first time he was heard swearing, using beastly language, in a little furious voice that he didn't recognize. Chest thrust forward, labouring as if he had had to haul the road along, he panted under his slave-collar:

"I'll chuck the blasted lot in the air at the next halt, and their filthy biscuits. . . ."

At every halt he made an inventory of everything out on the bank, and lightened himself of something--bottles of drugs, a portable filter, a box of powdered beef, a pile of strange, ridiculous objects that his comrades fought for like savages without knowing very clearly what they would do with them. Sulphart meanwhile was carrying half his load for him, his water-bottle, his white satchel full to bursting, and when the day's march was nearing its end, he even took his rifle, the strap of which was sawing into his shoulder. But the little he still had to carry was still too heavy, and at every halt he felt he would go no farther. When the whistles sent them to their kits he would fain not have heard, or that they might have compassion on him and leave him there for an hour, by himself, to let his skin heal over and the fever of his throbbing temples abate. Nevertheless, he always stood up like the others and set off again, limping, more stiff and numb than ever, a pang at every step. The lightened pack was no less heavy, and the unheeding, unconscious milestones added incessantly fresh kilomètres to the already long day's march.

Little by little the noise of the marching troop died down. They were feeling fatigue. "A halt! a halt!" one or another would call out, hiding himself as he did so. Footsore men were falling out and taking off their boots, seated at the foot of the bank. On the edge of the road Barbaroux the doctor, with his four stripes, was giving a consultation, holding in with reins and knees his horse that pawed the ground. Before him, all awkward and embarrassed, a man was standing at attention.

"Hold your tongue!" yelled the doctor, the veins on his temples standing out. "You will march like the rest. . . . I'm your Commanding Officer, d'ye hear? your Commanding Officer! What is it you owe me?"

The poor stupefied foot-slogger stared at him. "You owe me respect," bellowed Barbaroux, jumping in his saddle, "Stand up straight. . . . Hold your hand out. . . . Naturally his hand shakes. . . . All alcoholics, and sons of alcoholics. . . Well, you be off now; the others are marching and you'll march too. . . . And don't let me see you straggling behind, or look out for the sawbones."

At the halt the men took their ease lying stretched at full-length behind a line of piled arms. The newcomers, less hardened of body, now didn't even unbuckle their packs; they lay on their backs, their kit pulled up under their heads like a hard pillow, and felt their weariness shivering through their tortured legs.

"Packs up!"

Off they went again, limping along. They were not laughing now, and they talked much less loudly. The regiment that just now filled the whole dusty road up to the crest of the ridge lost itself in a light steamy haze. Soon the head of the battalion could be discerned no longer; then the company itself wavered through the mist. . Nightfall was at hand, they were entering the realms of dream. The villages were at rest, their day over, and their rustic incense of burning wood rose from their steep and pointed roofs.

In September there had been fighting in this district, and all along the road stood crosses lined up at attention to see us march past.

Near a stream there was grouped a whole cemetery; from each cross flickered a little flag, those children's flags that are bought in the bazaars; and all these little flying flapping flags gave that field of the dead the gay look of a naval squadron all dressed for a fête.

Along beside the ditches ranged their line, casual poor crosses, made with two bits of board or two sticks fixed crosswise. Sometimes a whole section of dead men with never a name, and one single cross to hold them in its keeping. "French soldiers slain on the field of honour," spelled out the regiment. Round the farms, in the middle of fields, they were everywhere to be seen; a whole regiment must have fallen in that place. From the top of the still green slope they watched us pass, and one might have fancied that their crosses leaned over to choose from out our ranks those who must join them on the morrow.

And for all that they were neither sad nor gloomy, those first tombs of the war. Ranged in green, rich gardens, framed in foliage and crowned with ivy, they still assumed the air of bowers to reassure the boys that were going off to fight. Then, apart, in a naked field, a black cross, all by itself, with a grey cap atop.

"A Boche!" cried someone.

And all the newcomers jostled to have a look; it was the first they had seen.

. . . .

In a dull, confused rumbling of half-stifled voices, clinking metal, and foundered feet, the company entered the village, all drowned in darkness and shadow. Not far away the rockets were cleaving the night with the brightness of a city street, and every now and then it was enlivened with red lights or green lights, swiftly quenched, for all the world like luminous signs.

This wartime sky made one think of a holiday night of the fourteenth of July. There was nothing tragic. Only the immense silence.

In the middle of the main street, a burning farm cast over the dismantled roofs a brutal red, like the flares of a country fair, and one was quite surprised not to hear the steam-organs going. Rabbits on fire dashed through the ranks, like little living torches. Then, between two walls on the point of crumbling in, there could be seen, running through the red haze of the conflagration, mute shadows carrying buckets.

"Hurry on! hurry on!" repeated the officers; "they will be firing again."

One fallen against the other, the wounded houses mingled their ruins, and men went stumbling over the scattered rubble. From time to time a front fallen out complete blocked up the street. They cursed their way over this mass of stonework, and the dislocated company formed up again at the double.

Where the village and the country joined, a small boy who could hardly be seen in the darkness was looking for the remains of who knows what among the ruins of his home. He raised his head, watched us pass without a word, and gravely saluted the officer, his little plaster-white paw lifted to his mop of hair.

"Young blighter!" growled Sulphart. "What are they up to out of doors just at the moment of a relief, these little lice? . . . We mustn't ask that. . . . And throw an eye on all these lights signalling. You may be sure the Boches know we're here."

An old woman passed from one yard to the other, hiding a lantern under her apron, both to cover the light and to shelter it from the wind. You might have fancied she carried a star in her bosom.

"There's another one. . . . Hi! old woman . . . that lantern!" shouted Sulphart.

Maroux, who called himself a poacher, groused with him; he saw spies everywhere, did Maroux. The smallest glimmer of a light seemed to him suspicious, and he imagined heaven knows what mysterious and complicated code of night signals between peasants lighting their candles and the enemy headquarters.

Harassed and thrusting out his neck like a horse going uphill, Demachy followed the poacher. When the file halted, he would knock up against his pack and wait in a dull stupor till they went on again. Even his fatigue had vanished; he was a thing extenuate, without will or volition, a thing to be pushed on. His eyes turned towards the front line, he was all the while trying to see the rockets through the gaps between two walls. It was a disillusion for him, this first glimpse of the war. He would fain have been deeply moved, have experienced something, and he kept his eyes stubbornly fixed in the direction of the trenches, to give himself an emotion, to win a little thrill.

But he kept repeating to himself, "This is war. . . . I am seeing war," without managing to rouse any emotion. He felt nothing at all, except perhaps a little surprise. It all seemed to him queer and out of place, that electric fairydom in the midst of the dumb and quiet fields. The few rifle shots that cracked out had an inoffensive air. Even this devastated village did not upset his calm: it was too much like a stage scene. . . . too much the kind of thing you could imagine to yourself. It would have needed cries, tumult, a burst of firing, to animate it all, to give a spirit to things; but this night, this huge silence, this was never war.

And yet, indeed, it was; a harsh and gloomy vigil rather than a battle.

The street came abruptly to an end, cut short by a barricade made of barrows and casks. This had to be traversed man by man, gliding under a plough-beam that caught up the kit on their backs.

"Silence! . . . Fall in again in the field to the left."

The motionless group of soldiers made in the darkness a kind of black vineyard with all the rifles held upright. Only there was the red top of one solitary cigarette piercing the night. It could be seen rising to the lips, glow up, then slowly sink again.

"Eh! that other filthy ruffian who's going to have us all marked down," grumbled somebody. . . . "They'd get their mates killed for a fag, those swine!"

Gilbert had unbuckled his pack and lain down. The earth in the fields was flabby and cold, still moist with the late rains, and that froze his legs through the thin overcoat. Pack under head, his hands slipped into his sleeves, he rested, filling his eyes with the sky. The pressure of the two straps was now burning his shoulders with a first-class blister, and his weariness ran down through all his relaxed limbs.

In the village, on the other side of the barricade, a company which had piled arms was jostling itself over its rations. You could hear orders, disputes, a whole uproar like a market-day. An indignant voice was crying out:

"They must be drunk! . . . In our squad we've had three lots of sugar and nothing to eat. . . ."

Others called to each other: "This way the water party. . . . Heads of squads for wine."

Next it was the machine gunners giving tongue, their mules caught in the hurly-burly. An officer was shouting to quiet things down. "Silence! less row, for the love of God!" All this clamour woke Gilbert, benumbed. He sat up on his elbows.

"Are the Boches still far from here?" he asked.

"No, the other side of the road," replied Sulphart, lying close by him in the damp grass. "You'll see that, by dint of hearing this tow-row, the Boches will start firing into the thick of it. I'd give twenty sous to see all these blankers getting themselves well hammered. . . . Just listen to them letting loose!"

He himself was not shouting now. His big, rowdy voice was prudently lowered; he had even put away his pipe, and was going forward with his back bent, and uneasy. These precautions amazed Gilbert.

"There's no danger here?" he asked.

"No, on the contrary; you listen."

Little tuneful whistling crossed the night, prolonged and dying away like a plucked guitar.

"You hear that? Those are bullets."

Gilbert listened, amused. It gave him pleasure to find that a bullet had this pretty, wasp-like sound. And it never even entered his head that that might be death. At an order sent along in low tones from mouth to mouth, the company dressed, with a long clattering of arms.

"In line at five paces. . . . Rifle in hand . . . no noise."

In the long zigzagging file, the troop dropped to the main road, whose line of trees could be seen standing out lower down. Communication trenches had not yet been dug to lead them down to it.

Beet with its tall tops, and the weeds and grass of the fallow fields, soaked our legs up to the knee, and wreathed wisps found our heavy feet. It was impossible to see anything. The world came to an end a few paces away, black earth and darkened sky melting together. Scarcely could you divine the bent profile of your nearest fellows. Now and then a man would stumble and fall full-length, with a hideous clanging of mess-tin, drinking-cup, and water-bottle. Then would stifled laughter run tittering down the line.

Suddenly Gilbert heard, as it might be, a swift sigh that came swelling up, and on the very instant he saw the long file of men go down with one single movement. He followed suit. A blaze of lightning burst forth with a dreadful shattering noise of copper and iron. The shards came lashing at the ground, shrieking viciously, and the acrid fumes subsided. Gilbert, rising on his knees, his heart dancing, drank in a big lungful of his first shell.

"That smells good," he thought.

Already the others were on their feet and starting off quicker than ever, nearly running. Tossing back the bidon that was knocking against his thighs, he followed Lemoine, who was dragging along a wretched dog at the end of a rope, propping itself back on all its four stiff legs.

"Halt!" was passed down by lowered voices.

The trench was dug just along this side of the road. Three lines of wire protected it, like the greensward of a city square. Under our very feet were murmuring, invisible soldiers, hoisting their packs on to their shoulders.

"They haven't done much bursting themselves to bring the relief," they were grousing. "For sure we'll play their dirty trick back on them."

And with this welcome, the boys went off.

A nice pallid sunshine, proper for Saint Martin. Over the soft pale blue of the sky the clouds were like wisps of shrapnel. A kestrel and a raven were pursuing one another savagely with hammering beaks. A lark was heard singing, ever in the same place, hardly moving at all. It was Sunday.

Over the sandbags the German trenches could be made out, two slender lines, one of them of brown earth, the other white marl. The devasted fields looked like mere waste land, with their ricks and ruin and their tossed and scattered sheaves. By the edge of a roadway an abandoned mowing-machine held up its long workless arms, idle and derelict.

The trench was loafing. Men sauntered about the communication trenches as in the streets of a little town, every nook and corner of which is familiar, and gossiped at the entry of the dug-outs.

Under their shelters the boys were doing odd jobs. Little Bélin was getting his fixed up to his liking, cutting one hole for his candle, a second for his drinking-cup, and another, a bigger one, to slide his feet into. Bréval was writing to his wife, and Broucke was sleeping, the only pleasure he had between grub and grub.

Fouillard was squatted down finishing a tin of bully-beef, administering it to himself in great mouthfuls between his dirty knife and his earthy thumb. Gilbert looked askance at him. He could not like that sickly, dirty creature; everything disgusted him--his voice, his pink eyes, and down to his eternal woollen scarf, with its filthy tassels hanging from it. They were both lying in the same hole, crammed together, side against side, and it was most of all for this that he execrated him.

All the same, the new chum had broken in speedily enough to our brutal life. He now knew how to wash his plate with a fistful of grass, he was beginning to drink our coarse wine with enjoyment, and was not ashamed now to relieve himself in public.

"You're coming on, you're coming on my boy!" Bréval would declare with satisfaction.

Wallowing on the rotting straw in his niche, Sulphart was drowsing away, letting only a slender shaft of light trickle into his half-shut eyes. He pulled and puffed lazily at his pipe with the well-chewed stem, and day-dreamed of Saint Romain's fair, with its balls, its circuses, its lotteries, its shooting-galleries--a whole cycle of explosive delights, all scented with frying and coarse wines.

Not having a watch to keep, they stretched themselves out one after another, wearied with the long night spent in carting corrugated iron. Vairon was growling in a doze, for Lemoine's snoring would not let him sleep. Those who had no den to doze in had lain down in the trench itself, wrapped round in their blankets. In a hole, scolding voices of card-players; all the others were deep in slumber.

Suddenly, sharply, a gust of explosions shook them awake. There was a moment of panic. They rose, came out of their holes, jostled one another to get their rifles, all at once crazed by the deafening thunder of the artillery suddenly let loose.

At the same signal, down the whole of the line our own guns set to work, and in this rending hub-bub you could no longer even hear the shells cleaving through the air. We had hurled ourselves to the loopholes, already dipping into our cartridge-pouches.

At the end of the waste ground that divided the two trench systems, precisely upon the German line, whose sinuous zigzag could still be discerned through the smoke, the shells were hammering with furious blows, making chunks of white trench fly like shavings under a carpenter's plane.

Unstrung, we were running right and left, calling out to one another, giving one another news, without knowing anything whatever.

"It's a Boche attack. . . . That's a barrage."

"No, it's to knock out their machine guns. . . ."

"It appears that the third battalion is going out to carry the wood."

Every shell sent up a long sheaf of earth in a cloud of smoke; those that fell on the wood uprooted whole trees and flung them into the undergrowth, all standing and unbroken like enormous bouquets. Our liaison orderly passed along swiftly, knocking against us as he went.

"Everybody into the dug-outs. It's a half-hour shoot; very possibly they will reply."

No one went back. The whole crowded trench was gazing at the spectacle, and as the German artillery made no answer, the most cautious became heroic. Fouillard even sat up on the parapet so as to miss nothing of the show.

When a well-aimed salvo fetched its four pickaxe blows on to the trench, ripping up a sheaf of earth, of stones and beams, a cry of admiration arose, the delighted clamour that greets a show of fireworks. In the hubbub nothing else could be heard but this happy laughter, this good sound laughter, as if we had been judging the effect of the wooden balls on an Aunt Sally in a village merry-making. Now and then a cry came through the tumult.

"Look, boys, a poilu going up in the air!" howled Vairon with wild, disjointed gestures.

"You're seeing spooks," retorted Lemoine, jealous because he had seen nothing. "That's a stump."

"What of! I tell you it's a Boche, and more than that, he had his hoofs in the air."

Then a big Jack Johnson came along, panting like an express train coming into a railway station, and every straining eye watched for the place it was likely to come down. Then there was an enormous black geyser that belched up, striped and streaked with fire, and then the explosion was heard thundering.

"There's a beauty!" cried the trench.

The wood under the shelling was smoking like a factory. Gesticulating in the middle of the hurly-burly, Sulphart was bawling his delight.

"He that hasn't won is going to win! It's all luck and the player's own fancy. . . . Come along! hurry up, whoever hasn't got his counter! Six for a penny." In one hand he waved imaginary numbers like a cheap-jack at a fair, and his bellowings drowned the row. With a horrible cracking of splintered bones others were bursting still, ripping up the lines of wire like ribbons.

"Boom! The gentleman has won a splendid turkey-poult. Come on, next, please! Have a flutter. Try your luck. . . ."

There was a duller thunder-clap, a shell lit squarely in the trench that threw up a huge spray of earth and stumps.

"This time it is," cried Vairon, who clung to his idea. "I saw the poilu jump. He fell back on to the bank."

The others, who had not yet seen anything, anxiously watched for the next shot with fixed eyes. Demachy, strangely fevered, his fists clenched, was humming a tune to show he was not afraid. One's ears soon get accustomed to this rolling crashing. You can recognize them all by their voice: the seventy-five that cracks in fury, sets off with a whiew, and passes so quick that you can see it burst as soon as you hear it starting; the hundred-and-twenty, out of breath--you would fancy it too much a Weary Willie to finish its journey; the hundred-and-fifty-five, that seems to go sliding along rails; and the big Jack Johnsons, that pass over high up with a tranquil sound of moving waters. The wind dissolving the thick eddying whirls brought a breath sulphur to us, a strong smell of powder. Gilbert breathed it in till he was brimful of it. Now and then you could clearly hear the shell whistle, and then five, ten seconds passed, and it didn't explode, fallen who knows where. A murmur of disappointment would go up, a growl of befooled sightseers.

"It's a dud. . ."

With his drinking-cup at his ear like a telephone-receiver, little Bélin was playing at being a gunner.

"4.800 mètres, . . . high-explosive. . . . Fire with two guns."

The firing, at first massed in front of the wood, had broadened along the whole enemy line, and the black and green plume-bursts now bordered it from end to end, like an infernal alley of trees. Suddenly it seemed as though grey caps could be seen passing.

"The Boches with a barrage!" cried Vairon.

Men jostled one another, climbed up on the sandbags.

"There, where that one has just dropped!" and many fingers pointed to the spot, under a green canopy slashed with lightnings. All the soldiers from the latest drafts were stretching their necks, tiptoeing on the square points of their big boots

"I'm going to let off a cartridge," said Vairon, loading his rifle.

He put his piece to his shoulder, barely took a snap-aim, and pulled the trigger. While still deafened by the report, he heard the infuriated yell of Morache, the Adjutant, who rushed on him gesticulating, waving his stick as though he was going to strike him.

"Who was that fired? . . . I want to know who fired! . . . It was you? You'll be punished."

His lean visage all puckered up, he was yelping into the very face of Vairon, who was clean bowled over.

"So we're forbidden to kill the Boches now," retorted the other spiritlessly. "That's the first shot I've fired for three months."

"Hold your tongue, I forbid you to argue!'

Vairon had grown pale and livid, and drooped his obstinate head, the head of a regular tough, and emptied his Lebel, clenching his teeth upon his anger.

"All right," he murmured, though he gave in, "we won't kill your Boches for you. . . . But then I'd like to know what the hell we're doing here. . . ."

"What! What's that you say?" cried Morache, fit to crack his voice. "I'll let the Captain know."

Vairon fell silent. He moved away, trailing his rifle like a useless cudgel. Then, to punish his officers, he ostentatiously dissociated himself from the bombardment, and went and lay down in his hole. He brought out his tobacco-pouch and rolled a cigarette with a hand that had not ceased to tremble. A series of coppery explosions made him lift his nose, like a connoisseur.

"Fused shrapnel," he murmured.

The outcry of admiration from the trench made him regret he hadn't seen them, but he still had his dignity as a man; he refused to get up. At that moment, crips and clear through the row, a German machine gun was heard. That was too much for him, he leaped to his loophole.

We had stopped crying out, astonished, a trifle uneasy. The machine gun was still firing without a break, exasperating, as if it was driving nails. And suddenly we saw what it was firing at.

"Polius going over the top! . . . They're attacking beyond the river."

Everybody had exclaimed together, then immediately all fell silent, anxious, nailed to the spot. A company had just left the trenches on our left. and in open skirmishing order, without their packs, with fixed bayonets, the soldiers were running over the bare fields. The regiment next to us was trying a surprise attack, and it was they that the Maxim was on to, with its regular tap-tap like a sewing-machine. Finding the range, it seemed to tear a wide gap in the line of men.

"They're mown down."

"No, they're taking cover."

The soldiers, springing up again, ran on, lay down, started off again, but in spite of the barrage pounding their line, the Germans had started firing and you could see, out in no man's land, men spin round and go down with a thud. Some of them when down still moved, dragged themselves towards the nearest shell-hole. Others, dropping heavily in a heap, never moved again. The firing crackled on, thicker and heavier, but none the less, what was left of the company thrust on, the scattered soldiers closing up as they came near the trench just as if they were afraid to tackle it alone. The machine gun concentrated its fire on this massed troop. and almost at one stroke the men went down.

One single cry of anguish broke from us. Then oaths, rage, distress.

"But no. . . . they've taken cover again!" cried Broucke.

"Yes," said Demachy, who had taken his field-glasses and was looking through them, despairing. . . . "There are some left. . . . They're in the shell-holes. The wires have held them up. . . ."

We were hustling one another behind him, stretching out our hands.

"Pass me your glasses, I say. . . . Hand them over here. . . ."

By looking closely, in spite of the smoke you could still see them, tiny, gone to ground, dotted about the shell-holes. But suddenly a cloud of smoke hid them; our own artillery was starting again and was trying--alas! too late--to hack through the wide hedge of barbed wire.

"In God's name," howled Hamel, "but they're firing on to them!"

A salvo dropped its five terrible gusts around the living wreckage, then the shrapnel broke and hailed above them. The eyeless guns were raging desperately against that poor corner.

"But they must be warned! . . . The firing must be stopped!" cried Demachy, livid with horror.

The Captain passed at the run.

"Can't they see, then! An orderly here! . . . Quick! to the telephone!"

Still it was lashing down, harrowing up the ground. Between the salvoes something could be seen moving in the shell-holes, a form rising from the earth; one of the survivors had unfastened his flannel belt, a wide red belt, and kneeling on the edge of his hole, thirty paces from the Germans, he was waving his pennon, his arms lifted as high as he could stretch.

"Red! He's asking them to lift the range," cried the trench.

Dry and tragical, Mauser shots rang out. The soldier had dropped back again, perhaps wounded. . . . Shells dug once more into the accursed spot, tearing away a whirlwind of earth in the heavy smoke. Anxiously we waited for the cloud to drift away.

No, he was not dead. The man stood up again, and stretching his arm to the utmost, he waved his belt in a sweeping red gesture. Once more again the Boches fired. The soldier fell once more.

Men were shouting: "Swine! Swine!"

"We must attack!" cried Gilbert, haggard with pity and rage.

Between every clap of thunder the soldier stood up every time, his pennon in his fist, and the bullets never sent him down for more than a second. "Red! Red!" went the waving belt. But the guns, gone crazy, fired on all the same, as if they were minded to smash them all. The shells encircled the burrowing group, came still nearer, was about to overwhelm them. . . .

Then the man stood upright, full in the open, and with a great wild gesture he brandished his pennon above his head, facing the enemy's rifles. Twenty shots were sped. They saw him stagger, and he fell, his body riddled and broken on the keen pointed wires whose strands received him.

The man had fallen, but the Boches went on firing ferociously all the same, and the murderous crackle hurt us cruelly, desperately, as if it had dealt us all a wound. A cloud of shelling hid the horrible scene. But still the firing could be heard behind the moving curtain. The smoke dissipated. Nothing was moving now. . . . Yes. . . . An arm moved still, barely moved, trailing its pennon in the grass "Red! . . . Lengthen the range! . . . Lengthen the range! . . ."

. . . .

Lights were hiding under the huts. Laughter and voices were snuggling into them, shivering with cold. It was the hour before sleep. The bitter wind that swept through the branches with the sound like a weir brought from the trenches the random shots of over-anxious sentries.

Then all at once the long crackle of a salvo tore the silence, rockets abolished the night with their sinister and livid career, and the firing broke out again as you might make a fire blaze up again with a bundle of briars.

"Here, that's beginning again," the boys would say. And Vairon, his blanket about his nose, would murmur. "As long as they don't begin asking for reinforcements!"

Solicitous, perhaps uneasy, the Captain, Cruchet, walked nervously up and down in the roadway; now and then he clambered up the bank, behind the vineyards, and scanned the big black fields towards the sheepfold. That was where the firing was going on. And yet there was nothing to be seen. The night was impervious, with never a streak of lightning, never a flare from a shell, and the rockets that burst over the main road in great balls of light only disclosed stately, silent trees in the sleeping fields.

What was happening? Nobody knew. Perhaps the Germans were attacking the main road. The firing was confined to not more than a couple of hundred mètres, and was as though lost in that vast horizon of absolute quiet. Wholly ignorant of events, we listened to the war of the two opposing noises, and when silence fell again after a salvo, we thought: "That's that. . . . They have repulsed the Boches."

Sulphart was shuffling the cards over and over; and Broucke, to lull himself to sleep, was repeating his ditty.

Dors, min p'tit quinquin.
Min p'tit pouchin,
Min p'tit poujin.

The others were already sleeping. In the dark depths of the hut there was nothing now to be heard but the regular sound of the nails of one of our boys who was scratching his stomach, tormented by lice. The firing, blazing up again, failed to waken them. The Captain watched alone, a long, lean frame, all legs. He was waiting for Bourland, one of his orderlies, whom he had sent to the road to bring him news, I heard the hobnailed boots of the soldier returning.

A little later an order passed from hut to hut.

"Get up. . . . Muster. . . . ."

As the firing seemed to be extending, we tumbled out quickly, thrusting each other about, our hands disputing for our rifles in the dark. Rapidly the sections fell into line. The newly awakened men shivered, surprised by the frosty night.

"The fourth company is perhaps going to need us," said the Captain in his dry voice. "They are expecting an attack. Accordingly it is expressly forbidden to take boots off. . . . Is that clear? Kits to be kept packed, blankets on top, every man to have his rifle by him. . . . Now, I want a volunteer."

We were listening, shoulder to shoulder, the four sections forming square. A desultory crackle of firing made him silent for a moment, his ear cocked; then the noise crumbled away in scattered shots, and a disturbing silence washed out everything. Were they at the road?

"A volunteer who knows the section pretty well," went on the Captain, speaking faster. "It is a matter of guiding a patrol of the fourth which is to get in touch with the territorials on the right bank of the river. Enemy details may perhaps have slipped in there. . . . I know more than one stout fellow in the company, I fancy, among my old hands."

"Here!" at once called out a voice.

It was Gilbert. Quickly he had called out, on the spur, without reflecting, merely for the vibrant delight of hearing in the silence his voice with no fear in it; merely to throw out his name proudly before three hundred dumb men.

"Demachy--first section."

And his heart thumped to hear his own voice, his proffered name. . . . Confidently he stepped out of his rank, making a way for himself with his elbows and stood at attention.

"I'd have liked an old hand better," said the Captain. "Still, since you come forward, it's well. . . . It's very well."

We were sent back to shelter, and Gilbert, having been given his orders, moved off, weapon in hand.

He climbed the bank and went by the fields. As he was skirting the vineyards he gave a jump. A man there, right in front of him. It was a sentry keeping watch on the plain.

"You're going to the road? Go down as far as the apple-tree, then you've only to follow the path. . . . But look lively, you know; it whistles a bit when they start firing."

He set off again. Partridges woke up and made away from under his feet with their heavy flight. He had again to repress a quick movement of recoil, and with freezing hands he loaded his rifle. His eyes searched the darkness; no sign of a tree there. Three hundred mètres from the dug-outs he felt himself isolated and alone, already threatened and in danger, far from everything. He was not afraid, however; it was this great silence, that void, that darkness, that troubled him.

The firing broke out again suddenly, and a few bullets sang round him. He felt no fear of them. Only he held his rifle across his body in such a way that the stock protected his belly, and he lowered his head, naively thinking that in this way nothing could touch him. Only the rockets guided him, and the invisible firing. He walked toilsomely, at every step heaving up his boots weighted with clay. Now and then he caught a furtive sound, and dropping on his knees, finger on trigger, he peered about.

The trenches were not joined up at the river. Suppose the Germans had slipped in there! He waited a moment, then started again, bending still more. A path cut across the fields. Was this the right one? . . . He followed it at random. The brutal sound of the firing was drawing nearer. At last he could distinguish the line of trees by the road, and let himself slide down the bank. In the ditch there lay about accoutrements, kit, weapons, packs; against a heap of broken stone a dead man was lying. Gilbert turned away his eyes and quickly sped across the roadway. The fourth company was deployed in skirmishing order, the soldiers clinging to the stony side of the bank. Sitting on a milestone a man was dipping bread in a drinking-cup.

"Who are you?"

"I'm from the third company. . . . I'm looking for Captain Stanislas, for the patrol."

"That's me."

At that moment a voice came down from above:

"There's something moving close to the stack."

The Captain swelled his voice.

"Attention for a salvo! Left of the straw stack. . . . Present. . . . Fire!"

A terrible crack stunned Gilbert. He had seen all along the bank the thin edging of flames jet forth.

"Follow the road as far as the tree that lies across it, about five hundred mètres off. . . ." said the officer, sitting down again. "The patrol is waiting for you."

Gilbert hurried along. In the darkness the sheepfold could be divined, a big derelict building with its walls riddled with loopholes. Farther on the bank decreased, barely overhanging the road, and at this point a tree was down. Gilbert halted and put one knee to the ground. A voice hailed him out of the field hidden in the dark:

"Is that the man from the third company? . . . This way."

There were five of them. Sitting on his heels, the corporal was scanning the night with mistrust.

"Do you know the road well?"

"Yes," said Gilbert, "it's over there."

And with a gesture he pointed into the night.

"That's where they made a surprise attack on Sunday? . . . The lad with the red pennon?"

They fixed bayonets, and the rifles were lengthened with a slender gleam. The corporal was hoisting himself up when a rocket whistled off.

"Don't move."

They stayed motionless. The full-blown rocket fell back, shaking its dazzling head. Crouching in a ring, they looked as if they were ready to dance the capucine. On the ridge a file of men was discovered, laden with stakes and tools, then it disappeared when the rocket was quenched.

"Come along!"

The firing that had calmed down for a moment at times livened up again, to die down again as quickly.

"Hark at them," grumbled the corporal. "They don't mean to leave a beet standing."

"You've been attacked?"

"Telegraph poles, oh yes! and the straw stack. That's what they've been firing at for the last two hours. . . . Good job they don't aim this way, the b----s!"

They went on in open order, several paces apart. Gilbert went in front. On the ridge, a dull noise gave life to the darkness, the clinking of spades. Then they entered into the realm of the unknown.

They went a hundred paces, kneeled down, ransacked the fields with a piercing eye, then set off again. The corporal prodded a black shape with the point of his bayonet. . . . Gilbert's heart leaped.

"Nothing. . . . a sheaf."

They must now have been coming close up to the river when the night seemed to grow brighter. There was now in front of the moon only a filmy curtain; the wind pulled it aside and the fields appeared, bare as your hand. The patrol stood still, unmasked by that huge celestial flare. They remained for one endless moment crouching, silent, without moving. Gilbert alone raised himself on his elbows, bare-headed, and tried to make out his whereabouts and the lay of the land. When the moon was hidden again, he got up the first and set off in a straight line. He had seen the first corpses lying in the grass. . . . it was the right road they were on. At the first he brushed against he made a sharp movement of terror, fear of the cold hand that was on the point of seizing him. The man had dropped in a ball, his knees doubled up, seeming to continue his dreadful praying into the infinite.

Gilbert no longer dared to go forward, fear thrilling in the pit of his stomach, his legs powerless and flabby. He pushed sharply up against the corporal.

"What, it's not there, is it?" murmured the voice.

"Yes."

He looked at the dead men, all those dead men he had seen running to their cruel, hideous fate. Their immense field frightened him, all those forgotten sheaves. . . . He guessed at them everywhere, in every shell-hole, in every furrow, and no longer dared to move. Nothing could save him, not even the comrade against whom he pressed.

"Well, then, we're going on?"

A little farther, the soldiers' overcoats were huddled in bunches. They were already so flat, the bodies so empty, that one could barely imagine that they had ever lived, had ever run. An illimitable distress weighed upon Gilbert's heart. Now they terrified him no more. Can one be afraid of those one loves? Making a powerful effort over himself, forcing his reluctant hands, he stooped over a corpse and unbuttoned its coat to take its papers. He hardly even had a little shiver of nerves when he felt the cold flesh of the neck under his timid fingers. The corporal was already stooping to take the medal from another.

The poor comrades they had come to see in their annihilation were to live again for a moment under their brotherly hands. And awakened and compassionate, it was the dead who guided the patrol, seeming to pass the living on from hand to hand.

. . . .

Gilbert came back at early dawn.

"I took the patrol right up to the Boche trench system," he recounted to the Captain.

Cruchet only replied, "Ah! . . ."

And he wore a smile so incredulous that Gilbert reddened under it. Someone present told the tale in his own version, and some of the boys looked at the volunteer with a bantering eye.

"Some blokes know how to tell the tale," said Fouillard to nobody in particular. . . . "He'll get his corporal's stripes."

And another:

"You shove yourself into shell-hole for a couple of hours, you know, and then you come and pitch it that you've visited their listening-post."

Gilbert, who was talking to us, made no retort. A little bitter smile wrinkled his mouth.

"I'm going to swaddle up my rifle like you," he said to Lemoine; "the rain has got mine all rusty."

He went off with his head down. Sitting at the entrance of his shelter, he took his rifle between his knees, and unbuttoning his coat, he brought out a wide belt of red flannel. The laughing stopped like a shot.

They looked out into the plain, in front of the German trench. The red pennon was not there now.

 

 

CHAPTER IV

GOOD DAYS

 

UNDER the rain we were humping ourselves like cats. This muddy black village was not expecting us, and, piled up in drenched packets along the sleeping houses, we watched out for the return of the quartermasters who were hunting for billets for us. Our own, big Lambert, had just gone into that farmhouse whose red-curtained windows crimsoned the night with a glare like a public house, and from the street we recognized, though without catching the words, his cordial tones endeavouring to convince and persuade the house-holder. The farmer, a stiff-necked peasant replied noisily:

"No, no! I won't sleep any of them in my cellar, I tell you flat. They'd drink the bit of a cask I've got left on me."

The company, which was going out of the trenches, had sat down at the whistle, harassed, covered with mud, soaked. Before us, others were still passing along, with the hurrying trampling of a funeral behind time, trotting towards Bagneux. After the machine gunners with their splashed mules, half seen through a mist of rain and weariness, there passed the jolting lorries of the Army Service Corps, the butcher's cart, the ambulance with its wheels iron-shod, and at the tail of the regiment the company carts, a burlesque procession of four-wheeled waggons, old stage-coaches, and shandry-dans picked up by chance in march and countermarch, from Charleroi to Reims: old wains with creaking axles, tilt-carts overflowing with packs and rifles, covered carts under dripping awnings, family brakes and brewers' drays; then bringing up the rear of the column, the baggage-master's phaeton, dragged by a big plough-horse almost too thick to squeeze into the shafts.

The men had no eyes for anything, absolutely worn out, half-sleeping. The passing wheels brushed against them, but they didn't even shift their feet back. They had let themselves drop just where they happened to be, without looking, with no fear of the mud that could never make them dirtier than they were, and piled themselves together in soaking bundles, crouching under doorways or sitting on their packs with their backs against the wall. Some that were still standing were cramping up to the houses all along, to shelter under the eaves; their arms crossed on their rifles, they talked of fresh straw, of wine not too dear, of rest-time with no drill, a whole world of visionary happiness; and the others were listening stupidly, too done to want anything beyond the mere right to fall asleep.

Every moment an officer would pass and throw a harsh light on the squatting forms with a sudden ray of his electric torch.

"Orderlies! . . . Where are the liaison orderlies? This is simply madness!"

Running up, a quartermaster called:

"That's all right, Captain! I've found a good billet for the horses."

The rain kept on falling, falling, fine, cold, and soft. Overhead, between the high wan banks of the houses, the night swam like a black river.

. . . .

The whole house resounds from the yard to the garret. In the kitchen, where eddies the acrid smoke from green wood, men are fighting for quarts of wine. The staircase is full of comings and goings, up and down, and singing.

But out here in the garden everything is at quiet. To make a seat for myself I have taken the bucket and turned it upside down, and, installed in idleness with my back to the wall, as though deep in an armchair, I am day-dreaming. It is early morning. Day has not long finished her toilette, the grass is still dewy, and the sky is bringing out armfuls of white clouds that he hangs out to dry like linen.

Indolent eyed, still dulled with sleep, I look at the garden all lying fallow, with its bushes despoiled, its tufts of weeds, and its squeaking, creaking pump, at which the boys are cleaning themselves up. I laze on, between sleeping and waking.

We have slept sumptuously. For the first time in a fortnight we have been able to get our boots off, get rid of belt, bayonet, all that beastly equipment that cuts into your soft ribs. I woke precisely as I lay down, sausaged up in my blanket, my head in a cupboard, the plank floor for my mattress and a bag of beans for pillow. I must have had splendid dreams. When I awoke fragments were still sticking in my mind like down from an eiderdown quilt.

The corporals, all collected in the washhouse, are sharing out woollen clothing for their squads. Now that it's not so cold great bales of it arrive every week.

Down along by the hedge, Sulphart is brushing Gilbert's puttees, whistling the while. He has found a room with some good people where we are to make our mess, and already he is thinking over breakfast. To eat at a table, and off plates, . . . that seems to me something almost too rich and rare, and I don't dare quite to believe in it altogether for fear of being disappointed.

"This is a good life," repeats Sulphart. Round him are six or seven men cleaning their mud-plastered coats. First of all they scrape at the mud with their knives or a bit of broken bottle, and when it is turned into dust they beat their duds like a carpet, with lusty blows of a stick. That's what we mean by "brushing."

"Talk about your rotten mud! . . . And this does stick--it's chalk."

With the charming immodesty of soldiers two of the boys, naked to the waist, are hunting for their lice. Vairon is holding his flannel out at arm's length, as a painter might scrutinize a picture, and with nose all wrinkled up and eyes intent, he is inspecting his garment. Then, when he has discovered the beast, he brings his thumbs quickly together, and "crack!" he squashes it. Broucke, on the contrary, is going over his shirt, fold by fold, his nose almost thrust into it, and hunts quietly and methodically. When he routs out a big fat fellow he utters a cry:

"One more that'll never nibble me again!"

Vairon, whose nails are cracking, counts out loud: "Thirty-two. . . . thirty-three."

"Twenty-seven. . . . twenty-eight, . . ." responds the lad from the North quietly.

As he scrapes the puttees, Sulphart follows the hunters with the eye of a connoisseur. Already he has his favourite.

"You'll see it will be Vairon that'll bag the most. His blood's hotter. . . . Are they big 'uns?"

"Regular iron crossers," the other informs him vaingloriously.

"That's nothing, anyway, that lot isn't," says Sulphart with his important air. "Some boys have had red ones, Arab lice. They're fiercer, they wolf in your blood. And they give you diseases, too. But the other ones likely would rather draw off bad humours."

"Nothing better for the health," adds a well-informed comrade, who is pulling off his shirt to begin his own private hunt. "They suck out the evil out of you. . . ."

"There was my small brother: it was the lice and the ringworm that kept him from having a go of meningitis."

"I'm not surprised," replies the other, now beginning the inspection of his belt.

But from his very first look he finds himself discouraged. His underclothing is simply swarming with vermin; their black files can be seen crawling in every fold. For one moment he seems to hesitate, then making up his mind, he rolls everything up into a ball--his shirt, his drawers, his belt--and hurls the parcel over the wall.

"So much the worse for that. I'll get on to fresh lot. Anyway, that'll always be so much the less to wash."

 

Fouillard, whom I heard a moment ago shouting in his den, has just displayed himself on the threshold, his bare arms black with soot and glistening with grease; from his unlaced shoes to his dishevelled hair nobody could find, no matter how closely he searched, a spot that could be soiled. His skin, his body-linen, his trousers, everything is grey, greasy, bespotted, and when with a familiar gesture he rubs his palms on his behind to wipe them dry, you ask yourself which is going to dirty the other, the seat of his trousers or his hands. He stares at us for an instant, severely, ransacks the garden with a mistrusting look, and shouts:

"Who is the dirty dog that's pinched my bucket?"

My first impulse was to get up in order to restore him the said object. But no, I am really much too comfortable. I find myself still more comfortable seated, since somebody wants to take the thing away from me. Comfort is a kind of paralysis to me.

"Anyhow, I can't jolly well go and fetch water in my boots," yells the cook.

Oh, no! That would be very poor advice to give. Nevertheless, I keep my knees close together so as to hide my seat, and I look guilelessly at Fouillard, now thoroughly frantic and howling with impotent fury.

"Pack of pigs! So after all, I'm through with it. I'm going to drop you and your cooking; if any of you would like to take it on, he has only to go and put his name down on the roll."

. . . .

We must make a fine show, the four sections in square formation.

There aren't two rigs precisely alike. Except the latest arrivals, we have been equipped with odds and ends, in the confusion of the early months of the war, and since then we've just managed the best way we could. There are overcoats of every kind of hue, of every kind of shape, every kind of age. Tall men have too short coats, and little men too long ones. Fouillard's back strap on his coat knocked most pitiably on his backside; and on Father Hamel's wide corporation the all too narrow coat made horizontal wrinkles, all the buttons ready to fly off. For my own part, Sulphart is the one I like best.

He is clad in a top-coat of the old style, deep blue, with a big patch pocket of a pretty hussar's blue. He has stitched his first-aid packet on to his left breast, and reinforced his puttees with a band of stout leather cut out of regulation gaiters. Like every good soldier on active service, he has taken pains to distinguish himself by breaking the peak of his képi, in the fashion of the Bat' d' Af'; and he has still further adorned this headgear, now flatter than a pancake, with a plaited chin-strap of the choicest effect.

His broad crackled shoes, dried up and hard as horn, that you might fancy had been cut out of old wood with a billhook, still carry on their twisted heels something of the glorious mud of the trenches; and his red trousers show at the thigh through a wide rent in his blue cloth coat. You might fancy he had been specially drawn for l'Illustration.

Others, who have already got hold of the new overcoats of horizon blue, play the heavy swell. You might say they are off to the war in their Sunday clothes. The boys look at them with an irony a little forced.

"Don't you worry; always the same lot, that click. . . ."

"Ah, you see, the quartermaster only chucked them to the blighters that greased his paw on the quiet. . . ."

And Sulphart, looking at those dandy jacks with eyes ensnared, is already dreaming of the happy alterations he is going to transact on his own rig.

"I'll cut two big raglan pockets on the two sides, and I'll fit up a stick-up collar for myself. . . . You'll see if I won't be the complete toff."

Captain Cruchet, who has very sharp ears, turns about, his lips tight.

"Silence! Who spoke? . . . You are at attention. Look after your men, Morache."

Ricordeau, who is looking to have his sergeant's stripes, draws down his brow as he looks at us to make it appear that he is a man in authority. Sulphart doesn't turn a hair, but behind him Gilbert is on tenterhooks, afraid that someone will spot his sweater, which is too long. Everybody is silent. Satisfied, the Captain goes on with his inspection. As he draws near, backs straighten up, as if a button had been pressed; left arms hung rigid, and all eyes, a little lacking in confidence, looked intelligently into space at a distance theoretically computed at fifteen paces. Lean, long-legged, his long face framed between short black side-whiskers, Captain Cruchet has an air of natural severity that produces its effect. With eye-brows full of care, he comes forward slowly, scanning every man as if he was meeting him for the first time.

"Take off your cap."

Our comrade, very red about the gills, awkwardly removes his képi.

"Tt! Tt! Tt! Tt! It's far too long, it's simply filthy! I must have that hair cut. Take his name, Morache."

As his back is turned to us, several of our boys furtively slip their caps off, and, spitting in their hands, sleek down their restive locks as well as they can. Unluckily the Captain is not taking an interest in hair only. He notices everything: the missing button, the rust-spot on the rifle, the ill-greased boot, the spot of mud on the cartridge-pouch; and in an icy voice he enquires:

"Where did you get yourself filthy like that?"

What a fool of a question! . . .

Having properly wigged Bréval, whose cartridge-pouch holds together with string, he stops in front of Sulphart. The other stood perfectly rigid, heels clamped together, eyes right. The Captain considers him for a good minute, and then:

"He's a beauty, that fellow," he scoffs.

Sulphart has not moved a muscle, not even winked an eye. His neighbours look at him out of the corners of their eyes, with little sidelong smiles.

"You fancy yourself more seductive with the peak of your cap broken, like a vagabond. Ttt! . . . ttt! . . . Is it to give the girls a treat? They'd have queer taste!"

The delight of the neighbours breaks out in little servile laughs. Still Sulphart does not turn a hair, the left hand wide open, the head a thought thrown back.

"And that hair! My word! he's not had it cut since the very start of the. campaign. . . . Torn trousers. Ttt! . . . ttt!. . . mud on his shoes. . . . Bad turnout, shocking bad turn-out! You will take this fellow's name, Morache; four days' cells. . . . And see that his hair's cut. . . . ttt! . . . ttt! . . . as short as possible."

Sulphart has remained perfectly impassible. He has not so much as blinked, not so much as shuddered. Ah! these conquerors of the Marne!

We were fancying the review at an end, and impatience was playing pins and needles in our knees when the Captain gave the order:

"Down kits!"

I was sure it would come. It's an inspection of emergency rations this time. Kneeling before your unfastened kit, you've got to unpack everything, undo everything, bring out everything; to find the salt soup-cube crushed under your shirts, or the coffee tablet that is crumbling away among your socks and soiling your linen.

On your knees, in a fury, you empty your whole wardrobe.

"He thinks we're going to eat his blasted biscuits on him, no," growls Vairon.

You spread out all your possessions: cartridges, the little box of sugar, the tin of bully-beef. The pack that gave you so much pain and grief to put together has to be emptied to the very bottom. Some of the boys, down on all fours, are counting and recounting their cartridges with an uneasy air.

"Good Lord! I'm one packet short. . . . You've not got one to spare, have you?"

Our whole belongings are contained in this little pile of duds and tinned stuffs, which the Captain tosses over with the end of his cane to count the bunches of cartridges. He goes the round at a good pace, then planting himself face-to-face with our section, he enquires:

"Anybody got a fancy to be cook? The fifth squad's cook is relieved. Who would like to take his place?"

At once, with one accord, everybody looked at Bouffioux. Two hundred jolly, open faces are gazing on him, enjoying the joke beforehand. The horse-dealer has turned pink about the gills, but for all that he has called out:

"Here!"

"You know how to cook?" asked Cruchet.

"I was a cook in civilian life, Captain."

At that the whole company broke into laughter. Broucke was choking, bent double. Even the sergeants standing solemnly at attention could not contain themselves; and Cruchet, displeased and scandalized, had to give the order:

"Fall out! Dismiss!"

When I went down next into the kitchen, where slabs of flooring were burning with gay flames, the late cook, black as a sweep, was handing over his powers and authority to Bouffioux in front of the assembled squad. The ceremony was a very simple one. Fouillard, who was stirring the stew with a fragment of a vine-prop, held the thing out to his supplanter.

"Here, there's your ladle. You've nothing to do but dish up. This evening you'll have to make the scoff. . . . Only I'm going to feed off sausage, for it strikes me you look about as much fit to be a cook as I am to be a verger."

An uproar full of laughter greeted the cook. Bouffioux placidly took off his overcoat.

"Don't you worry about the grub," he answered mildly.

Sulphart, who was looking at him with strong fellow-feeling, dug him in the ribs.

"Hi, old bull-face, they say you've got the shivers for going up the trenches. You didn't happen to be born on a windy day, by chance?"

Bouffioux was quietly starting to stir his stew.

"Don't you worry yourself about the wind, either. . . . As long as my hair curls all right and my belly isn't flapping I'm not the boy to fash myself."

. . . .

I should fancy this must be something like the way savages do their cooking.

Down on his knees before his pot, Bouffioux, a trifle drunk, his eyes inclined to tears, his big face shining with sweat and smeared with soot, is blowing himself clean out of breath at a little fire of damp wood that is smoking, smoking, smoking, but simply refuses to break into flame. Beside him, holding the lid by way of a shield, Vairon is stirring the mess with the vine-prop, whilst Broucke, tattered and half-naked, is chopping up extremely red and raw frozen meat with a wood axe, shouting Flemish choruses the while. You might fancy he was disjointing an explorer! Then he throws the frozen gobbets very circumspectly on to a potato-sack as muddy as a straw mat.

All about the hearth-place the boys are crowding in, their hands thrust in their pockets, with airs of prodigious interest, and a slight smile hovering round the corners of their mouths. One would say that they are tightening their lips to keep their delight from bursting out: from their glistening eyes to their puffed-out cheeks you feel that they are just ripe to break into shouts of merriment.

Still down upon his knees, Bouffioux is still puffing and blowing, stopping now and then to cough and to spit out flakes of soot.

"Get on with it, my buck," Vairon exhorts encouragingly; "it's just beginning to come on the boil."

And first warning the boys with a sly wink, he adds with a perfectly serious air:

"Would you like to know what I think, my fine laddie? Well, here goes. Your mess would be better if you were to chuck a bit of rice to it. . . . That would thicken the gravy for you."

The other lifts his face with its eyes running, its lost and bewildered look.

"What. . . . rice? . . . ."

Like that, crumpled up on his knees, his eyes streaming with tears, hairy and besmeary, you could imagine he is begging forgiveness from his murderers in the hour of his being roasted alive.

"Naturally, a go of rice," perfidiously approves Fouillard, who would fain give Bouffioux all the benefit of his experience. "That will give you something smoother and more fit to serve up."

The boys dig one another in the ribs, half-choked with delight. "Come along, then, with the rice," consents Bouffioux, getting up painfully.

He goes off to get a big double handful, a porringer full, and throws it into the pot. Hidden behind the duty corporal, one of the cooks laughs into his handkerchief, unable to hold in any longer.

"Ah! This is a lark! What on earth are the lads of the fifth going to have to swallow? . . . ."

"More wood," orders Vairon, "the fire's catching. Don't bring any branches, they make too much smoke."

Without changing the weapon he wields, Broucke seizes the half of a door, props it up against a wall, and splits it with one stout blow.

"We'll soon have to pull up more treads out of the stair," says he, "there's no more wood left already. Anyhow, that's the stuff burns best of all."

And, in fact, over this very dry wood that is burning with a clear steady blaze, the mess begins to simmer and sing.

"That's the style! It's getting hot!" stammers the horse-dealer. "I'll be ready up to time!"

A whole ring of happy faces is contemplating him; their delight is turning to celestial happiness.

"Do you know, Bouffioux," now cunningly suggests the duty corporal; "if I was you, I'd pour a good couple of litres of wine into it and make something like a broth of it."

A laugh jerks out. Fouillard can't hold in any more. But the others approve with nodding heads, solemn as a council of state.

But this time Bouffioux protests: "There's no sense in me bunging wine into it." He is beginning to recover a slight glimmer of reason in the fumes of his rotgut brandy. . . . "You've made me stick milk into it already."

"What's that got to do with it? Milk first--you've not put in such a flood of it, and then the vegetables have soaked it all up. I tell you you're wrong."

"Sure, that would certainly improve it," is Vairon's hypocritical opinion.

"But I haven't got any pinard. And then I can't take what's for the squad."

The duty corporal, perceiving that the bewildered cook is weakening on it, has a noble notion.

"Here, I'll slip you a couple of litres on my own. . . . Broucke, fetch it out of the corner. There are six full buckets and three bottles."

Prompt at the word, the ch'timi lays hold of the nearest bucket--I recognize the canvas bucket in which I made my toilet this morning--and from it pours out four good cupfuls by guess-work.

"That will be topping!" declares Vairon, already smacking his lips with the air of an epicure.

"Do you think so?" asks Bouffioux, vaguely uneasy.

"Certain!" agree all the others in chorus. "You've put nothing bad in it. . . . Meat, sweet potatoes, milk to soften it, leeks, wine, American bacon to give it a touch of fat, rice to thicken the sauce, biscuits. That's all good stuff."

Bouffioux, careworn in spite of everything, takes off the lid and sniffs at the mixture.

"I don't know if it's only my notion, but it smells queer."

"What would it smell queer for?" protests Sulphart, who wants to take a hand.

And pushing the oth