Under Fire

by Barbusse, Henri; Wray, William Fitzwater;

  “And then, those sort of beings, don’t you believe there’s only one of them. There are barrels of ’em in every depot, that hang on and writhe when their time comes to go, and they say, ‘I’m not going,’ and they don’t go, and they never succeed in driving them as far as the front.”

  “Nothing new in all that,” said Barque, “we know it, we know it!”

  “Then there are the offices,” Volpatte went on, engrossed in his story of travel; “whole houses and streets and districts. I saw that my little corner in the rear was only a speck, and I had full view of them. No, I’d never have believed there’d be so many men on chairs while war was going on——”

  A hand protruded from the rank and made trial of space—“No more sauce falling”—“Then we’re going out, bet your life on it.” So “March!” was the cry.

  The storm held its peace. We filed off in the long narrow swamp stagnating in the bottom of the trench where the moment before it had shaken under slabs of rain. Volpatte’s grumbling began again amidst our sorry stroll and the eddies of floundering feet. I listened to him as I watched the shoulders of a poverty-stricken overcoat swaying in front of me, drenched through and through. This time Volpatte was on the track of the police——

  “The farther you go from the front the more you see of them.”

  “Their battlefield is not the same as ours.”

  Tulacque had an ancient grudge against them. “Look,” he said, “how the bobbies spread themselves about to get good lodgings and good food, and then, after the drinking regulations, they dropped on the secret wine-sellers. You saw them lying in wait, with a corner of an eye on the shop-doors, to see if there weren’t any poilus slipping quietly out, two-faced that they are, leering to left and to right and licking their moustaches.”

  “There are good ones among ’em. I knew one in my country, the Côte d’Or, where I——”

  “Shut up!” was Tulacque’s peremptory interruption; “they’re all alike. There isn’t one that can put another right.”

  “Yes, they’re lucky,” said Volpatte, “but do you think they’re contented? Not a bit; they grouse. At least,” he corrected himself, “there was one I met, and he was a grouser. He was devilish bothered by the drill-manual. ‘It isn’t worth while to learn the drill instruction,’ he said, ‘they’re always changing it. F’r instance, take the department of military police; well, as soon as you’ve got the gist of it, it’s something else. Ah, when will this war be over?’ he says.”

  “They do what they’re told to do, those chaps,” ventured Eudore.

  “Surely. It isn’t their fault at all. It doesn’t alter the fact that these professional soldiers, pensioned and decorated in the time when we’re only civvies, will have made war in a damned funny way.”

  “That reminds me of a forester that I saw as well,” said Volpatte, “who played hell about the fatigues they put him to. ‘It’s disgusting,’ the fellow said to me, ‘what they do with us. We’re old non-coms., soldiers that have done four years of service at least. We’re paid on the higher scale, it’s true, but what of that? We are Officials, and yet they humiliate us. At H.Q. they set us to cleaning, and carrying the crap away. The civilians see the treatment they inflict on us, and they look down on us. And if you look like grousing, they’ll actually talk about sending you off to the trenches, like foot-soldiers! What’s going to become of our prestige? When we go back to the parishes as rangers after the war—if we do come back from it—the people of the villages sand forests will say, “Ah, it was you that was sweeping the street at X——!” To get back our prestige, compromised by human injustice and ingratitude, I know well,’ he says, ‘that we shall have to make complaints, and make complaints and make ’em with all our might, to the rich and to the influential!’ he says.”

  “I knew a gendarme who was all right,” said Lamuse. “‘The police are temperate enough in general,’ he says, ‘but there are always dirty devils everywhere, what? The civilian is really afraid of the gendarme,’ says he, ‘and that’s a fact; and so, I admit it, there are some who take advantage of it, and those ones—the tag-rag of the gendarmerie—know where to get a glass or two. If I was Chief or Brigadier, I’d screw ’em down, not half I wouldn’t,’ he says; ‘for public opinion,’ he says again, ‘lays the blame on the whole force when a single one with a grievance makes a complaint.’”

  “As for me,” says Paradis, “one of the worst days of my life was once when I saluted a gendarme, taking him for a lieutenant, with his white stripes. Fortunately—I don’t say it to console myself, but because it’s probably true—fortunately, I don’t think he saw me.”

  A silence. “Yes, ’vidently,” the men murmured; “but what about it? No need to worry.”

  A little later, when we were seated along a wall, with our backs to the stones, and our feet plunged and planted in the ground, Volpatte continued unloading his impressions.

  “I went into a big room that was a Depot office—bookkeeping department, I believe. It swarmed with tables, and people in it like a market. Clouds of talk. All along the walls on each side and in the middle, personages sitting in front of their spread-out goods like waste-paper merchants. I put in a request to be put back into my regiment, and they said to me, ‘Oh, go and crap, and get busy with it.’ I lit on a sergeant, a little chap with airs, spick as a daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass—eyeglasses with a tape on them. He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the right not to go to the front. I said to him, ‘Sergeant!’ But he didn’t hear me, being busy slanging a secretary—‘It’s unfortunate, young fellow,’ he was saying; ‘I’ve told you twenty times that you must send one notice of it to be carried out by the Squadron Commander, Provost of the C.A., and one by way of advice, without signature, but making mention of the signature, to the Provost of the Force Publique d’Amiens and of the centres of the district, of which you have the list—in envelopes, of course, of the general commanding the district. It’s very simple,’ he says.

  “I’d drawn back three paces to wait till he’d done with jawing. Five minutes after, I went up to the sergeant. He said to me, ‘My dear sir, I have not the time to bother with you; I have many other matters to attend to.’ As a matter of fact, he was all in a flummox in front of his typewriter, the chump, because he’d forgotten, he said, to press on the capital-letter lever, and so, instead of underlining the heading of the page, he’d damn well scored a line of 8’s in the middle of the top. So he couldn’t hear anything, and he played hell with the Americans, seeing the machine came from there.

  “After that, he growled against another woolly-leg, because on the memorandum of the distribution of maps they hadn’t put the names of the Ration Department, the Cattle Department, and the Administrative Convoy of the 328th D.I.

  “Alongside, a fool was obstinately trying to pull more circulars off a jellygraph than it would print, doing his damnedest to produce a lot of ghosts that you could hardly read. Others were talking: ‘Where are the Parisian fasteners?’ asked a toff. And they don’t call things by their proper names: ‘Tell me now, if you please, what are the elements quartered at X ——?’ The elements! What’s all that sort of babble?” asked Volpatte.

  “At the end of the big table where these fellows were that I’ve mentioned and that I’d been to, and the sergeant floundering about behind a hillock of papers at the top of it and giving orders, a simpleton was doing nothing but tap on his blotting-pad with his hands. His job, the mug, was the department of leave-papers, and as the big push had begun and all leave was stopped, he hadn’t anything to do—‘Capital!’ he says.

  “And all that, that’s one table in one room in one department in one depot. I’ve seen more, and then more, and more and more again. I don’t know, but it’s enough to drive you off your nut, I tell you.”

  “Had they got brisques*?”

  “Not many there, but in the department of the second line every one had ’em. You had museums of ’em there—whole Zoological Gard
ens of stripes.”

  “Prettiest thing I’ve seen in the way of stripes,’ said Tulacque, “was a motorist, dressed in cloth that you’d have said was satin, with new stripes, and the leathers of an English officer, though a second-class soldier as he was. With his finger on his cheek, he leaned with his elbows on that fine carriage adorned with windows that he was the valet de chambre of. He’d have made you sick, the dainty beast. He was just exactly the poilu that you see pictures of in the ladies’ papers—the pretty little naughty papers.”

  Each has now his memories, his tirade on this much-excogitated subject of the shirkers, and all begin to overflow and to talk at once. A hubbub surrounds the foot of the mean wall where we are heaped like bundles, with a grey, muddy, and trampled spectacle lying before us, laid waste by rain.

  “—orderly in waiting to the Road Department, then at the Bakery, then cyclist to the Revictualling Department of the Eleventh Battery.”

  “—every morning he had a note to take to the Service de l’Intendance, to the Gunnery School, to the Bridges Department, and in the evening to the A.D. and the A.T.—that was all.”

  “—‘when I was coming back from leave,’ said that orderly, ‘the women cheered us at all the level-crossing gates that the train passed.’ ‘They took you for soldiers,’ I said.”

  “—‘Ah,’ I said, ‘you’re called up, then, are you?’ ‘Certainly,’ he says to me, ‘considering that I’ve been a round of meetings in America with a Ministerial deputation. P’raps it’s not exactly being called up, that? Anyway, my friend,’ he says, ‘I don’t pay any rent, so I must be called up.’ ‘And me——’”

  “To finish,” cries Volpatte, silencing the hum with his authority of a traveller returned from “down there,” “to finish, I saw a whole legion of ’em all together at a blow-out. For two days I was a sort of helper in the kitchen of one of the centres of the C.O.A., ’cos they couldn’t let me do nothing while waiting for my reply, which didn’t hurry, seeing they’d sent another inquiry and a super-inquiry after it, and the reply had too many halts to make in each office, going and coming.

  “In short, I was cook in the shop. Once I waited at table, seeing that the head cook had just got back from leave for the fourth time and was tired. I saw and I heard those people every time I went into the dining-room, that was in the Prefecture, and all that hot and illuminated row got up my snout. They were only auxiliaries in there, but there were plenty of the armed service among the number, too. They were almost all old men, with a few young ones besides, sitting here and there.

  “I’d begun to get about enough of it when one of the broomsticks said, ‘The shutters must be closed; it’s more prudent.’ My boy, they were a lump of a hundred and twenty-five miles from the firing-line, but that pock-marked puppy he wanted to make believe there was danger of bombardment by aircraft——”

  “And there’s my cousin,” said Tulacque, fumbling, “who wrote to me—Look, here’s what he says: ‘My dear Adolphe, here I am definitely settled in Paris as attaché to Guard-Room 60. While you are down there, I must stay in the capital at the mercy of a Taube or a Zeppelin!’”

  The phrase sheds a tranquil delight abroad, and we assimilate it like a tit-bit, laughing.

  “After that,” Volpatte went on, “those layers of soft-jobbers fed me up still more. As a dinner it was all right—cod, seeing it was Friday, but prepared like soles à la Marguerite—I know all about it. But the talk!——”

  “They call the bayonet Rosalie, don’t they?”

  “Yes, the padded luneys. But during dinner these gentlemen talked above all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he wasn’t somewhere else, as good as said (but all the while saying something else and gorging like an ogre), ‘I’m ill, I’m feeble, look at me, ruin that I am. Me, I’m in my dotage.’ They were all seeking inside themselves to find diseases to wrap themselves up in—‘I wanted to go to the war, but I’ve a rupture, two ruptures, three ruptures.’ Ah, no, that blow-out!—‘The orders that speak of sending everybody away,’ explained a funny man, ‘they’re like the comedies,’ he explained, ‘there’s always a last act to clear up all the jobbery of the others. That third act is this paragraph, “Unless the requirements of the Departments stand in the way.” ’ There was one that told this tale, ‘I had three friends that I counted on to give me a lift up. I was going to apply to them; but, one after another, a little before I put my request, they were killed by the enemy; look at that,’ he says, ‘I’ve no luck!’ Another was explaining to another that, as for him, he would very much have liked to go, but the surgeon-major had taken him round the waist to keep him by force in the depot with the auxiliary. ‘So,’ he says, ‘I resigned myself. After all, I shall be of greater value in putting my intellect to the service of the country, than in carrying a knapsack.’ And him that was alongside said, ‘Yes,’ with his head-piece feathered on top. He’d jolly well consented to go to Bordeaux at the time when the Boches were getting near Paris, and then Bordeaux became the stylish place; but afterwards he returned firmly to the front—to Paris—and said something like this, ‘My ability is of value to France; it is absolutely necessary that I guard it for France.’

  “They talked about other people that weren’t there—of the commandant who was getting an impossible temper, and they explained that the dottier he got the harsher he got; and the General had made unexpected inspections with the idea of kicking all the soft-jobbers out, but who’d been laid up for eight days, very ill—‘he’s certainly going to die; his condition no longer gives rise to any uneasiness,’ they said, smoking the cigarettes that Society swells send to the depots for the soldiers at the front. ‘D’you know,’ they said, ‘little Frazy, who is such a nice boy, the cherub, he’s at last found an excuse for staying behind. They wanted some cattle slaughterers for the abattoir, and he’s enlisted himself in there for protection, although he’s got a University degree and in spite of being an attorney’s clerk. As for Flandrin’s son, he’s succeeded in getting himself attached to the roadmenders.—Roadmender, him? Do you think they’ll let him stop so?’ ‘Certain sure,’ replies one of the cowardly milksops. ‘A roadmender’s job is for a long time.’”

  “Talk about idiots,” Marthereau growls.

  “And they were all jealous, I don’t know why, of a chap called Bourin. Formerly he moved in the best Parisian circles. He lunched and dined in the city. He made eighteen calls a day, and fluttered about the drawing-rooms from afternoon tea till daybreak. You couldn’t tire him at leading cotillons, getting up do’s, swallowing theatrical shows, without counting the motoring parties, and all the lot running with champagne. Then the war came. So he’s no longer capable, the poor boy, of staying on the look-out a bit late at an embrasure, or of cutting wire. He must stay peacefully in the warm. And then, him, a Parisian, to go into the provinces and bury himself in the trenches! Never in this world! ‘I realise, too,’ replied an individual, ‘that at thirty-seven I’ve arrived at the age when I must take care of myself!’ And while the fellow was saying that, I was thinking of Dumont the gamekeeper, who was forty-two, and was done in close to me on Hill 132, so near that after he got the handful of bullets in his head, my body shook with the trembling of his.”

  “And what were they like with you, these thieves?”

  “F—— me, it was, but they didn’t show it too much, only now and again when they couldn’t hold themselves in. They looked at me out of the corner of their eyes, and took damn good care not to touch me in passing, for I was still war-mucky.

  “It disgusted me a bit to be in the middle of that heap of good-for-nothings, but I said to myself, ‘Come, it’s only for a bit, Firmin.’ There was just one time that I very near broke out with the itch, and that was when one of ’em said, ‘Later, when we return, if we do return.’—NO! He had no right to say that. Sayings like that, before you let them out of your gob, you’ve got to earn them; it’s like a decoration. Let them get cushy jobs, if they like, but not play at bein
g men in the open when they’ve damned well run away. And you hear ’em discussing the battles, for they’re in closer touch than you with the big bugs and with the way the war’s managed; and afterwards, when you return, if you do return, it’s you that’ll be wrong in the middle of all that crowd of humbugs, with the poor little truth that you’ve got.

  “Ah, that evening, I tell you, all those heads in the reek of the light, the foolery of those people enjoying life and thriving on peace! It was like a ballet at the theatre or the make-believe of a magic-lantern. There were—there were—there are a hundred thousand more of them,” Volpatte at last concluded in confusion.

  But the men who were paying for the safety of the others with their strength and their lives enjoyed the wrath that choked him, that brought him to bay in his corner, and overwhelmed him with the apparitions of shirkers.