Fouillade has put his chin on his fists, and looks unseeing at a corner of the room where the crowded poilus elbow, squeeze, and jostle each other to get by.
It was pretty good, that swig of white wine, but of what use are those few drops in the Sahara of Fouillade? The blues did not far recede, and now they return.
The Southerner rises and goes out, with his two glasses of wine in his stomach and one sou in his pocket. He plucks up courage to visit one more tavern, to plumb it with his eyes, and by way of excuse to mutter, as he leaves the place, “Curse him! He’s never there, the animal!”
Then he returns to the barn, which still—as always—whistles with wind and water. Fouillade lights his candle, and by the glimmer of the flame that struggles desperately to take wing and fly away, he sees Labri. He stoops low, with his light over the miserable dog—perhaps it will die first. Labri is sleeping, but feebly, for he opens an eye at once, and his tail moves.
The Southerner strokes him, and says to him in a low voice, “It can’t be helped, it——” He will not say more to sadden him, but the dog signifies appreciation by jerking his head before closing his eyes again. Fouillade rises stiffly, by reason of his rusty joints, and makes for his couch. For only one thing more he is now hoping—to sleep, that the dismal day may die, that wasted day, like so many others that there will be to endure stoically and to overcome, before the last day arrives of the war or of his life.
* French soldiers have extensively developed a system of corresponding with French women whom they do not know from Eve and whose acquaintance they usually make through newspaper advertisements. As typical of the latter I copy the following: “Officier artilleur, 30 ans, désire correspondance discrète avec jeune marraine, femme du monde. Ecrire,” etc. The “lonely soldier” movement in this country is similar.—Tr.
XII
THE PORTAL
“It’s foggy. Would you like to go?”
It is Poterloo who asks, as he turns towards me and shows eyes so blue that they make his fine, fair head seem transparent.
Poterloo comes from Souchez, and now that the Chasseurs have at last retaken it, he wants to see again the village where he lived happily in the days when he was only a man.
It is a pilgrimage of peril; not that we should have far to go—Souchez is just there. For six months we have lived and worked in the trenches almost within hail of the village. We have only to climb straight from here on to the Béthune road along which the trench creeps, the road honeycombed underneath by our shelters, and descend it for four or five hundred yards as it dips down towards Souchez. But all that ground is under regular and terrible attention. Since their recoil, the Germans have constantly sent huge shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in our caverns from time to time, and we see, high above the scarps, now here now there, the great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the piled columns of smoke, as high as churches. Why do they bombard Souchez? One cannot say why, for there is no longer anybody or anything in the village so often taken and retaken, that we have so fiercely wrested from each other.
But this morning a dense fog enfolds us, and by favour of the great curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there, enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of partition between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and Angres, whence the enemy spies upon us.
“Right you are!” I say to Poterloo.
Adjutant Barthe, informed of our project, wags his head up and down, and lowers his eyelids in token that he does not see.
We hoist ourselves out of the trench, and behold us both, upright, on the Béthune road!
It is the first time I have walked there during the day. I have never seen it, except from afar, the terrible road that we have so often travelled or crossed in leaps, bowed down in the darkness, and under the whistling of missiles.
“Well, are you coming, old man?”
After some paces, Poterloo has stopped in the middle of the road, where the fog like cotton-wool unravels itself into pendent fragments, and there he dilates his sky-blue eyes and half opens his scarlet mouth.
“Ah, la, la! Ah, la, la!” he murmurs. When I turn to him he points to the road, shakes his head and says, “This is it, good Lord, to think this is it! This bit where we are, I know it so well that if I shut my eyes I can see it as it was, exactly. Old chap, it’s awful to see it again like that. It was a beautiful road, planted all the way along with big trees.
“And now, what is it? Look at it—a sort of long thing without a soul—sad, sad. Look at these two trenches on each side, alive; this ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these trees uprooted, split, scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by bullets—look, this pock-marked pestilence, here! Ah, my boy, my boy, you can’t imagine how it is difisgured, this road!” And he goes forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.
It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year and a half. It is a great dishevelled highway, travelled only by bullets and by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and upheaved it, covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and laid bare its bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no colour, burned and old, sinister and awful to see.
“If you’d only known it—how clean and smooth it was!” says Poterloo. “All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and colours—like butterflies; and there was always some one passing on it to give good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets, or people shouting* to each other in a chaise, with the good wind ballooning their smocks. Ah, how happy life was once on a time!”
He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the roadway towards the land of parapets. Stooping, he stops by some faint swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed—tombs, recessed at intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the Cross in a church.
I call him—we shall never get there at such a funeral pace. Come along!
We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo lagging behind, his head confused and heavy with thought as he tries in vain to exchange with inanimate things his glances of recognition. Just there the road is lower, a fold secrets it from the side towards the north. On this sheltered ground there is a little traffic.
Along the hazy, filthy, and unwholesome space, where withered grass is embedded in black mud, there are rows of dead. They are carried there when the trenches or the plain are cleared during the night. They are waiting—some of them have waited long—to be taken back to the cemeteries after dark.
We approach them slowly. They are close against each other, and each one indicates with arms or legs some different posture of stiffened agony. There are some with half-mouldy faces, the skin rusted, or yellow with dark spots. Of several the faces are black as tar, the lips hugely distended—the heads of negroes blown out in goldbeaters’ skin. Between two bodies, protruding uncertainly from one or the other, is a severed wrist, ending with a cluster of strings.
Others are shapeless larvae of pollution, with dubious items of equipment pricking up, or bits of bone. Farther on, a corpse has been brought in in such a state that they have been obliged—so as not to lose it on the way—to pile it on to a lattice of wire which was then fastened to the two ends of a stake. Thus was it carried in the hollow of its metal hammock, and laid there. You cannot make out either end of the body; alone, in the heap that it makes, one recognises the gape of a trouser-pocket. An insect goes in and out of it.
Around the dead flutter letters that have escaped from pockets or cartridge pouches while they were being placed on the ground. Over one of these bits of white paper, whose wings still beat though the mud ensnares them, I stoop slightly and read a sentence—“My dear Henry, what a fine day it is for your birthday!” The man is on his belly; his loins are r
ent from hip to hip by a deep furrow; his head is half turned round; we see a sunken eye; and on temples, cheek and neck a kind of green moss is growing.
A sickening atmosphere roams with the wind around these dead and the heaped-up debris that lies about them—tent-cloth or clothing in stained tatters, stiff with dried blood, charred by the scorch of the shell, hardened, earthy and already rotting, quick with swarming and questing things. It troubles us. We look at each other and shake our heads, nor dare admit aloud that the place smells bad. All the same, we go away slowly.
Now come breaking out of the fog the bowed backs of men who are joined together by something they are carrying. They are Territorial stretcher-bearers with a new corpse. They come up with their old wan faces, toiling, sweating, and grimacing with the effort. To carry a dead man in the lateral trenches when they are muddy is a work almost beyond human power. They put down the body, which is dressed in new clothes.
“It’s not long since, now, that he was standing,” says one of the bearers. “It’s two hours since he got his bullet in the head for going to look for a Boche rifle in the plain. He was going on leave on Wednesday and wanted to take a rifle home with him. He is a sergeant of the 405th, Class 1914. A nice lad, too.”
He takes away the handkerchief that is over the face. It is quite young, and seems to sleep, except that an eyeball has gone, the cheek looks waxen, and a rosy liquid has run over the nostrils, mouth, and eyes.
The body strikes a note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this still pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if to lie better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than the others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic, nearer to one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything in the presence of all that heap of beings destroyed, it would have been “Poor boy!”
We take the road again, which at this point begins to slope down to the depth where Souchez lies. Under our feet in the whiteness of the fog it appears like a valley of frightful misery. The piles of rubbish, of remains and of filthiness accumulate on the shattered spine of the road’s paving and on its miry borders in final confusion. The trees bestrew the ground or have disappeared, torn away, their stumps mangled. The banks of the road are overturned and overthrown by shell-fire. All the way along, on both sides of this highway where only the crosses remain standing, are trenches twenty times blown in and re-hollowed, cavities—some with passages into them—hurdles on quagmires.
The more we go forward, the more is everything turned terribly inside out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic. We walk on a surface of shell fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step. We go among them as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets, sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and German accoutrements all mutilated and encrusted in dried mud, and among the sinister piles of clothing, stuck together with a reddish-brown cement. And one must look out, too, for the unexploded shells, which everywhere protrude their noses or reveal their flanks or their bases, painted red, blue, and tawny brown.
“That’s the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end.” It is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes. The sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled, emptied, scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams are splintered, and point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim with earth and with—no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed of a river, smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned. In one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the guns. The wide fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of new-turned earth, made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in length and in breadth.
I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to have been traversed by a giant plough. But he is absorbed to his very vitals in the metamorphosis of the country’s face.
He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a stupefied air, as though he came out of a dream—“The Red Tavern!” It is a flat field, carpeted with broken bricks.
And what is that, there? A milestone? No, it is not a milestone. It is a head, a black head, tanned and polished. The mouth is all askew, and you can see something of the moustache bristling on each side—the great head of a carbonised cat. The corpse—it is German—is underneath, buried upright.
“And that?” It is a ghastly collection containing an entirely white skull, and then, six feet away, a pair of boots, and between the two a heap of frayed leather and of rags, cemented by brown mud.
“Come on, there’s less fog already. We must hurry.”
A hundred yards in front of us, among the more transparent waves of fog that are changing places with us and hide us less and less, a shell whistles and bursts. It has fallen in the spot we are just nearing. We are descending, and the gradient is less steep. We go side by side. My companion says nothing, but looks to right and to left. Then he stops again, as he did at the top of the road. I hear his faltering voice, almost inaudible—“What’s this! We’re there—this is it——”
In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and barren—but we are in Souchez!
The village has disappeared, nor have I seen a village go so completely. Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency, these still retained some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses, their yards heaped high with plaster and tiles. Here, within the framework of slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, stones, and scrap-iron. This—here—was a street.
It might have been a dirty and boggy waste near a big town, whose rubbish of demolished buildings and its domestic refuse had been shot here for years, till no spot was empty. We plunge into a uniform layer of dung and debris, and make but slow and difficult progress. The bombardment has so changed the face of things that it has diverted the course of the mill-stream, which now runs haphazard and forms a pond on the remains of the little place where the cross stood.
Here are several shell-holes where swollen horses are rotting; in others the remains of what were once human beings are scattered, distorted by the monstrous injury of shells.
Here, athwart the track we are following, that we ascend as through an avalanche or inundation of ruin, under the unbroken melancholy of the sky, here is a man stretched out as if he slept, but he has that close flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man from a sleeper. He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves threaded over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades’ water-bottles slung on his shoulder by a skein of straps. It must have been only last night that the fragment of a shell caught him in the back. No doubt we are the first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly dead. Perhaps he will be scattered before others find him, so we look for his identity disc—it is stuck in the clotted blood where his right hand stagnates. I copy down the name that is written in letters of blood.
Poterloo lets me do it by myself—he is like a sleep-walker. He looks, and looks in despair, everywhere. He seeks endlessly among those evanished and eviscerated things; through the void he gazes to the haze of the horizon. Then he sits down on a beam, having first sent flying with a kick a saucepan that lay on it, and I sit by his side. A light drizzle is falling. The fog’s moisture is resolving in little drops that cover everything with a slight gloss. He murmurs, “Ah, la, la!”
He wipes his forehead and raises imploring eyes to me. He is trying to make out and take in the destruction of all this corner of the earth, and the mournfulness of it. He stammers disjointed remarks and interjections. He takes off his great helmet and his head is smoking. Then he says to me with difficulty, “Old man, you cannot imagine, you cannot, you cannot——”
He whispers: “The Red Tavern, wh
ere that—where that Boche’s head is, and litters of beastliness all around, that sort of cesspool—it was on the edge of the road, a brick house and two out-buildings alongside—how many times, old man, on the very spot where we stood, how many times, there, the good woman who joked with me on her doorstep, I’ve given her good-day as I wiped my mouth and looked towards Souchez that I was going back to! And then, after a few steps, I’ve turned round to shout some nonsense to her! Oh, you cannot imagine——! But that, now, that——!” He makes an inclusive gesture to indicate all the emptiness that surrounds him.
“We mustn’t stay here too long, old chap. The fog’s lifting, you know.”
He stands up with an effort—“Come.”
The most serious part is yet to come. His house——
He hesitates, turns towards the east, goes. “It’s there—no, I’ve passed it. It’s not there. I don’t know where it is—or where it was. Ah, misery, misery!” He wrings his hands in despair and staggers in the middle of the medley of plaster and bricks. Then, bewildered by this encumbered plain of lost landmarks, he looks questioningly about in the air, like a thoughtless child, like a madman. He is looking for the intimacy of the rooms scattered in infinite space, for their inner form and their twilight now cast upon the winds!
After several goings and comings, he stops at one spot and draws back a little—
“It was there, I’m right. Look—it’s that stone there that I knew it by. There was a vent-hole there, you can see the mark of the bar of iron that was over the hole before it disappeared.”
Sniffling he reflects, and gently shaking his head as though he could not stop it: “It is when you no longer have anything that you understand how happy you were. Ah, how happy we were!”
Under Fire Page 15