Under Fire

by Barbusse, Henri; Wray, William Fitzwater;

  We have had bad days and tragic nights in the cold and the rain and the mud. Now, although it is still winter, the first fine morning shows and convinces us that it will soon be spring once more. Already the top of the trench is graced by green young grass, and amid its new-born quivering some flowers are awakening. It means the end of contracted and constricted days. Spring is coming from above and from below. We inhale with joyful hearts; we are uplifted.

  Yes, the bad days are ending. The war will end, too, what the devil! And no doubt it will end in the beautiful season that is coming, that already illumines us, whose zephyrs already caress us.

  A whistling sound—hullo, a spent bullet! A bullet? Nonsense—it’s a blackbird! Curious how similar the sound was! The blackbirds and the birds of softer song, the countryside and the pageant of the seasons, the intimacy of dwelling-rooms, arrayed in light—Oh! the war will end soon; we shall go back for good to our own; wife, children, or to her who is at once wife and child, and we smile towards them in this young glory that already unites us again.

  At the forking of the two trenches, in the open and on the edge, here is something like a doorway. Two posts lean one upon the other, with a confusion of electric wires between them, hanging down like tropical creepers. It looks well. You would say it was a theatrical contrivance or scene. A slender climbing plant twines round one of the posts, and as you follow it with your glance, you see that it already dares to pass from one to the other.

  Soon, passing along this trench whose grassy slopes quiver like the flanks of a fine horse, we come out into our own trench on the Béthune road, and here is our place. Our comrades are there, in clusters. They are eating, and enjoying the goodly temperature.

  The meal finished, we clean our aluminium mess-tins or plates with a morsel of bread. “Look, the sun’s going!” It is true; a cloud has passed over and hidden it. “It’s going to splash, my little lads,” says Lamuse; “that’s our luck all over! Just as we are going off!”

  “A damned country!” says Fouillade. In truth this Northern climate is not worth much. It drizzles and mizzles, reeks and rains. And when there is any sun, it soon disappears in the middle of this great damp sky.

  Our four days in the trenches are finished, and the relief will commence at nightfall. Leisurely we get ready for leaving. We fill and put aside the knapsacks and bags. We give a rub to the rifles and wrap them up.

  It is already four o’clock. Darkness is falling quickly, and we grow indistinct to each other. “Damnation! Here’s the rain!” A few drops and then the downpour. Oh, la, la, la! We don our capes and tent-cloths. We go back into the dug-out, dabbling, and gathering mud on our knees, hands, and elbows, for the bottom of the trench is getting sticky. Once inside, we have hardly time to light a candle, stuck on a bit of stone, and to shiver all round—“Come on, en route!”

  We hoist ourselves into the wet and windy darkness outside. I can dimly see Poterloo’s powerful shoulders; in the ranks we are always side by side. When we get going I call to him, “Are you there, old chap?”—“Yes, in front of you,” he cries to me, turning round. As he turns he gets a buffet in the face from wind and rain, but he laughs. His happy face of the morning abides with him. No downpour shall rob him of the content that he carries in his strong and steadfast heart; no evil night put out the sunshine that I saw possess his thoughts some hours ago.

  We march, and jostle each other, and stumble. The rain is continuous, and water runs in the bottom of the trench. The floor-gratings yield as the soil becomes soaked; some of them slope to right or left and we skid on them. In the dark, too, one cannot see them, so that we miss them at the turnings and put our feet into holes full of water.

  Even in the greyness of the night I will not lose sight of the slaty shine of Poterloo’s helmet, which streams like a roof under the torrent, nor of the broad back that is adorned with a square of glistening oilskin. I lock my step in his, and from time to time I question him and he answers me—always in good humour, always serene and strong.

  When there are no more of the duckboards, we tramp in the thick mud. It is dark now. There is a sudden halt and I am thrown on Poterloo. Up higher we hear half-angry reproaches—“What the devil, will you get on? We shall get broken up!”

  “I can’t get my trotters unstuck!” replies a pitiful voice.

  The engulfed one gets clear at last, and we have to run to overtake the rest of the company. We begin to pant and complain, and bluster against those who are leading. Our feet go down haphazard; we stumble and hold ourselves up by the walls, so that our hands are plastered with mud. The march becomes a stampede, full of the noise of metal things and of oaths.

  In redoubled rain there is a second halt; some one has fallen, and the hubbub is general. He picks himself up and we are off again. I exert myself to follow Poterloo’s helmet closely that gleams feebly in the night before my eyes, and I shout from time to time, “All right?”—“Yes, yes, all right,” he replies, puffing and blowing, and his voice always singsong and resonant.

  Our knapsacks, tossed in this rolling race under the assault of the elements, drag and hurt our shoulders. The trench is blocked by a recent landslide, and we plunge into it. We have to tear our feet out of the soft and clinging earth, lifting them high at each step. Then, when this crossing is laboriously accomplished, we topple down again into the slippery stream, in the bottom of which are two narrow ruts, boot-worn, which hold one’s foot like a vice, and there are pools into which it goes with a great splash. In one place we must stoop very low to pass under a heavy and glutinous bridge that crosses the trench, and we only get through with difficulty. It obliges us to kneel in the mud, to flatten ourselves on the ground, and to crawl on all fours for a few paces. A little farther there are evolutions to perform as we grasp a post that the sinking of the ground has set aslope across the middle of the fairway.

  We come to a trench-crossing. “Come, forward! Look out for yourselves, boys!” says the adjutant, who has flattened himself in a corner to let us pass and to speak to us. “This is a bad spot.”

  “We’re done up,” shouts a voice so hoarse that I cannot identify the speaker.

  “Damn! I’ve enough of it, I’m stopping here,” groans another, at the end of his wind and his muscle.

  “What do you want me to do?” replies the adjutant. “No fault of mine, eh? Come, get a move on, it’s a bad spot—it was shelled at the last relief!”

  We go on through the tempest of wind and water. We seem to be going ever down and down, as in a pit. We slip and tumble, butt into the wall of the trench, into which we drive out elbows hard, so as to throw ourselves upright again. Our going is a sort of long slide, on which we keep up just how and where we can. What matters is to stumble only forward, and as straight as possible.

  Where are we? I lift my head, in spite of the billows of rain, out of this gulf where we are struggling. Against the hardly discernible background of the buried sky, I can make out the rim of the trench; and there, rising before my eyes all at once and towering over that rim, is something like a sinister doorway, made of two black posts that lean one upon the other, with something hanging from the middle like a torn-off scalp. It is the doorway.

  “Forward! Forward!”

  I lower my head and see no more; but again I hear the feet that sink in the mud and come out again, the rattle of the bayonets, the heavy exclamations, and the rapid breathing.

  Once more there is a violent back-eddy. We pull up sharply, and again I am thrown upon Poterloo and lean on his back, his strong back and solid, like the trunk of a tree, like healthfulness and like hope. He cries to me, “Cheer up, old man, we’re there!”

  We are standing still. It is necessary to go back a little—good Lord!—no, we are moving on again!

  Suddenly a fearful explosion falls on us. I tremble to my skull; a metallic reverberation fills my head; a scorching and suffocating smell of sulphur pierces my nostrils. The earth has opened in front of me. I feel myself lifted and hurled as
ide—doubled up, choked, and half blinded by this lightning and thunder. But still my recollection is clear; and in that moment when I looked wildly and desperately for my comrade-in-arms, I saw his body go up, erect and black, both his arms outstretched to their limit, and a flame in the place of his head!

  * All these high roads are stone-paved, and traffic is noisy.—Tr.

  XIII

  THE BIG WORDS

  Barque notices that I am writing. He comes towards me on all fours through the straw and lifts his intelligent face to me, with its reddish forelock and the little quick eyes over which circumflex accents fold and unfold themselves. His mouth is twisting in all directions, by reason of a tablet of chocolate that he crunches and chews, while he holds the moist stump of it in his fist.

  With his mouth full, and wafting me the odour of a sweetshop, he stammers—

  “Tell me, you writing chap, you’ll be writing later about soldiers, you’ll be speaking of us, eh?”

  “Why yes, sonny, I shall talk about you, and about the boys, and about our life.”

  “Tell me, then”—he indicates with a nod the papers on which I have been making notes. With hovering pencil I watch and listen to him. He has a question to put to me—“Tell me, then, though you needn’t if you don’t want—there’s something I want to ask you. This is it; if you make the common soldiers talk in your book, are you going to make them talk like they do talk, or shall you put it all straight—into pretty talk? It’s about the big words that we use. For after all, now, besides falling out sometimes and blackguarding each other, you’ll never hear two poilus open their heads for a minute without saying and repeating things that the printers wouldn’t much like to print. Then what? If you don’t say ’em, your portrait won’t be a lifelike one; it’s as if you were going to paint them and then left out one of the gaudiest colours wherever you found it. All the same, it isn’t usually done.”

  “I shall put the big words in their place, dadda, for they’re the truth.”

  “But tell me, if you put ’em in, won’t the people of your sort say you’re a swine, without worrying about the truth?”

  “Very likely, but I shall do it all the same, without worrying about those people.”

  “Do you want my opinion? Although I know nothing about books, it’s brave to do that, because it isn’t usually done, and it’ll be spicy if you dare do it—but you’ll find it hard when it comes to it, you’re too polite. That’s just one of the faults I’ve found in you since we’ve known each other; that, and also that dirty habit you’ve got, when they’re serving brandy out to us, you pretend it’ll do you harm, and instead of giving your share to a pal, you go and pour it on your head to wash your scalp.”

  XIV

  OF BURDENS

  At the end of the yard of the Muets farm, among the outbuildings, the barn gapes like a cavern. It is always caverns for us, even in houses! When you have crossed the yard, where the manure yields underfoot with a spongy sound, or have gone round it instead on the narrow paved path of difficult equilibrium, and when you have arrived at the entrance to the barn, you can see nothing at all.

  Then, if you persist, you make out a misty hollow where equally misty and dark lumps are asquat or prone or wandering from one corner to another. At the back, on the right and on the left, the pale gleams of two candles, each with the round halo of a distant moon, allow you at last to make out the human shape of these masses, whose mouths emit either steam or thick smoke.

  Our hazy retreat, which I allow carefully to swallow me whole, is a scene of excitement this evening. We leave for the trenches to-morrow morning, and the nebulous tenants of the barn are beginning to pack up.

  Although darkness falls on my eyes and chokes them as I come in from the pallid evening, I still dodge the snares spread over the ground by water-bottles, mess-tins and weapons, but I butt full into the loaves that are packed together exactly in the middle, like the paving of a yard. I reach my corner. Something alive is there, with a huge back, fleecy and rounded, squatting and stooping over a collection of little things that glitter on the ground, and I tap the shoulder upholstered in sheepskin. The being turns round, and by the dull and fitful gleam of a candle which a bayonet stuck in the ground upholds, I see one half of a face, an eye, the end of a moustache, and the corner of a half-open mouth. It growls in a friendly way, and resumes the inspection of its possessions.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I’m fixing things, and clearing up.”

  The quasi-brigand who appears to be checking his booty, is my comrade Volpatte. He has folded his tent-cloth in four and placed it on his bed—that is, on the truss of straw assigned to him—and on this carpet he has emptied and displayed the contents of his pockets.

  And it is quite a shop that he broods over with a housewife’s solicitous eyes, watchful and jealous, lest some one walks over him. With my eye I tick off his copious exhibition.

  Alongside his handkerchief, pipe, tobacco-pouch (which also contains a note-book), knife, purse, and pocket pipe-lighter, which comprise the necessary and indispensable groundwork, here are two leather laces twisted like earthworms round a watch enclosed in a case of transparent celluloid, which has curiously dulled and blanched with age. Then a little round mirror, and another square one; this last, though broken, is of better quality, and bevel-edged. A flask of essence of turpentine, a flask of mineral oil nearly empty, and a third flask, empty. A German belt-plate, bearing the device, “Gott mit uns”; a dragoon’s tassel of similar origin; half wrapped in paper, an aviator’s arrow in the form of a steel pencil and pointed like a needle; folding scissors and a combined knife and fork of similar pliancy; a stump of pencil and one of candle; a tube of aspirin, also containing opium tablets, and several tin boxes.

  Observing that my inspection of his personal possessions is detailed, Volpatte helps me to identify certain items—

  “That, that’s a leather officer’s glove. I cut the fingers off to stop up the mouth of my blunderbuss with; that, that’s telephone wire, the only thing to fasten buttons on your greatcoat with if you want ’em to stay there; and here, inside here, d’you know what that is? White thread, good stuff, not what you’re put off with when they give you new things, a sort of macaroni au fromage that you pull out with a fork; and there’s a set of needles on a postcard. The safety-pins, they’re there, separate.”

  “And here, that’s the paper department. Quite a library.”

  There is indeed a surprising collection of papers among the things disgorged by Volpatte’s pockets—the violet packet of writing-paper, whose unworthy printed envelope is out at heels; an Army squad-book, of which the dirty and desiccated binding, like the skin of an old tramp, has perished and shrunk all over; a note-book with a chafed moleskin cover, and packed with papers and photographs, those of his wife and children enthroned in the middle.

  Out of this bundle of yellowed and darkened papers Volpatte extracts this photograph and shows it to me once more. I renew acquaintance with Madame Volpatte and her generous bosom, her mild and mellow features; and with the two little boys in white collars, the elder slender, the younger round as a ball.

  “I’ve only got photos of old people,” says Biquet, who is twenty years old. He shows us a portrait, holding it close to the candle, of two aged people who look at us with the same well-behaved air as Volpatte’s children.

  “I’ve got mine with me, too,” says another; “I always stick to the photo of the nestlings.”

  “Course! Every man carries his crowd along,” adds another.

  “It’s funny,” Barque declares, “a portrait wears itself out just with being looked at. You haven’t got to gape at it too often, or be too long about it; in the long run, I don’t know what happens, but the likeness mizzles.”

  “You’re right,” says Blaire, “I’ve found it like that too, exactly.”

  “I’ve got a map of the district as well, among my papers,” Volpatte continues. He unfolds it to the light. Il
legible and transparent at the creases, it looks like one of those window-blinds made of squares sewn together.

  “I’ve some newspaper too”—he unfolds a newspaper article upon poilus—“and a book”—a twopence-halfpenny novel, called Twice a Virgin—“Look, another newspaper cutting from the Etampes Bee. Don’t know why I’ve kept that, but there must be a reason somewhere. I’ll think about it when I have time. And then, my pack of cards, and a set of draughts, with a paper board and the pieces made of sealing-wax.”

  Barque comes up, regards the scene, and says, “I’ve a lot more things than that in my pockets.” He addresses himself to Volpatte. “Have you got a Boche pay-book, louse-head, some phials of iodine, and a Browning? I’ve all that, and two knives.”

  “I’ve no revolver,” says Volpatte, “nor a Boche pay-book, but I could have had two knives or even ten knives; but I only need one.”

  “That depends,” says Barque. “And have you any mechanical buttons, fathead?”

  “I haven’t any,” cries Bécuwe.

  “The private can’t do without ’em,” Lamuse asserts. “Without them, to make your braces stick to your breeches, the game’s up.”

  “And I’ve always got in my pocket,” says Blaire, “so’s they’re within reach, my case of rings.” He brings it out, wrapped up in a gas-mask bag, and shakes it. The files ring inside, and we hear the jingle of aluminium rings in the rough.

  “I’ve always got string,” says Biquet, “that’s the useful stuff!”

  “Not so useful as nails,” says Pépin, and he shows three in his hand, big, little, and average.

  One by one the others come to join in the conversation, to chaffer and cadge. We are getting used to the half-darkness. But Corporal Salavert, who has a well-earned reputation for dexterity, makes a hanging lamp with a candle and a tray, the latter contrived from a Camembert box and some wire. We light up, and around its illumination each man tells what he has in his pockets, with parental preferences and bias.