Gradually each has regained his place. I have stretched myself on the straw, and Marthereau wraps himself up by my side.
Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise. It is the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded simpleton in spectacles. When he has taken off his greatcoat and appears in his jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about showing his legs. We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette of a bearded hippopotamus. He blows, sighs, and mutters.
Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his head, and says to me, “Look at him. Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge. When we ask him what he does in civil life, he won’t say ‘I’m a school teacher’; he says, leering at you from under his specs with the half of his eyes, ‘I’m a professor.’ When he gets up very early to go to mass, and sees that he’s waking the chaps, he won’t say ‘I’m going to mass.’ No, he says ‘I’ve got belly-ache. I must leg it to the latrines, certain sure.’”
A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland: “Where I live, it’s just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes. There’s my old man there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he’s working or resting, he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the stove.”
I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialised and technical character: “That’s why he makes a paillon. D’you know what a paillon is? You take a stalk of green corn and peel it. You split it in two and then in two again, and you have different sizes. Then with a thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the stem of his pipe——”
The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.
There are only two candles alight. A wide wing of darkness overspreads the prostrate collection of men.
Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory, and some fragments of it reach my ears. Just now, Papa Ramure is abusing the commandant.
“The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I’ve noticed he don’t know how to smoke. He sucks all out at his pipes, and he burns ’em. It isn’t a mouth he’s got in his head, it’s a snout. The wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it’s coal. Clay pipes, they’ll stick it better, but he roasts ’em brown all the same. Talk about a snout! So, old man, mind what I’m telling you, he’ll come to what doesn’t ever happen often; through being forced to get white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe’ll explode in his nose before everybody. You’ll see.”
Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of the barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The lines of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by side in their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth diversified snoring.
With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to me about himself: “I’m a buyer of rags, you know,” he says, “or to put it better, a rag merchant. But me, I’m wholesale; I buy from the little rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop—a warehouse, mind you!—which I use as a depot. I deal in all kinds of rags, from linen to jam-pots, but principally brush-handles, sacks, and old shoes; and naturally, I make a speciality of rabbit-skins.”
And a little later I still hear him: “As for me, little and queer-shaped as I am, all the same I can carry a bin of two hundred pounds’ weight to the warehouse, up the steps, and my feet in sabots. Once I had a to-do with a person——”
“What I can’t abide,” cries Fouillade, all of a sudden, “is the exercises and marches they give us when we’re resting. My back’s mincemeat, and I can’t get a snooze even, I’m that cramped.”
There is a metallic noise in Volpatte’s direction. He has decided to take the stove, though he chides it constantly for the fatal fault of its perforations.
One who is but half asleep groans, “Oh, la, la! When will this war finish!”
A cry of stubborn and mysterious rebellion bursts forth—“They’d take the very skin off us!”
There follows a single, “Don’t fret yourself!” as darkly inconsequent as the cry of revolt.
I wake up a long time afterwards, as two o’clock is striking; and in a pallor of light which doubtless comes from the moon, I see the agitated silhouette of Pinégal. A cock has crowed afar. Pinégal raises himself halfway to a sitting position, and I hear his husky voice: “Well now, it’s the middle of the night, and there’s a cock loosing his jaw. He’s blind drunk, that cock.” He laughs, and repeats, “He’s blind, that cock,” and he twists himself again into the woollens, and resumes his slumber with a gurgle in which snores are mingled with merriment
Cocon has been wakened by Pinégal. The man of figures therefore thinks aloud, and says: “The squad had seventeen men when it set off for the war. It has seventeen also at present, with the stop-gaps. Each man has already worn out four greatcoats, one of the original blue, and three cigar-smoke blue, two pairs of trousers and six pairs of boots. One must count two rifles to each man, but one can’t count the overalls. Our emergency rations have been renewed twenty-three times. Among us seventeen, we’ve been mentioned fourteen times in Army Orders, of which two were to the Brigade, four to the Division, and one to the Army. Once we stayed sixteen days in the trenches without relief. We’ve been quartered and lodged in forty-seven different villages up to now. Since the beginning of the campaign, twelve thousand men have passed through the regiment, which consists of two thousand.”
A strange lisping noise interrupts him. It comes from Blaire, whose new ivories prevent him from talking as they also prevent him from eating. But he puts them in every evening, and retains them all night with fierce determination, for he was promised that in the end he would grow accustomed to the object they have put into his head.
I raise myself on my elbow, as on a battlefield, and look once more on the beings whom the scenes and happenings of the times have rolled up all together. I look at them all, plunged in the abyss of passive oblivion, some of them seeming still to be absorbed in their pitiful anxieties, their childish instincts, and their slave-like ignorance.
The intoxication of sleep masters me. But I recall what they have done and what they will do; and with that consummate picture of a sorry human night before me, a shroud that fills our cavern with darkness, I dream of some great unknown light.
* There is a complete set for each squad—stoves, canvas buckets, coffee-mill, pan, etc.—and each man carries some item on march.—Tr
* Cantine à vivres, chest containing two days rations and cooking utensils for four or five officers.—Tr.
XV
THE EGG
We were badly off, hungry and thirsty; and in these wretched quarters there was nothing!
Something had gone wrong with the revictualling department and our wants were becoming acute. Where the sorry place surrounded them, with its empty doors, its bones of houses, and its bald-headed telegraph posts, a crowd of hungry men were grinding their teeth and confirming the absence of everything:—
“The juice has sloped and the wine’s up the spout, and the bully’s zero. Cheese? Nix. Napoo jam, zero butter on skewers.”
“We’ve nothing, and no error, nothing; and play hell as you like, it doesn’t help.”
“Talk about rotten quarters! Three houses with nothing inside but draughts and damp.”
“No good having any of the filthy here, you might as well have only the skin of a bob in your purse, as long as there’s nothing to buy.”
“You might be a Rothschild, or even a military tailor, but what use’d your brass be?”
“Yesterday there was a bit of a cat mewing round where the 7th are. I feel sure they’ve eaten it.”
“Yes, there was; you could see its ribs like rocks on the seashore.”
“There were some chaps,” says Blaire, “who bustled about when they got here and managed to find a few bottles of common wine at the bacca-shop at the corner of the street.”
“Ah, the swine! Lucky devils to be slidi
ng that down their necks.”
“It was muck, all the same, it’d make your cup as black as your baccy-pipe.”
“There are some, they say, who’ve swallowed a fowl.”
“Damn,” says Fouillade.
“I’ve hardly had a bite. I had a sardine left, and a little tea in the bottom of a bag that I chewed up with some sugar.”
“You can’t even have a bit of a drunk—it’s off the map.”
“And that isn’t enough either, even when you’re not a big eater and you’ve got a communication trench as flat as a pancake.”
“One meal in two days—a yellow mess, shining like gold, no broth and no meat—everything left behind.”
“And worst of all we’ve nothing to light a pipe with.”
“True, and that’s misery. I haven’t a single match. I had several bits of ends, but they’ve gone. I’ve hunted in vain through all the pockets of my flea-case—nix. As for buying them its hopeless, as you say.”
“I’ve got the head of a match that I’m keeping.”
It is a real hardship indeed, and the sight is pitiful of the poilus who cannot light pipe or cigarette but put them away in their pockets and stroll in resignation. By good fortune, Tirloir has his petrol pipe-lighter and it still contains a little spirit. Those who are aware of it gather round him, bringing their pipes packed and cold. There is not even any paper to light, and the flame itself must be used until the remaining spirit in its tiny insect’s belly is burned.
As for me, I’ve been lucky, and I see Paradis wandering about, his kindly face to he wind, grumbling and chewing a bit of wood. “Look,” I say to him, “take this.”
“A box of matches!” he exclaims amazed, looking at it as one looks at a jewel. “Egad! That’s capital! Matches!”
A moment later we see him lighting his pipe, his face saucily sideways and splendidly crimsoned by the reflected flame, and everybody shouts, “Paradis’ got some matches!”
Towards evening I meet Paradis near the ruined triangle of a house-front at the corner of the two streets of this most miserable among villages.
He beckons to me. “Hist!” He has a curious and rather awkward air.
“I say,” he says to me affectionately, but looking at his feet, “a bit since, you chucked me a box of flamers. Well, you’re going to get a bit of your own back for it. Here!”
He puts something in my hand. “Be careful!” he whispers, “it’s fragile!”
Dazzled by the resplendent purity of his present, hardly even daring to believe my eyes, I see—an egg!
XVI
AN IDYLL
“Really and truly,” said Paradis, my neighbour in the ranks, “believe me or not, I’m knocked out—I’ve never before been so paid on a march as I have been with this one, this evening.”
His feet were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the burden of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline seemed almost fantastic. Twice he tripped and stumbled.
Paradis is tough. But he had been running up and down the trench all night as liaison man while the others were sleeping, so he had good reason to be exhausted and to growl “Help! These kilometres must be made of india-rubber, there’s no way out of it.”
Every three steps he hoisted his knapsack roughly up with a hitch of his hips, and panted under its dragging; and all the heap that he made with his bundles tossed and creaked like an overloaded wagon.
“We’re there,” said a non-com.
Non-coms. always say that, on every occasion. But—in spite of the non-com.’s declaration—we were really arriving in a twilight village which seemed to be drawn in white chalk and heavy strokes of black upon the blue paper of the sky, where the sable silhouette of the church—a pointed tower flanked by two turrets more slender and more sharp—was that of a tall cypress.
But the soldier, even when he enters the village where he is to be quartered, has not reached the end of his troubles. It rarely happens that either the squad or the section actually lodges in the place assigned to them, and this by reason of misunderstandings and cross purposes which tangle and disentangle themselves on the spot; and it is only after several quarter-hours of tribulation that each man is led to his actual shelter of the moment.
So after the usual wanderings we were admitted to our night’s lodging—a roof supported by four posts, and with the four quarters of the compass for its walls. But it was a good roof—an advantage which we could appreciate. It was already sheltering a cart and a plough, and we settled ourselves by them. Paradis, who had fumed and complained without ceasing during the hour we had spent in tramping to and fro, threw down his knapsack and then himself, and stayed there awhile, weary to the utmost, protesting that his limbs were benumbed, that the soles of his feet were painful, and indeed all the rest of him.
But now the house to which our hanging roof was subject, the house which stood just in front of us, was lighted up. Nothing attracts a soldier in the grey monotony of evening so much as a window whence beams the star of a lamp.
“Shall we have a squint?” proposed Volpatte.
“So be it,” said Paradis. He gets up gradually, and hobbling with weariness, steers himself towards the golden window that has appeared in the gloom, and then towards the door. Volpatte follows him, and I Volpatte.
We enter, and ask the old man who has let us in and whose twinkling head is as threadbare as an old hat, if he has any wine to sell.
“No,” replies the old man, shaking his head, where a little white fluff crops out in places.
“No beer? No coffee? Anything at all——”
“No, my lads, nothing of anything. We don’t belong here; we’re refugees, you know.”
“Then seeing there’s nothing, we’ll be off.” We half-turn. At least we have enjoyed for a moment the warmth which pervades the house and a sight of the lamp. Already Volpatte has gained the threshold and his back is disappearing in the darkness.
But I espy an old woman, sunk in the depths of a chair in the other corner of the kitchen, who appears to have some busy occupation.
I pinch Paradis’ arm. “There’s the belle of the house. Shall we pay our addresses to her?”
Paradis makes a gesture of lordly indifference. He has lost interest in women—all those he has seen for a year and a half were not for him; and moreover, even when they would like to be his, he is equally uninterested.
“Young or old—pooh!” he says to me, beginning to yawn. For want of something to do and to lengthen the leaving, he goes up to the goodwife. “Good-evening, gran’ma,” he mumbles, finishing his yawn.
“Good-evening, my sons,” quavers the old dame.
So near, we see her in detail. She is shrivelled, bent and bowed in her old bones, and the whole of her face is white as the dial of a clock.
And what is she doing? Wedged between her chair and the edge of the table she is trying to clean some boots. It is a heavy task for her infantile hands; their movements are uncertain, and her strokes with the brush sometimes go astray. The boots, too, are very dirty indeed.
Seeing that we are watching her, she whispers to us that she must polish them well, and this evening too, for they are her little girl’s boots, who is a dressmaker in the town and goes off first thing in the morning.
Paradis has stooped to look at the boots more closely, and suddenly he puts his hand out towards them. “Drop it, gran’ma; I’ll spruce up your lass’s trotter-cases for you in three secs.”
The old woman lodges an objection by shaking her head and her shoulders. But Paradis takes the boots with authority, while the grandmother, paralysed by her weakness, argues the question and opposes us with a shadowy protest.
Paradis has taken a boot in each hand; he holds them gingerly and looks at them for a moment, and you would even say that he was squeezing them a little.
“Aren’t they small!” he says in a voice which is not what we hear in the usual way.
He has secured the brushes as well, and sets himself
to wielding them with zealous carefulness. I notice that he is smiling, with his eyes fixed on his work.
Then, when the mud has gone from the boots, he takes some polish on the end of the double-pointed brush and caresses them with it intently.
They are dainty boots—quite those of a stylish young lady; rows of little buttons shine on them.
“Not a single button missing,” he whispers to me, and there is pride in his tone.
He is no longer sleepy; he yawns no more. On the contrary, his lips are tightly closed; a gleam of youth and spring-time lights up his face; and he who was on the point of going to sleep seems just to have woke up.
And where the polish has bestowed a beautiful black his fingers move over the body of the boot, which opens widely in the upper part and betrays—ever such a little—the lower curves of the leg. His fingers, so skilled in polishing, are rather awkward all the same as they turn the boots over and turn them again, as he smiles at them and ponders—profoundly and afar—while the old woman lifts her arms in the air and calls me to witness “What a very kind soldier!” he is.
It is finished. The boots are cleaned and finished off in style; they are like mirrors. Nothing is left to do.
He puts them on the edge of the table, very carefully, as if they were saintly relics; then at last his hands let them go. But his eyes do not at once leave them. He looks at them, and then lowering his head, he looks at his own boots. I remember that while he made this comparison the great lad—a hero by destiny, a Bohemian, a monk—smiled once more with all his heart.
The old woman was showing signs of activity in the depths of her chair; she had an idea. “I’ll tell her! She shall thank you herself, monsieur! Hey, Josephine!” she cried, turning towards a door.
But Paradis stopped her with an expansive gesture which I thought magnificent. “No, it’s not worth while, gran’ma; leave her where she is. We’re going. We won’t trouble her—march!”
Such decision sounded in his voice that it carried authority, and the old woman obediently sank into inactivity and held her peace.
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