The gusts of death drive us on.
Forward!
Now, we are nearly running. I see some who fall solidly flat, face forward, and others who founder meekly, as though they would sit down on the ground. We step aside abruptly to avoid the dead, quiet and rigid, prone or upreared, and also—more perilous snares!—the wounded that hook on to you, struggling.
The International Trench! We are there. The wire entanglements have been torn up into long roots and creepers, thrown afar and coiled up, swept away and piled in great drifts by the guns. Between these big bushes of rain-damped steel the ground is open and free.
The trench is not defended. The Germans have abandoned it, or else a first wave has already passed over it. Its interior bristles with rifles placed against the bank. In the bottom are scattered corpses. From the jumbled litter of the long trench, hands emerge that protrude from grey sleeves with red facings, and booted legs. In places the embankment is destroyed and its woodwork splintered—all the flank of the trench collapsed and fallen into an indescribable mixture. In other places, round pits are yawning. And of all that moment I have best retained the vision of a whimsical trench covered with many-coloured rags and tatters. For the making of their sandbags the Germans had used cotton and woollen stuffs of motley design pillaged from some house-furnisher’s shop; and all this hotch-potch of coloured remnants, mangled and frayed, floats and flaps and dances in our faces.
We have spread out in the trench. The lieutenant, who has jumped to the other side, is stooping and summoning us with signs and shouts—“Don’t stay there; forward, forward!”
We climb the wall of the trench with the help of the sacks, of weapons, and of the backs that are piled up there. In the bottom of the ravine the soil is shot-churned, crowded with jetsam, swarming with prostrate bodies. Some are motionless as blocks of wood; others move slowly or convulsively. The barrage fire continues to increase its infernal discharge behind us on the ground that we have crossed. But where we are at the foot of the rise it is dead ground for the artillery.
A short and uncertain calm follows. We are less deafened and look at each other. There is fever in the eyes, and the cheekbones are blood-red. Our breathing snores and our hearts drum in our bodies.
In haste and confusion we recognise each other, as if we had met again face to face in a nightmare on the uttermost shores of death. Some hurried words are cast upon this glade in hell:—“It’s you!”—“Where’s Cocon?”—“Don’t know.”—“Have you seen the captain?”—“No.”—“Going strong?”—“Yes.”
The bottom of the ravine is crossed and the other slope rises opposite. We climb in Indian file by a stairway rough-hewn in the ground: “Look out!” The shout means that a soldier half-way up the steps has been struck in the loins by a shell-fragment; he falls with his arms forward, bareheaded, like the diving swimmer. We can see the shapeless silhouette of the mass as it plunges into the gulf. I can almost see the detail of his blown hair over the black profile of his face.
We debouch upon the height. A great colourless emptiness is outspread before us. At first one can see nothing but a chalky and stony plain, yellow and grey to the limit of sight. No human wave is preceding ours; in front of us there is no living soul, but the ground is peopled with dead—recent corpses that still mimic agony or sleep, and old remains already bleached and scattered to the wind, half assimilated by the earth.
As soon as our pushing and jolted file emerges, two men close to me are hit, two shadows are hurled to the ground and roll under our feet, one with a sharp cry, and the other silently, as a felled ox. Another disappears with the caper of a lunatic, as if he had been snatched away. Instinctively we close up as we hustle forward—always forward—and the wound in our line closes of its own accord. The adjutant stops, raises his sword, lets it fall, and drops to his knees. His kneeling body slopes backward in jerks, his helmet drops on his heels, and he remains there, bareheaded, face to the sky. Hurriedly the rush of the rank has split open to respect his immobility.
But we cannot see the lieutenant. No more leaders, then——Hesitation checks the wave of humanity that begins to beat on the plateau. Above the trampling one hears the hoarse effort of our lungs. “Forward!” cries some soldier, and then all resume the onward race to hell with increasing speed.
“Where’s Bertrand?” comes the laborious complaint of one of the foremost runners. “There! Here!” He had stooped in passing over a wounded man, but he leaves him quickly, and the man extends his arms towards him and seems to sob.
It is just at the moment when he rejoins us that we hear in front of us, coming from a sort of ground swelling, the crackle of a machine-gun. It is a moment of agony—more serious even than when we were passing through the flaming earthquake of the barrage. That familiar voice speaks to us across the plain, sharp and horrible. But we no longer stop. “Go on, go on!”
Our panting becomes hoarse groaning, yet still we hurl ourselves towards the horizon.
“The Boches! I see them!” a man says suddenly.
“Yes—their heads, there—above the trench—it’s there, the trench, that line. It’s close. Ah, the hogs!”
We can indeed make out little round grey caps which rise and then drop on the ground level, fifty yards away, beyond a belt of dark earth, furrowed and humped. Encouraged they spring forward, they who now form the group where I am. So near the goal, so far unscathed, shall we not reach it? Yes, we will reach it! We make great strides and no longer hear anything. Each man plunges straight ahead, fascinated by the terrible trench, bent rigidly forward, almost incapable of turning his head to right or to left. I have a notion that many of us missed their footing and fell to the ground. I jump sideways to miss the suddenly erect bayonet of a toppling rifle. Quite close to me, Farfadet jostles me with his face bleeding, throws himself on Volpatte who is beside me and clings to him. Volpatte doubles up without slackening his rush and drags him along some paces, then shakes him off without looking at him and without knowing who he is, and shouts at him in a breaking voice almost choked with exertion: “Let me go, let me go, by God! They’ll pick you up directly—don’t worry.”
The other man sinks to the ground, and his face, plastered with a scarlet mask and void of all expression, turns in every direction; while Volpatte, already in the distance, automatically repeats between his teeth, “Don’t worry,” with a steady forward gaze on the line.
A shower of bullets spirts around me, increasing the number of those who suddenly halt, who collapse slowly, defiant and gesticulating, of those who dive forward solidly with all the body’s burden, of the shouts, deep, furious, and desperate, and even of that hollow and terrible gasp when a man’s life goes bodily forth in a breath. And we who are not yet stricken, we look ahead, we walk and we run, among the frolics of the death that strikes at random into our flesh.
The wire entanglements—and there is one stretch of them intact. We go along to where it has been gutted into a wide and deep opening. This is a colossal funnel-hole, formed of smaller funnels placed together, a fantastic volcanic crater, scooped there by the guns.
The sight of this convulsion is stupefying; truly it seems that it must have come from the centre of the earth. Such a rending of virgin strata puts new edge on our attacking fury, and none of us can keep from shouting with a solemn shake of the head—even just now when words are but painfully torn from our throats—“Oh, Christ! Look what hell we’ve given ’em there! Oh, look!”
Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the hollows and the earthy mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and blackened and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet and we tear them out angrily. The accoutrements and stuffs that cover the soft soil, the linen that is scattered about from sundered knapsacks, prevent us from sticking fast in it, and we are careful to plant our feet in this debris when we jump into the holes or climb the hillocks.
Behind us voices urge us—“Forward, boys, forward, damn it!”
“A
ll the regiment is behind us!” they cry. We do not turn round to see, but the assurance electrifies our rush once more.
No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are nearing. Some German dead are crumbling in front of it, in pinnacled heaps or extended lines. We are there. The parapet takes definite and sinister shape and detail; the loopholes—we are prodigiously, incredibly close!
Something falls in front of us. It is a bomb. With a kick Corporal Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the trench.
With that fortunate deed the squad reaches the trench.
Pépin has hurled himself flat on the ground and is involved with a corpse. He reaches the edge and plunges in—the first to enter. Fouillade, with great gestures and shouts, jumps into the pit almost at the same moment that Pépin rolls down it. Indistinctly I see—in the time of the lightning’s flash—a whole row of black demons stooping and squatting for the descent, on the ridge of the embankment, on the edge of the dark ambush.
A terrible volley bursts point-blank in our faces, flinging in front of us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earthen verge. After the stunning shock we shake ourselves and burst into devilish laughter—the discharge has passed too high. And at once, with shouts and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into the belly of the trench!
We are submerged in a mysterious smoke, and at first I can only see blue uniforms in the stifling gulf. We go one way and then another, driven by each other, snarling and searching. We turn about, and with our hands encumbered by knife, bombs and rifle, we do not know at first what to do.
“They’re in their funk-holes, the swine!” is the cry. Heavy explosions are shaking the earth—underground, in the dug-outs. We are all at once divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see nothing more. We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night. One stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom. Hardly can one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made of white sandbags, which are everywhere torn like paper. At one time the heavy adhesive reek sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of the attackers. Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and sinks to the bottom. I hear several shrill cries of “Kamerad!” proceeding from a pale-faced and grey-clad group in the huge corner made by a rending shell. Under the inky cloud the tempest of men flows back, climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling, along the earthwork dark and ruined.
And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and understand that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has not encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our approach. The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender curtain of defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are caught like rats or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void, a great void. We advance in crowds like a terrible array of spectators.
And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled white walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a vanished river that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the flat round hole of a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the sloping banks and in the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of corpses—a dead river that is filled again to overflowing by the new tide and the breaking wave of our company. In the smoke vomited by dug-outs and the shaking wind of subterranean explosions, I come upon a compact mass of men hooked on to each other who are describing a wide circle. Just as we reach them the entire mass breaks up to make a residue of furious battle. I see Blaire break away, his helmet hanging on his neck by the chin-strap and his face flayed, and uttering a savage yell. I stumble upon a man who is crouching at the entry to a dug-out. Drawing back from the black hatchway, yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself with his left hand on a beam. In his right hand and for several seconds he holds a bomb which is on the point of exploding. It disappears in the hole, bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him from the bowels of the earth. The man seizes another bomb.
Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another dug-out with a pickaxe he has found there, causing a landslide, and the entry is blocked. I see several shadows trampling and gesticulating over the tomb.
Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible shells and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognise those whom I know, just as though all that had gone before of our lives had suddenly become very distant. There is some change working in them. A frenzied excitement is driving them all out of themselves.
“What are we stopping here for?” says one, grinding his teeth.
“Why don’t we go on to the next?” a second asks me in fury. “Now we’re here, we’d be there in a few jumps!”
“I, too, I want to go on.”—“Me, too. Ah, the hogs!”
They shake themselves like banners. They carry the luck of their survival as it were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with themselves.
We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange demolished way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown to the unknown.
Advance to the right!
We begin to flow again in one direction. No doubt it is a movement planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs. We trample soft bodies underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their position; rivulets and cries come from them. Like posts and heaps of rubbish, corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them down, suffocate them, strangle them. So that I can get by, I must push at a slaughtered trunk of which the neck is a spring of gurgling blood.
In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together, athwart the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in all its environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed, blood-red with sweat, eyes flashing. Some groups seem to be dancing as they brandish their knives. They are elated, immensely confident, ferocious.
The battle dies down imperceptibly. A soldier says, “Well, what’s to be done now?” It flares up again suddenly at one point. Twenty yards away in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the grey embankment makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its scattered missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits intermittently and seems to be in difficulties.
Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see men encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it. Near to me I make out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight and with no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking explosions come in jerky sequence.
A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two. Joseph halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee. I run to him and he watches me coming. “It’s nothing—my thigh. I can crawl along by myself.” He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways slowly towards the trench.
I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit him, and I slip round there by the left, making a detour. No one there. I only meet another of our squad on the same errand—Paradis.
We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of iron of all shapes. They block up the trench and separate us. “The machine-gun’s taken by the 7th,” they shout, “it won’t bark any more. It was a mad devil—filthy beast! Filthy beast!”
“What’s there to do now?”—“Nothing.”
We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down. The living have ceased to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last, surrounded by smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to all the ends of the earth. We no longer know where we are. There is neither earth nor sky—nothing but a sort of cloud. The first period of inaction is forming in the chaotic drama, and there is a general slackening in the movement and the
uproar. The cannonade grows less; it still shakes the sky as a cough shakes a man, but it is farther off now. Enthusiasm is allayed, and there remains only the infinite fatigue that rises and overwhelms us, and the infinite waiting that begins over again.
Where is the enemy? He has left his dead everywhere, and we have seen rows of prisoners. Yonder again there is one, drab, ill-defined and smoky, outlined against the dirty sky. But the bulk seem to have dispersed afar. A few shells come to us here and there, blunderingly, and we ridicule them. We are saved, we are quiet, we are alone, in this desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins a line of the living.
Night has come. The dust has flown away, but has yielded place to shadow and darkness over the long-drawn multitude’s disorder. Men approach each other, sit down, get up again and walk about, leaning on each other or hooked together. Between the dug-outs, which are blocked by the mingled dead, we gather in groups and squat. Some have laid their rifles on the ground and wander on the rim of the trench with their arms balancing; and when they come near we can see that they are blackened and scorched, their eyes are red and slashed with mud. We speak seldom, but are beginning to think.
We see the stretcher-bearers, whose sharp silhouettes stoop and grope; they advance linked two and two together by their long burdens. Yonder on our right one hears the blows of pick and shovel.
I wander into the middle of this gloomy turmoil. In a place where the bombardment has crushed the embankment of the trench into a gentle slope, some one is seated. A faint light still prevails. The tranquil attitude of this man as he looks reflectively in front of him is sculptural and striking. Stooping, I recognise him as Corporal Bertrand. He turns his face towards me, and I feel that he is looking at me through the shadows with his thoughtful smile.
“I was coming to look for you,” he says; “they’re organising a guard for the trench until we’ve got news of what the others have done and what’s going on in front. I’m going to put you on double sentry with Paradis, in a listening-post that the sappers have just dug.”
Under Fire Page 25