No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  Two days ago, at dawn, the Bulgarians started bombarding us with time-fire projectiles and asphyxiant gas, combined. It was our first opportunity to experience the latter weapon in actual use. True, we had heard of it previously as a kind of legend, thanks to the theoretical lectures delivered to us before we buried ourselves in the trenches. Since then, our gasmasks had been an almost senseless luxury, indeed a troublesome one, since their containers, suspended awkwardly from our belts at the end of a cord, bang relentlessly against our thighs and make noise as they strike our rifles.

  About a dozen friends were gathered in my dugout telling stories when the initial gas bombs landed, making a special type of hollow sound. We took them at first for common shells which had plunged into some boggish area and failed to explode. Several of the men even shouted out the customary mock – ‘New fuse needed! Take aim, boys!’ – and then returned to their storytelling as if nothing had happened.

  Afterwards we caught a whiff of some scent in the air. It was an extremely light and pleasant aroma resembling bitter-almond. The concentration soon increased, however, and before long the air was acrid, pungently sour, poisoned. In an instant the trench hummed with sudden stirrings. A pandemonium of cries, the stupefied confusion of shrieks and commands.

  ‘Gas! Gas!’ shouted the N. C. O.s maniacally. ‘Masks everyone! Your masks!’

  But practically none of us had his mask ready to hand. Those who chanced to be visiting in someone else’s dugout at that moment, far from their kits, had an especially bad time of it. What followed was a tragedy of mass confusion. Most of the men attempted to flee my dugout. It’s a deep one, you see, and thus more and more of the gas – which is heavier than air – kept settling inside and filling it. But how could anyone stick even his nose out into the trench? It was guaranteed suicide. The sky out there was raining lead and steel, the time fuses just waiting for each man to scamper out of his dugout so that they could smash him head-on; the ‘bonbonnières’ were bursting at a fixed height over our lines and scattering a thick hail of lead upon anyone who dared emerge. So all the men retreated back into the shelter. Climbing over one another like drunkards or lunatics, they dug their fists into eyes that were smarting horribly and flooding with tears as though sprinkled with red pepper. Their noses and mouths (which were locked tight) they thrust so deeply beneath blankets that they were in danger of suffocating. A painful clawing in the throat and nose made everyone bellow with a harsh cough while the mud-covered hands kept furiously rubbing enflamed eyes. It was a sight whose unspeakable bestiality I could never have imagined before I actually saw it. In my own case, I had managed to find my mask in time, searching blindly with eyes squeezed tight. Soon, I was staring through its clouded lenses, overcome by the unheard-of horror and listening to the agony of my tormented comrades all of whom were rolling about in one frenzied mass of pale, blinded, mud-besplattered humanity, rolling about and bellowing as though in the last throes of rabies. Howling, they bit into their greatcoats and blankets. Their heads groped about and knocked against each other inside this skein of tangled bodies, like the heads of newly-born puppies when their eyes are still sealed and they search in chaos, using the sensitivity to touch possessed by their naked snouts. I was glued against the shelter’s partition-wall pressing my palms tightly against the mask and overcome to such a degree by fear and pain that I could give no assistance whatsoever to anyone. If an enemy soldier had entered our dugout at that point, one single enemy soldier, he would have been able to polish us all off without the slightest difficulty. We would have sat there and allowed him to slaughter us just as we were, with our blinded eyes, powerless to defend our lives, and weeping like little girls. Several might even have thanked him profusely for delivering them from this torment.

  Fortunately, it did not last very long. Even better, a furious wind began to blow immediately afterward, a wind which went right inside us, reviving us as it raced refreshingly through our flaming lungs like a fountain of life. It rinsed the infection out of the trench’s air and carried away the lethal vapor. Places where the gas bombs exploded are still unapproachable. Most of the shells, however, we buried. To fumigate the dugouts we burned solidified alcohol inside them.

  Although the horror did not last very long, hordes of men were sent to the hospitals: blinded, vomiting, coughing until racked with convulsions, grimacing horribly and spitting blood, viscera festering, eyes swollen shut: pasted together by yellowish discharges and resembling two wounds beginning to scab. In our trench six men died, among them George Dimitratos, who suffocated within ten minutes. When I went to see him I failed to recognize him at first. His face was bloated, his lips so swollen that the hairs of his mustache were standing erect, like porcupine quills. He seemed to be holding a mouthful of water between his distended cheeks, prior to spitting it out at us in jest. In short, the Jack-of-all-trades will not be court-martialed after all. Nor shall we hear him ever again telling any of those cynical jokes of his. May God have pity on his children, so that he may repose in eternal peace. Amen.

  The rest of us have acquired an uninterrupted watering of the eyes as our souvenir from this bombardment. Strong light irritates us now and we seek out dim corners like people infected with rabies. In addition, there have been repercussions in our stomachs, which balk at accepting nourishment. The chief sentiment which this weapon has left in us is rage – an impotent rage for having undergone humiliation, and especially a humiliation caused by such an unmanly means of waging war. All such means are so contrary to the traditions of Greek gallantry that they are almost incomprehensible to us. The men have been going into the trench and spitting toward the Bulgarian line.

  ‘Cheats! Frauds! Charlatans!… Phthou!’

  Stratis Myrivilis is the pseudonym of Efstratios Stamatopoulos, who was born on the Greek island of Lesbos in 1890. After enlisting to fight in the first Balkan War against Turkey in 1912, he returned home injured. In the First World War, Myrivilis fought in the army of Elefterios Venizelos’ breakaway government on the Macedonian front. Life in the Tomb, his novel of his wartime experiences, was published in serialised form in the weekly newspaper Kambana in 1923/24. It was published in book form in Athens in 1930 and is seen as the novel that founded modern Greek literature. A journalist and broadcaster, Myrivilis opposed the German occupation during the Second World War and was until 1951 director of the Greek National Broadcasting Institute. He died in Athens in 1969.

  In Life in the Tomb, Myrivilis uses an ironic, mocking and humorous voice to attack his many targets. He was never one to beat about the bush, and his message comes across loud and clear – put a foot wrong and you end up in the shit.

  RAYMOND ESCHOLIER

  SHEEP

  from Mahmadou Fofana

  translated by Malcolm Imrie

  In memory of Major Mazand

  In these flowery meadows

  Watered by the Seine,

  Seek the one who leads you,

  My dear little sheep.

  Mme Antoinette de Lafon de Boisguérin Deshoulières (c. 1634–1694)

  I

  Dinner had just finished. Warrant officer Bourriol stretched out his hand to the flask draped in a blue cloth that still stood on the table:

  ‘Be generous with it!’ he advised.

  And yet the draught he poured himself scarcely filled two-thirds of his quarter-litre tin mug, which long use had coated with a thick, dark patina.

  It is true, though, that this was just the post-digestif which, as everyone knows, follows the coffee, the after-coffee snifter, and the digestif itself.

  Nevertheless, don’t imagine that warrant officer Bourriol nurtured any special love for army-issue gnole.*On the contrary, he claimed that he had never drunk such a treacherous concoction. Back in France, no one had ever persuaded him to touch even a drop of the stuff. But, as Bourriol put it, you’ve got to drink something, and where are you going to find anything better in this Balkan village in the back of beyond?

  For all
this was happening at Grechowatz, in the non-commissioned officers’ mess of the 196th battalion of the Tirailleurs sénégalais.

  After the woeful hours of the victorious attack in Dobropol* and the terrible suffering of the pursuit that followed (oh, those dark days in Eg˘ri Palanka, where breakfast was a biscuit and dinner a potato found in a field!), Bourriol and his pals were enjoying a wonderful feeling of peace and comfort in this rustic village of Old Serbia.

  In the centre of the large, low room with whitewashed walls and a floor covered with wooden pallets for lounging or sleeping, the wood-fired stove snored softly; pipe smoke was starting to obscure the ceiling. Bourriol warmed his stained mug in his hands and every now and then took another swig of the caustic beverage that seemed like a mixture of tobacco juice and paregoric elixir. No one said a word, basking in a glow of well-being.

  Little Sergeant Barbotin, the most fidgety of them all, broke this blissful silence:

  ‘Hey, Pitit!’ he shouted suddenly at tirailleur Tiani Bigo, who was busy tidying up the food locker… ‘Pitit! Is my belly good enough to eat?’

  And tirailleur Tiani Bigo, nicknamed Pitit on account of his diminutive stature, baby face and gazelle-like eyes, tirailleur Tiani Bigo diligently recited:

  ‘No, sergeant, it’s gone off!’

  You will not be surprised to learn that such a witty joke originally met with considerable success. But its frequent repetition ever since by Sergeant Barbotin, its inventor, had robbed it of much of its humour. On this particular day, the mirth that it produced was nothing out of the ordinary. It was not enough to drag Bourriol away from his dreams; he was dozing now, beside his empty mug, off in some sort of nirvana.

  Standing by the window, chief warrant officer Fouillepot did not move either, and continued to gaze out through the little square panes, and between the wooden arches of the balcony, on to the orchard in front of the house which spread out the yellowing carpet of its damp grass and the gnarled trunks of its quince trees whose branches now bore only a few rare, golden-brown leaves.

  Still, someone asked:

  ‘How about a round of manille?’

  ‘I vote for auction manille,’ said Bourriol. ‘That’s the best version.’

  The chief warrant officer shrugged.

  ‘Pah! Rubbish! The king of all games is 4-hand piquet. But if it makes you happy, I’ll play auction manille.’

  *

  Sergeant Rossignol was starting to shuffle the cards when the door opened to admit tirailleur John. The latter took a few steps on to the floor of beaten earth, corrected his position, saluted, looked round for the chief warrant officer and, having found him, said:

  ‘Warrant officer, sir, the captain he ask for you straight away.’

  And John stood still, hands on the seams of his trousers, his saffroncoloured face embellished with strange peacock blue tattoos, glowing with self-importance.

  ‘So the captain’s asking for me, is he? You tell him,’ exclaimed Fouillepot, ‘you tell him he’s getting on my bloody nerves!’

  John lowered his head under a torrent of curses… Isn’t it always the same people who get called? We ever going to get a moment’s peace in this shit job? When are they going to stop f–… fooling around?

  *

  While Fouillepot was swearing and demanding his boots, his belt and his puttees, Sergeant Barbotin struck up a conversation with tirailleur John:

  ‘So, John, you are still happy English?’

  The yellowish-skinned tirailleur narrowed his eyes a little.

  ‘Yes, sergeant, me Senegal English! Senegal English only make Senegal war. Not make France war! Senegal English make France war, that not good way.’*

  Thus tirailleur John expressed the bitterness in his soul. He considered himself the victim of a great injustice, something outrageously unfair.

  A citizen of Fataba, in Sierra Leone, on one ill-starred day in 1915 he had crossed the border to go to Goundiou, in French Guinea. Had he not been assured that there he would find excellent kola nuts at an amazingly good price?

  He had set off with no misgivings. It would be a very short trip. He would be back in Fataba within three days at the outside. But alas! John was forgetting that the door of our dwelling opens on to infinity and he who fancies that he knows where he is going when he crosses that threshold has taken leave of his senses.

  No sooner had John entered Goundiou than he was brought to a halt by a large gathering. In the middle of a circle, helped by an interpreter, a white officer was berating a native who, as John quickly understood, was the village head:

  ‘I must have five volunteers!’ shouted the officer. And the unfortunate Samba Dialo, Goundiou’s headman, replied with despairing gestures. Let the lieutenant look around him, search the village; he would only find old men, women, and children!

  Then suddenly the officer, who had just noticed John, exclaimed, ‘And what about this one?’The village head rubbed his eyes, thought he was dreaming. Who was this tall stranger with broad shoulders, in the flower of robust youth?

  ‘This man’, declared Samba Dialo, ‘this man is not from Goundiou, which does not prevent him from being an ideal volunteer.’

  This was indeed the lieutenant’s opinion, too. And so it was that John found himself promoted straight away to the honourable position of volunteer soldier for the duration of the war in the glorious corps of tirailleurs sénégalais.

  When he grasped what was going on, John cried out in dismay:

  ‘Me Senegal English! Senegal English not…’

  ‘That’ll do! What’s your name?’

  ‘My name John, me Senegal English…’

  ‘That’s quite enough. You’re repeating yourself! But John isn’t a Soussou name. Don’t you have another?’

  ‘My name John. Mister Bulwer always call me like that. Me his boy.’

  ‘Yes, fine. Now stop babbling!’

  After that, John had never seen Fataba again, but he had gone on a long journey across the rolling sea. He had come to know Marseille, Saint-Raphaël and the army camp Gallieni in neighbouring Fréjus, along with the beaches of Valescure and the pine woods of Boulouris; and then he had visited Champagne, and the Somme, before returning to the sea again, with its golden isles,* and its floating mines, and its underwater torpedoes, and finally disembarking at ancient Thessaloniki.

  But he had still refused to give any other name than John. And in fact no one had bothered too much about this little detail and he had been registered under the name of John, as he wanted.

  As for sending him back to his home, the question had never even been considered, and yet has it not been proven that someone who bears the name of John can only be English Senegalese?

  So by what law was John made into a volunteer? His complaints about this matter are endless: ‘French not bad but me Senegal English! Senegal English not…’

  ‘Come on, John, give it a rest!’

  Chief warrant officer Fouillepot is ready to leave. John follows him.

  Outside, neither says a word as they walk along the rough surface of the village’s only street, past thatched barns and houses with wooden balconies, with a bitter wind blowing the fine autumn rain into their faces.

  John continues to meditate on the cruel twist of fate that has taken him away from Fataba, while Fouillepot worries about what the captain might want of him. ‘What stupid scheme have they come up with now?’ he asks himself.

  [The captain’s ‘stupid scheme’ turns out to be to order Fouillepot to take a squad of men headed by corporal Mahmadou Fofana, the novel’s eponymous hero, to collect a flock of 407 sheep, destined for feeding the troops, in nearby Tsaribrod and take them to a centre in Zaïtchar, some 120 kilometres away. The last time something similar was attempted, a third of the sheep ‘disappeared’ en route, so Fouillepot is given strict instructions to ensure that he does not lose any.

  We rejoin the story some way into the journey when they have reached the town of Pirot, where they are given
a warm welcome by the inhabitants and where Fouillepot is given an especially warm welcome by a young Serbian widow named Militza. The ‘reverie’ from which he is about to get a rude awakening is of the night he has just spent with her.]

  *

  When Fouillepot emerged from his reverie, he was in the courtyard of the barracks. His first thought was for the sheep, and he headed towards the stables. He had only just opened the gate when the two guards Zangué Diarra and Balisé loomed up, looking threatening. They were already pulling out their machetes when they recognised their leader.

  Come on now! Nothing bad could have happened. It would be a waste of time to count the sheep again before setting off.

  Nonetheless, once the sun was up Fouillepot did check the number just to put his mind at rest.

  Oh! What a terrible shock! There were only three hundred and ninety-two. Fifteen sheep were missing! Oh, dear God!

  They searched the stable. Right at the back, under a flight of steps, there was a little door covered in dust and spiders’ webs that no one had noticed before. It was still half-open. That is where they had got out! Now what?

  Fouillepot went off to explain the situation to Major Stoïanovitch. This old warrior expressed no surprise, then, elaborating his thoughts, let it be known that during the occupation the town had been infested by a great number of Bulgarians, Levantines, thieves and hoodlums who had not yet been entirely purged, but nonetheless he would clean this Augean Stable or his name wasn’t Stoïanovitch! As for those who had stolen the sheep he would find them and have them beaten to death. How could these good and courageous allies have been so treacherously robbed in the town of Pirot! This was something he would never get over!

  In his agitation he was stamping his foot on the ground and lashing his high, polished boots with his riding whip.