“If the sergeant wants his gun,” he said to the group near the candle, “tell him I borrowed it. He can have my rifle in the meantime. Here are my things, here. My personal belongings are in the haversack. There’s no money, so you needn’t start fighting over it as soon as I go. Anyway, I’ll be back. Ready, Paul? Come on, then. We’ll pick up some bombs at the lieutenant’s dugout when we come down again.”
“Say, I thought this was a reconnaissance patrol.”
“So it is, but we’re going to take some bombs just the same.”
“Why not some machine guns too.”
“Come on, shake a leg. See you later, you dugout pimps.”
“Good luck!”
“Bring me a spiked helmet!”
“Come and get it yourself.”
“Keep your rump down, Paul, or you’ll draw a barrage of heavies.”
“And don’t tread on my feet when you come in.”
“Good luck! . . . As I was saying. The doctor says to him, ‘What a beauty! Where d’you get it?’ It was a beauty too, I saw it myself. That long. ‘I got it from the cannon,’ he says, ‘the 155-mm.’ ‘You must be a very passionate young man,’ says the doctor. ‘But I wasn’t thinking of your dose just then. There’s only one way to get that, you know.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ says the fellow. ‘There was a man in my squad who had it and I must have caught the infection off the gun.’ What a fathead! And did the doctor roar! Take it from me, boys, calomel ointment’s all right against the syph, but you can’t be too careful when it comes to . . .”
Lieutenant Roget saw the flame of his candle waver and knew, even before he heard the footsteps, that his gas blanket had been pulled aside and closed again. He put the bottle he had been drinking from under his overcoat on the bunk.
“Well, you took your time about it,” he said.
“It’s only ten past two,” said Didier, guessing.
“Anything to report?”
“Yes. Sentries are all warned, down to here. There’s some shelling going on up there on the right, also some gas. Number 8 will start sending up flares at four-thirty. But they’ll send them up at ten-minute intervals, not five. And not from their post, but fifty metres to the left of it . . .”
“I see. Perhaps they’d rather go to a cinema instead.”
“The sergeant says every five minutes is too much. It’s sure to start the artillery going again. Ten minutes is plenty too, he says. It’ll give the position of his post away and he figures that after the third or fourth flare there won’t be any post left. So he’s going to send a man down the trench to shoot the flare off at a distance. All we have to do is to bear to the left of it as we come in.”
“Quite a strategist, that sergeant. What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re a liar, but it won’t do him any good. I’ll get it later. Did he have any other observations to make?”
“No,” said Didier, privately relishing the malice of his evasion. He had omitted to tell Roget that the sergeant had covered himself by getting permission for the changes from his company commander.
“All right, you two go up and get some bombs. I’ll join you directly.”
“We’ve got the bombs.”
“Where are your gas masks?”
“You don’t take gas masks on patrol,” said Didier. “They get in the way, get caught in the wire . . .”
“Well, go ahead anyway. I’ll be up in a minute.”
Didier and Lejeune climbed up the dugout steps, passed the gas blanket and stood on the other side of it, waiting.
“He’s fortifying himself,” said Didier. “See the bottle under his coat?”
“No, but the place stank like a bistro.”
“You can always tell when he’s had a few. He gets sarcastic.”
“He might have passed it round, the swine.”
“There isn’t enough even in a barrel to give him guts. Listen, Paul, if he gets funny, or starts kicking up a noise . . .”
“I understand.”
Lieutenant Roget felt fine, just about right, he thought. His condition was so nearly perfect that he reasoned he ought to have one more shot of the cognac to go on, and now that those two were out of the way, he could take it. He reached for the bottle under his coat and took a long pull at it, then set it down on the table. He lighted a cigarette and looked at the map again.
“Very simple,” he thought. “Go out up here where the beginning of the wood marks the boundary, crawl over to the German wire, there, then along it for a few hundred metres until we reach this old communication trench, and that will lead us to Post Number 8. In fact, Number 8 is behind a block in that trench, about fifty metres from our front line.”
It was simple, too, on the map. The nice smooth strip of white, which was no-man’s-land. The German wire, neatly marked by double rows of x’s. The outskirts of the village that straddled the German wire and then, farther on, the thin, winding, blue line which joined the two fronts and represented the unpossessed communication trench. There were no shell-holes marked on the map, no corpses, no stray wire, no obstacles of any kind. There were no symbols for the men who stood behind that wire, nor any signs to indicate that they were armed with rifles, bombs, machine guns, and flares.
“It’ll be easy,” said Roget out loud, and belched. He picked up the bottle to put it away, felt that there was still some liquid in it, and held it up to the candle for appraisal.
“For when I come in,” he said, and continued to look at it. By the time he decided to stop looking at it, he found, as he had expected, that his mind had changed.
“Might as well,” he said. His tone had that mixture of apology and joviality which it would have had if some other person were present. He tossed the empty bottle onto a bunk, trod on his cigarette and blew out the candle, then went up the dugout steps, bumping the braziers and boxes there and cursing them. He found Didier and Lejeune sitting on the firing-step.
The three men made their way along the trench, Roget in front, Didier in the rear. The lieutenant was stepping out, and it wasn’t long before he had left the other two behind, for they were delayed in each traverse by stopping to warn the sentries that the patrol was going out. Sometimes the sentries were a bit thick and Didier had to waste time explaining what it was all about. He didn’t consider it a waste of time at all, but Lejeune did. He was for hurrying on and trying to keep up with the lieutenant. Didier, however, insisted on seeing that the sentries understood.
“Go ahead, if you want to,” he said. “But I’m going to see that these fatheads know we’re out. One of the most dangerous parts of a patrol, you know, is trying to get back into your own line. And we might be driven in anywhere.”
Not far from the left boundary they came around the corner of a traverse and found Roget rooted there, his arms raised over his head, furiously cursing the sentry. The sentry’s bayonet was brushing the lieutenant’s chest.
“Calais! Calais!” said Didier, taking in the situation at a glance.
“All right,” said the sentry. “Come through. Where are all you Senegalese coming from? Here’s a fellow all dressed up like an officer and he doesn’t know the password. He can talk French, too. Say, send the sergeant up, will you, you’ll find him down the line there. I know my orders. I’m no fool, you know . . .”
“As it happens, you are this time,” said Didier. “We’re not Senegalese in spite of our faces. Put your bayonet down, this is our lieutenant. We’re going out on patrol, and we’ll be out a couple of hours. So watch what you’re doing, will you. Understand? I said, do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand. But how was I to know? Orders are orders, you know, and the officers make them themselves. A black-faced devil comes around the corner and when I challenge him . . .”
“All right, forget it. You only did right. Remember we’re going to be out there. And remember to tell your relief.”
Roget had gone on ahead again. They found him, a few minutes later,
in conversation with another officer, and Didier was pleased to hear the officer saying:
“. . . it wasn’t my sentry anyway and it certainly isn’t his fault if you forget the password.”
“Here they are,” said Roget. “Didier, you look around for a place to get through the wire.”
“Perhaps the captain knows a place . . .” Didier began.
“Yes, I do. Come along and I’ll show you.”
They retraced their steps through two traverses. In the third one they found half a dozen men, three of them standing near a machine gun which was on the parapet.
“There’s a lane through the wire here,” said the captain. “That gun is pointing to the opening and straight down the lane.”
“Thanks, Sancy,” said Roget. “Keep your fingers off that coffee grinder till we get out of the way. All right, you two. Come on!”
All three got their revolvers into their hands, unbuttoned the flaps of the pockets which held the bombs, then one by one, with Roget leading, they climbed the parapet and made quickly for the opening in the wire, crouching. They crawled into the lane and followed it as it led them obliquely away from the front line for a few metres. Half-way through the wire, the lane turned at right angles and led them obliquely in the other direction. Just when they thought they should be coming out of it, they found themselves wired in. Roget started to swear.
“Keep quiet,” Didier whispered. “It’s only a block in the lane. Follow me. We can crawl through here.” He went off down a slight incline, wriggling under the wire, laboriously detaching the barbs from his uniform when it got caught. As soon as he was clear, he raised himself on his knees and looked around, then made for a nearby shell-hole. Standing in the shell-hole, he examined his surroundings with care, noting the position of the wood behind him and its relationship to his own and the German line. He was looking attentively at the moon when Roget and Lejeune joined him.
“Who are those two?” asked Roget, pointing to two figures already occupying the shell-hole and apparently asleep.
“Can’t you smell? They’re dead.”
Lejeune went over to them.
“Tirailleurs,” he reported.
“Come on then!” said Roget, getting up and starting to walk off briskly, as he thought, towards the German front. He was feeling very fine indeed, very brave and very clever. The cognac had given him a sense of being disembodied and immune. He wished he had a rifle, for he wanted to lead a bayonet charge, a bayonet charge by moonlight. The idea appealed to him immensely. . . .
“Hey! Not that way!” said Didier. “You’ll be back in our wire again in a minute. This is the way over here. Keep the moon on your right. And crawling. We’re not in the Champs Elysées.”
“Well, those two are,” said Roget, laughing at his own joke.
“And we’ll be joining them soon, if we keep on making all this noise,” Lejeune added, shooting the lieutenant a glance.
Roget oriented himself and moved off over the lip of the shell-hole, Didier and Lejeune falling in behind him so that he made the point, they the wings, of an inverted V. Roget continued to set a fast pace, even when crawling, so fast, in fact, that Didier pulled himself up to him twice and caught him by the ankle. The last time, he drew level with him and whispered in his ear:
“Not so fast. We’re getting near their wire. I think that’s it over there. Yes, now you can see it. Take it slowly, a few metres at a time, and then stop and listen. They may have a patrol out too. And if they’re doing any wiring, they’re sure to have a covering party out here somewhere.”
Roget belched.
“And cut that out too. You make a devil of a lot of noise. Watch where you’re going, and don’t kick tins and things.”
“Who d’you think you’re talking to?”
“You. If you can’t run a patrol properly, I will. I know my business, and I’m not going to have my head blown off just because you don’t.”
“You’ll hear more about this later.”
Didier said nothing, and Roget started off again, bearing a little to the right. Didier waited for Lejeune to come up with him. There were several corpses scattered about and they stank.
“What’s the matter?” Lejeune whispered.
“Plenty. Roget’s drunk and doesn’t give a———. We’ll be lucky to get out of this without a mess of some kind.”
“How about . . .?”
“No. He may sober up.”
Roget was working along the German wire now, with Lejeune behind him and Didier a couple of metres off on the flank. The Pimple loomed on their left, an enormous-looking bulk, cutting cleanly into the moonlit sky. They felt as if they were crawling on its base; actually they were about three or four hundred metres from it.
Roget belched.
Instantly a flare went off, so close it seemed as if they had fired it themselves. A machine gun started to rattle, and they lay still as death, pressing themselves into the unyielding earth. The flare burst right over them, the machine gun was firing over them too, and they felt huge and naked on a naked plane. They held their breaths and their minds were emptied of all thought.
The flare went out and the machine gun, after two or three more bursts, stopped firing. Didier could hear a little bunch of shells travelling by quietly, high overhead.
The German wire began to bulge and to force them over in the direction of their own line. They crossed a series of shell-holes linked by shallow trenches. The earth seemed quite fresh to Didier, and he wondered if Roget had noticed it. A little farther on, they came to an area thick with French corpses. The smell was nauseating. Roget started belching again, speeding up his pace, going forward heedless of the noise he was making and reckless of the danger he might be running into.
Didier started to close in on him from his flank position and succeeded in catching him by the leg.
“Name of God! Don’t do that!” It was almost a shriek.
“Another sound out of you, and I’ll kill you,” Didier whispered.
“Well, don’t sneak up on me like that then. It’s enough to make anybody jump out of his skin. Hurry up and get me away from these bodies. I’m going to be sick.”
“Go ahead and vomit, you swine, and be quiet about it. We’re right in front of a strong point here.”
There was a low gurgling sound while Roget gave up his cognac and spread it in a puddle under his nose.
“Come over in this direction,” said Didier.
They drew away from the bulging German wire and moved out towards the centre of no-man’s-land. They gathered for a while in a shell-hole to take stock of things and to give Roget a chance to pull himself together. Then they went on again, in V formation, Didier on the lieutenant’s left now, Lejeune on his right. Roget’s feeling of immunity had flowed out of him soon after the flowing out of his liquor. He now had an imperious need to be done with the patrol and to get back to the safety of his own dugout. His sense of well-being had evaporated, leaving him defenceless and afraid in a hostile world. His nerves came to life again from their alcoholic anæsthesia. They were jumpy and hard to control.
A large mound of what looked like kindling wood appeared in front of them. Roget turned and threw lumps of earth at his companions, the signal to close in. They lay on their stomachs and put their heads together. Roget’s breath was sour.
“What d’you make of that?” he asked Didier.
“Ruins of some houses.”
“All right, then, Lejeune, you work around the right of the pile. Didier will come with me on the left. We’ll meet on the other side.”
“Not on your life,” said Didier. “Split a patrol? You’re crazy!”
“Shut up. Do as you’re told, Lejeune.”
“Don’t do it, Paul, it’s madness.”
Roget turned his wrist slightly and Didier found himself looking into the muzzle of the lieutenant’s gun. Lejeune saw the movement too and checked a remark he was on the point of making. He searched for Didier’s eyes, the questi
on he wanted to ask him plainly to be seen in his expression. Didier, however, was staring down the barrel of the revolver, his own weapon uselessly pointing away from under his left armpit. Lejeune was baffled. He decided the safest way out of the dilemma would be to obey. He started to crawl off to the right of the mound.
When Roget could no longer hear Lejeune, he dropped the aim of his gun and smiled—an unpleasant smile—then started off towards the left. Didier followed him, straining to make all his senses alert, and silently raging at the lieutenant for making the double blunder of splitting the patrol and leading him into the zone between the ruins and the enemy wire. Roget, too, soon felt that he had made a mistake in getting himself into the corridor, however short it might turn out to be. He stopped to borrow a couple of bombs from Didier and put them in his breast pockets, leaving the flaps unbuttoned, then went on again, taking infinite pains not to disturb the loose debris of the ruined houses. The place was in shadow there, and no matter how careful he was, it was impossible not to make some noise in the mass of litter which was strewn about. The lieutenant’s heart was, therefore, constantly in his mouth. Didier wondered what they would find on the other side of the mound. The signs all indicated that there would be some kind of outpost thereabouts. In fact, he was surprised and made increasingly anxious by the fact that they hadn’t yet seemed to disturb anything but loose bricks and timbers. Was he being led straight into an ambush? How was it Lejeune hadn’t flushed anything? Or had he, and was he now lying with a bayonet through his throat? . . .
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