Sergeant Picard had just left Captain Sancy’s Number 4 Company lines. The sight of the sergeant, but more particularly that of his stole, had had the effect of transforming the prevalent rumour of an attack into a certainty. A group of Number 4 Company men were talking.
“When the priests come around you always know there’s death in the wind.”
“Yes, and you’re the first one to run to them.”
“Naturally, I always take every precaution.”
“Including the permanganate of potash?”
“Don’t blaspheme.” It was said sarcastically.
“Listen to who’s talking about blasphemy! The Jew!”
“Well, there’s nobody knows any more about it than those two.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“Well, you’ve done time in Cayenne, haven’t you, Meyer? And Férol has served in the Legion. They’re not seminaries, those places.”
“You’ve said it. You’ve got to be a man to go through the dry guillotine,” said Meyer.
“And you’ve got to be two men to be in the Legion,” Férol retorted. Meyer and Férol were started again on their everlasting wrangle, a wrangle which always removed them from the general conversation and which quite often ended in blows.
“They’re off again. Who gives a curse which is tougher, Algeria or Guiana?”
“You’re right. This war’s tough enough for me. I’d swap places right now with any convict or legionary, anywhere. . . .”
“That’s because you’re afraid of going over the top tomorrow, afraid of being killed.”
“I’m not going to be killed.”
“Don’t say that, it’s bad luck.”
“Bad luck nothing. This war is bad luck.”
“I know I won’t be killed because I’m not afraid of it. It’s always the ones who are afraid of it who get it. You’ve seen that.”
“That may be true. I don’t know. But I’m afraid of it and they haven’t got me yet. What’s more, they’re not going to. They haven’t got my number.”
“Don’t say that, I tell you. That’s a sure way to get it.”
“If you stay here long enough, you’ll get it. That’s sure anyway.”
“What time’s zero hour?”
“Usual time. Dawn, I suppose.”
“They say the general was down here today.”
“Which one? There’s millions of generals. This army is all generals and privates.”
“Joffre, of course.”
“Say, he couldn’t get that carcass of his into a trench.”
“And he wouldn’t if he could.”
“They must feed well down at G.H.Q.”
“Generals and priests are always fat.”
“I’ve never seen a picture of a fat English general. And Assolant isn’t fat.”
“Who’s Assolant?”
“You tell him.”
“He’s the divisional mascot. A pet tiger. He can kill you with a look.”
“Well, anyway, generals and priests always mean death. That’s sure.”
“If those colonials would ever shut up, I’d take a nap.”
“Colonials is good. . . .”
Langlois got back to his section in time for the evening meal, breakfast for some of the men who had managed to get some sleep during the day.
“Hey there, Langlois, what’s new at the regimental train? Any papers?”
“No papers, but it’s going to be an attack all right.”
“You’re telling us! It’s been official around here for hours.”
“Yes, the general was through here . . .”
“And the priest . . .”
“And look at those extra packages of ammunition . . .”
“Yes, I know. The carpenter was making wooden crosses.”
“Did they look pretty?”
“He didn’t make one for me.”
“Don’t say that. That’s a sure way to get it.”
“Stay here long enough, that’s the sure way to get it.”
“Was he making one for you, Langlois? Did you print your own name while you had the chance?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care much. I’m not afraid of dying, only of getting killed.”
“That’s as clear as trench mud.”
“Well, which would you rather be done in by, a bayonet or a machine gun?”
“A machine gun, naturally.”
“Naturally—that’s just my point. They’re both pieces of steel going into your guts. Only the machine gun is cleaner, quicker, less painful, isn’t it?”
“What does that prove?”
“That proves that most of us are more afraid of getting hurt than of getting killed. Look at Bernard. He’s in a panic when it comes to gas, but gas doesn’t mean anything to me. He’s seen photos of gas cases and it looks bad to him. Now that doesn’t bother me a bit. But I hate like the devil to be without my tin hat. But I don’t mind not having a tin hat for my tail. Why’s that?”
“Well, you ought to, since that’s where your brains seem to be. Why is it you don’t want a tin hat for your tail? You tell us.”
“Because I know a wound in the head will hurt much more than one in the tail. Your tail is just flesh, but your head is all bone . . .”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I am. Now you tell me, apart from bayonets, what are you most afraid of?”
“High explosive.”
“Me too.”
“And me.”
“Exactly. It’s the same with me,” said Langlois. “Because it can chew you up worse than anything else. Just what I’m trying to tell you. If you’re really afraid of dying, you’d be living in a funk all your life because you know you’ve got to some day, any day. And besides, if it’s death you’re afraid of, why should you care about what it is that kills you? Why are you more afraid of shells than machine guns, or bayonets than shells?”
“You’re too deep for me, professor. All I know is, nobody wants to die.”
“You mean you don’t want to.”
“Yes, and you too.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Langlois. “Personally, I’d rather like to. It’s the only absolute thing in life. It has a mystery and perfection all its own. I have a strong curiosity about it. So strong at times that I’ve thought quite seriously of suicide.”
“Well, hang on to your curiosity for a few hours more and it will be satisfied without the danger of losing your immortal soul.”
“Don’t invoke fate. It’s bad luck.”
“But how d’you know my soul is immortal?” Langlois liked to discuss these things.
“I just do, that’s all.”
“Well, I don’t. In fact my intelligence tells me it isn’t. Nothing to nothing, why not? It’s logical enough.”
“Yes, but then why are we here?”
“No reason, so far as I can see.”
“We’re here to propagate the race.”
“That’s another phrase that gives me a pain,” said Langlois, glad of the chance to express his ideas on this subject, “like ‘self-preservation.’ They take the instinct not to get hurt and call it the instinct of self-preservation. It’s some instinct of self-preservation all right, that makes people continue to live right under a volcano, in the earthquake and typhoon zones! And then they call the business of going with a woman the instinct of self-reproduction, when all it is is the instinct of going with a woman. Do you want a child every time you tear off a piece? You do not, and you take good care not to have one. It’s the finest indoor and outdoor sport there is and there’s no need for any further justification of it. Why do people have to go round trying to make it a noble thing by saying they are reproducing their species when all they’re doing is having some fun?”
“Well, if they acted the way you talk, the race would die out.”
“All right, and who’d be the worse off for that? Plenty of races have died out and nobody seems to be mourning them. Ours
will too, and I can bet the animals will be delighted when the day comes.”
“What about the unborn children?”
“What about them? I wish I was an unborn child this minute. . . .”
“That’s because we’re going to attack tomorrow.”
“D’you think you’re doing anybody a favour by creating them out of nothing for the very doubtful joy of living a life of misery and pain in the world of men, the most savage of the predatory animals?”
“It’s nature’s law. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
“Take this war,” Langlois continued. “Do you think our parents would have had us if they had foreseen the things they were sentencing us to?”
“Probably. There have always been wars and there always will be. They’re part of life, like disease, storms, death. There are lots worse things than war to my mind. For instance, sitting on your tail in some bastard’s office and making and counting his money for him. It takes a man to make a war, but a louse can make money.”
“It takes a fool to make war, if you judge by those who are making this one. This attack they’re pushing us into now, it’s just plain murder. Look at what the Boches did to the Tirailleurs. Anyway, war never settled anything except who was the strongest.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s never enough.”
“I’m going to get some sleep,” said Langlois.
“Good night. And don’t oversleep. You’ll miss your chance to satisfy that curious curiosity of yours.”
During the night working parties cut lanes through the French entanglements, using wire cutters. Four men were killed and nine wounded during this.
II
At zero minus thirty minutes, that is to say at half-past six o’clock in the morning, every man of the division, from the general to the last private, was at his post. Everybody was equipped in attack order, armed and ready. Cannons were loaded and aimed. Watches were synchronized. Maps, boundaries, and objectives were known by heart. Telephone lines were repaired and in working order. Signal rockets were inspected and checked.
The usual quiet which followed the dawn bombardment lay over the front.
Assolant and Captain Nicolas of the artillery were in the observation post. Both had powerful binoculars instead of telescopes, and both were studying a map which had been divided into countless little numbered squares. Squatting on the ground and trying not to touch the artillery officer’s knees, was a telephonist corporal. He was talking in a low voice into two receivers he was holding, first into one and then into the other.
“Through to Division, sir,” he said. “Through to Polygon,” he added, using the code name for the seventy-fives.
Nicolas said nothing. Assolant said nothing. The general was not in a talkative humour. He was, in fact, in the grip of a smouldering anger, an anger which was all the more bitter because he had nothing to vent it on but the weather, an unresponsive target.
A northeaster had started to blow up sometime during the night bringing squalls of heavy rain with it. Just at present it was not raining, but the damage to the ground had been done. Clouds were, moreover, still moving across the sky, flying so low they seemed to just miss catching their dark bellies on the crest of the Pimple, dark bellies from which more water was likely to pour at any minute. “What’s your hurry?” Nicolas wanted to ask them, they looked so much to him like workers, pressed for time, hastening to their offices in the morning.
An ugly day had, not without reason, given Assolant an ugly mood. The gas barrage had had to be abandoned because of the wind’s direction. The same wind would, if it rained again, blow the water blindingly into the faces of his advancing men. Then there was the mud. Mud and rain, as Assolant knew, had taken the sting out of more than one attack. But what annoyed him the most was, perhaps, that his dream of directing some target shooting might be spoiled by a sudden squall. Visibility had already been lowered by an atmosphere which was laden with humidity. If the rain started to come down again it would be reduced still more and his horizon might be no wider than his own front line, four or five hundred metres away.
“Get the latest weather report,” the general ordered out of pure irascibility and nothing else. This was the third one the corporal had been told to get since Assolant had arrived at the post, and it was the first and the same report which he was quoting again:
“Northeast winds, rain, and squalls for the next six hours.”
But the general had already forgotten he had asked for it. He was looking through his glasses and the lenses pulled at his eyes a bit.
“Zero minus fifteen minutes,” the corporal announced, repeating what the voice in the divisional ear-piece was telling him. “Everything quiet. All units report themselves ready.”
The front-line trench was crowded, more crowded, so it seemed, than when it had been filled with the double congestion of the relief two nights earlier, crowded with men whose uniforms were slate-grey with moisture and whose thoughts were slate-grey with apprehension. They stood in the jumping-off positions quite silently and almost motionlessly, staring in front of them. Each man carried two extra packages of rifle ammunition and a small bag of bombs. Here and there a man would be fairly well loaded with what looked like satchels, giving him the appearance of a traveler waiting for a train. His satchels were explosive charges for use on the galleries and dugouts of the Pimple. He looked rather taller than the rest, but this was a deception caused by the dwarfing effect of the other men’s rifles, elongated as they were by the disproportionately long bayonet.
A cruel-looking thing, a bayonet, Langlois thought. And the cruelest-looking of all, the French one. Perhaps because it was the most slender, the purity of its lines the most perfect, its intrinsic proportions the nicest. Or, perhaps, because it had the reputation of making the wickedest wound, the quadrangular wound that was so difficult to heal. Langlois had never used his bayonet, and he never would unless he was caught with an empty magazine in front of an oncoming German. He asked the time of Lieutenant Bonnier who was standing right beside him.
“Zero minus twenty minutes,” the lieutenant said. He was in command of the company and he was feeling a slight nausea in the pit of his stomach.
Langlois looked at the men around him. Some of them were condemned to be dead within the half hour. Perhaps he was one of them. The thought passed through his head, a strangely impersonal one, as if it had not been a thought of his at all, but some story he was reading. He noted the unusual self-possession of these men but he had seen it before and accepted it as granted. The thought kept returning: this one, or this one, or that one, would actually, inevitably be dead in a few minutes. He tried, half-heartedly, to guess which. Then: a number of lives right there next to him, within touching distance, some of which he had been on intimate terms with, were rushing with incredible speed (yet a stationary one, too) towards their ends. No, the ends were rushing towards the lives. Thirty minutes more to live, and then the totally unknown, apotheosis. The idea had a force so poignant at that time and place that it suffocated and extinguished itself.
His mind, having been emptied of a thought the power of which it was no longer capable of bearing, reverted to the more commonplace and personal subject of his own flesh. There were three wounds that Langlois dreaded: in the eyes, in the genitals, and in the feet. When he thought about this, as he did now and then, in places of safety, it was the wounding of his genitals which he abhorred the most. Night made him wish that his eyes might be spared above all else. But now, on the eve of a hand-to-hand encounter with the enemy, it was his feet which obsessed him, the feet without which he would be helpless to move. That was the way he felt, and that was all there was to it. Yes, his feet would not be of much use to him if his eyes were gone, but still he would rather have it so. If he had his feet he could move, grope, he would manage. Above all, he could move, move, move....
“Zero minus fifteen,” said Bonnier, without anyo
ne having asked him.
“I’ll get it this time,” Didier said to himself. He did not actually picture himself as dead, for that would have been beyond him. “Seventh time over the top without a scratch, that’s too much to expect.” What he would have said, had it been in him to reason about the signs he was so good at reading, was: “I ought to get it this time.” He felt that his run of luck had built up a cumulative weight of probability against him. The weight oppressed him, and he felt vaguely that there was something unfair about it, that he was now handicapped. Langlois would have been able to tell him that his chances, whatever they were, say fifty-fifty, were the same for each attack no matter how often he had previously benefited from those chances. Didier would have followed the reasoning easily, once it was made for him, but he would have none the less gone over convinced that he was a marked man.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was a certain time. The man next to him asked for the time and Didier had to look at his watch again.
“Fifteen minutes to go,” he said.
Captain Charpentier had developed a blister on his heel which was so sore that it made him limp. It was sore enough, too, to have taken almost complete possession of his mind. He stood in the trench and cursed it endlessly and repetitively. He cursed the weather, too, for having added to the difficulty of walking just at the time when he wanted the greatest bodily ease, when he wanted, in fact, to be as unconscious of having a body as it was possible to be.
He looked at his wrist watch for the twentieth time, but what he saw on the dial was the raw spot on his heel, that exasperating blister which obtruded itself upon everything. Charpentier was in a rage....
At zero minus six minutes it began to rain again, a slanting, hostile rain, maddening and penetrating.
“That settles it,” Dax reflected with some bitterness. “The weather’s always on the side of the Boche. It’s going to be bad.” He yawned, a nervous, uncompleted little yawn.
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