The Prospector
Page 24
Then we began our long march up the Ypres Canal heading north-west in the direction of Hooges Wood, where the thunder was rumbling. We passed troops every day. They were French and Belgians who’d escaped the Dixmude massacre, who were coming back from Ramskappelle, where the Belgians had provoked vast floods by opening the sluice gates. Bloody, in tatters, they related terrifying stories, frenetic bellowing hordes of Germans endlessly moving forward, hand-to-hand combat in the mud, with bayonets, with daggers, bodies scattered along the river, hung up in the barbed wire, stuck in the reeds.
Those tales keep ringing in my ears. Then, all around us, the circle of fire is closing in to the north over by Dixmude, by Saint Julien, in Houthulst Forest, to the south on the banks of the Lys, in the direction of Menin, Wervicq. Then we move forwards through a deserted landscape gutted by mortar shells, where the only things standing are the branchless trunks of charred trees. We move forwards so very slowly, as if crawling on our bellies: some mornings, at the other end of the field, we can see the ravine, the ruined farm that we know we won’t reach until evening. The earth is heavy, it weighs upon our legs, clings to the soles of our shoes and makes us fall facedown in the mud. Some never get up again.
We crawl through the trenches we dug before sunrise, listening to the rumbling of cannon – very near now – and the clattering of machine guns. Far away, on the other side of the hills, around Ypres, the French are fighting too. But we don’t see any soldiers: only the dirty black smudges they’re making in the sky.
In the evenings Barneoud, who comes from Trois Rivières, talks about women. He describes their bodies, their faces, their hair. He talks about all of that in a strange voice, hoarse and sad, as if the women he’s describing are all dead. We laugh at first, because it’s so incongruous, all those naked women in the middle of the war with us. War doesn’t have anything to do with women, on the contrary, it’s the most sterile gathering of men that could exist. Then all of those women’s bodies in the mud, surrounded by the smell of urine and putridity, with the circle of fire burning day and night around us, makes us shudder, fills us with horror. Then we tell him in English, in French: that’s enough, shut up, tais-toi! Stop talking about women, shut up! One evening when he starts raving again, a tall English devil beats him savagely with his fists and might well have killed him if the officer, the second lieutenant, hadn’t come up with his service pistol in hand. The next day Barneoud had disappeared. They say he was sent to join the 13th infantry brigade and died in the fighting near Saint Julien.
At that time I think we’d already grown indifferent to death. Every hour of every day the sounds of the dead filled our ears, the dull thud of shells exploding in the earth, the spurts of machine-gun fire and the strange rumour that immediately followed. Voices, the sound of men running in the mud, orders shouted by officers, the rout before the counter-attack.
23 April: following the first release of poison gas over the French lines, we counter-attack under the orders of Colonel Geddes, joining the 13th Brigade and the battalions of the 3rd Canadian Brigade. All day long we march north-west in the direction of Houthulst Forest. In the middle of the plain the exploding bombs, leaving craters nearer and nearer to us, force us to find shelter for the night. Hastily, we open up ten-foot ditches in which six or seven of us ensconce ourselves, packed in as tight as crabs. Huddling, steel helmet pushed down over our heads, we await the following day, hardly daring to move. We can hear the British cannon countering German cannon. In the morning, as we sleep leaning against one another, the whistling of a mortar shell awakens us with a start. The explosion is so powerful that we are sent sprawling, despite the narrowness of the ditch. Crushed under the weight of my comrades, I feel a warm liquid running over my face: blood. I’m wounded, dying maybe? I push away the bodies that have fallen on me and see that my comrades are the ones who’ve been killed, it’s their blood spilling on me.
I crawl over to the other holes filled with men, calling out to survivors. Together we pull the wounded back behind the lines, to find shelter. But where? Half of our company has been killed. The second lieutenant who arrested Barneoud was decapitated by a mortar shell. We reach the rear. At five in the evening we launch another assault with General Snow’s Englishmen, advancing in sallies of five yards. At five-thirty, when the twilight is growing dimmer, a large, yellowish-green cloud rises suddenly in the sky some fifty yards ahead of us. The light breeze pushes it slowly southwards, fans it out. Other, still closer explosions, cause new poisonous plumes to rise.
My heart stops beating – horror-stricken – I’m unable to move! Someone cries, ‘The gas! Turn back!’ We run for the trenches, hurriedly improvise masks with handkerchiefs, bits of torn coats, tatters of ripped cloth that we wet with our meagre provisions of water. The cloud is still moving towards us, light, menacing, copper-coloured in the dusk light. Already the acrid smell is entering our lungs, making us cough. The men turn, looking over their shoulders with expressions of hatred, of terror on their faces. When the order to fall back to Saint Julien comes, many have already begun to run, doubled over towards the ground. I think of the wounded who’ve been left in their holes, over whom death is now passing. I too am running across the shell-pocked field, through charred stands of trees, clamping the handkerchief dampened with muddy water to my face.
How many have been killed? How many are still able to fight? After what we’ve seen – that deadly cloud wafting slowly towards us, yellow and golden brown like a sunset – we remain hunkered down in our holes, tirelessly scrutinizing the sky, day and night. We count our ranks, maybe in the hopes of making those who are absent, whose names no longer belong to anyone, reappear: ‘Simon, Lenfant, Garadec, Schaffer… and Adrien, and the little redhead – Gordon, that was his name, Gordon… and Pommier, Antoine who was from Joliette, but whose family name I’ve forgotten, and Léon Berre and Raymond, Dubois, Santeuil, Reinert…’ Are they really names? Did they really exist? We thought of death differently when we first arrived from so far away: glorious death out in broad daylight, a star of blood on one’s chest. But death is deceitful and insidious, it sneaks up, whisks men away in the night while they’re sleeping, unbeknownst to others. It drowns men in the bogs, in the muddy pools at the bottom of ravines, it smothers them in the earth, it spreads its icy fingers into the bodies of those who are lying in lazarettos, under torn tents, those with livid faces and emaciated chests, wasted from dysentery, from pneumonia, from typhus. Those who die vanish and one day we notice their absence. Where are they? Maybe they’ve been lucky enough to have been sent to the rear, maybe they’ve lost an eye, a leg, maybe they’ll never go back to war. But something tells us, something about their absence, about the silence that surrounds their names: they’re dead.
Thus, it’s as if some monstrous animal came in the night, during our precarious slumber, to seize certain men among us and carry them off to devour them in its den. It makes a pain, a burning feeling deep down in our bodies that we can never forget, no matter what. We haven’t moved since the gas attack on 24 April. We’ve remained in the trenches, the same ones we began digging six months ago when we first arrived. Back then the landscape before us was still intact, undulating woodland, rusty with winter, farms in their fields, pastures dotted with ponds, fences, rows of apple trees, and off in the distance the silhouette of the town of Ypres with its stone steeple rising out of the mist. Now all I can see through the machine-gun sights is a chaos of churned earth, burned trees. The shells have gouged out hundreds of craters, destroyed the forests and the hamlets, and Ypres’s steeple is leaning over like a broken branch. Silence, solitude have taken the place of the hellish din of the bombardments of the early weeks. The circle of fire has waned, like a wildfire that has consumed everything in its path and is dying out for want of anything to burn. Now we can just barely make out the rumbling of artillery from time to time, barely glimpse puffs of smoke in the places where allied shells have struck.
Is everyone dead? One night when I’m o
n guard, sitting on a crate behind the shield of the machine gun, that thought crosses my mind. To stave off the urge to smoke, I’m chewing on a licorice root given to me by a Canadian soldier whose name I don’t even know. The night is cold, cloudless, another winter night. I can see the stars, some that I’m not familiar with that belong to the northern skies alone. In the light of the rising moon the shell-torn earth seems even stranger, more deserted. In the silent night the world seems bereft of men and beasts, like a remote, high plateau in some region that has been for ever abandoned by all life. The feeling of death that has come over me is so powerful I can’t stand it any longer. I walk over to a comrade who’s asleep, sitting with his back propped against the wall of the trench. I shake him. He looks at me in a daze as if he doesn’t remember where he is any more. ‘Come and see! Come on!’ I drag him over to the lookout post, I show him the frozen landscape in the moonlight, looking through the peephole in the gun shield. ‘Look, there’s not a soul out there. It’s all over with! The war’s over!’ I’m speaking in a low voice, but the tone of my voice, the look in my eyes must be disturbing, because the soldier pulls away. He says, ‘You’re crazy!’ In the same strangled voice, I repeat, ‘But look! Look! I’m telling you there’s no one out there, they’re all dead! The war is over!’ Other soldiers come over, having been roused from their sleep. The officer is there, he says in a loud voice, ‘What’s going on here?’ They say, ‘He’s crazy! He says the war’s over.’ Still others add, ‘He says everyone’s dead.’ The officer looks at me, as if trying to comprehend. Maybe they’ll realize that it’s true, that everything is over now, since everyone is dead. The officer seems to be listening to the silence of the night all around us. Then he says, ‘Go back to sleep! The war isn’t over. We’ll have plenty to do tomorrow!’ To me, he says, ‘You go to bed too. You’re tired.’ Another man stands guard and I go down into the trench. I listen to the breathing of the men who have already gone back to sleep, the only living beings on earth, buried in the gutted earth.
Somme, summer 1916
Like so many ants, we’re walking across this plain on the banks of the great muddy river. Endlessly, we follow the same paths, the same grooves, dig up the same fields, making countless holes, not knowing where we’re going. Digging out underground galleries, corridors, tunnels through the heavy black earth, the damp earth that slides down all around us. We don’t ask any more questions, we have no desire to know where we are, why we’re here any more. Day after day, for months now, we’ve been ploughing through, digging up, raking the earth along the river, facing the hills. In the beginning, when we arrived on the banks of the Ancre, shells would fall, to the left, to the right, and we’d throw ourselves on our bellies in the mud, listening to the sinister whistling of the projectiles at the end of their trajectory. The shells exploded in the earth, blew up trees and houses and the fires burned throughout the night. But there was no counter-attack. We waited, and then went back to digging trenches, and the convoys of mules continued to bring wooden stanchions and cement, sheet metal for the roofs. In the spring a drizzling rain falls, a mist dispelled by the sun. Then the first planes appear, flying under the clouds. Odilon and I look up at them, blinking our eyes, trying to see who they are. They veer round and fly off southward. ‘They’re French,’ says Odilon. On the Kraut’s side they’ve only got dirigibles. Sometimes we see them rising in the dawn sky like large ribboned slugs. ‘Just wait, the French planes will gouge their eyes out!’
Odilon is my comrade. He’s a Jerseyman, who speaks with a funny accent that I don’t always understand. He’s an eighteen year old with an angelic face. He hasn’t got a beard yet and the cold makes his skin ruddy. We’ve been working side by side for months now, we share the same nooks to eat and sleep in. We never really talk, except to say a few words, just the bare minimum, a few questions and answers. He enrolled in the army after I did, and since I was named corporal after the Battle of Ypres, I chose him to be my orderly. When they wanted to send him to the front lines in Verdun, I requested that he stay with me. Ever since I met him I feel as if I need to look after him in this war, as if I am his older brother.
Warmer weather has set in, nights are clearer, with deep, star-filled skies. In the evening, when everything is asleep, we listen to the song of the toads in the marshes, on the banks of the river. That is where the men from our contingent are building barricades of barbed wire, lookout towers, laying cement platforms for the cannon. But at night, when you can’t see the barbed wire or the trenches gaping like open graves, you can forget there is a war, thanks to the gentle songs of toads.
The train brought the horse carcasses to the station in Albert. They were carried in carts along muddy roads to the banks of the Ancre. Every day carts bring mountains of horse carcasses and dump them in the grassy fields near the river. We can hear the shrieking of the ravens and crows following the carts. One day we’re walking along the shore of the Ancre to work in the trenches and we cross a large field of oats and stubble where the cadavers of horses killed in the war lie. The bodies are already black and stinking, and flights of crows fan out, squawking. We aren’t neophytes, we’ve all seen death, comrades suddenly doubling over as if from an invisible punch and being thrown backwards by machine-gun bullets. Those who’ve been disembowelled or had their brains blown out by mortar fire. But when we go across that field where hundreds of horse carcasses have been left, our legs grow wobbly and nausea rises in our throats.
That was the very beginning of the war and we didn’t know it. At the time we thought the fighting would soon be over, that all around us the countryside was deserted like these open graves where they dumped the dead horses.
Stretching out before us like the sea: those hills, those forests, so very dark in spite of the bright summer light, almost unreal, over which only the crows have the right to fly. What lies out there? Our enemies, silent, invisible. They are living over there, conversing, eating, sleeping like we are, but we never see them. From time to time the sound of machine guns in the distance to the north-west or to the south tells us they still exist. Or else the high-pitched humming of an aeroplane slipping between two clouds that we never see again.
So we work at building roads. Every day trucks bring loads of stones that they dump in piles along the banks of the Ancre. The soldiers from the Territorial Army and the New Army join us in the road construction, in preparing the railway that will cross the river to reach Hardecourt. No one would recognize this land after these past few months. In the place where, in the beginning of winter, there was nothing but pasture, fields, woods, a few old farms, now stretches a network of stone roads, railways, with their sheet-metal shelters, their hangars for trucks and aeroplanes, tanks, cannon, munitions. Over all of that, the camouflage teams have strung great brown tarps, tent cloths that imitate the scabby prairies. When the wind blows the tarps snap like the sails of a ship and you can hear a metallic hum in the barbed wire. The heavy cannon have been buried in the centre of large craters, looking like giant antlions, wicked land crabs. The carts come and go endlessly, bringing loads of artillery shells: the Navy’s 37- and 47 mm-calibre shells, but also 58-, 75-calibre shells. Beyond the railway the men are digging trenches on the banks of the Ancre, pouring concrete platforms for cannon, building fortified shelters. In the plains south of Hardecourt, near Albert, Aveluy, Mesnil, where the valley grows narrower, props in trompe l’œil have been set up: fake ruins, fake wells that hide machine-gun positions. With old uniforms we make figures stuffed with straw that look like the bodies of soldiers sprawled on the ground. With bits of sheet metal and branches we set up fake hollow trees to shield lookouts, machine guns, artillery. On the roads, the railway, the bridges, we’ve put up large grass-coloured raffia screens, bales of hay. With an old barge brought from Flanders, the British Expeditionary Corps has prepared a river gunboat that will sail down the Ancre all the way to the Somme.
Now that summer is here, bringing such long days, we feel new strength, as if every
thing we were witnessing being prepared here were nothing but a game, and we don’t think about death any more. After the despair of the long winter months spent in the mud of the Ancre, Odilon has become gay and self-confident. After days of working on the roads and railways he drinks coffee and talks with the Canadians before curfew in the evenings. Nights are starry and I recall the nights in Boucan, the sky over English Bay. For the first time in months we allow ourselves to confide in one another. The men talk about their parents, their fiancées, their wives and children. Photographs are passed around, dirtied, mouldy old bits of cardboard upon which, in the flickering light of the lamps, smiling faces appear, distant, fragile figures, like spectres. Odilon and I don’t have any photographs, but in my coat pocket I have the last letter I received from Laure, in London, before boarding the Dreadnought. I’ve read and reread it so many times I could recite it by heart, with those half-mocking and somewhat melancholy words I so love. She mentions Mananava, where we’ll be reunited one day, when all this is over. Does she really believe that? One night I can’t keep from talking to Odilon about Mananava, about the two tropicbirds that circle over the ravine at twilight. Has he listened to me? I think he’s gone to sleep with his head on his bag in the underground shelter that serves as a barracks. It doesn’t matter. I need to go on talking, not for him, but for myself. So that my voice will reach out beyond this hellhole, all the way out to the island where Laure is surrounded by the night silence, eyes wide, listening to the rustling of the rain, as in the old days in the house in Boucan.
We’ve been working on setting up this scenery for so long that we don’t believe in the reality of war any more. Ypres, the forced marches in Flanders, are far behind. Most of my comrades didn’t live through that. At first this trompe l’œil work made them laugh, they who’d been expecting the smell of gunpowder, the thundering of cannon. Now they don’t understand any more, they’re growing impatient. ‘Is this what war is all about?’ asks Odilon after a harrowing day spent digging out mine galleries and trenches. The sky above us is leaden, heavy. The storm breaks with a sudden downpour and when it’s time for the relief guard we are drenched, as if we’d fallen in the river.