Under Fire, Henri Barbusse [free novel reading sites TXT] 📗

the coarsest expressions the human ear ever hears. But one of the disputants, a stranger from another squad, is ejected by the tenants, and the flow of curses from the other grows feebler and expires.

“Same as us,” says Marthereau with a certain pride, “they hold themselves in!”

It is true. Thanks to Bertrand, who is possessed by a hatred of drunkenness, of the fatal poison that gambles with multitudes, our squad is one of the least befouled by wine and brandy.

They are shouting and singing and talking all around. And they laugh endlessly, for in the human mechanism laughter is the sound of wheels that work, of deeds that are done.

One tries to fathom certain faces that show up in provocative relief among this menagerie of shadows, this aviary of reflections. But one cannot. They are visible, but you can see nothing in the depth of them.

*

“Ten o’clock already, friends,” says Bertrand. “We’ll finish the camel’s humps off to-morrow. Time for by-by.” Each one then slowly retires to rest, but the jabbering hardly pauses. Man takes all things easily when he is under no obligation to hurry. The men go to and fro, each with some object in his hand, and along the wall I watch Eudore’s huge shadow gliding, as he passes in front of a candle with two little bags of camphor hanging from the end of his fingers.

Lamuse is throwing himself about in search of a good position; he seems ill at ease. To-day, obviously. and whatever his capacity may be, he has eaten too much.

“Some of us want to sleep! Shut them up, you lot of louts!” cries Mesnil Joseph from his litter.

This entreaty has a subduing effect for a moment, but does not stop the burble of voices nor the passing to and fro.

“We’re going up to-morrow, it’s true,” says Paradis, “and in the evening we shall go into the first line. But nobody’s thinking about it. We know it, and that’s all.”

Gradually each has regained his place. I have stretched myself on the straw, and Marthereau wraps himself up by my side.

Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise. It is the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded simpleton in spectacles. When he has taken off his greatcoat and appears in his jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about showing his legs. We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette of a bearded hippopotamus. He blows, sighs, and mutters.

Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his bead, and says to me, “Look at him. Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge. When we ask him what he does in civil life, he won’t say ‘I’m a school teacher’ he says, leering at you from under his specs with the half of his eyes, ‘I’m a professor.’ When he gets up very early to go to mass, he says, ‘I’ve got belly-ache, I must go and take a turn round the corner and no mistake.’”

A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland: “Where I live, it’s just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes. There’s my old man there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he’s working or resting, he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the stove.”

I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialized and technical character: “That’s why he makes a paillon. D’you know what a paillon is? You take a stalk of green corn and peel it. You split it in two and then in two again, and you have different sizes. Then with a thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the stem of his pipe—”

The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.

There are only two candles alight. A wide wing of darkness overspreads the prostrate collection of men.

Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory, and some fragments of it reach my ears. Just now, Papa Ramure is abusing the commandant.

“The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I’ve noticed he don’t know how to smoke. He sucks all out at his pipes, and he burns ‘em. It isn’t a mouth he’s got in his head, it’s a snout. The wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it’s coal. Clay pipes, they’ll stick it better, but he roasts ‘em brown all the same. Talk about a snout! So, old man, mind what I’m telling you, he’ll come to what doesn’t ever happen often; through being forced to get white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe’ll explode in his nose before everybody. You’ll see.”

Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of the barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The lines of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by side in their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth diversified snoring.

With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to me about himself: “I’m a buyer of rags, you know,” he says, “or to put it better, a rag merchant. But me, I’m wholesale; I buy from the little rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop—a warehouse mind you!—which I use as a depot. I deal in all kinds of rags, from linen to jam-pots, but principally brush-handles, sacks, and old shoes; and naturally, I make a specialty of rabbit-skins.”

And a little later I still hear him: “As for me, little and queer-shaped as I am, all the same I can carry a bin of two hundred pounds’ weight to the warehouse. up the steps, and my feet in sabots. Once I had a to-do with a person—”

“What I can’t abide,” cries Fouillade, all of a sudden, “is the exercises and marches they give us when we’re resting. My back’s mincemeat, and I can’t get a snooze even, I’m that cramped.”

There is a metallic noise in Volpatte’s direction. He has decided to take the stove, though he chides it constantly for the fatal fault of its perforations.

One who is but half asleep groans, “Oh, la, la! When will this war finish!”

A cry of stubborn and mysterious rebellion bursts forth—“They’d take the very skin off us!”

There follows a single, “Don’t fret yourself!” as darkly inconsequent as the cry of revolt.

I wake up a long time afterwards, as two o’clock is striking; and in a pallor of light which doubtless comes from the moon, I see the agitated silhouette of Pinegal. A cock has crowed afar. Pinegal raises himself halfway to a sitting position, and I hear his husky voice: “Well now, it’s the middle of the night, and there’s a cock loosing his jaw. He’s blind drunk, that cock.” He laughs, and repeats, “He’s blind, that cock,” and he twists himself again into the woolens, and resumes his slumber with a gurgle in which snores are mingled with merriment.

Cocon has been wakened by Pinegal. The man of figures therefore thinks aloud, and says: “The squad had seventeen men when it set off for the war. It has seventeen also at present, with the stop-gaps. Each man has already worn out four greatcoats, one of the original blue, and three cigar-smoke blue, two pairs of trousers and six pairs of boots. One must count two rifles to each man, but one can’t count the overalls. Our emergency rations have been renewed twenty-three times. Among us seventeen, we’ve been mentioned fourteen times in Army Orders, of which two were to the Brigade, four to the Division, and one to the Army. Once we stayed sixteen days in the trenches without relief. We’ve been quartered and lodged in forty-seven different villages up to now. Since the beginning of the campaign, twelve thousand men have passed through the regiment, which consists of two thousand.”

A strange lisping noise interrupts him. It comes from Blaire, whose new ivories prevent him from talking as they also prevent him from eating. But he puts them in every evening, and retains them all night with fierce determination, for he was promised that in the end he would grow accustomed to the object they have put into his head.

I raise myself on my elbow, as on a battlefield, and look once more on the beings whom the scenes and happenings of the times have rolled up all together. I look at them all, plunged in the abyss of passive oblivion, some of them seeming still to be absorbed in their pitiful anxieties, their childish instincts, and their slave-like ignorance.

The intoxication of sleep masters me. But I recall what they have done and what they will do; and with that consummate picture of a sorry human night before me, a shroud that fills our cavern with darkness, I dream of some great unknown light.

[note 1] There is a complete set for each squad—stoves, canvas buckets, coffee-mill, pan, etc—and each man carries some item on march.—Tr.

[note 2] Cantine vivres, chest containing two days’ rations and cooking utensils for four or five officers.—Tr.

15

The Egg

WE were badly off, hungry and thirsty; and in these wretched quarters there was nothing!

Something had gone wrong with the revictualing department and our wants were becoming acute. Where the sorry place surrounded them, with its empty doors, its bones of houses, and its bald-headed telegraph posts. a crowd of hungry men were grinding their teeth and confirming the absence of everything:—“The juice has sloped and the wine’s up the spout, and the bully’s zero. Cheese? Nix. Napoo jam, napoo butter on skewers.”

“We’ve nothing, and no error, nothing; and play hell as you like, it doesn’t help.”

“Talk about rotten quarters! Three houses with nothing inside but draughts and damp.”

“No good having any of the filthy here, you might as well have only the skin of a bob in your purse, as long as there’s nothing to buy.”

“You might be a Rothschild, or even a military tailor, but what use’d your brass be?”

“Yesterday there was a bit of a cat mewing round where the 7th are. I feel sure they’ve eaten it.”

“Yes, there was; you could see its ribs like rocks on the sea-shore.”

“There were some chaps,” says Blaire, “who bustled about when they got here and managed to find a few bottles of common wine at the bacca-shop at the corner of the street.”

“Ah, the swine! Lucky devils to be sliding that down their necks.”

“It was muck, all the same, it’d make your cup as black as your baccy-pipe.”

“There are some, they say, who’ve swallowed a fowl.”

“Damn,” says Fouillade.

“I’ve hardly had a bite. I had a sardine left, and a little tea in the bottom of a bag that I chewed up with some sugar.”

“You can’t even have a bit of a drunk—it’s off the map.”

“And that isn’t enough either, even when you’re not a big eater and you’re got a communication trench as flat as a pancake.”

“One meal in two days—a yellow mess, shining like gold, no broth and no meat—everything left behind.”

“And worst of all we’ve nothing to light a pipe with.”

“True, and that’s misery. I haven’t a single match. I had several bits of ends, but they’ve gone. I’ve hunted in vain through all the pockets of my flea-case—nix. As for buying them it’s hopeless, as you say.”

“I’ve got the head of a match that I’m keeping.” It is a real hardship indeed, and the sight is pitiful of the poilus who cannot light