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

their task, they have the outline of fabled dragons.

Our line of faces on the level of the ground turns that way, and we follow them with our eyes from the bottom of the trench in the middle of this country peopled by blazing and ferocious apparitions, these fields that the sky has crushed.

“Those, they’re the 150 mm. howitzers.”—“They’re the 210’s, calf-head.”—“There go the regular guns, too; the hogs! Look at that one!” It was a shell that burst on the ground and threw up earth and debris in a fan-shaped cloud of darkness. Across the cloven land it looked like the frightful spitting of some volcano, piled up in the bowels of the earth.

A diabolical uproar surrounds us. We are conscious of a sustained crescendo, an incessant multiplication of the universal frenzy. A hurricane of hoarse and hollow banging, of raging clamor, of piercing and beast-like screams, fastens furiously with tatters of smoke upon the earth where we are buried up to our necks, and the wind of the shells seems to set it heaving and pitching.

“Look at that,” bawls Barque, “and me that said they were short of munitions!”

“Oh, la, la! We know all about that! That and the other fudge the newspapers squirt all over us!”

A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens the heart.

“The coffee-mill! [note 1] One of ours, listen. The shots come regularly, while the Boches’ haven’t got the same length of time between the shots; they go crack—crack-crack-crack—crack-crack—crack—”

“Don’t cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn’t an unsewing-machine at all; it’s a motor-cycle on the road to 31 dugout, away yonder.”

“Well, I think it’s a chap up aloft there, having a look round from his broomstick,” chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and sweeps the firmament in search of an aeroplane.

A discussion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and that’s all. One tries in vain to become familiar with all those diverse disturbances. It even happened the other day in the wood that a whole section mistook for the hoarse howl of a shell the first notes of a neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray.

“I say, there’s a good show of sausages in the air this morning,” says Lamuse. Lifting our eyes, we count them.

“There are eight sausages on our side and eight on the Boches’,” says Cocon, who has already counted them.

There are, in fact, at regular intervals along the horizon, opposite the distance-dwindled group of captive enemy balloons, the eight long hovering eyes of the army, buoyant and sensitive, and joined to the various headquarters by living threads.

“They see us as we see them. how the devil can one escape from that row of God Almighties up there?”

There’s our reply!

Suddenly, behind our backs, there bursts the sharp and deafening stridor of the 75’s. Their increasing crackling thunder arouses and elates us. We shout with our guns, and look at each other without hearing our shouts—except for the curiously piercing voice that comes from Barque’s great mouth—amid the rolling of that fantastic drum whose every note is the report of a cannon.

Then we turn our eyes ahead and outstretch our necks, and on the top of the hill we see the still higher silhouette of a row of black infernal trees whose terrible roots are striking down into the invisible slope where the enemy cowers.

While the “75″ battery continues its barking a hundred yards behind us—the sharp anvil-blows of a huge hammer, followed by a dizzy scream of force and fury—a gigantic gurgling dominates the devilish oratorio; that, also, is coming from our side. “It’s a gran’pa, that one!”

The shell cleaves the air at perhaps a thousand yards above us; the voice of its gun covers all as with a pavilion of resonance. The sound of its travel is sluggish, and one divines a projectile bigger-boweled, more enormous than the others. We can hear it passing and declining in front with the ponderous and increasing vibration of a train that enters a station under brakes; then, its heavy whine sounds fainter. We watch the hill opposite. and after several seconds it is covered by a salmon-pink cloud that the wind spreads over one-half of the horizon. “It’s a 220 mm.”

“One can see them,” declares Volpatte, “those shells, when they come out of the gun. If you’re in the right line, you can even see them a good long away from the gun.”

Another follows: “There! Look, look! Did you see that one? You didn’t look quick enough, you missed it. Get a move on! Look, another! Did you see it?”

“I did not see it.”—“Ass! Got to be a bedstead for you to see it! Look, quick, that one, there! Did you see it, unlucky good-for-nothing?”—” I saw it; is that all?”

Some have made out a small black object, slender and pointed as a blackbird with folded wings, pricking a wide curve down from the zenith.

“That weighs 240 lb., that one, my old bug,” says Volpatte proudly, “and when that drops on a funk-hole it kills everybody inside it. Those that aren’t picked off by the explosion are struck dead by the wind of it, or they’re gas-poisoned before they can say ‘ouf!’”

“The 270 mm. shell can be seen very well, too—talk about a bit of iron—when the howitzer sends it up—allez, off you go!”

“And the 155 Rimailho, too; but you can’t see that one because it goes too straight and too far; the more you look for it the more it vanishes before your eyes.”

In a stench of sulphur amid black powder, of burned stuffs and calcined earth which roams in sheets about the country, all the menagerie is let loose and gives battle. Bellowings, roarings, growlings, strange and savage; feline caterwaulings that fiercely rend your ears and search your belly, or the long-drawn piercing hoot like the siren of a ship in distress. At times, even, something like shouts cross each other in the air-currents, with curious variation of tone that make the sound human. The country is bodily lifted in places and falls back again. From one end of the horizon to the other it seems to us that the earth itself is raging with storm and tempest.

And the greatest guns, far away and still farther, diffuse growls much subdued and smothered, but you know the strength of them by the displacement of air which comes and raps you on the ear.

Now, behold a heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers over the bombarded region and draws out in every direction. This touch of strangely incongruous color in the picture summons attention, and all we encaged prisoners turn our faces towards the hideous outcrop.

“Gas, probably. Let’s have our masks ready.”—“The hogs!”

“They’re unfair tricks, those,” says Farfadet.

“They’re what?” asks Barque jeeringly.

“Why, yes, they’re dirty dodges, those gases—”

“You make me tired,” retorts Barque, “with your fair ways and your unfair ways. When you’ve seen men squashed, cut in two, or divided from top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as if by a blow with a club, and in place of the head a bit of neck, oozing currant jam of brains all over the chest and back—you’ve seen that and yet you can say ‘There are clean ways!’”

“Doesn’t alter the fact that the shell is allowed, it’s recognized—”

“Ah, la, la! I’ll tell you what—you make me blubber just as much as you make me laugh!” And he turns his back.

“Hey, look out, boys!”

We strain our eyes, and one of us has thrown himself flat on the ground; others look instinctively and frowning towards the shelter that we have not time to reach. and during these two seconds each one bends his head. It is a grating noise as of huge scissors which comes near and nearer to us, and ends at last with a ringing crash of unloaded iron.

That ore fell not far from us—two hundred yards away, perhaps. We crouch in the bottom of the trench and remain doubled up while the place where we are is lashed by a shower of little fragments.

“Don’t want this in my tummy, even from that distance,” says Paradis, extracting from the earth of the trench wall a morsel that has just lodged there. It is like a bit of coke, bristling with edged and pointed facets, and he dances it in his hand so as not to burn himself.

There is a hissing noise. Paradis sharply bows his head and we follow suit. “The fuse!—it has gone over.” The shrapnel fuse goes up and then comes down vertically; but that of the percussion shell detaches itself from the broken mass after the explosion and usually abides buried at the point of contact, but at other times it flies off at random like a big red-hot pebble. One must beware of it. It may hurl itself on you a very long time after the detonation and by incredible paths, passing over the embankment and plunging into the cavities.

“Nothing so piggish as a fuse. It happened to me once—”

“There’s worse things,” broke in Bags of the 11th, “The Austrian shells, the 130’s and the 74’s. I’m afraid of them. They’re nickel-plated, they say, but what I do know, seeing I’ve been there, is they come so quick you can’t do anything to dodge them. You no sooner hear em snoring than they burst on you.

“The German 105’s, neither, you haven’t hardly the time to flatten yourself. I once got the gunners to tell me all about them.”

“I tell you, the shells from the naval guns, you haven’t the time to hear ‘em. Got to pack yourself up before they come.”

“And there’s that new shell, a dirty devil, that breaks wind after it’s dodged into the earth and out of it again two or three times in the space of six yards. When I know there’s one of them about, I want to go round the corner. I remember one time—”

“That’s all nothing, my lads,” said the new sergeant, stopping on his way past, “you ought to see what they chucked us at Verdun, where I’ve come from. Nothing but whoppers, 380’s and 420’s and 244’s. When you’ve been shelled down there you know all about it—the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when they’ve three thicknesses of beams, all the road-crossings sprinkled, the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shoveled up. You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the cross-roads; you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left. You could see one of these 380’s go into a house at Verdun by the roof, bore through two or three floors, and burst at the bottom, and all the damn lot’s got to go aloft; and in the fields whole battalions would scatter and lie flat under the shower like poor little defenseless rabbits. At every step on the ground in the fields you’d got lumps as thick as your arm and as wide as that, and it’d take four poilus to lift the lump of iron. The fields looked as if they were full of rocks. And that went on without a halt for months on end, months on end!” the sergeant