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

Two obscure forms pass in the dark, several paces from us; they are talking together in low voices—“You bet, old chap, instead of listening to him, I shoved my bayonet into his belly so that I couldn’t haul it out.”

“There were four in the bottom of the hole. I called to ‘em to come out, and as soon as one came out I stuck him. Blood ran down me up to the elbow and stuck up my sleeves.”

“Ah!” the first speaker went on, “when we are telling all about it later, if we get back, to the other people at home, by the stove and the candle, who’s going to believe it? It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

“I don’t care a damn about that, as long as we do get back,” said the other; “I want the end quickly, and only that.”

Bertrand was used to speak very little ordinarily, and never of himself. But he said, “I’ve got three of them on my hands. I struck like a madman. Ah, we were all like beasts when we got here!”

He raised his voice and there was a restrained tremor in it: “it was necessary,” he said, “it was necessary, for the future’s sake.”

He crossed his arms and tossed his head: “The future!” he cried all at once as a prophet might. “How will they regard this slaughter, they who’ll live after us, to whom progress—which comes as sure as fate—will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don’t know whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch’s and Corneille’s heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches?

“And for all that, mind you,” Bertrand went on. “there is one figure that has risen above the war and will blaze with the beauty and strength of his courage—”

I listened, leaning on a stick and towards him, drinking in the voice that came in the twilight silence from the lips that so rarely spoke. He cried with a clear voice—“Liebknecht!”

He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly serious as a statue’s, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once again from his marble muteness to repeat, “The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful. And yet—this present—it had to be, it had to be! Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier’s calling, that changes men by turns into stupid victims or ignoble brutes. Yes, shame. That’s the true word, but it’s too true; it’s true in eternity, but it’s not yet true for us. It will be true when there is a Bible that is entirely true, when it is found written among the other truths that a purified mind will at the same time let us understand. We are still lost, still exiled far from that time. In our time of to-day, in these moments, this truth is hardly more than a fallacy, this sacred saying is only blasphemy!”

A kind of laugh came from him, full of echoing dreams—“To think I once told them I believed in prophecies, just to kid them!”

I sat down by Bertrand’s side. This soldier who had always done more than was required of him and survived notwithstanding, stood at that moment in my eyes for those who incarnate a lofty moral conception, who have the strength to detach themselves from the hustle of circumstances, and who are destined, however little their path may run through a splendor of events, to dominate their time.

“I have always thought all those things,” I murmured.

“Ah!” said Bertrand. We looked at each other without a word, with a little surprised self-communion. After this full silence he spoke again. “It’s time to start duty; take your rifle and come.”

From our listening-post we see towards the east a light spreading like a conflagration, but bluer and sadder than buildings on fire. It streaks the sky above a long black cloud which extends suspended like the smoke of an extinguished fire, like an immense stain on the world. It is the returning morning.

It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering fatigue. We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth chatter. Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes from the sky into the slender framework of the black clouds. All is frozen, colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere. There is rime and snow under a burden of mist. Everything is white. Paradis moves—a heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white. I had placed my shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and it looks as if wrapped in paper. In the bottom of the hole a little snow floats, fretted and gray in the black foot-bath. Outside the hole, on the piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded dead, snow rests like muslin.

Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow darker as they approach and hail us. They are the men who come to relieve us. Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.

Paradis hoists himself out. Over the plain I follow his Father Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up white-felted soles. Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty whiteness that covers the ground.

Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which tarpaulins are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white velvet or mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and between the watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to fight against the cold. to exclude it from the meager fireside of their own chests, or who are simply frozen. A dead man has slid down. upright and hardly askew, with his feet in the trench and his chest and arms resting on the bank. He was clasping the earth when life left him. His face is turned skyward and is covered with a leprosy of ice, the eyelids are white as the eyes, the mustache caked with hard slime. Other bodies are sleeping, less white than that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on lifeless things.

“We must sleep.” Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where we may hide ourselves and shut our eyes. “It can’t be helped if there are stiffs in the dugouts,” mutters Paradis; “in a cold like this they’ll keep, they won’t be too bad.” We go forward, so weary that we can only see the ground.

I am alone. Where is Paradis? He must have lain down in some hole, and perhaps I did not hear his call. I meet Marthereau. “I’m looking where I can sleep, I’ve been on guard,” he says.

“I, too; let’s look together.”

“What’s all the row and to-do?” says Marthereau. A mingled hubbub of trampling and voices overflows from the communication trench that goes off here. “The communication trenches are full of men. Who are you?”

One of those with whom we are suddenly mixed up replies, “We’re the Fifth Battalion.” The newcomers stop. They are in marching order. The one that spoke sits down for a breathing space on the curves of a sand-bag that protrudes from the line. He wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve.

“What are you doing here? Have they told you to come?”

“Not half they haven’t told us. We’re coming to attack. We’re going yonder, right up.” With his head he indicates the north. The curiosity with which we look at them fastens on to a detail. “You’ve carried everything with you?”—“We chose to keep it, that’s all.”

“Forward!” they are ordered. They rise and proceed, incompletely awake, their eyes puffy, their wrinkles underlined. There are young men among them with thin necks and vacuous eyes, and old men; and in the middle, ordinary ones. They march with a commonplace and pacific step. What they are going to do seems to us, who did it last night, beyond human strength. But still they go away towards the north.

“The revally of the damned,” says Marthereau.

We make way for them with a sort of admiration and a sort of terror. When they have passed, Marthereau wags his head and murmurs, “There are some getting ready, too, on the other side, with their gray uniforms. Do you think those chaps are feeling it about the attack? Then why have they come? It’s not their doing, I know, but it’s theirs all the same, seeing they’re here.—I know, I know, but it’s odd, all of it.”

The sight of a passer-by alters the course of his ideas: “Tiens, there’s Truc, the big one, d’you know him? Isn’t he immense and pointed, that chap! As for me, I know I’m not quite hardly big enough; but him, he goes too far. He always knows what’s going on, that two-yarder! For savvying everything, there’s nobody going to give him the go-by! I’ll go and chivvy him about a funk-hole.”

“If there’s a rabbit-hole anywhere?” replies the elongated passer-by, leaning on Marthereau like a poplar tree, “for sure, my old Caparthe, certainly. Tiens, there”—and unbending his elbow he makes an indicative gesture like a flag-signaler—“‘Villa von Hindenburg.’ and there, ‘Villa Glucks auf.’ If that doesn’t satisfy you, you gentlemen are hard to please. P’raps there’s a few lodgers in the basement, but not noisy lodgers, and you can talk out aloud in front of them, you know!”

“Ah, nom de Dieu!” cried Marthereau a quarter of an hour after we had established ourselves in one of these square-cut graves, “there’s lodgers he didn’t tell us about, that frightful great lightning-rod, that infinity!” His eyelids were just closing, but they opened again and he scratched his arms and thighs: “I want a snooze! It appears it’s out of the question. Can’t resist these things.”

We settled ourselves to yawning and sighing, and finally we lighted a stump of candle, wet enough to resist us although covered with our hands; and we watched each other yawn.

The German dug-out consisted of several rooms. We were against a partition of ill-fitting planks; and on the other side, in Cave No. 2, some men were also awake. We saw light trickle through the crannies between the planks and heard rumbling voices. “It’s the other section,” said Marthereau.

Then we listened, mechanically. “When I was off on leave,” boomed an invisible talker, “we had the hump at first, because we were thinking of my poor brother who was missing in March—dead, no doubt—and of my poor little Julien, of Class 1915, killed in the October attacks. And then bit by bit, her and me, we settled down to be happy at being together again, you see. Our little kid, the last, a five-year-old, entertained us a treat. He wanted to play soldiers with me, and I made a little gun for him. I explained the trenches to him; and he, all fluttering with delight like a bird, he was shooting at me and yelling. Ah, the damned young gentleman, he did it properly! He’ll make a famous poilu later! I tell you, he’s quite got the military spirit!”

A silence; then an obscure murmur of talk, in the midst of which we catch the name of Napoleon; then another voice, or the same, saying, “Wilhelm, he’s a stinking beast to have brought this war on.