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

serves as a handle for his huge drooping mustache. Even the corrugations of Cocon’s poor little face are lighted up.

Becuwe goes in search of firewood to warm the coffee. While we wait for our drink, we roll cigarettes and fill pipes. Pouches are pulled out. Some of us have shop-acquired pouches in leather or rubber, but they are a minority. Biquet extracts his tobacco from a sock, of which the mouth is drawn tight with string. Most of the others use the bags for anti-gas pads, made of some waterproof material which is an excellent preservative of shag, be it coarse or fine; and there are those who simply fumble for it in the bottom of their greatcoat pockets.

The smokers spit in a circle, just at the mouth of the dug-out which most of the half-section inhabit, and flood with tobacco-stained saliva the place where they put their hands and feet when they flatten themselves to get in or out.

But who notices such a detail?

*

Now, a propos of a letter to Marthereau from his wife, they discuss produce.

“La mere Marthereau has written,” he says. “That fat pig we’ve got at home, a fine specimen, guess how much she’s worth now?”

But the subject of domestic economy degenerates suddenly into a fierce altercation between Pepin and Tulacque. Words of quite unmistakable significance are exchanged. Then—“I don’t care a what you say or what you don’t say! Shut it up!”—“I shall shut it when I want, midden!”—“A seven-pound thump would shut it up quick enough!”—“Who from? Who’ll give it me?”—“Come and find out!”

They grind their teeth and approach each other in a foaming rage. Tulacque grasps his prehistoric ax, and his squinting eyes are flashing. The other is pale and his eyes have a greenish glint; you can see in his blackguard face that his thoughts are with his knife.

But between the two, as they grip each other in looks and mangle in words, Lamuse intervenes with his huge pacific head, like a baby’s, and his face of sanguinary hue: “Allons, allons! You’re not going to cut yourselves up! Can’t be allowed!”

The others also interpose, and the antagonists are separated, but they continue to hurl murderous looks at each other across the barrier of their comrades. Pepin mutters a residue of slander in tones that quiver with malice—

“The hooligan, the ruffian, the blackguard! But wait a bit! I’ll see him later about this!”

On the other side, Tulacque confides in the poilu who is beside him: “That crab-louse! Non, but you know what he is! You know—there’s no more to be said. Here, we’ve got to rub along with a lot of people that we don’t know from Adam. We know ‘em and yet we don’t know ‘em; but that man, if he thinks he can mess me about, he’ll find himself up the wrong street! You wait a bit. I’ll smash him up one of these days, you’ll see!”

Meanwhile the general conversation is resumed, drowning the last twin echoes of the quarrel.

“It’s every day alike, alors!” says Paradis to me; “yesterday it was Plaisance who wanted to let Fumex have it heavy on the jaw, about God knows what—a matter of opium pills, I think. First it’s one and then it’s another that talks of doing some one in. Are we getting to be a lot of wild animals because we look like ‘em?”

“Mustn’t take them too seriously, these men,” Lamuse declares; “they’re only kids.”

“True enough, seeing that they’re men.”

*

The day matures. A little more light has trickled through the mists that enclose the earth. But the sky has remained overcast, and now it dissolves in rain; With a slowness which itself disheartens, the wind brings back its great wet void upon us. The rain-haze makes everything clammy and dull—even the Turkey red of Lamuse s cheeks, and even the orange armor that caparisons Tulacque. The water penetrates to the deep joy with which dinner endowed us, and puts it out. Space itself shrinks; and the sky, which is a field of melancholy, comes closely down upon the earth, which is a field of death.

We are still there, implanted and idle. It will be hard to-day to reach the end of it, to get rid of the afternoon. We shiver in discomfort, and keep shifting our positions, like cattle enclosed.

Cocon is explaining to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations. In the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of French trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half leveled; the others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These parallels are joined up by innumerable galleries which hook and crook themselves like ancient streets. The system is much more dense than we believe who live inside it. On the twenty-five kilometers’ width that form the army front, one must count on a thousand kilometers of hollowed lines—trenches and saps of all sorts. And the French Army consists of ten such armies. There are then, on the French side, about 10,000 kilometers [note 2] of trenches, and as much again on the German side. And the French front is only about one-eighth of the whole war-front of the world.

Thus speaks Cocon, and he ends by saying to his neighbor, “In all that lot, you see what we are, us chaps?”

Poor Barque’s head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child’s, is underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an apostrophe: “Yes, it’s true, when you come to think of it. What’s a soldier, or even several soldiers?—Nothing, and less than nothing, in the whole crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the few drops of blood that we are among all this flood of men and things.”

Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: “He was coming along with two horses—Fs-s-s—a shell; and he’s only one horse left.”

“You get fed up with it,” says Volpatte.

“But you stick it,” growls Barque.

“You’ve got to,” says Paradis.

“Why?” asks Marthereau, without conviction.

“No need for a reason, as long as we’ve got to.”

“There is no reason,” Lamuse avers.

“Yes, there is,” says Cocon. “It’s—or rather, there are several.”

“Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we’ve got to stick it.”

“All the same,” comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance slip of airing his pet phrase—“All the same, they’d like to steal the very skin off us!”

“At the beginning of it,” says Tirette, “I used to think about a heap of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don’t think any more.”

“Nor me either.”

“Nor me.”

“I’ve never tried to.”

“You’re not such a fool as you look, flea-face,” says the shrill and jeering voice of Mesnil Andre. Obscurely flattered, the other develops his theme—

“To begin with, you can’t know anything about anything.”

Says Corporal Bertrand, “There’s only one thing you need know, and it’s this; that the Boches are here in front of us, deep dug in, and we’ve got to see that they don’t get through, and we’ve got to put ‘em out, one day or another—as soon as possible.”

“Oui, oui, they’ve got to leg it, and no mistake about it. What else is there? Not worth while to worry your head thinking about anything else. But it’s a long job.”

An explosion of profane assent comes from Fouillade, and he adds, “That’s what it is!”

“I’ve given up grousing,” says Barque. “At the beginning of it, I played hell with everybody—with the people at the rear, with the civilians, with the natives, with the shirkers. Yes, I played hell; but that was at the beginning of the war—I was young. Now, I take things better.”

“There’s only one way of taking ‘em—as they come!”

“Of course! Otherwise, you’d go crazy. We’re dotty enough already, eh, Firmin?”

Volpatte assents with a nod of profound conviction. He spits, and then contemplates his missile with a fixed and unseeing eye.

“You were saying?” insists Barque.

“Here, you haven’t got to look too far in front. You must live from day to day and from hour to hour, as well as you can.”

“Certain sure, monkey-face. We’ve got to do what they tell us to do, until they tell us to go away.”

“That’s all,” yawns Mesnil Joseph.

Silence follows the recorded opinions that proceed from these dried and tanned faces, inlaid with dust. This, evidently, is the credo of the men who, a year and a half ago, left all the corners of the land to mass themselves on the frontier: Give up trying to understand, and give up trying to be yourself. Hope that you will not die, and fight for life as well as you can.

“Do what you’ve got to do, oui, but get out of your own messes yourself,” says Barque, as he slowly stirs the mud to and fro.

“No choice”—Tulacque backs him up. “If you don’t get out of ‘em yourself, no one’ll do it for you.”

“He’s not yet quite extinct, the man that bothers about the other fellow.”

“Every man for himself, in war!”

“That’s so, that’s so.”

Silence. Then from the depth of their destitution, these men summon sweet souvenirs—“All that,” Barque goes on, “isn’t worth much, compared with the good times we had at Soissons.”

“Ah, the Devil!”

A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to redden their cold faces.

“Talk about a festival!” sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland.

“Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be ours! The houses and the beds—”

“And the cupboards!”

“And the cellars!”

Lamuse’s eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full.

“Were you there long?” asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the drafts from Auvergne.

“Several months.”

The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again fiercely at this vision of the days of plenty.

“We used to see,” said Paradis dreamily, “the poilus pouring along and behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round their middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good fellow or woman that they hadn’t seen and won’t ever see again.”

We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. “There were things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We held all the aces in those days.”

“A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops.”

“Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you’ve no idea of, a sort of devil’s delight.”

“Believe me or not,” said Blaire to Cadilhac, “but in the middle of it all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and everywhere else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to it. Ah, mon vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!”

“Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the great Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!”

“Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted without twisting himself.”

“Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks chasing and gabbling about the streets in