Part 12

At Nanteuil a slight recrudescence of life was noticeable. A grocer was taking down the wooden shutters of his shop, and some of the windows were thrown open as we went by. As at Dammartin I read on several of the doors the notice: "_Gute Leute_."

The road we were following skirted the fields on which we repulsed the enemy yesterday. We halted, doubtless waiting for fresh orders.

The surrounding country was motionless, but, between the Paris road and the railway, grey-coated corpses lay among the mangel-wurzels as far as the eye could reach. On the fringe of some large maize-fields six Germans had fallen in a heap. The last to die had toppled backwards on to the others, his stiffened legs pointing skywards. His neck was doubled up under the weight of his body, and his chin touched his chest. His eyes were wide open and his mouth twisted in a horrible grimace of agony. With a single exception, nothing could be seen of the other corpses under him save the shoulders, necks, and feet. But one of them, who had not been killed outright and who lay half buried beneath the rest, must have died hard. Scalped by a shell splinter he had tried to rid himself of the ghastly burden crushing his back and legs, but his strength had failed him. Propped up on one elbow, his mouth wide open as though his last breath had been a shout, he had died stretching a huge knotted fist towards the hills we had just left, whence death had come to him.

His cheeks, already turning grey, had begun to fall in, and in the stiffening features from which all semblance of life was rapidly departing one already seemed to see the hollow-eyed, square-chinned, grinning mask of Death.

A little farther on three Army Service Corps men were standing round a Prussian lying on his back, his arms clasped as if in some awful embrace. As one of them lifted his head in order to take off his helmet a stream of black blood gushed from the dead man's mouth and covered the soldier's hands.

"Pig!" growled he, and wiped his gory hands on the skirts of the German's grey coat.

* * * * *

Near-by a Sub-Lieutenant of Engineers was counting the corpses for burial.

"So it's you gunners who have given me all this work! I've already counted seventeen hundred, and I haven't finished yet! There'll be more than two thousand."

As I returned, sick at heart, across the maize-fields I stumbled against something soft. Suspecting a corpse I hastily jumped to one side.

* * * * *

Again we advanced, towards the north.

The roadside was strewn with Mausers, bayonets as short as butchers' knives, cartridge-pouches, helmets, cowhide-packs, wallets, saddles, dead horses....

On the evening of the Battle of Virton the Ruettes road had borne a similar appearance. Upon that occasion I had dejectedly said to myself: "This is a French defeat," and now I was equally astonished to realize that I had taken part in a victory, of which these remains were the proofs, a victory which had snatched Paris from the jaws of the Germans, saved France, and which conceivably might open a new era for us all. In sight of this Calvary of the German army we told ourselves that the enemy would evacuate France as quickly as he had entered it.

Across one of the broad, flat fields ran a yellow line of freshly turned earth, staked out with rifles planted butt-end upwards. Hundreds of men--thousands perhaps--had been buried there side by side, and the air was tainted with all the pestilential odours of decomposition which escaped through the cracks and fissures in the sun-baked soil. On approaching one of the scattered clumps of trees under which other corpses had been buried, the same sickening smell assailed our nostrils. Despite ourselves we kept sniffing the air with an uneasiness like that shown by dogs when they are said to scent death.

Farther down the road we came upon a party of sappers busily plying pick and shovel. At the bottom of a hole they had just finished digging lay a brown crupper marked "Uh. 3" (3rd Uhlans), and on the ploughed land at the edge of the ditch lay a dead horse covered with clayey earth. Worms were swarming in the putrid blood surrounding him.

One of the sappers, who was covering up the carrion with large spadefuls of earth, looked up.

"Phew! he smells bad, doesn't he?" he said. "Nasty job, this! I shan't apply for undertakers' work when I've finished soldiering! And horses smell worse than men. We shall end by getting the plague!"

"When I started to drag him," said another, "his hoof came off in my hand."

And he pointed with his foot to an iron-shod hoof lying on the ground like a stone.

Close by, in a newly harrowed field, undisturbed save for the hoof-prints of a couple of horses which had galloped across it, lay two lances, one of them broken, a light cavalry sword, a Uhlan's helmet, and a water-bottle.

* * * * *

The weather gradually became foggy. The fields, monotonous and drab under the grey sky, and littered at intervals with uniforms, arms, and corpses, imbued us with a sadness which bordered on fear. We had to keep repeating to ourselves "Victory, victory!" in order once again to feel the joy--which nevertheless was so deep--of knowing that the Country was saved.

_Saturday, September 12_

For two days it has rained incessantly, and we have advanced about twenty-two miles under the downpour. The enemy is still retiring, his retreat covered by a few Howitzers which appear to be short of ammunition. Each hour that passes confirms our victory, and we should be in excellent spirits were it not raining so heavily.

* * * * *

The Captain has sent me to pass a few days with the first line of wagons, partly on account of persistent diarrhoea, which was weakening me considerably, and partly owing to a rather serious cut in the wrist. Life in my new billet is far less strenuous; one's rations are better cooked, and one gets plenty of sleep.

While our batteries keep up a lively bombardment on the rear of the German columns in retreat, the first lines of wagons are installed in a wide ravine cut right across the plateau as if by giant swordstroke. It almost seems as if the rain converged in this hollow from all points of the compass. Shells fall also, but they bury themselves without bursting in the marsh near-by, raising geysers of mud.

* * * * *

To-day the N.C.O. of the 6th gun, to which I am temporarily attached, called the men round him:

"_Les poilus!_"[2]

"Here we are!" answered a voluntarily re-enlisted man who was already grey about the temples. "Hairies without a dry hair on our bodies!"

"Listen to this!"

And the N.C.O. in a hoarse voice began to read an order of the day:

"_For five days, without interruption or respite, the 6th Army has been engaged in combat with a foe strong in numbers, whose morale has hitherto been exalted by success. The struggle has been a hard one, and the loss of life due to gun-fire, and the exhaustion caused by want of sleep and sometimes food, have exceeded all that could have been imagined. The courage, fortitude, and endurance with which you have borne all these hardships cannot be adequately extolled in words.

"Comrades, the G.O.C. has asked you, in the name of your Country, to do more than your duty; you have responded even more heroically than seemed possible. Thanks to you, victory has now crowned our arms, and now that you know the satisfaction of success you will never let it escape you.

"For my part, if I have done anything worthy of merit, I have been rewarded by the greatest honour which in a long career has fallen to my lot--that of commanding men such as you.

"From my heart I thank you for what you have done, for to you I owe that which has been the aim of all my efforts and all my energy for the last forty-four years--the Revenge for 1870.

"All honour and thanks to you and to all combatants of the 6th Army.

"Claye (Seine-et-Marne) 10th September 1914.

"Signed: Joffre.

"Countersigned: Manoury."_

* * * * *

"Hear, hear!" cried some one.

"I say, sergeant," shouted the old soldier who had spoken before, "as the General is pleased with us, can't you get them to ask him to turn off some of this water?"

* * * * *

We started off again. The country through which we had been marching since dawn, with halts of one and sometimes two hours during which the guns went into action, seemed, at the first glance, an endless and almost deserted plain. The beetroot-and corn-fields where the crops, often in sheaves, had now rotted, seemed to succeed each other without interruption from one side of the horizon to the other under the lowering, cheerless sky, from which the cold rain poured relentlessly down. But suddenly, in the middle of the flat and barren country, there opened a dale whose existence one would never have suspected, well wooded and so deep that even the church steeple of the village nestling in its lap was hidden from view.

Under the stinging rain the teams walked on with heads held low and twitching ears, their coats shining like oil-skin. By this time many of our horses were only kept on their legs as if by a miracle. The foul weather had put the final touch to their ruin, and we had to abandon three of them, one after the other. They keep going until they reach the extreme limit of their strength, and then suddenly they stumble and stop dead; after that no power on earth will make them advance another inch. They have to be taken out of the traces, unharnessed, and abandoned where they stand. They remain in the same place until they die.

The men were apathetic and taciturn under their black cloaks. Water ran down our backs and made us shiver. Many of the drivers had turned their képis round so that the peaks protected their necks. Their faces, wincing under the sting of the lashing rain, were half hidden in their upturned collars. Our shirts clave to our shoulders and our trousers to our knees. The soaking garments absorbed the warmth of the body, and we experienced the horrible sensation of gradually becoming chilled to the marrow. It seemed as if life was slowly ebbing from our limbs and as if we were dying by inches.

We passed a group of miserable, saturated foot-soldiers, from the skirts of whose coats the rain ran in streams. Some of them had thrown sacks full of straw over their shoulders. One man was sheltering his head and back underneath a woman's skirt, and others under capes, neckerchiefs, and flowery-patterned bed-curtains.

The road was a river of liquid clay upon which neither the men's boots, horseshoes, nor the tyres of the wheels left a trace.

As night approached the grey vault of the sky seemed to sink still lower, drawing in the horizon over the fields, and almost to touch the earth itself. A dense fog first surrounded and then smothered us. We could not have told upon which side the sun was setting; the west was as opaque as the east. The yellow, diffused light gradually became weaker. Here and there by the wayside we could still distinguish the dark forms of dead horses. Night fell. The rain was trickling down my back as far as my loins. I was very cold and now felt more acutely than ever that indescribable sensation as if my life's blood was being slowly sucked from my veins. The battery lumbered on and on....

It was perhaps ten o'clock when we finally halted on the outskirts of a village and ranged up our carriages by the side of the road. We had to wait there some time, sitting motionless on the limbers and becoming more frozen every minute. Our teeth chattered with cold. The delay was probably caused by a cross-roads, a block in the transport traffic, a passing convoy, or some other obstacle; in any case we could not move on. I began to wonder whether we should have to pass the whole night in the rain....

Eventually we reached a field in which we bivouacked, stretching the lines between the carriages. The hurricane lamps formed large yellow points in the opaque darkness, piercing the night without lighting anything. There was no sound save the squelching of dragging footsteps as the exhausted men and horses moved about in the mud.

The sergeant-major summoned the corporals for the issue of rations. But the distribution between the guns had not been finished and the men immediately went away again, preferring to wait until the next day to get their rations. The sergeant-major shouted after them, declaring that if there should be an alarm they would risk going for a whole day without food. He was perfectly right, but no one listened to him.

The darkness was so intense that it was difficult to follow the road, and in order to keep together the men kept shouting:

"Eleventh!... This way.... Eleventh!..."

Convoys passed by, splashing us with mud. A wheel just grazed me. After a long march the only shelter we could find was some rickety old barns, open to the four winds of heaven, in which a thin sprinkling of straw hardly separated us from the beaten-down earth. Here the battery, silent, soaked to the skin and smelling like wet animals, sank shivering into a troubled sleep, continually interrupted by the cries of men dreaming.

_Sunday, September 13_

This morning the sun was shining. Clouds were still banked up to the west, but the blue, which cheered us up wonderfully, eventually spread over the whole sky. We continued our march forward.

The enemy's Howitzers were still bombarding the country round us, but spasmodically and at haphazard. The Germans were being hotly pursued; in the villages we learned that less than two hours previously stragglers were still passing through. It seems that yesterday the enemy's retreat almost became a rout. Disbanded infantrymen without arms, gunners, dismounted horsemen--all fled pell-mell, pursued by the fire of our ·75's and harassed by our advanced guard.

At Vic-sur-Aisne, while waiting till the pontoon bridge should be clear, I entered a pretty little house, the doors and windows of which had been left wide open by the Germans on their departure. The wardrobes and chests of drawers had all been broken into and pillaged. Women's chemises and drawers together with other underlinen were trailing down the staircase. A meal was served on the dining-room table, but the overturned chairs bore witness to the precipitation with which the guests had fled. I was hungry and sat down without hesitation. The food was good although cold.

The leading carriages of the column had already begun to cross the bridge before I learned that the luncheon I had just eaten had been prepared for the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but had been interrupted by the arrival of the French advanced guard.

We crossed the Aisne without difficulty. How came it that the enemy was allowing us to cross the river? The thought of a trap, such as that we laid for the Germans when they crossed the Meuse, made me a little uneasy.

Near Attichy our batteries went off to take up position, while the first lines of wagons halted on a winding road leading to the plateau through some extremely dense woods, all damp and odorous after the rains of yesterday. In a little quarry of white stone yawning on one side of the road in the full glare of the sun, I lay down with a few comrades in some tall ferns. I was nearly asleep when, suddenly, the noise of a bursting shell, which had just fallen close by, spread in vibrant waves through the trees, of which every leaf seemed to rustle.

At the entrance to the quarry appeared a gunner staggering from side to side, his face deathly pale. He grasped his right elbow with his left hand and let himself fall among the bracken.

"Oh!" he murmured, "I'm hit!"

"Where?"

With a slight movement of the head he indicated his elbow, which was cut open and bleeding. And, suddenly, from the road which at this point made two successive bends and then plunged beneath a dark vault of big beech-trees, came a confused sound of groans, cries, and stamping.

A driver hurried up without his képi, his face streaming with blood.

"Come quickly ... it's fallen down there ... it's fallen on the road! Everything's all messed up, the horses are on top.... Oh, my God!...

"Are you wounded?"

"No ... where?"

"Your cheek...."

"Oh, that's nothing--it's a horse, my off-horse.... Come on!"

More shells whistled overhead. We started to run. Suddenly, at the bend of the road I stopped dead, breathless, paralysed by a ghastly sight.

Under the sun, which, breaking through the branches, marbled the white road, lay a shapeless mass of mangled men and horses. The entire teams of the forge and store wagon were welded together in a writhing heap of bleeding flesh. Men were struggling underneath. In the middle of the road lay two gunners, face downwards; others were dragging themselves about on their hands among the fallen saddle-horses. Wounded were moving in the ditches.

From this shambles rose long-drawn-out groans similar to the harrowing cries made by certain animals at night, a muffled and interminable "Aaah!... aaah!" rising and falling like some savage song. Blood was running in streams in the gutters on each side of the way. A nauseating stale stench, like that of a slaughter-house, a sort of warmth, an odour of steaming flesh and flowing blood, a smell of horses, entrails, and animal gasses gripped our throats and turned our stomachs.

One man, who lay buried beneath the team of the forge, had succeeded in passing his arm through a mass of tangled intestines, but the viscera had gripped his wrist in a tenacious grasp. He shook them furiously, scattering jets of blood in all directions. Round him the horses lay writhing in their death agony, breaking wind, dunging, staling, and scraping the ground with their stiffening limbs, their shoes grating stridently on the flints. In their death-throes they strained at the traces and one heard a noise of cracking chains. The vehicle to which they were harnessed advanced a few inches, and then rolled back.

Near-by lay a dead foot-soldier, his whole chest one gaping wound. In his wide-open blue eyes was a fixed expression of horror that went to my heart like a knife. An artilleryman, his stomach ripped open, had been pinned to the road in an almost erect posture by a wounded horse which, bleeding at the nostrils, had fallen across his feet.

Whenever the groaning and wailing stopped for a second one heard the noise of the blood as it burbled and trickled stream by stream and drop by drop, and the gurgle of the intestines which lay in an entangled pink and white mass on the road.

I ran to help the man buried under the forge team. His face was red all over, and horribly convulsed, his hair and beard glued with blood, and his white eyeballs rolling like those of one asphyxiated. A horse in its agony was threatening to kill a gunner wounded in the loins who was dragging himself along on his hands, so I quickly killed the animal with a revolver shot. It was only then that I perceived, stretched out between two horses, my friend M----, very pale, with closed eyes. I ran up and put my arm round him in order to lift him up.... All my blood suddenly ceased to flow, my heart stopped beating.... My arm had sunk up to the elbow in an enormous wound in my friend's back....

I stood up. For an instant the ghastly scene turned round and round.... I thought that I should faint with horror. I put my hand--dripping with blood--to my forehead.... I daubed my face with gore. In order not to fall I had to lean up against the wheel of the forge.

A hospital orderly had succeeded in extricating a couple of untouched stretchers from the ambulance, which had also been shattered by the shell. On one side of the road the Medical Officer, still much upset, himself slightly wounded by the explosion, was occupied with some first-aid dressing. Three of us hoisted on to one of the stretchers a big, fair-haired gunner with a Gaulois moustache, whose foot, almost completely severed from the leg, dangled in the air, and who was yelling with pain. We remembered that there was a dressing-station at the foot of the hill on the fringe of the woods.

We started off, bending our knees in order to jolt the stretcher as little as possible, but we continually had to step over the scattered limbs of horses and pick our way between corpses so disfigured as to be unrecognizable.

A wounded man clasped my leg as we passed, lifting up a deathly face which the blood, running from his ear, had surrounded with a gory collar. His eyes implored us to stop, and in a low voice of profound supplication he murmured:

"For God's sake don't leave me here!"

But we could not carry two men at a time. I bent down a little:

"The others will be along in a minute or two with the other stretcher. They'll take you. Come, now, let go of my foot!..."

We left the shambles and began to breathe again....

The closely meshed cloth of the stretcher retained the blood of the wounded man, whose foot swam in a red pool. He was suffering horribly and twisted his arms together, groaning:

"Oh, my foot!... You're shaking me.... Oh, how you're shaking me!"

And then:

"For God's sake walk slowly!"

In spite of all our efforts we could not avoid the shaking which caused him so much pain, and he continued to murmur, his voice getting fainter and fainter:

"Walk, walk ... slowly!..."

His lips silently repeated "walk" until a fresh jolt made him cry out.

In front of the field-hospital some medical officers had improvised an operating-table in a shady part of the road. The wounded were laid out in rows on the edge of the ditch. A fat doctor with four stripes on his arm ran hither and thither, shouting.

Carried on stretchers or limping on foot, either alone or with the aid of their comrades, the wounded arrived. One man's chin was no more than a bloody jelly; one of his eyes was shut and the other wide open.

The veterinary surgeon's horse, shot through by a shell splinter, had followed the wounded as far as the ambulance, but as soon as he stopped he sank to his knees by the side of the road. The eyes of the animal were full of a suffering almost human, and as he turned his head towards me I fired my revolver in his ear. With a dull, heavy thud like that of an axe as it sinks deep in a tree-trunk, the animal fell on his flank, and from the top of the slope skirting the road rolled over twice into the field below.

We had at once to return to the scene of slaughter, where we were badly needed. As soon as I left the fresh air and sunshine and re-entered the woods I felt almost paralysed by the thought of what I was going to see, and the shadows of the trees, growing darker as the daylight waned, helped to intensify my fear.

"Come on!..."

Two saddle-horses with bleeding wounds were walking away from the shambles by instinct. With faltering steps they slowly descended the road towards the sun. The dead horses had been unharnessed and dragged to one side of the way, but two artillerymen had been left lying in the middle of the road, and some one, either out of force of habit or out of pity for the dead, had broken two branches off one of the beeches and had covered their faces with leaves.

In the gutters the rivers of blood had become congealed. The hot, fetid smell, imprisoned under the vault of the trees, still floated in the air, more nauseating and terrifying than ever. The efforts the men had made in order to unharness the horses and clear the roadway had caused the intestines to split and break, and they now trailed about everywhere, covered with dust, separated by several yards from the gaping, empty bodies from which they had been torn.