Part 10

In going towards Mouilly, we repass the big grey motor-car at the side of the road. A little further on, the ranks open a little without command, in order not to disturb a wounded horse. It is a magnificent, black beast, a king of its kind. Shrapnel has wounded it in the chest and broken one of its shoulders, from which the blood streams right down to the hoof to form a pool in the dust. Its flanks are quivering with the agony it is enduring, while the shattered leg is violently trembling. The sufferings of this poor, gasping, dumb brute, dying minute by minute, and the pathetic, pain-darkened eyes with which it watches us as we pass, stir every man among us as if we were looking upon human agony....

The nearer we approach the village, the more numerous become the wounded men returning from the fight. They come in groups, carefully selecting the shorter grass to walk over, seeking the shade to avoid the burning sun, which makes their wounds smart intolerably. There are a few Germans mingled with our men; one big-built man, fair, ruddy and with blue eyes, is assisting a little French infantryman, who limps along jesting and laughing and displaying all his teeth. With a wicked glance towards us, he cries aloud to the Boche:

"Is it not true, you pig, that you are a good pig?"

"I understand," exclaims the German gutturally. "Pig, good pig! I understand!"

And an unctuous laugh spreads all over his greasy face, happy at this display of camaraderie which promises so well for him, as vile and loathsome as are all Boches when at the mercy of a conqueror.

_Mouilly._ Other roads descend from the woods, all choked with processions of wounded, and still more wounded, moving slowly down into the village. Dressing-stations have been set up in the barns; about them is a litter, constantly increasing, of stained bandages and blood-soaked pieces of cotton-wool, extending in some cases almost into the middle of the road. From the interior of the barns emanate sharp cries, speaking eloquently of bitter pain and endurance; the air reeks with the pungent smell of iodoform.

About the little church, with its shell-shattered windows, lies the cemetery, with its mossy tombstones and rust-eaten metal crosses. Empty, newly-dug graves yawn; so many little mounds bear the fresh marks of the pick! And towards this cemetery some stretcher-bearers come, walking slowly and in time, carrying between them stretchers, hurdles, step-ladders, on which still figures lie, rigid beneath the rough cloth covering them.

We come to a halt near the Amblonville Farm, whose spacious and strongly-built walls look down over wide and rolling grass-lands, moist and verdant. The Mouilly Road terminates there: it stretches away before us, crossing a stream over a little stone bridge, passes a silver-surfaced lake, which acts as a mirror to the superb trees about it, to become winding and narrow near some sombre woods, amid which a half-hidden windmill arises, and finally scales the abrupt heights behind which lies the village.

Behind the summit some 75's are firing steadily and slowly. Lower down, guns, horses and their drivers, and ammunition wagons, appearing as though sighted through the wrong end of a telescope, flow almost imperceptibly this way and that, like weeds slowly waving in the depths of a river.

We make a fire, and soon potatoes begin to glaze and blacken among the glowing cinders. As a matter of sheer habit we eat them, defying such inconveniences as dyspepsia or enteritis or dysentery, from one or the other of which almost all of us have suffered for a month past.

German aeroplanes come circling above us in the course of the afternoon. Our shells hurtle towards them like gigantic rockets minus their tail of sparks. Puffs of smoke, shot through for an instant by a golden glow, follow the aircraft, describing drifting circles about them, white as driven snow. They continue their flight, however, wheeling through space like birds of prey, watching always. A few bombs are dropped, burying themselves in the earth about us. One of them explodes violently, rather uncomfortably close at hand. The cyclist, who was lying down, jumped hastily to his feet and examined his foot.

"Not a scratch!" he exclaimed. "It only cut open my shoe!"

Down into the grass where he had been dozing he sank again, waving his hand towards the whistling shells:

"You up there! Let us have no more of your impertinence."

Having carefully arranged his handkerchief over his face, to shield his eyes from the sun, he continued to grumble under cover of it:

"A good pair of bath-pumps gone for nothing! I have a good mind to give up marching altogether!"

An hour later a few smoke-wreathed whizz-bangs pass over the top of the hill and fall alongside our batteries. One or two burst directly above the medley of traffic in the roadway, causing the microscopical horses (as they appeared to us), to rear and kick, and sending men, who looked to be no more than big insects, running this way and that; finally the whole concourse, like a long-drawn ribbon, moves away to vanish beneath the trees to the left. The guns remain in position.

The sunset this evening over the valley is limpid and indescribably beautiful. The sky pales to the zenith as the sinking sun glides from transparent emerald to its bed of many golds, which deepen to the crimson of leaping flames on the skyline.

_Thursday, September 24th._

One half the company is quartered at the farm. A stroke of luck enabled me to snatch a good four hours' sleep in the hay. Of course there was bound to be one fly in the amber. Our barn, big and lofty, was a veritable trap for draughts. Moreover, the noise of a continual coming and going, quarrels among the men regarding their respective berths, or a lost water-bottle, or a rifle that had been substituted for another one, created an unceasing din hardly propitious to sleep. With the dawn we march back to our meadow. Once more we wait and wait, with nothing to do, knowing nothing.

Ten o'clock! An order comes to hand: "The men must get their food now or not at all, and be ready to move at a moment's notice."

The cooks are in a very bad temper because the haricot beans, defying all efforts and coaxings, remain obdurately hard.

"Not worth while making oneself ill with such stuff! They would blow out a wooden horse!"

"Of course if the men don't mind chewing shrapnel!"

I advise my men to cook what meat they have, so that, if necessary, it can be eaten on the road as we go along.

It appears I was wise in my generation, for very shortly the "Fall in!" sounds, and we set off at once, evidently in the direction of Mouilly.

It is odd, but we cannot hear the faintest sound of fighting, not even the snap of a rifle or the boom of a gun. Yet over the hilltop there comes at a trot towards us a non-commissioned officer of mounted chasseurs, his head swathed in blood-stained bandages. Although rather pale, he sits erect in his saddle and smiles cheerfully.

"Hit?" someone calls out.

"Nothing to talk about. A shell splinter shaved my head."

Questions follow him along the road.

"Is it very unhealthy over there?"

"A little, my son. Just wait five minutes and you will have something to show as good as anything you will find at Mouilly!"

Down in the village Red Cross officers are fussing about. We meet two motor-cars travelling at full speed and raising a suffocating cloud of dust.

Wounded men drag themselves along, without equipment or rifles, their chests bare, uniforms tattered, hair wet with perspiration, white-cheeked and bloodstained. They have improvised bandages out of their handkerchiefs, shirt-sleeves or towels. They walk stoopingly, heads bent, hunched to one side, by reason of broken shoulders or arms that hang listless and heavy. Some are crawling, some are hopping on one foot, some with the aid of two sticks drag behind them a lifeless limb, smothered in bandages. There are faces so swathed that only the eyes appear, feverish and distressed; others in which only one eye is visible, the other hidden beneath dressings through which the blood percolates and trickles down bristly chins. And here are two wounded men on stretchers, their faces waxlike and shrunken, nostrils pinched, eyes closed and shadowed, bloodless hands clutching the sides of the ambulance; behind them huge drops mark their course through the dust.

"An ambulance! Where can I find an ambulance?" ask some of the other wounded of the bearers.

"Where are you going to be sent to?"

"I say, you fellow there! Have you got any bandages?"

"Give him your flask, I say; give it to him!..."

Looking upon all which sights, the nerves of my men begin to suffer as I can plainly see.

"... (Censored)...!"

"...!"

Some of the wounded joke light-heartedly:

"Eh! Binet, now were you careful to number your giblets?..."

"Oh, my mother! If you could only see your son's face now!"

"Thank the good Boches for my nice wound; a billet at Nice, the Côte d'Azur and the Casinos where you can scratch up the gold with little rakes!"

"So you've been saving up now?"

"Saving! I should think so. Live carefully on a bullet a day, and it doesn't take you long to become a millionaire."

But gaiety finds no echo. The men fall silent, stricken with nameless forebodings. Suddenly the shells hurtle whistling over the wood.

"In single file through the cutting!"

We stumble against branches, get entangled in the brambles. The grass deadens the echo of our footsteps, which a moment before resounded along the road.

"Lie down!"

The order comes not a moment too soon, for hardly have we obeyed it when a shell bursts right on top of us. Stones are flung high in the air, and simultaneously two men behind me cry out. The detonation makes my ears tingle; a heavy, acrid odour fills the air.

"Lieutenant! That was my baptism. Just look at these two little holes!"

I turn to look into a rather pale and anxious face, which nevertheless expresses great relief. The man is a corporal, newly joined. He has unbuckled his pack to show me two bullet holes running right through the roll of it.

"You will find the bullets inside, all right," I tell him. "You had better keep them as souvenirs!"

All this while another of my men, named Gaubert, is grumbling and congratulating himself at one and the same moment. He playfully exhibits his flask, a battered, pitiful object which had just intercepted a bullet on its way to his thigh.

"Bravo, my little flask--bravo, my friend! You did not want your Gaubert to be sent down; so you took his place. What a good chap you are!... But what do you think your Gaubert is going to drink out of now? What do you want me to drink out of? I ask you!"

But he does not throw the useless can away; instead he places it carefully in his sack.

"I shall have to use my mess-tin--but never mind!"

Listen! I fancy I can hear the sounds of firing. It gives one the impression of being far distant; yet it should be near enough to us, rather too near, in fact. Perhaps the hill to the right is obstructing the sound! Porchon is at my side, because I am marching with the leading section.

"Do you hear?" I ask him.

"Hear what?"

"Rifle fire."

"No!"

How does he manage not to hear it? I am more certain than ever now that I am not mistaken. That sort of crackling, distant perhaps, but nevertheless continuously audible, is the battle towards which we are marching, and which is being waged away over there beyond the hilltop. Let us hasten! It is imperative we should fling ourselves immediately and without hesitation into the midst of that fight, face boldly the bullets streaming and striking. Hurry we must, for wounded men are coming down towards us, followed by others in an endless file, and it is as if merely by showing themselves with their wounds and their blood and their appearance of complete exhaustion, with their anguished faces--it is as if they said and repeated again and again to my men:

"See, there is a battle raging! See what it has done for us; just look upon us returning. And there are hundreds and hundreds more who cannot follow us; who have fallen as we did, who have striven to rise, but could not, and who are lying about everywhere in the woods, dying. There are hundreds and hundreds of others who fell dead where they stood, struck in the head, in the heart, in the stomach, who have rolled over on to the moss, whose still warm bodies you will find lying about everywhere in the woods. You can see them for yourselves if you go there. But if you do go, the bullets will kill you also, as they killed them; or they will wound you, as they have wounded us. Do not go on!"

And the living flesh, shrinking instinctively from death, recoils.

"Porchon, watch the men!"

I have carefully lowered my voice and he, replying to me, does the same.

"Things look bad: I am afraid we may have trouble in a bit."

In one backward glance he has seen the faces of the men, anxious, lined with dread, distorted by nervous grimaces, every man in the grip of a tempest of fear, wide-eyed and feverish.

Still, without faltering, they march behind us. Each step forward they take brings them nearer that corner of the earth where death reigns to-day, yet still they march onwards. Each one with his living flesh is about to enter an inferno; yet the terror-stricken body will act as it should, will perform all the actions of a man fighting a battle. The eyes will aim wind judge; the finger on the trigger will not fail. And so they will go on for as long as may be necessary, despite the bullets flying about them, whistling and singing without pause, often striking with a queer dead noise which makes one turn one's head quickly, and which seems to say: "Here! Look!" They look and see a comrade fall, and say to themselves: "In a little while perhaps it will be my turn; in an hour or a minute or even in this passing second, it will be my turn." And then every particle of their flesh will shrink and know fear. They will be afraid--that is as certain as it is inevitable; but being afraid, they will remain at their posts. And they will fight, compelling their bodies to obedience, because they know that that is what they should do, and because--well! because they are men.

By fours, through the wood and up the slope. I cannot overcome the forebodings aroused by the nervousness of my men. I have complete confidence in them and in myself; but, that confidence notwithstanding, something warns me instinctively of the presence of a new element, of a danger I cannot define even to myself, of--can it be panic? What an age we are in going up! My pulses are beating violently; the blood is rushing to my brain.

"Ah!..."

The instant we reach the top of the slope a volley, hissing, tearing and spitting, is directed at us. A common impulse causes the men to throw themselves flat to the earth.

"Up you get, _nom d'un chien_! Regnard, Lauche, all the N.C.O.'s ... (Censored) ... Make them get up!"

The fire is not yet heavy. A few bullets only come seeking us, shattering the branches about us. I call out at the top of my voice:

"Let it be clearly understood! All N.C.O.'s are responsible for seeing that no man falls out. We are about to cross a copse where it is very easy to get away. You must keep a very sharp look-out."

Two men rush into the clearing where I am standing. They run so quickly that they appear to be flying from the foe. Their faces are bloody and no merciful bandage conceals the wounds which they are coming to show to my men! As they come up, the first man cries:

"Get out of the way! Make room! There are others following us!"

That man no longer possesses a nose; in place of it there is a hole which bleeds and bleeds....

His companion has had his lower jaw blown off. Is it credible a single bullet could effect such a shocking injury? Almost half his face is no more than a soft, hanging, crimson piece of flesh, from which blood and saliva trickle in a viscous stream. Above this horror peer out two round, blue, boyish eyes; they stare at me, eloquent with unendurable distress, in mute stupefaction. The sight shakes me to the very depths of my being, to the point of tears; then the unmeasured rage of a madman against those who caused this war, who set all this blood running, who massacre and mutilate, sweeps over me like a storm.

"Get out of the way! Get out of the way!"

Another man is crying out the words now. Staggering and livid, he presses both his hands to the lower part of his abdomen to hold in his intestines, bulging in his crimson shirt. Another is desperately clutching his arm, from which large drops of blood drip constantly. A fourth suddenly stops running, kneels down before us, with his back towards the enemy, opens his clothes and deliberated withdraws from the inner side of the groin a bullet, which he carefully places in his purse.

And so endlessly they stream past us, each one with the same staring eyes, following the same stumbling and zigzag course, panting, obsessed by the thought of the hilltop behind which lies safety, burning to get out of this ravine where death whistles amid the leaves, in order to recover their nerves down there, where their wounds will be dressed, where they will be cared for, perhaps even saved.

"Your section will occupy the ditch which forms a continuation of the Callone trench," Porchon tells me. "Keep a close watch over our left, the roadway and this clearing. You will be covering the battalion on this side."

I lead my men right into the heart of the inferno. I have to shout at the top of my voice to make the sergeant and corporals hear my orders. Behind us a machine-gun spits furiously, sweeping the road with a veritable stream of bullets. We are only just beyond the arc of its fire, and the incessant detonations follow each other so rapidly that all one can hear is a rending sound, as though the earth itself were gradually splitting asunder. At times the vicious sweep gets unpleasantly close, and a death-dealing swarm of lead whips and rends the air, dashing warm puffs into our faces. At the same time German bullets fly through the leaves; they embed themselves in the trunks of trees, shatter big branches, tear off smaller ones, which drift lightly and slowly down upon us; they fly over the road before the machine-gun bullets, which they seem to defy; it is almost as if a duel were being waged between these whistling demons which pass spattering, spluttering and ricochetting, spitefully hissing there before us over the road where the stones lie pulverized.

"Lie down at the bottom of the ditch. Good Lord, don't raise your head!"

Two of my men have now been wounded; one of them near me has sunk to his knees, and is gasping and vomiting blood; the other sits down with his back to a tree-trunk and begins to unlace his gaiters with trembling fingers in order to see "where it is," and "how it is."

The noise of galloping in the clearing. Are they coming this way? No! ...! ...!

"Well done, Morand! Bravo, my boy! ...!"

(Suppressed by Censor.)

(Censored)

(Censored)

(Censored)

"What, the Boches? How will they explain it afterwards?"

"Ah, good! Here you are, Lieutenant...."

A corporal stands beside me, cool and unperturbed. There is no such word as fear in the dictionary of this man.

"Some of the men broke and ran a few moments ago," he says, "and it is not good to think about. But I must say the occasion justified them. The Boches came up like rats, swarming everywhere. The thickets are full of them now; some of them are not more than fifty yards away. I assure you it is so, Lieutenant, and I am not short-sighted. There is not a single Frenchman between us and them, and they are there all right...."

It is true enough, but all the same.... Their cursed bullets are covering every inch of ground round about us.

Suddenly their bugles ring out and their drums sound close at hand, very close. They are charging.

"Look, they're there," cries one of my men. "You can see them there."

At the end of the clearing two Germans are kneeling and firing.

"Rapid fire! Right into them!... Fire!"

Lebels crack. The fumes of burnt powder drift beneath the trees. The German bugles sound louder; the noise of their drums almost drowns the fusillade. Behind us the machine-gun splutters with sufficient violence to destroy its own tripod.

"There they are! There they are!..."

The men have called out simultaneously and without any trace of fear in their voices. They are excited by the surrounding inferno, by the increasing smell of burning powder, by the sight of the enemy advancing in mass formation less than a hundred yards away--dense ranks of men in which our bullets create constant gaps. The intoxication of battle has seized the men; no longer is there thought of panic.

"Fix bayonets!"

"Hardly worth the trouble now, Lieutenant ... you must retire."

A breathless voice has uttered these words, and I turn to find that Presle, my _agent de liaison_, has come up behind me. Great drops of perspiration fall from him, and he breathes pantingly, mouth wide open. One of his cartridge slings hangs severed from his belt.

"A bullet did that," he said. "Cut the sling while I was running. However, I come to inform you that you must retire behind the hill, above the Saint Remy road. We are going to hold on there. The other companies are gone already--you alone remain now. You must move quickly."

Move quickly! A very simple business, of course, considering the thorny and tangled undergrowth, which wraps itself about one's legs, binds and tears them.

"Morand, see that no one goes by the path. If they do, they'll only get cut down. They'll be mere targets. No one by the path until we meet at the top of the hill!"

It's the same old story of the poor lot who wouldn't go through the scrub at Vauxmarie. It's much easier to run by the path; there are no thorns to tear one's legs or get in the way; but certain death lurks there!

"Halt!... Half turn ... skirmishing formation ... fire as you like!"

The men obey me to the letter. That is good, very good--an obedient, intelligent fighting section. My heart beats rapidly but steadily. Just now I feel sure of myself, self-possessed, happy. I want to laugh at the bullets, and I thrust my quite unnecessary revolver back into my belt.

The German bugles are now no longer sounding; their Mausers are firing only at irregular intervals. What are they up to? I determine to try and discover.

"Cease fire!"

I walk forward a few steps erect, seeking no cover. I am ready to wager that the forest is teeming with the pigs, that they will try to swamp us at twenty yards. I feel them numerous, invisible, about me. Invisible!... Not quite. I can see you, German beast, behind that tree, and you also to the left; your uniform is darker than the leaves. Just wait a moment, my merry men, and we'll make you a present of something. I make a signal to Morand, who has received previous instructions, and he runs up. I show him the bull's-eye.

"Just look there, behind that big ... ah! ... I have got it!"

"Lieutenant!" ... Morand's voice is startled.... "Are you wounded?... Lieutenant!..."

"Eh? What?... Oh, yes!..."

Some enormous projectile has caught me full in the stomach, while at the same moment a brilliant yellow streak flies before my eyes. I have fallen to my knees, doubled up, my hands pressing my stomach. How horribly painful.... I can no longer breathe.... In the stomach, too--that is serious!... What is going to become of my men?... In the stomach! If only I could see my dear ones for the last time!... Ah! I can breathe now. That is a bit better. Where exactly have I been struck?