Part 6

"Reserve--or the Line! Ah, well, I fear bullets take no heed of such distinctions!"

He stares at me long and fixedly, as if engaged in weighing my invisible merit in the scales, and then explains clearly and rapidly exactly what he expects of me.

"All my orderlies are busy on some mission or the other. I wish you to find, without loss of an instant, Colonel G----, commanding the brigade, and ask him, in my name, to send to me here as many men as he can possibly spare of the --th. Tell him we are in contact with enormous effectives, that our losses up to the present have been very heavy, so heavy, in fact, that I am afraid my regiment is no longer capable of holding on.

"He must be near Hill 281, a mile to the north of Marats-la-Petite. Do everything in your power to find him, not losing a second, and impress upon him how urgent is my necessity for immediate reinforcements."

"Very well, mon Colonel!"

With the bullets humming in my ears, I set out at a speed which sends the mud splashing all over me, from head to foot. The old sense of elation is upon me, impelling me forward, forgetful of the night's happenings, impervious to fatigue--I must find the commander of the brigade and obtain the assistance so desperately needed, from him. There is no room for other thought than that in my brain. Happily, I do not dwell on the weight of the responsibility thrust upon me in this unlooked-for fashion; my burning desire is to succeed in my mission, nothing more.

I have already started away at a run when the Colonel receives a bullet in the forearm. With his other arm, he imperatively motions to me to keep on my way.

Skirting the base of a steep slope, I pass through a fire zone where the bullets in hundreds, whining and shrilling, tear up the soil all about me. Then I encounter a group of men, standing at the foot of a tree. There is a dying officer in the centre, supported against the tree-bole. A glimpse I have of a dark blue tunic wide opened, of a shirt stained with bright blood. The wounded man's head sags heavily down to his shoulder, and in the whitened, tortured face, moist from fearful agony, I recognize my own major.

But I must not stay!

My heart is thundering within me; there is a sharp pain between my shoulders; there is a rending pain at the small of my back. And my legs! Every other minute violent cramp paralyses thighs or calves, sending me sprawling to the earth, where I lie gasping and panting for what seem eternities, striving to fight it back. My sodden clothes become almost fantastically heavy, and the weight is for ever increasing. To the very tips of my fingers I feel the irregular, violent pulsing of my arteries; my cloth-covered sword scabbard pricks my hand.

On the top of a rising alongside the road is a road-mender's hut. Behind it, a section of dismounted chasseurs is drawn up. It opens out into skirmishing order and sets off briskly and confidently for the scene of the fighting.

I take a steep declivity at full speed. Once or twice I fall full length in the mud. Another slope is negotiated in a sitting attitude. At the bottom of it I stumble, bruised from head to foot, into a little wood, where some soldiers stand, waiting orders, leaning on their rifles. Still more dismounted chasseurs! They too deploy, ascend the slope, and march unflinchingly into the inferno. The fight rages continuously behind me, as well as away to the left.

For the third time I encounter dismounted chasseurs, formed up in sections. And one after another these sections breast the rising ground, reach the summit, where for a moment they remain clean-cut and distinct against the sky, and then plunge downwards into the heart of the fight.

Another steep descent! I take it lying flat on my back, creating a veritable avalanche of stones and rubble. This deposits me in a well-sheltered, luxuriant little ravine. Almost irresistible is the desire that springs up in me to stretch myself full length among the fresh, fragrant grasses, to bathe my fevered face in the moisture, to lie still there and forget.... In a panic I force myself to my feet, afraid of losing grip!

A 77 drops neatly into the hollow and explodes at the bottom of it. I receive a tremendous and disconcerting shock, while about me fragments of steel and lead plough and tear up the earth.

In response to a command, some chasseurs suddenly appear at the edge of the ravine, and roll down exactly at the point where a few moments earlier I had descended. One of them jumps down, his legs quite stiff, blood trickling out of one of his boots from a smashed leg.

"How pale you are," says a second-lieutenant who comes up. "Are you wounded?"

"I don't think there is anything much the matter with me," I reply. "A bunch of shrapnel caught me in the knapsack fortunately."

The wounds of the injured soldier are dressed. A second man lies prone and still, a bullet through his brain.

Shells are hurrying over us now, carrying their shrill messages; a good number burst a little before us, and the echo of their harsh, metallic explosions is flung from one side of the ravine to the other. At each explosion huge, torn fragments of steel fly high above us across the sky. Columns of yellow smoke, dense and heavy, drift slowly through the still air, until they encounter the pines whose branches part and disperse them.

"Do you know where I can find Colonel G----?" I ask the chasseur lieutenant.

"Not exactly! Somewhere close at hand, I think. But the major will be able to inform you of his whereabouts."

I find the major to be quite a young man, tall, with an expression at once frank and resolute. He listens to my mission and says:

"That is quite all right. You will find the Colonel behind that wood there--at least he was there less than an hour ago. Some of the --th are entrenched on that slope.

(Censored)

... "Go along, and good fortune go with you!"

I am pretty well exhausted by this time. Only some internal exaltation sustains me. This hollow is endless ... this hill steep beyond imagination! Up at the top some men are moving about and talking. I tell myself to run onwards ... but all I can do for the moment is to rest on my sword and slowly drag one swollen foot after the other. The pain in my back has become intense. Nevertheless I must go on. One final effort and I shall have reached my destination. Onwards!...

(Censored)

The men I totteringly approach have assumed the dimensions of giants. They possess enormous, unbalanced bodies; they are monstrosities who dance before my burning eyes. With a gentle, sustained power, the mud itself seems to draw me towards them.

Forward!... But I can no longer move forward.... The light is failing.... Ah, what an unfortunate devil I am!

Someone raises and carries me with strong, careful arms. The sensation is good. Then some burning liquid scorches my mouth and throat, and instantly causes me to open my eyes. Close to my face, a voice asks:

"How do you feel now?"

"It is nothing at all," I say weakly. "Fatigue! no sleep ... nothing to eat. Been fighting all night. It is all right!"

I am lying in a trench covered with muddy straw. Near me is a lieutenant and several men. It is the former who just spoke to me and who presses whiskey upon me from his flask.

I look at the collar of his coat and see the number of the regiment I have been seeking.

"Ah! So I have found you," I cried. "Is the whole regiment here?"

The abruptness of my question takes him back for a moment.

"Yes, that is so! Didn't you know?"

"I should say I didn't, seeing that I have zig-zagged all over the countryside for you and Colonel G----. We hadn't the slightest idea where to find you at the advance post and for hours we, unsupported, have been at grips with more Germans than you could count in a week.

"You are wanted very badly indeed over there. Do you know where he is--Colonel G----?"

"In this wood, I believe. He has taken up his position somewhere before those batteries you can hear firing. It should be possible to see him from here."

He raises himself and looks about.

"I can see him no longer, but he has been here for a long time past. They will certainly be able to tell you over there where he is gone."

I thank him and ask before leaving: "Just one more drop of '_Gniole_,' if you can spare it. I am very badly in want of a stiffener."

I take a long gulp of neat spirit and set off towards the 75's which are growling together in the wood.

When I reach them I find the artillerymen absolutely overjoyed. They are working their guns at a speed and with a precision and enthusiasm which greatly impresses an infantryman such as I am. One has scarcely time to perceive the small copper shells which are gallantly waging their part in this long distance duel. They pass before the eyes in a thin line, red and yellow, instantly to vanish into the breech, still smoking from the last shot. And the next second the gun hurls its shrapnel message with a report imperious and gay as though delighting in the glory of the spurting flame and the heavy smoke drifting away in a column. The artillery-men run, jump and gesticulate about their gun. Most of them have flung aside their coats and rolled their sleeves to their elbows. They are one and all in high spirits, joking and laughing boyishly. With my mud-stained clothes, with my pale and lugubrious face, my advent has an effect similar to that of an owl suddenly alighting in the midst of a flock of sparrows. But their happiness is contagious, and little by little I feel my own spirits rising. They give me the impression that something happy has occurred. I question a lieutenant who is marking the fall of the shells through his glasses, shaking from head to foot the while from excitement.

"Things going well? Eh?"

He turns towards me. The joy which fills him is plainly legible in his face. He laughs exuberantly:

"I should say they are going well. The Germans are giving way--deserting their positions like rats a sinking ship."

He laughs once more. "Listen to our 75's! They are making them dance like madmen! That is the way to carry on, what? They are being kicked in the sterns now, the swine!"

A staff captain on foot is watching the delighted gunners. He laughs also and repeats several times in a loud voice: "Good! Very good!"

I approach him and in a few words inform him of what was befalling half an hour ago over towards Vauxmarie on the Erize road. I repeat to him my wounded colonel's words, indicate the course I have followed, express my joy at having finally reached my destination, and add:

"I should, however, like to see Colonel G----, as I have been sent to him."

The Captain pauses before he replies kindly:

"You go and get some rest now. The --th are no longer needed. Nor will you be wanted for a little while. You have done well."

Then he informs me that my regiment has been withdrawn from the firing line and is being re-established a little to the rear. On his map he indicates the point of assembly and afterwards shakes me warmly by the hand.

"_Au revoir_, young man," he says. "Sleep well, eat well, keep yourself fit. You will want all your strength to keep fast on the heels of the Boches."

My heart leaps within me.

"Then, Captain, we have won a great victory?"

"I do not know ... not yet. But truly it will be so if all our rascals have progressed since Sunday as these have."

A surge of joy sweeps through me--a curious warmth, sweet, fervent and strong. Oh, that this may be true, that it may be true! The nervous tension under which I have laboured for hours past breaks suddenly. I feel strangely small and weak, and am obsessed by an insane desire to cry without constraint.

In the background, the 75's aligned along the edge of the wood continue joyously their triumphant salvoes. But the rattle they make now sounds queerly afar off, as though my head had been enveloped in a thick hood of wadding. Beneath my feet the soil, strewn with wet pine-needles, becomes elastic, enabling me to walk without effort. And so I leave the Captain, walking slowly, already forgetful of my recent travails, blind to the things about me.

Visions of those who are dear to me dance before my eyes. I can see them as though in life smiling tenderly upon me. They give me a sense of being protected, watched over, soothed. I can even hear their familiar voices speaking rather solemnly but caressingly, nevertheless.

"Be of good heart. It is only the passage of the cruel moments such as those of yesterday, of to-day, and maybe those of to-morrow which, bringing victory, shall reunite us."

(Censored)

Before rejoining my regiment I have to pass along a road leading from one of the Marats to the other. Near Marats-la-Petite I discover a first-aid post, and show the surgeon my back, which has become still more painful. The post consists of a dimly-lit barn, containing several seriously wounded men lying on straw. One could scarcely distinguish the outlines of their bodies and could only hear their groans emanating from the gloom. The floor was littered with pieces of cotton wool stained with blood, dried and brown, or freshly crimson.

"You must rest," the surgeon told me. "The shrapnel has not penetrated, but you have some really famous bruises."

I discovered my regiment bivouacked in a meadow near a stone culvert bestriding a large ditch full of water.

Porchon is there, also the Captain.

(Censored)

Of the 5th Company there survive about 50 men only. And only a few more of the 6th. Not a single officer remains. They were stationed further ahead than we were that night, and the darkness, the confusion, the rain, enabled the Boches to enfilade their trenches, marked during the day by those large aeroplanes with the black crosses. It was a white-handed massacre, the disgusting exploit of assassins who stab in the back.

The Germans in question belonged to the 13th Army Corps, and were for the most part Würtembergers. They had been made drunk with alcohol and ether--such at least the prisoners had avowed. In the knapsacks of some of them were found incendiary pastilles, and many of my men assured me that they had seen a number of Germans burst into flame from head to foot when struck by a bullet, and continue to burn like torches.

A march across inundated fields or over roads whose puddles reflect the wan sky. I walk in the rear of the company with the Captain, who moves onwards with long, slow steps, his inevitable lance marking time against the pebbles. Two prisoners march alongside us. The Captain, a man of Lorraine, from the neighbourhood of Sarrebourg, gossips with one of them, I with the other. He is a gardener from Esslingen, near Stuttgart. I chat with him about these towns which I know well. A certain confidence having been established between us, he offers me his tin of meat. I accept it without exhibition of much pride; it is certain he will be given something to eat to-morrow, and as for us, maybe we shall get nothing. I divide the booty with my orderly and two of my men. It was excellent, that meat, surrounded with a transparent jelly. ... (Censored) ... Bread is lacking, but that does not matter. The meat suffices to fill a void.

Halt at the edge of a wood on a slope. Dead leaves from last autumn still lie about, and here and there are some quite freshly yellow which the convulsion of the night has stripped from the branches.

As company after company comes up the men hail one another, laughing and congratulating themselves on having escaped. Sitting amid the undergrowth, they eat what they have got. Those who have been wise enough to preserve at the bottom of their knapsacks a tin of meat have become kings. The others roam about in their vicinity, tortured by a covetousness which is plain in their eyes, burning with a desire to commandeer, yet not daring so far. Fortunate, too, beyond their fellows are those who have found in the knapsacks of captured Germans small sweetened biscuits. Many men raid the fields, returning with carrots and terrific turnips which they cut up with their pocket-knives and swallow voraciously.

A night dull and cold. Lying on the bare earth of the slope, I am constantly freezing. The stones which form my bed penetrate my flesh and make me as uncomfortable as if I had as many wounds. A nightmare haunts me. It concerns the loss of my flask by one of my men who should have brought it to me filled with water, but whom I cannot find anywhere. Deeply do I regret having teased Porchon because he left his sword among the straw of his trench, while I contrived to save mine! I have my sword, I have my cap, I have my knapsack, but no longer have I my flask. And that is a loss that renders the future dark and gloomy. Still sleeping, I recall the exquisite taste of the few drops of tepid water I swallowed that night at Sommaisne, which were as balm to my arid, burning throat; I recall the spirit I gulped that very morning, and which built up anew my declining strength ... no longer a flask! What a misfortune!

_Friday, September 11th._

"Attention! Fall in!"

We depart. Ten or so "marmites" burst behind us over a wood not very far away. The Boches must have smelt us hidden beneath the trees. There is just as much water in the fields as yesterday--puddles, pools forming miniature lakes, and microscopical rivers running between upstanding ridges.

We encounter more woods and lose our way among the dense growth, vividly green by reason of the recent rain. We stumble through ditches, grass-choked, and thrust a way through interlacing brambles which push their shoots into the middle of the path. From the heart of the wood ring out monotonously the sharp trilling and twittering of many birds at song. Occasionally, a blackbird rises and flies before us, but so low that it is almost able to touch the earth with its claws; in the breeze its wings create the leaves rise and flutter. Above our heads a break in the clouds forms a lake, blue, limpid and deep. All is stillness and peace.

But when we leave the wood the world has become grey and depressing. We splash across a marshy field in which guns and ammunition wagons are drawn up, plastered with mud to the axles, and tarnished with splashes. There are the entrails and soft skins of sheep lying in little round piles in the puddles. Bones are scattered about, to which fragments of rain-washed meat are still attached, and they serve to give the bare field the semblance of a charnel-house. A road crosses it, shining with stagnant water and bordered until lost to sight by dejected-looking trees. And over this unelevating prospect, leaden rain-laden clouds hang low and drift one into the other, until the little lake of blueness is completely veiled from view.

We are at Rosnes. It is a village alongside the road. It serves to make me think rather pathetically of all those houses which have not yet suffered bombardment, of those barns even, which contain hay, hay soft and fragrant, in which one can find warmth and comfort.

We leave Rosnes behind us and, marching easy, slowly ascend a steep rising, finally to arrive on a plateau covered far and near with thick growth. The breeze passing over it gives it the appearance of a mysterious and noisome pond whose icy surface is ruffled by autumn winds.

At Captain C----'s invitation, a meeting of officers takes place. It is he who, at Gercourt, distributed the men of our detachment into companies. And now here he commands the regiment, since the colonel and the chief of the first battalion are wounded, and those of the second and third are killed. It is only then I learn that for several days past the 3rd Battalion has been commanded by the officer of gendarmerie whom I saw on the morning of the 9th, when he ran up shouting at us and at our major because he hesitated to throw us out over a bare plain swept by machine-gun fire. He had died magnificently.

Captain C---- addressed us in his unimpassioned voice. He congratulated us and told us he relied on each one of us. We were worn out, but it was necessary to keep going and preserve appearances before the men, in order to maintain their courage so long as the present hard times continued; to prevent them, by the exhibition of our own energy and enthusiasm, from succumbing to the temptation of grumbling and complaining.

From the expression of the faces about me, from the serenity legible in each man's eyes, I gathered we were all ready to face the future, whatsoever it might contain. It almost seemed we leaned on each other for support, true brothers by the common faith within us. A grace exalted and fortified us.

Thus my captain became my battalion chief and Porchon my company commander. I was well content, because the passage of each day had brought Porchon and myself nearer each other. I know him to-day to be a man open and frank to the last word, ambitious to show himself just, but indulgent in all things, and brave with that simplicity which exalts courage. Moreover, I love his good humour, his never failing laugh, the ardent life in him. To be gay and light-hearted, to remain so under the sharpest physical sufferings, even when devastation and cruel death break or snatch away the men or human things about you; to remain constant before these assaults which strike more at the heart than at the intellect, is for a leader a hard but sacred duty. Porchon had perhaps taught me this. No longer did I wish to deaden my senses in order to render my task the easier. I was eager to confront all the demands of this prodigious and unnatural world into which I had been suddenly cast; I no longer even sought to escape those duties which seem to lead one to certain death. And these things would be easy to achieve if only I could attain something of that good humour which I sedulously sought to possess as one sets out to conquer a virtue. Porchon would assist me.

We set off together to settle the location of the trenches which our company must construct. Our men set to work with tools obtained from a park. The picks quickly break up the brown, heavy soil. It is raining, but the task is not difficult. The men sing and jokes fly about--probably because the first section has already been called up for the distribution of rations!

They have descended towards Seigneulles, a village close at hand at the bottom of the valley. From our position we can see the regimental carts pointing their shafts towards us, tilted and supported on garden fences. Further away, emerging from a lake of greenness, is a small group of houses, and the cock on a church steeple.

Soon now along the roadside the fires begin to smoke. This evening we are going to eat cooked meat and hot potatoes. We shall have straw for our beds and a roof to shelter us from the wind and rain. Who cares for to-morrow since life to-day is so good!

_Saturday, September 12th._

Heavily and dreamlessly I sleep, and awake to find myself in precisely the same attitude as that in which I flung myself down the preceding night. The straw wraps me in grateful warmth, rather moist, perhaps, because the water in my saturated clothes has evaporated during the night. Above me I can see the rafters of the roof from which dusty spider-webs hang; for the moment I am amazed to find myself thus snugly ensconced beneath a roof, instead of the usual branches or the bare sky to which I have become accustomed. The rain trickles softly and gently over the tiles. The sound intensifies my sense of comfort, and it pleases me to think that I have slept in warmth and comfort, despite the never-ceasing downpour.