Part 4

“You tell me what to do,” says Berthet, “I will take your orders.” “It is very simple,” I respond, “one knee on the ground. In the deep grass you will not be seen. For myself, I am going onto the road itself. I will stop any one who looks suspicious. Don’t worry, and don’t let your gun go off unless you hear me fire.” “Very well.” “Oh, another thing! If we are attacked, we will fire, then run for the fort without following the road. Our companions will fire, and we must cut across the fields. Do you agree?” “Yes.”

I leave him, to take my post just at the edge of the road, eyes and ears on the alert, finger on the trigger. A host of memories crowd my brain. How often in other days have I stood guard in just this manner! I recall similar hours which I experienced in China, at Tonkin, in the Sahara. I feel once more the intense poetry which is inspired by such a vigil: a poetry incomparable to any other; a poetry in which alert action is mingled with the strangeness of night, with the thousand noises of a stirring populace, with the imminence of danger, with visions crowding up from the past, with all that surrounds us and all that flees from us. Less than a fortnight ago, at this hour, I used to write my daily article. My young wife, in our dainty dining-room, was rocking the baby to sleep. Or I was correcting proof on my forthcoming book, and she came to sit near me, her fingers busy with some fine needlework. She always placed on my desk the flowers from the dinner-table, and I thanked her for being so good, so pretty, so loving and thoughtful, by a swift stolen kiss on her rosy finger-tips. I read to her the last page I had written. She smiled and approved. Our confidence was complete. She had faith in my ability, I rejoiced to know that she was mine. We were so happy----

To-day, with loaded gun, with every nerve strained, I lie in wait for an advancing enemy. My wife is far away. She has shelter, at least. Without doubt she dreams of me, as I dream of her, and she trembles and she fears the future, the danger, death. My brothers--where are they?--and their wives, and our parents, and all my dear ones, like myself, like all of France, thrown into war, into danger, into suffering. And all the children, and all the helpless women, and old men, all counting on us, on our stoutness of heart, to defend and to save them.

My meditations did not in the least interfere with my watchfulness. From time to time I stopped a passer-by.

“Halt there!”

“We are French.”

“Advance slowly, one by one.”

The poor creatures were terrified and bewildered.

“We are trying to escape!”

“Pass on.”

After a bit I return to see Berthet.

“Anything new?” “No, nothing.” “Supposing you look around more at the left.” “All right.”

I resume my place. All at once, I hear the clatter of horses’ hoofs. Berthet rejoins me. “Do you hear that?” “Yes. It must be they. Don’t forget. Fire, then run across fields.”

The cavalcade approaches, is clearly audible. With eyes strained, I can still see nothing in the blackness. Suddenly I catch the glitter of helmets.

“Halt, there!”

“Gendarmes!” cries a voice, “don’t shoot!” French gendarmes, in retreat!

“Advance slowly, one by one.”

The troop halts. One horseman advances, stops at ten paces from my bayonet.

“I am a brigadier of the gendarmes, brigade of Avor. I have not the password.”

The voice is indeed French. I recognize the uniform--but I still fear a possible trap.

“Command your men to pass, one by one.”

The order is executed without reply. Some ten men file by.

“Look out for yourselves,” says the last horseman, “the Uhlans are at our heels.”

“Thanks for the information. Tell that to the officer whom you will meet about a hundred metres from here.” “Good luck to you.”

_Ouf!_ Berthet and I both grow hot. The watching brings us together, we remain together. One feels stronger with company.

* * * * *

It begins to rain--only a mist at first, then a steady rain. The poor fugitives tramp along, miserable, driven ghosts, weird figures in the blackness of the night. Some of them give scraps of information in passing.

“They are at the chapel.”

“They are arriving at Saint Michel.”

“There are twenty Uhlans at the _mairie_.”

Our lieutenant makes his round. “Nothing new?” “Nothing, sir.” “Very well, I am going to look about, as far as the town. I will be back in about fifteen minutes.” “Very well, sir.”

He disappears, swallowed up in the darkness. We wait. It rains harder and harder. The water runs in rivulets on our shoulders, trickles down our necks, soaks our shirts. From time to time we shake ourselves like wet spaniels. There is nothing to do but wait. It would not do to seek shelter. Besides, there is no shelter. When one is a sentinel in full campaign, one must accept the weather as it comes. If it is fine, so much the better; if it is frightful, too bad! It is impossible to provide comforts, or conveniences. If the sun burns you or the rain soaks you, if the heat roasts you or the cold freezes you, it is all the same. The strong resist it, the weak succumb: so much the worse! One is there to suffer, to endure, to hold his position. If one falls, his place is filled. So long as there are men, the barrier is raised and put in opposition to the enemy. “_C’est la guerre._” That is war: a condition in which only the robust man may survive; where everything unites madly to destroy, to obliterate him, where he must fight at the same time his adversaries and the elements which seem to play with him as the breeze plays with the leaf on the tree.

However, the night was advancing. The Great Bear, intermittently visible between the clouds, had already gone down in the sky, and we were still there. The crowd still surged on, as dense as ever. The people came from every quarter. Very few were gathered into groups. Here and there some worn-out soldiers were seen, who asked information and vanished in haste. In the background of the dark picture of the night were the burning villages and towns, but their flames were subsiding, their ruddy glow was waning. The fires seemed to have reached the end of their food, exhausted by a night of violence. Sudden puffs of sparks rising with the smoke already foretold their extinction.

Berthet, my comrade, was pale in the twilight dawn. “You have had enough of it?” I say to him. “Oh! no,” he responds, “it is nothing but nervousness.”

The most critical moment was approaching: the dawning of day, that troubled moment when fatigue crushes the shoulders of the most valiant, when the vision confuses distances and blurs objects, when all one’s surroundings take on a strange, uncanny appearance. Dawn, lustreless and gray, the dawn of a day of rain, rising sulkily, drippingly, coming pale and wan to meet men broken by an anxious vigil, is not a pleasing fairy, is not the divine Aurora with fingers of light; and yet, it brings solace. With its coming the vision is extended; it pierces the fog, identifies the near-by hedge, the twisted birch, the neighboring knoll of ground. Day breaks. The shadows disappear, objects regain their natural aspect, and the terrors created by the night vanish.

Thus it was with us. I was pleased with Berthet. He had carried himself well, and I told him so. That pleased him. He was a boy whose self-esteem was well developed, who could impose upon a rather weak body decisions made by his will.

“I was afraid of only one thing,” he said, “and that was that I might be afraid.” I smiled and answered: “But you will be afraid. It is only fools who know not fear, or deny it. Every one knows fear. Even the bravest of the brave, Maréchal Ney himself, knew it well.”

At this moment our lieutenant returned from his hazardous expedition, without having observed anything remarkable, and there was nothing for us to do but wait for other sentries to relieve us, or for orders specifying a new mission.

Nothing of the sort came, at first. If we had been abandoned in a desert, our solitude could not have been more complete. As far as the eye could see, we could not detect a living thing. There were no more fugitives. We two were guarding a bare highroad where neither man nor beast appeared.

At last, some one was seen coming from the fort. It was a comrade bringing coffee and news. While we were absorbing with delight the hot drink which seemed to make renewed life throb in our veins, he recounted the events which had taken place behind us, and in some manner under our protection.

“The boys,” he said, “have left. The fort will be blown up. It seems that we have waited too long already. The Germans have gone by, now. We are surrounded. No one knows how those animals slip by, but there is fighting all around us.”

“No! Is that true?”

“Truest thing you know. Last night we put mines in the powder-magazine. There are eight metres of fuse. We will light it on leaving. You are going to see some fireworks.”

We did not know what to say, at first. We could not doubt the accuracy of the information supplied by our comrade, but Berthet’s surprise was extreme. The most difficult thing, in war, is to be willing to comprehend nothing of what surrounds you near at hand, and to content yourself to live as does an animal. Always one tries to reason, to use logic, and nothing is further removed from reason and logic than important events in which one is plunged, but of which one sees but an infinitesimal part, too small to form even an approximate idea of the whole.

“How,” says Berthet, “could the enemy pass by in force, without using this road?” I shook my head. “Who knows?” “I don’t know how it was done,” declared our comrade, “but they have passed us. As proof, three kilometres from here they took by surprise a squad asleep in a farmhouse. The Uhlans arrived without any one suspecting, and made them all prisoners.”

A sharp whistle cut short our reflections. Our lieutenant called us. We joined him and found, at the turn of the road, the entire garrison, ready for departure. They were only awaiting the signal from the commandant. The ranks were formed, the captains were mounted on their horses, the lieutenants and the sergeants were overseeing the last preparations.

We took our places in silence, not having slept at all, and having had the sack buckled on our shoulders for twelve hours in the rain. The rain had not ceased. The troop was enveloped in it as in a gray veil, and the wet faces of the men expressed dejection. Their moustaches drooped, their caps were pulled down, their looks were sullen. Even Yo himself, with his unvarying good humor, could not find another word with which to revive the spirits of the men. Only Amelus could be heard growling somewhat more vigorously than usual.

Weather has an enormous effect on the morale of troops, as on all human agglomerations. We were all more or less touched by the malign influence of the rain. No jest flashed from the ranks as is usual in a French troop, where bantering springs from the lip involuntarily, where chaffing is as natural as the air one breathes, as necessary as bread. A regiment remains alert and strong so long as this spirit of optimism remains; but at the moment of which I speak, when we were drenched with rain, when we saw our country invaded, when we knew ourselves to be surrounded by the enemy, we were morose and feared the worst. However, it was only necessary that there should be an unexpected peal of laughter to bring light to every face, and that was what happened soon after we were given the order to march.

Indeed, the column was scarcely in motion, when the irrepressible Yo burst forth with a raucous tone in one of the most ancient songs of the march, one of those which are transmitted from generation to generation. Instantly, another voice responded, then another, then a chorus. And then, in the downpour of rain, on a road so water-soaked that one sunk to the ankle at each step, it was no longer a surrounded regiment in flight, but a troop sprightly, gay, and confident and, like their Gallic ancestors, having nothing to fear but this: that the weeping heavens might really fall on their heads.

We had not been on the march an hour when a terrific explosion was heard, reverberating overhead. It was the mined fort which was blowing up. All the work of those last days was flying into the air in a re-echoing crash of bricks, ironwork, shells, and guns. Our labor was wiped out. Nevertheless, it had not been in vain. Thanks to its existence, the German army which had faced us had been retarded twenty-four hours in its advance. Indeed, their advance-guards had encountered that garrisoned fort, and had been obliged to await the arrival of artillery sufficient to reduce and take it. This delay had permitted the last French troops to retreat without trouble. They were safe when the fort, henceforth useless, blew up. It left nothing for the hand of the enemy, and its mission was accomplished. A battle would have added to our work nothing but blood. Our chiefs were wise in sparing that.

It was not until later that we knew all this. At that moment we did not look so far. We pursued our way singing, in a deluge of rain, overtaking distracted fugitives along the route: exhausted old men, women carrying and leading children, who moved aside to make way for us, then stumbled in our wake. We passed through villages already deserted, a forsaken countryside where the rain beat down the fields of barley and ripe wheat. On we went. In passing, we gathered fruit from the trees. At the fountains and springs we drank water made turbid by the rain. We sang. We heard, somewhere, the roar of the cannon. We had no idea where it thundered so. It seemed ahead of us and behind us. As we saw nothing terrifying, as there was no visible evidence of a battle, we advanced constantly, quite light-hearted, without knowing that we were passing through one of the great battles of the beginning of the war, one of the decisive struggles which did much to retard the advance of the enemy; that our column, quite ignorant of events, was thus marching freely across the battle of Guise.

That, at foundation, is not so impossible as might appear. Shortly after, we had occasion to verify such zones of silence in the midst of violent action. Yes, one may be in the midst of battle and not be aware of it. Even at Austerlitz the guard had not yet charged, half the troops had not broken a cartridge, when the battle was won.

This time our battle was to be gained by our legs, and consisted solely of marching. And we marched. And we took no account of fatigue, nor that the men who hastened along the road were all unaccustomed to marching. One month before, all of us were civilians. Some were in offices, bending over books; others sold dry goods, others were at work-benches or in construction-yards. We were required to make an unprecedented effort, to which none of us was trained. We were asked to march for hours, for a day, for a night, none knew how long. We must advance, cost what it might, follow an unfamiliar road, avoid ambuscades, regain the rear of our army, rejoin other formations which, farther on, were grouping under orders identical with our own.

We went on. The officers had their orders, we followed them. And we sang to drive away fatigue, to forget misery, to escape the thought of the heavy knapsack, of the cartridges dragging on our shoulders, of all the military harness, so useful but so heavy, which weighed down each step of the soldier. We crossed fields of freshly ploughed ground. We climbed slopes, descended hills, traversed plains. We went straight toward the south, covering on foot the route by which we had come to the fort in the train; a route which had become interminable, cut only by a pause every fifty minutes, when one could stretch his aching limbs, could pierce the swollen blisters on his heels, could break a crust of bread or drink a swallow of water.

Some civilians followed and attached themselves to us in the hope of protection. There were women who marched close to the ranks, others who confided their infants for a stage to near-by soldiers, still others gave up, exhausted, and fell on the stones, with eyes rolled back, full of terror and a sort of reproach. They felt themselves abandoned, too worn out to follow longer, given over to all the tragic misery of the invasion. And we turned our eyes that we might not see, in an agony of soul that we must leave them, that we could not help them, that we could not take them with us; ourselves crushed by the burdens of the soldier, hard pushed to arrive at a destination still so far away, at the spot selected for the halt, for rest, for sleep.

We went on, and fatigue began to weigh upon us. Some comrades suddenly quit the ranks, threw down their sacks with a wild gesture, and fell to the ground. They were the physically weak, those first overwhelmed by the burden, whom the enemy would gather up in his advance and take away prisoner, an easily won booty. The underofficers tried to make these men rise and continue their way, without much success. They were at the end of their strength, incapable of further effort. They gave up and fell. They accepted whatever fate awaited them. They had struggled to the extreme limit of endurance. One had marched for several hours with the soles of his feet entirely blistered away from the flesh; another had persisted though suffering intolerably from hernia. Some had foam on the chin. Several attempted suicide. Their firearms were taken from them and were given to another man to carry for a time. The latter soon threw them away because of their weight, first breaking them that they might not be of service to the enemy. Every one began to relieve himself of superfluous articles. We threw away linen and change of shoes; then rations. We emptied our pockets; discarded our jackets.

We marched, and marched, and marched: a march without end. There was no pause, no aim, no goal. We marched. We sought the horizon, and must push on still, as one horizon stretched away and gave place to another, which again must be passed as the first. The day lengthened. The road was never-ending. One after the other the hours rolled on, and still we marched. We encountered vehicles stuck in the mire, which no one attempted to help out of the ruts. We encountered horses in the last throes of agony, struggling one last time to move one foot before the other, then stiffening in death. We encountered automobiles in flames, others in smoking ashes. We encountered encampments of poor wretches, waiting at the edge of the road for a better hour. We encountered lost children. Here and there we came upon a house pillaged, devastated, bare, where remained no crust of bread, where even the wells had been emptied of water. With difficulty one could draw from them a little muddy liquid. The men chewed some beet-roots torn up in a field, to allay the burning thirst. Then night approached. We still marched. The twilight spread her veil of mist and blood. We marched. The shadows fell. We marched. Night came. We marched. We stumbled on the stones which seemed to rise from the road; over the wagon-ruts which cut it, on the slopes which bordered it. We marched. There were unexpected stops, when the column, suddenly halted at some point forward, folded back upon itself like a telescope. The men jostled and swore. Wagons were crushed, horses fell, in an indescribable confusion. Some soldiers fell, and did not rise again. Then the movement resumed. We marched again, and marched, and stopped, and went on.

There was no more singing. There was no more talking. Occasionally an oath. We discarded knapsack, clothing, food, even letters, in hope of relief, and marched on toward our goal with groans.

At last we stopped. We were in the midst of a black plain, lighted only by a few dim fires, where the mud was almost knee-deep. We threw ourselves down, broken, inert masses, without strength to spread a blanket on the ground, asleep before we touched the earth. We had covered seventy kilometres in one forced march, and no longer heard the cannon.

* * * * *

Thus we slept, like brutes, until morning. It was not long. The early light shone on a marsh made humpy by the bodies of men sleeping under the mist. There were soldiers of all departments of service; Zouaves, infantry, cavalry, artillery, fallen where they happened to be, without order, and all but a few still sleeping. These few had lighted large bonfires, where they warmed themselves. The light of the fires also attracted many women, children, and old men, who stretched toward the grateful warmth limbs stiffened by cold. The fires were fed with branches of trees, broken parts of wagons, anything ready at hand without too much effort to gather.

The result was a more or less comforting warmth for the benumbed creatures who crowded around, in a surprisingly promiscuous assemblage. Some were heating soup made from heaven knows what, others attempted to dry their shirts and blouses, soaked by sweat and rain. The rain had ceased, but the sky remained gray, covered with hostile clouds. The vision was limited by a low-hanging fog. On the road, the procession of retreat continued to roll, disordered, in nervous haste and at the same time slow. The underofficers reassembled our troop. We must start again, enter the column surging along the road, resume the flight, take up the march, press on still farther, and gain ground.

With the new day the cannon again began to roar. It seemed quite near, although one could not say exactly where the thundering came from. One felt hunted down, without knowing the location of the enemy who pursued so relentlessly. So the ranks were formed. Those who still had knapsacks lifted them again to the shoulder, and again we marched.

The first steps were difficult. Every joint was stiff, every muscle ached, and we swore with every stride. Soon we warmed up to the exercise and advanced more easily. The pace was set for five kilometres an hour, and every one followed.

Yo had found some wine, no one knows where. He poured a drop in the cup of each of his neighbors, and it seemed quite refreshing. We managed to keep going the entire morning. After a repose of two hours we started again, always toward the south, always pursued by the cannon, which seemed to move even faster than did we. We neared Vervins. The outlying parishes indicated it at each kilometre, and we were only surprised that the enemy had preceded us. It was nevertheless true. He went like the wind, regardless of broken bridges, obstructed roads, opened ravines. However fast we went, he went too fast even for us to follow. He was ahead of us and behind us. He was reported on both sides of us. He seemed to be everywhere.