Part 9
For reference later, when his body will be removed, I am now going to draw a plan of the cemetery in my notebook, counting the rows of graves and the number of graves in each row. Look! bullets are whistling past us, two or three in succession. Whence can they be coming to us, these bullets? They are undoubtedly intended for us, for the noise that each one makes ends in that kind of little honeyed song, "Cooee you! Cooee you!" which is characteristic of them when they expire somewhere in your direction, somewhere quite close. After their flight silence prevails again, but I make more haste with my drawing.
And the longer I remain here the more I am impressed with the horror of the place. Oh this cemetery which, instead of ending like things in real life, plunges little by little into enfolding mists; these tombs, these tombs all decked with gem-like icicles which have dropped as tears drop; the whiteness of the soil, the whiteness of everything, and Death which returns and hovers stealthily, uttering a little cry like a bird! Yonder, by the grave of Pierre D----, I notice Osman, likewise much blurred in the fog. He has found a spade, which has doubtless remained there ever since the interments, and he finishes burying the little bottle which is to serve as a token.
Again that sound, "Cooee you! Cooee you!" The place is decidedly unhealthy, as the soldiers say. I should be to blame if I lingered here any longer.
Upon my soul, here comes shrapnel! But before I heard it explode in the air I recognised it by the sound of its flight, which is different from that of ordinary shells. This first shot is aimed too far to the right, and the fragments fall twenty or thirty yards away on the little white hillocks. But they have found us out, so much is certain, and that is owing to the microphones. This will continue, and there is no cover anywhere, not a single trench, not a single hole.
"Stoop down, sir, stoop down," shouts Osman from the distance, seeing another coming towards me while my attention is still occupied with the graves. Why should I stoop down? It is a useful precaution against shells. But against shrapnel, which strikes downwards from above? No, we ought to have our steel helmets, but carelessly, anticipating no danger, we left them in the car with our masks. All that is left for us is to beat a hasty retreat. Osman comes running towards me with his spade and his second little bottle, and I shout at him:
"No, no, it is too late, you must run away."
Good heavens, the car has not even been turned! Why, that was an elementary precaution, and as soon as we arrived I ought to have seen to that. What a long, black record of carelessness to-day; where is my head? It is because our entry to the cemetery was so undisturbed. I call out to the two chauffeurs who were still taking photographs:
"Stop that, stop! Go at once and turn the car! Not too fast though, or you will make too much noise, but hurry up! Run!"
Osman took advantage of this diversion with the chauffeurs to begin digging in the ground near me.
"No, I tell you, stop at once. Can you not see that they are still shelling us? Run and get behind a tree by the roadside."
"But it is all right, sir, it is just finished. It will be finished by the time the car has been turned."
In my heart I am glad that he is disobeying me a little and completing the work. Never was a hole dug so rapidly nor a bottle buried so nimbly. Then he puts back the earth, jumps on it to flatten it down, and throws down his sexton's spade. Then we run away at full speed, stepping on the hillocks of our dead, apologising to them inwardly. Nothing seems so ridiculous and stupid as to run under fire. But I am not alone; the safety of these soldiers is in my charge, and I should be guilty if I delayed them for as much as a second in their flight.
Shrapnel is still bursting, scattering its hail around us. And how strange and subtle are the ways of modern warfare, where death comes thus seeking us out of invisible depths, depths of a horizon that looks like white cotton wool; death launched at us by men whom we can see no more than they can see us, launched blindly, yet in the certainty of finding us.
We reach the car just as it has finished turning; we jump in, and off our car goes at full speed, all open. We pass the occupied trenches like a hurricane; this time heads are scarcely raised because of the shower of shrapnel. These men, to be sure, are under cover, but not so we, who have nothing but our speed to save us.
In our frantic flight, in which my part is simply passive, my imagination is free to return to that gloomy cemetery and its dead. And it was strange how clearly we could hear the shrapnel in the midst of this silence and in this extraordinary mist, which increased, like a microphone, the noise of its flight. It is, moreover, perhaps the first time that I have heard it performing a solo apart from all the customary clamour, in intimacy, if I may say so, for it has done me the honour of coming solely on my account. Never before, then, had I felt that almost physical appreciation of the mad velocity of these little hard bodies, and of the shock with which they must strike against some fragile object, say a chest or a head.
The game is over, and we are entering again the village of B----. Here, out of range of shrapnel, only long-distance guns could reach us. We have not even a broken pane of glass or a scratch. Instinctively the chauffeurs draw up, just as I was about to give the order, not because the car is out of breath, or we either, but we need a moment to regain our composure, to arrange the overcoats thrown into the car in a confused heap, which, after our hurried departure, danced a saraband with cameras, helmets, and revolvers.
And then, like people who at last succeed in finding a shelter from a shower in a gateway, we look at one another and feel inclined to laugh--to laugh in spite of the painful and still recent memory of our dead, to laugh at having made good our escape, to laugh because we have succeeded in doing what we set out to do, and especially because we have defied those imbeciles who were firing at us.
XXIII
THE FIRST SUNSHINE OF MARCH
_March 10th, 1916._
It is just here, I believe, that that zone, some fifteen to twenty miles in breadth, so terribly torn and rent, which stretches through our land of France from the North Sea to Alsace, following the line of those trenches, where the barbarians have dug themselves in, it is just here, I believe, that that zone, where suffering and glory reign supreme, attains the climax of its nightmare-like illusiveness, the climax of its horror. I say "just here" because I am not allowed to be more definite; just here, however, in a certain province which had even before the war a depressing-nickname, something like "the desolate province," "the mean province," or even, if you like, "the lousy province." The reason was that even before it was laid waste it was already very barren, almost without verdure; it had nothing to show except unfruitful valleys, some clumps of stunted pines, some poverty-stricken villages, which had not even the saving grace of antiquity, for century by century savages from Germany had come and disported themselves there, and when they went away everything had to be rebuilt.
And now since the great new onrush, which surpassed all abominations ever before experienced, how strange, fantastic almost, seems this region of woe, with its calcined ruins, its chalky soil dug over and again dug over down to its very depths, as if by myriads of burrowing animals.
Once again I make my way to-day in my motor car into the midst of it all on some mission assigned to me, and I had never yet seen it in all the mire of the thaw, in which our poor little warriors in blue caps are so uncomfortably engulfed up to mid-leg. I feel my heart sinking more and more the farther I go along these broken-up roads, which are becoming still more crowded with our dear soldiers, all lamentably coated with greyish mud. The occasional villages on our road are more and more damaged by shells, and peasant women or children are no longer to be seen; there are no more civilians, nothing but blue helmets, but of these there are thousands. The rapid melting of the snow in such a sudden burst of sunshine marks the distant landscape with zebra-like stripes, white and earth-coloured. And all the hills which we pass now seem to be inhabited by tribes of troglodytes, while every slope which faces us, who are coming in this direction, and which, owing to its position, has thus escaped the notice and the fire of the enemy, is riddled with mouths of caves, some ranged in rows, some built in stories one above the other, and from these peer out human heads in helmets, enjoying the sun. What can this country be? Is it prehistoric, or merely very remote? Surely no one would say that it was France. Save for this bitter, icy wind, this country, with its sky almost too blue to-day for a northern sky, might be taken for the banks of the upper Nile, the Libyan ridge where subterranean caverns gape.
Again a semblance of a village appears, the last through which I shall pass, for those which are distant landmarks on the road that leads towards the barbarians, are nothing more now than hapless heaps of stone resembling barrows. This village, too, be it understood, is three-quarters in ruins; there remain fragments of walls in grotesque shapes, letting in the daylight and displaying a black marbling of soot where the chimneys used to be. But many soldiers are gaily having their breakfast in the purely imaginary shelter afforded them by these remains of houses. There are pay-sergeants even, who are seated unconcernedly at improvised tables, busy with their writing.
Bang! A shell! It is a shell hurled blindly and from a great distance by the barbarians, without definite purpose, merely in the hope that it may succeed in hurting someone. It has fallen on the ruins of a roofless stable, where some poor horses are tethered, and here are two of them who have been struck down and are lying bellies upwards and kicking out, as they do when they are dying; they stain the snow crimson with blood spurting from their chests in jets, as if forced from a pump.
The village soon disappears in the distance, and I enter this no man's land, always rather a solemn region, which from end to end along the front indicates the immediate neighbourhood of the barbarians. The March sun, astonishingly strong, beats down upon this tragic desert where great sheets of white snow alternate with broad, mud-coloured surfaces. And now whenever my car stops and pauses, for some reason or other, and the engine is silent, the noise of the cannon is heard more and more loudly.
At last I reach the farthest point to which my car can convey me; if I took it on farther it would be seen by the Boches, and the shells that are roaming about here and there in the air would converge upon it. It must be safely bestowed, together with my chauffeurs, in a hollow of the undulating ground, while I continue my journey alone on foot.
First of all I have to telephone to General Headquarters. The telephone office is that dark hole over there, hidden among scanty bushes. Climbing down a very narrow flight of steps, I penetrate seven or eight yards into the earth, and there I find four soldiers installed as telephone girls, illumined by tiny electric lamps that shine like glow-worms. These are territorials, about forty years of age, and the man who hands me the telephone apparatus wears a wedding ring--doubtless he has a wife and children living somewhere yonder out in the open air, where life is possible. Nevertheless he tells me that he has been six months in this damp hole, beneath the surface of ground which is continually swept by shells, and he tells me this with cheerful resignation, as if the sacrifice were quite a natural thing. In the same spirit his companions speak of their white-ant existence without a shade of complaint. And these, too, are worthy of admiration, all these patient heroes of the darkness, equally so, perhaps, with their comrades who fight in the open air in the light of day, with mutual encouragement.
Emerging from the underground cave, where the noises are muffled, I hear very clearly the cannonade; my eyes are dazzled by the unwonted sunlight which illumines all those white stretches of snow.
I have to journey about two miles through this strange desert to reach a paltry little clump of sorry-looking pines which I perceive over there on some rising ground. It is there that I have made an appointment to meet an officer of sappers, whom my business concerns, for the purpose of fulfilling my mission.
A pretence of a desert, I ought rather to call it, for underground it is thickly populated by our soldiers, armed and alert. At the first signal of an attack they would rush out through a thousand apertures; but for the moment, throughout the whole extent of this tract, so sun-steeped and yet so cold, not more than one or two blue caps are visible, belonging to men who are stealing along from one shelter to another.
And it is, moreover, a terribly noisy desert, for besides the continual detonation of artillery from varying ranges, there is a noise like huge kinds of beetles flying, which, as they pass, make almost the same buzzing sound as aeroplanes, but they all fly so fast as to be invisible. Their flight is haphazard, and when they strike their heads hard against the ground pebbles, earth, scrap-iron, spout up in jets shaped like wheat-sheaves. On the eastern horizon, silhouetted against the sky, stands one of those tumuli of ruins which now mark the place of former villages; and it is here especially that those huge beetles are bent on falling, raising each time clouds of plaster and dust. It is, to be sure, a useless and idle bombardment, for already all this has perished.
To-day especially, being a day of a great thaw, a distance of two miles here in this region where so many of our poor soldiers are doomed to exist, is equal to a distance of at least ten miles elsewhere--it is such heavy going. You sink up to your ankles in mud, and you cannot draw your foot out, for the mud sticks tight like glue. The wind still remains cold and icy, but in the midst of a sky too deeply blue shines a sun, beating down upon my head, and under the steel helmet, which grows heavier and heavier, beads of sweat stand upon my forehead. The snow has made up its mind to melt, and that suddenly. All the summits of those melancholy-looking hills, bared of their covering, resume again their brown colour and resemble hindquarters of animals couching on these plains which still remain white.
This is the first time that I find myself absolutely, infinitely alone, in the midst of this scene of intense desolation, which, though to-day it happens to glitter with light, is none the less dismal. Until I reach the little wood whither I am bound on duty there is nothing to think about, nothing with which I need concern myself. I need not trouble to get out of the way of shells, for they would not give me time, nor even to select places where to put my feet, since I sink in equally wherever I step. And so, gradually, I find myself relapsing into a state of mind characteristic of former days before the war, and I look at all these things to which I had grown accustomed and view them impartially, as if they were new. Twenty short months ago, who would have imagined such scenes? For instance, these countless spoil-heaps, white in colour, because the soil of this province is white, spoil-heaps which are thrown up everywhere in long lines, tracing on the desert so many zebra-like stripes; is it possible that these indicate the only tracks by which to-day our soldiers of France can move about with some measure of safety? They are little hollow tracks, some undulating, some straight, communication trenches which the French nickname "intestines." These have been multiplied again and again, until the ground is furrowed with them unendingly. What prodigious work, moreover, they represent, these mole-like paths, spreading like a network over hundreds of leagues. If to their sum be added trenches, shelter caves, and all those catacombs that penetrate right into the heart of the hills, the mind is amazed at excavations so extensive, which would seem the work of centuries.
And these strange kinds of nets, stretched out in all directions, would anyone, unless previously warned and accustomed to them, understand what they were? They look as if gigantic spiders had woven their webs around countless numbers of posts, which stretch out beyond range of sight, some in straight lines, some in circles or crescents, tracing on that wide tract of country designs in which there must surely be some cabalistic significance intended to envelop and entangle the barbarians more effectively. Since I last came this way these obstructing nets must have been reinforced to a terrible extent, and their number has been multiplied by two, by ten. In order to achieve such inextricable confusion our soldiers, those weavers of snares, must have made in them turnings and twists with their great bobbins of barbed wire carried under their arms. But here, at various points, are enclosures, whose purpose is obvious at a glance and which add to the grisly horror of the whole scene; these fences of wood surround closely packed groups of humble little wooden crosses made of two sticks. Alas! what they are is clear at first sight. Thus, then, they lie, within sound of the cannonade, as if the battle were not yet over for them, these dear comrades of ours who have vanished, heroes humble yet sublime--inapproachable for the present, even for those who weep for them, inapproachable, because death never ceases to fly through the air which stirs overhead, above their little silent gatherings.
Ah! to complete the impression of unreality a black bird appears of fabulous size, a monster of the Apocalypse, flying with great clamour aloft in the air. He is moving in the direction of France, seeking, no doubt, some more sheltered region, where at last women and children are to be found, in the hope of destroying some of them. I keep on walking, if walking it can be called, this wearisome, pitiless repetition of plunges into snow and ice-cold mud. At last I reach the clump of trees where we have arranged to meet. I am thankful to have arrived there, for my helmet and cap were encumbrances under that unexpectedly hot sun. I am, however, before my time. The officer whom I invited to meet me here--in order to discuss questions concerning new works of defence, new networks of lines, new pits--that is he, no doubt, that blue silhouette coming this way across the snow-shrouded ground. But he is far away, and for a few more moments I can still indulge in the reverie with which I whiled away the journey, before the time comes when I must once more become precise and businesslike. Evidently the place is not one of perfect peace, for it is clear that these melancholy boughs, half stripped of leaves already, have suffered from those great humming cockchafers that fly across from time to time, and have been shot through as if they were no stronger than sheets of paper. It is, to be sure, but a small wood, yet it keeps me company, wrapping me round with an illusion of safety.
I am standing here on rising ground, where the wind blows more icily, and I command a view of the whole terrible landscape, a succession of monotonous hills, striped in zebra fashion with whitish trenches; its few trees have been blasted by shrapnel. In the distance that network of iron wire, stretching out in all directions, shines brightly in the sun, and is not unlike the gossamer which floats over the meadows in spring time. And on all sides the detonation of artillery continues with its customary clamour, unceasing here, day and night, like the sea beating against the cliffs.
Ah! the big black bird has found someone to talk to in the air. I see it suddenly assailed by a quantity of those flakes of white cotton wool (bursts of shrapnel), in appearance so innocent, yet so dangerous to birds of his feather. So he hurriedly turns back, and his crimes are postponed to another day.
From behind a neighbouring hill issues a squad of men in blue, who will reach me before the officer on the road yonder. It is one, just one, of a thousand of those little processions which, alas! may be met with every hour all along the front, forming, as it were, part of the scenery. In front march four soldiers carrying a stretcher, and others follow them to relieve them. They, too, are attracted by the delusive hope of protection afforded by the branches, and at the beginning of the wood they stop instinctively for a breathing space and to change shoulders. They have come from first line trenches a mile or two away and are carrying a seriously wounded man to a subterranean field hospital, not more than a quarter of an hour's walk away. They, likewise, had not anticipated the heat of that terrible March sun, which is beating down on their heads; they are wearing their helmets and winter caps, and these weigh upon them as heavily as the precious burden which they are so careful not to jolt. In addition to this they drag along on each leg a thick crust of snow and sticky mud, which makes their feet as heavy as elephants' feet, and the sweat pours in great drops down their faces, cheerful in spite of fatigue.
"Where is your man wounded?" I ask, in a low voice.
In a voice still lower comes the reply: "His stomach is ripped open, and the Major in the trench said that----" they finish the sentence merely by shaking their heads, but I have understood. Besides he has not stirred. His poor hand remains lying across his eyes and forehead, doubtless to protect them from the burning sun, and I ask them:
"Why have you not covered his face?"
"We put a handkerchief over it, sir, but he took it off. He said he preferred to remain like this, _so that he could still look at things between his fingers_."
Ah! the last two men have blood as well as sweat pouring over their faces and trickling in a little stream down their necks.
"It is nothing much, sir," they say, "we got that as soon as we started. We began by carrying him along the communication trenches, but that jolted him too much, so then we walked along outside in the open."
Poor fellows, admirable for their very carelessness. To save their wounded man from jolts they risked their own lives. Two or three of these death-bringing cockchafers, which go humming along here at all hours, came down and were crushed to pieces on the stones close to them, and wounded them with their shattered fragments. The Germans disdain to fire at a single wayfarer like myself, but a group of men, and a stretcher in particular, they cannot resist. One of these men, both of whom are dripping with blood, has perhaps actually received only a scratch, but the other has lost an ear; only a shred is left, hanging by a thread.
"You must go at once and have your wound dressed at the hospital, my friend," I say to him.
"Yes, sir. And we are just on our way there, to the hospital. It is very lucky."
This is the only idea of complaint that has entered his head.
"It is very lucky."
And he says this with such a quiet, pleasant smile, grateful to me for taking an interest in him.
I hesitated before going to look more closely at their seriously wounded man who never stirred, for I feared lest I should disturb his last dream. Nevertheless I approach him very gently, because they are just going to carry him away.