Under Fire. Henri Barbusse
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of their old comrades-in-arms, of those who toil night and day on the brink of the great war to make ready and make good the fields of battle.
And even the other watchers join in. Miserable themselves, they scoff at the still more miserable.
"Look at that one! And that, look!"
"Non, but take me a snapshot of that little rump-end! Hey, earth-worm!"
"And that one that has no ending! Talk about a sky-scratcher! Tiens, la, he takes the biscuit. Yes, you take it, old chap!"
This man goes with little steps, and holds his pickax up in front like a candle; his face is withered, and his body borne down by the blows of lumbago.
"Like a penny, gran'pa?" Barque asks him, as he passes within reach of a tap on the shoulder.
The broken-down poilu replies with a great oath of annoyance, and provokes the harsh rejoinder of Barque: "Come now, you might be polite, filthy-face, old muck-mill!"
Turning right round in fury, the old one defies his tormentor.
"Hullo!" cries Barque, laughing, "He's showing fight; the ruin! He's warlike, look you, and he might be mischievous if only he were sixty years younger!"
"And if he wasn't alone," wantonly adds Pepin, whose eye is in quest of other targets among the flow of new arrivals.
The hollow chest of the last straggler appears, and then his distorted back disappears.
The march past of the worn-out and trench-foul veterans comes to an end among the ironical and almost malevolent faces of these sinister troglodytes, whom their caverns of mud but half reveal.
Meanwhile, the hours slip away, and evening begins to veil the sky and darken the things of earth. It comes to blend itself at once with the blind fate and the ignorant dark minds of the multitude there enshrouded.
Through the twilight comes the rolling hum of tramping men, and another throng rubs its way through.
"Africans!"
They march past with faces red-brown, yellow or chestnut, their beards scanty and fine or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats yellowish-green, and their muddy helmets sporting the crescent in place of our grenade. Their eyes are like balls of ivory or onyx, that shine from faces like new pennies, flattened or angular. Now and again comes swaying along above the line the coal-black mask of a Senegalese sharpshooter. Behind the company goes a red flag with a green hand in the center.
We watch them in silence. These are asked no questions. They command respect, and even a little fear.
All the same, these Africans seem jolly and in high spirits. They are going, of course, to the first line. That is their place, and their passing is the sign of an imminent attack. They are made for the offensive.
"Those and the 75 gun we can take our hats off to. They're everywhere sent ahead at big moments, the Moroccan Division."
"They can't quite fit in with us. They go too fast—and there's no way of stopping them."
Some of these diabolical images in yellow wood or bronze or ebony are serious of mien, uneasy, and taciturn. Their faces have the disquieting and secret look of the snare suddenly discovered. The others laugh with a laugh that jangles like fantastic foreign instruments of music, a laugh that bares the teeth.
We talk over the characteristics of these Africans; their ferocity in attack, their devouring passion to be in with the bayonet, their predilection for "no quarter." We recall those tales that they themselves willingly tell, all in much the same words and with the same gestures. They raise their arms over their heads—"Kam'rad, Kam'rad!" "Non, pas Kam'rad!" And in pantomime they drive a bayonet forward, at belly-height, drawing it back then with the help of a foot.
One of the sharpshooters overhears our talk as he passes. He looks upon us, laughs abundantly in his helmeted turban, and repeats our words with significant shakes of his head: "Pas Kam'rad, non pas Kam'rad, never! Cut head off!"
"No doubt they're a different race from us, with their tent-cloth skin," Barque confesses, though he does not know himself what "cold feet" are. "It worries them to rest, you know; they only live for the minute when the officer puts his watch back in his pocket and says, 'Off you go!'"
"In fact, they're real soldiers."
"We are not soldiers," says big Lamuse, "we're men." Though the evening has grown darker now, that plain true saying sheds something like a glimmering light on the men who are waiting here, waiting since the morning, waiting since months ago.
They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the joy of life. Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are ignorant and of narrow outlook, full of a sound common sense—which some-times gets off the rails—disposed to be led and to do as they are bid, enduring under hardships, long-suffering.
They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances—the instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living through, the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals they are cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the silence and the shadows of their great human hearts.
When we can no longer see clearly, we hear down there the murmur of a command, which comes nearer and rings loud—"Second half-section! Muster!" We fall in; it is the call.
"Gee up!" says the corporal. We are set in motion. In front of the tool-depot there is a halt and trampling. To each is given a spade or pickax. An N.C.O. presents the handles in the gloom: "You, a spade; there, hop it! You a spade, too; you a pick. Allons, hurry up and get off."
We leave by the communication trench at right angles to our own, and straight ahead towards the changeful frontier, now alive and terrible.
Up in the somber sky, the strong staccato panting of an invisible aeroplane circles in wide descending coils and fills infinity. In front, to right and left, everywhere, thunderclaps roll with great glimpses of short-lived light in the dark-blue sky.
[note 1:] The popular and international name for a French soldier. Its literal meaning is "hairy, shaggy," but the word has conveyed for over a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose strength lay in his locks.—Tr.
[note 2:] 6250 miles.
[note 3:] Pourvu que les civils tiennent. In the early days of the war it was a common French saying that victory was certain—"if the civilians hold out."—Tr.
III
The Return
RELUCTANTLY the ashen dawn is bleaching the still dark and formless landscape. Between the declining road on the right that falls into the gloom, and the black cloud of the Alleux Wood—where we hear the convoy teams assembling and getting under way—a field extends. We have reached it, we of the 6th Battalion, at the end of the night. We have piled arms, and now, in the center of this circle of uncertain light, our feet in the mist and mud, we stand in dark clusters (that yet are hardly blue), or as solitary phantoms; and the heads of all are turned towards the road that comes from "down there." We are waiting for the rest of the regiment, the 5th Battalion, who were in the first line and left the trenches after us.
Noises; "There they are!" A long and shapeless mass appears in the west and comes down out of the night upon the dawning road.
At last! It is ended, the accursed shift that began at six o'clock yesterday evening and has lasted all night, and now the last man has stepped from the last communication trench.
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