Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (drm ebook reader TXT) 📕

“Vous savez pas,” says Pepin, “the chaps of the 9th, they’re in clover! An old woman has taken them in for nothing, because of her old man that’s been dead fifty years and was a rifleman once on a time. Seems she’s even given them a rabbit for nix, and they’re just worrying it jugged.”

“There’s good sorts everywhere. But the boys of the 9th had famous luck to fall into the only shop of good sorts in the whole village.”

Palmyra comes with the coffee, which she supplies. She thaws a little, listens to us, and even asks questions in a supercilious way: “Why do you call the adjutant ‘le juteux’?”

Barque replies sententiously, “‘Twas ever thus.”

When she has disappeared, we criticize our coffee. “Talk about clear! You can see the sugar ambling round the bottom of the glass.”—“She charges six sous for it.”—“It’s filtered water.”

The door half opens, and admits a streak of light. The face of a little boy is defined in it. We entice him in like a kitten and give him a bit of chocolate.

Then, “My name’s Charlie,” chirps the child. “Our house, that’s close by. We’ve got soldiers, too. We always had them, we had. We sell them everything they want. Only, voila, sometimes they get drunk.”

“Tell me, little one, come here a bit,” says Cocon, taking the boy between his knees. “Listen now. Your papa, he says, doesn’t he, ‘Let’s hope the war goes on,’ eh?” [note 2]

“Of course,” says the child, tossing his head, “because we’re getting rich. He says, by the end of May, we shall have got fifty thousand francs.”

“Fifty thousand francs! Impossible!”

“Yes, yes!” the child insists, stamping, “he said it to mamma. Papa wished it could be always like that. Mamma, sometimes, she isn’t sure, because my brother Adolphe is at the front. But we’re going to get him sent to the rear, and then the war can go on.”

These confidences are disturbed by sharp cries, coming from the rooms of our hosts. Biquet the mobile goes to inquire. “It’s nothing,” says he, coming back; “it’s the good man slanging the woman because she doesn’t know how to do things, he says, because she’s made the mustard in a tumbler, and he never heard of such a thing, he says.”

We get up, and leave the strong odor of pipes, wine, and stale coffee in our cave. As soon as we have crossed the threshold, a heaviness of heat puffs in our faces, fortified by the mustiness of frying that dwells in the kitchen and emerges every time the door is opened. We pass through legions of flies which, massed on the walls in black hordes, fly abroad in buzzing swarms as we pass: “It’s beginning again like last year! Flies outside, lice inside.—”

“And microbes still farther inside!”

In a corner of this dirty little house and its litter of old rubbish, its dusty debris of last year and the relics of so many summers gone by, among the furniture and household gear, something is moving. It is an old simpleton with a long bald neck, pink and rough, making you think of a fowl’s neck which has prematurely molted through disease. His profile is that of a hen, too—no chin and a long nose. A gray overlay of beard felts his receded cheek, and you see his heavy eyelids, rounded and horny, move up and down like shutters on the dull beads of his eyes.

Barque has already noticed him: “Watch him—he’s a treasure-seeker. He says there’s one somewhere in this hovel that he’s stepfather to. You’ll see him directly go on all-fours and push his old phizog in every corner there is. Tiens, watch him.”

With the aid of his stick, the old man proceeded to take methodical soundings. He tapped along the foot of the walls and on the floor-tiles.. He was hustled by the coming and going of the occupants of the house, by callers, and by the swing of Palmyra’s broom; but she let him alone and said nothing, thinking to herself, no doubt, that the exploitation of the national calamity is a more profitable treasure than problematical caskets.

Two gossips are standing in a recess and exchanging confidences in low voices, hard by an old map of Russia that is peopled with flies. “Oui, but it’s with the Picon bitters that you’ve got to be careful. If you haven’t got a light touch, you can’t get your sixteen glasses out of a bottle, and so you lose too much profit. I don’t say but what one’s all right in one’s purse, even so, but one doesn’t make enough. To guard against that, the retailers ought to agree among themselves, but the understanding’s so difficult to bring off, even when it’s in the general interest.”

Outside there is torrid sunshine, riddled with flies. The little beasts, quite scarce but a few days ago, multiply everywhere the murmur of their minute and innumerable engines. I go out in the company of Lamuse; we are going for a saunter. One can be at peace today—it is complete rest, by reason of the overnight march. We might sleep, but it suits us much better to use the rest for an extensive promenade. To-morrow, the exercise and fatigues will get us again. There are some, less lucky than we, who are already caught in the cogwheels of fatigue. To Lamuse, who invites him to come and stroll with us, Corvisart replies, screwing up the little round nose that is laid flatly on his oblong face like a cork, “Can’t—I’m on manure!” He points to the shovel and broom by whose help he is performing his task of scavenger and night-soil man.

We walk languidly. The afternoon lies heavy on the drowsy land and on stomachs richly provided and embellished with food. The remarks we exchange are infrequent.

Over there, we hear noises. Barque has fallen a victim to a menagerie of housewives; and the scene is pointed by a pale little girl, her hair tied behind in a pencil of tow and her mouth embroidered with fever spots, and by women who are busy with some unsavory job of washing in the meager shade before their doors.

Six men go by, led by a quartermaster corporal. They carry heaps of new greatcoats and bundles of boots. Lamuse regards his bloated and horny feet—“I must have some new sheds, and no mistake; a bit more and you’ll see my splay-feet through these ones. Can’t go marching on the skin of my tongs, eh?”

An aeroplane booms overhead. We follow its evolutions with our faces skyward, our necks twisted, our eyes watering at the piercing brightness of the sky.

Lamuse declares to me, when we have brought our gaze back to earth, “Those machines’ll never become practical, never.”

“How can you say that? Look at the progress they’ve made already, and the speed of it.”

“Yes, but they’ll stop there. They’ll never do any better, never.”

This time I do not challenge the dull and obstinate denial that ignorance opposes to the promise of progress, and I let my big comrade alone in his stubborn belief that the wonderful effort of science and industry has been suddenly cut short.

Having thus begun to reveal to me his inmost thoughts, Lamuse continues. Coming nearer and lowering his head, he says to me, “You know she’s here—Eudoxie?”

“Ah!” said I.

“Yes, old chap. You never notice anything, you don’t, but I noticed,” and Lamuse smiles at me indulgently. “Now, do you catch on? If she’s come here, it’s because we interest her, eh? She’s followed us for one of us, and don’t you forget it.”

He gets going again. “My boy, d’you want to know what I say? She’s come after me.”

“Are you sure of it, old chap?”

“Yes,” says the ox-man, in a hollow voice. “First, I want her. Then, twice, old man, I’ve found her exactly in my path, in mine, d’you understand? You may tell me that she ran away; that’s because she’s timid, that, yes—”

He stopped dead in the middle of the street and looked straight at me. The heavy face, greasily moist on the cheeks and nose, was serious. His rotund fist went up to the dark yellow mustache, so carefully pointed, and smoothed it tenderly. Then he continued to lay bare his heart to me “I want her; but, you know, I shall marry her all right, I shall. She’s called Eudoxie Dumail. At first, I wasn’t thinking of marrying her. But since I’ve got to know her family name, it seems to me that it’s different, and I should get on all right. Ah, nom de Dieu! She’s so pretty, that woman! And it’s not only that she’s pretty—ah!”

The huge child was overflowing with sentiment and emotion, and trying to make them speak to me. “Ah, my boy, there are times when I’ve just got to hold myself back with a hook,” came the strained and gloomy tones, while the blood flushed to the fleshy parts of his cheeks and neck. “She’s so beautiful, she’s—and me I’m—she’s so unlike—you’ll have noticed it, surely, you that notices—she’s a country girl, oui; eh bien, she’s got a God knows what that’s better than a Parisienne, even a toffed-up and stylish Parisienne, pas? She—as for me, I—”

He puckered his red eyebrows. He would have liked to tell me all the splendor of his thoughts, but he knew not the art of expressing himself, so he was silent. He remained alone in his voiceless emotion, as always alone.

We went forward side by side between the rows of houses. In front of the doors, drays laden with casks were drawn up. The front windows blossomed with many-hued heaps of jam-pots, stacks of tinder pipe-lighters—everything that the soldier is compelled to buy. Nearly all the natives had gone into grocery. Business had been getting out of gear locally for a long time, but now it was booming. Every one, smitten with the fever of sum-totals and dazzled by the multiplication table, plunged into trade.

Bells tolled, and the procession of a military funeral came out. A forage wagon, driven by a transport man, carried a coffin wrapped in a flag. Following, were a detachment of men, an adjutant, a padre, and a civilian.

“The poor little funeral with its tail lopped off!” said Lamuse. “Ah, those that are dead are very happy. But only sometimes, not always—voila!”

We have passed the last of the houses. In the country, beyond the end of the street, the fighting convoy and the regimental convoy have settled themselves, the traveling kitchens and jingling carts that follow them with odds and ends of equipment, the Red Cross wagons, the motor lorries, the forage carts, the baggage-master’s gig. The tents of drivers and conductors swarm around the vehicles. On the open spaces horses lift their metallic eyes to the sky’s emptiness, with their feet on barren earth. Four poilus are setting up a table. The open-air smithy is smoking. This heterogeneous and swarming city, planted in ruined fields whose straight or winding ruts are stiffening in the heat, is already broadly valanced with rubbish and dung.

On the edge of the camp a big, white-painted van stands out from the others in its tidy cleanliness. Had it been in the middle of a fair, one would have said it was the stylish show where one pays more than at the others.

This is the celebrated “stomatological” van that Blaire was asking about. In point of fact, Blaire is there in