Light by Henri Barbusse (good novels to read in english txt) 📕

answered the Territorial, as interpreter of the general opinion.

Having thus spoken, the old soldier yawned, went on all fours, arranged the straw of his claim, and added, "We'll not worry, but just let him be. 'Specially seeing we can't do otherwise."

It was time for slumber. The shed gaped open in front and at the sides, but the air was not cold.

"We've done with the bad days," said Rémus; "shan't see them no more."

"At last!" said Margat.

We stretched ourselves out, elbow to elbow. The one in the dark corner blew out his candle.

"May the war look slippy and get finished!" mumbled Orango.

"If only they'll let me transfer to the cyclists," Margat replied.

We said no more, each forming that same great wandering prayer and some little prayer like Margat's. Gently we wrapped ourselves up on the straw, one with the falling night, and closed our eyes.

* * * * * *


At the bottom of the village, in the long pink farmhouse, there was a charming woman, who smiled at us with twinkling eyes. As the days emerged from the rains and fogs, I looked at her with all my soul, for she was bathed in the youth of the year. She had a little nose and big eyes and slight fair down on her lips and neck, like traces of gold. Her husband was mobilized and we paid attentions to her. She smiled at the soldiers as she went by, and chattered willingly with the non-coms; and the passage of officers brought her to a standstill of vague respect. I used to think about her, and I forgot, through her, to write to Marie.

There were many who inquired, speaking of the farmer's wife, "Any chance?" But there were many who replied, "Nothing doing."

One morning that was bright above all others, my companions were busy holding their sides around a tipsy comrade whom they were catechizing and ragging, and sprinkling now and then with little doses of wine, to entertain him, and benefit more by him. These innocent amusements, like those which Termite provoked when he discoursed on militarism and the universe, did not detain me, and I gained the street.

I went down the paved slope. In gardens and enclosures, the buds were holding out a multitude of lilliputian green hands, all still closed, and the apple-trees had white roses. Spring was hastening everywhere. I came in sight of the pink house. She was alone in the road and she took all the sunshine for herself. I hesitated, I went by--my steps slackened heavily--I stopped, and returned towards the door. Almost in spite of myself I went in.

At first--light! A square of sunshine glowed on the red tiled floor of the kitchen. Casseroles and basins were shining brightly.

She was there! Standing by the sink she was making a streak of silver flow into a gleaming pail, amid the luminous blush of the polished tiles and the gold of the brass pans. The greenish light from the window-glass was moistening her skin. She saw me and she smiled.

I knew that she always smiled at us. But we were alone! I felt a mad longing arise. There was something in me that was stronger than I, that ravished the picture of her. Every second she became more beautiful. Her plump dress proffered her figure to my eyes, and her skirt trembled over her polished sabots. I looked at her neck, at her throat--that extraordinary beginning. A strong perfume that enveloped her shoulders was like the truth of her body. Urged forward, I went towards her, and I could not even speak.

She had lowered her head a little; her eyebrows had come nearer together under the close cluster of her hair; uneasiness passed into her eyes. She was used to the boyish mimicry of infatuated men. But this woman was not for me! She dealt me the blow of an unfeeling laugh, and disappearing, shut the door in my face.

I opened the door. I followed her into an outhouse. Stammering something, I found touch again with her presence, I held out my hand. She slipped away, she was escaping me forever--when a monstrous Terror stopped her!

The walls and roof drew near in a hissing crash of thunder, a dreadful hatch opened in the ceiling and all was filled with black fire. And while I was hurled against the wall by a volcanic blast, with my eyes scorched, my ears rent, and my brain hammered, while around me the stones were pierced and crushed, I saw the woman uplifted in a fantastic shroud of black and red, to fall back in a red and white affray of clothes and linen; and something huge burst and naked, with two legs, sprang at my face and forced into my mouth the taste of blood.

I know that I cried out, hiccoughing. Assaulted by the horrible kiss and by the vile clasp that bruised the hand I had offered to the woman's beauty--a hand still outheld--sunk in whirling smoke and ashes and the dreadful noise now majestically ebbing, I found my way out of the place, between walls that reeled as I did. Bodily, the house collapsed behind me. In my flight over the shifting ground I was brushed by the mass of maddened falling stones and the cry of the ruins, sinking in vast dust-clouds as in a tumult of beating wings.

A veritable squall of shells was falling in this corner of the village. A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a little house which had just been broken in two. They did not go close to it because of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here and there all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow. Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault of smoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest.

"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted.

Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones and broken spine, that human house.

It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down. In a single second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, the geometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on the skeleton of a bed. In the upper story an overhanging floor remained, and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked to their places round the table where they were lunching when the lightning fell--a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and a bottle of champagne.

"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferrière."

One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlarged that his head was half open, he was smiling. One arm was raised aloft in the festive gesture which he had begun forever. The other, his fine fair hair untouched, was seated with his elbows on a cloth now red as a Turkey carpet, hideously attentive, his face besmeared with shining blood and full of foul marks. They seemed like two statues of youth and the joy of life framed in horror.

"There's three!" some one shouted.

This one, whom we had not seen at first, hung in the air with dangling arms against the sheer wall, hooked on to a beam by the bottom of his trousers. A pool of blood which lengthened down the flat plaster looked like a projected shadow. At each fresh explosion splinters were scattered round him and shook him, as though the dead man was still marked and chosen by the blind destruction.

There was something hatefully painful in the doll-like attitude of the hanging corpse.

Then Termite's voice was raised. "Poor lad!" he said.

He went out from the shelter of the wall.

"Are you mad?" we shouted; "he's dead, anyway!"

A ladder was there. Termite seized it and dragged it towards the disemboweled house, which was lashed every minute by broadsides of splinters.

"Termite!" cried the lieutenant, "I forbid you to go there! You're doing no good."

"I'm the owner of my skin, lieutenant," Termite replied, without stopping or looking round.

He placed the ladder, climbed up and unhooked the dead man. Around them, against the plaster of the wall, there broke a surge of deafening shocks and white fire. He descended with the body very skillfully, laid it on the ground, and remaining doubled up he ran back to us--to fall on the captain, who had witnessed the scene.

"My friend," the captain said, "I've been told that you were an anarchist. But I've seen that you're brave, and that's already more than half of a Frenchman."

He held out his hand. Termite took it, pretending to be little impressed by the honor.

When he returned to us he said, while his hand rummaged his hedgehog's beard, "That poor lad--I don't know why--p'raps it's stupid--but I was thinking of his mother."

We looked at him with a sort of respect. First, because he had gone up and then because he had passed through the hail of iron and won. There was no one among us who did not earnestly wish he had tried and succeeded in what Termite had just done. But assuredly we did not a bit understand this strange soldier.

A lull had come in the bombardment. "It's over," we concluded.

As we returned we gathered round Termite and one spoke for the rest.

"You're an anarchist, then?"

"No," said Termite, "I'm an internationalist. That's why I enlisted."

"Ah!"

He tried to throw light on his words. "You understand, I'm against all wars."

"All wars! But there's times when war's good. There's defensive war."

"No," said Termite again, "there's only offensive war; because if there wasn't the offensive there wouldn't be the defensive."

"Ah!" we replied.

We went on chatting, dispassionately and for the sake of talking, strolling in the dubious security of the streets which were sometimes darkened by falls of wreckage, under a sky of formidable surprises.

"All the same, isn't it chaps like you that prevented France from being prepared?"

"There's not enough chaps like me to prevent anything; and if there'd been more, there wouldn't have been any war."

"It's not to us, it's to the Boches and the others that you must say that."

"It's to all the world," said Termite; "that's why I'm an internationalist."

While Termite was slipping away somewhere else his questioner indicated by a gesture that he did not understand. "Never mind," he said to us, "that chap's better than us."

Gradually it came about that we of the squad used to consult Termite on any sort of subject, with a simplicity which made me smile--and sometimes even irritated me. That week, for instance, some one asked him, "All this firing--is it an attack they're getting ready?"

But he knew no more than the rest.


CHAPTER XII


THE SHADOWS

We did not