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

the trajectories of the shells. Yonder, under the mass of the rust-red sky and its sullen flames, there opens a yellow rift where trees stand forth like gallows. The soil is dismembered. The earth's covering has been blown a lot in slabs, and its heart is seen reddish and lined white--butchery as far as the eye can see.

There is nothing now but to sit down and recline one's back as conveniently as possible. We stay there and breathe and live a little; we are calm, thanks to that faculty we have of never seeing either the past or the future.

* * * * * *


CHAPTER XIII


WHITHER GOEST THOU?

But soon a shiver has seized all of us.

"Listen! It's stopped! Listen!"

The whistle of bullets has completely ceased, and the artillery also. The lull is fantastic. The longer it lasts the more it pierces us with the uneasiness of beasts. We lived in eternal noise; and now that it is hiding, it shakes and rouses us, and would drive us mad.

"What's that?"

We rub our eyelids and open wide our eyes. We hoist our heads with no precaution above the crumbled parapet. We question each other--"D'you see?"

No doubt about it; the shadows are moving along the ground wherever one looks. There is no point in the distance where they are not moving.

Some one says at last:--

"Why, it's the Boches, to be sure!"

And then we recognize on the sloping plain the immense geographical form of the army that is coming upon us!

* * * * * *


Behind and in front of us together, a terrible crackle bursts forth and makes somber captives of us in the depth of a valley of flames, and flames which illuminate the plain of men marching over the plain. They reveal them afar, in incalculable number, with the first ranks detaching themselves, wavering a little, and forming again, the chalky soil a series of points and lines like something written!

Gloomy stupefaction makes us dumb in face of that living immensity. Then we understand that this host whose fountain-head is out of sight is being frightfully cannonaded by our 75's; the shells set off behind us and arrive in front of us. In the middle of the lilliputian ranks the giant smoke-clouds leap like hellish gods. We see the flashes of the shells which are entering that flesh scattered over the earth. It is smashed and burned entirely in places, and that nation advances like a brazier.

Without a stop it overflows towards us. Continually the horizon produces new waves. We hear a vast and gentle murmur rise. With their tearing lights and their dull glimmers they resemble in the distance a whole town making festival in the evening.

We can do nothing against the magnitude of that attack, the greatness of that sum total. When a gun has fired short, we see more clearly the littleness of each shot. Fire and steel are drowned in all that life; it closes up and re-forms like the sea.

"Rapid fire!"

We fire desperately. But we have not many cartridges. Since we came into the first line they have ceased to inspect our load of ammunition; and many men, especially these last days, have got rid of a part of the burden which bruises hips and belly and tears away the skin. They who are coming do not fire; and above the long burning thicket of our line one can see them still flowing from the east. They are closely massed in ranks. One would say they clung to each other as though welded. They are not using their rifles. Their only weapon is the infinity of their number. They are coming to bury us under their feet.

Suddenly a shift in the wind brings us the smell of ether. The divisions advancing on us are drunk! We declare it, we tell it to ourselves frantically.

"They're on fire! They're on fire!" cries the trembling voice of the man beside me, whose shoulders are shaken by the shots he is hurling.

They draw near. They are lighted from below along the descent by the flashing footlights of our fire; they grow bigger, and already we can make out the forms of soldiers. They are at the same time in order and in disorder. Their outlines are rigid, and one divines faces of stone. Their rifles are slung and they have nothing in their hands. They come on like sleep-walkers, only knowing how to put one foot before the other, and surely they are singing. Yonder, in the bulk of the invasion, the guns continue to destroy whole walls and whole structures of life at will. On the edges of it we can clearly see isolated silhouettes and groups as they fall, with an extended line of figures like torchlights.

Now they are there, fifty paces away, breathing their ether into our faces. We do not know what to do. We have no more cartridges. We fix bayonets, our ears filled with that endless, undefined murmur which comes from their mouths and the hollow rolling of the flood that marches.

A shout spreads behind us:

"Orders to fall back!"

We bow down and evacuate the trench by openings at the back. There are not a lot of us, we who thought we were so many. The trench is soon empty, and we climb the hill that we descended in coming. We go up towards our 75's, which are in lines behind the ridge and still thundering. We climb at a venture, in the open, by vague paths and tracks of mud; there are no trenches. During the gray ascent it is a little clearer than a while ago: they do not fire on us. If they fired on us, we should be killed. We climb in flagging jumps, in jerks, pounded by the panting of the following waves that push us before them, closely beset by their clattering, nor turning round to look again. We hoist ourselves up the trembling flanks of the volcano that clamors up yonder. Along with us are emptied batteries also climbing, and horses and clouds of steam and all the horror of modern war. Each man pushes this retreat on, and is pushed by it; and as our panting becomes one long voice, we go up and up, baffled by our own weight which tries to fall back, deformed by our knapsacks, bent and silent as beasts.

From the summit we see the trembling inundation, murmuring and confused, filling the trenches we have just left, and seeming already to overflow them. But our eyes and ears are violently monopolized by the two batteries between which we are passing; they are firing into the infinity of the attackers, and each shot plunges into life. Never have I been so affected by the harrowing sight of artillery fire. The tubes bark and scream in crashes that can hardly be borne; they go and come on their brakes in starts of fantastic distinctness and violence.

In the hollows where the batteries lie hid, in the middle of a fan-shaped phosphorescence, we see the silhouettes of the gunners as they thrust in the shells. Every time they maneuver the breeches, their chests and arms are scorched by a tawny reflection. They are like the implacable workers of blast furnace; the breeches are reddened by the heat of the explosions, the steel of the guns is on fire in the evening.

For some minutes now they have fired more slowly--as if they were becoming exhausted. A few far-apart shots--the batteries fire no more; and now that the salvos are extinguished, we see the fire in the steel go out.

In the abysmal silence we hear a gunner groan:--

"There's no more shell."

The shadow of twilight resumes its place in the sky--henceforward empty. It grows cold. There is a mysterious and terrible mourning. Around me, springing from the obscurity, are groans and gasps for breath, loaded backs which disappear, stupefied eyes, and the gestures of men who wipe the sweat from their foreheads. The order to retire is repeated, in a tone that grips us--one would call it a cry of distress. There is a confused and dejected trampling; and then we descend, we go away the way we came, and the host follows itself heavily and makes more steps into the gulf.

* * * * * *


When we have gone again down the slope of the hill, we find ourselves once more in the bottom of a valley, for another height begins. Before ascending it, we stop to take breath, but ready to set off again should the flood-tide appear on the ridge yonder. We find ourselves in the middle of grassy expanses, without trenches or defense, and we are astonished not to see the supports. We are in the midst of a sort of absence.

We sit down here and there; and some one with his forehead bowed almost to his knees, translating the common thought, says:--

"It's none of our fault."

Our lieutenant goes up to the man, puts his hand on his shoulder, and says, gently:--

"No, my lads, it's none of your fault."

Just then some sections join us who say, "We're the rearguard." And some add that the two batteries of 75's up yonder are already captured. A whistle rings out--"Come, march!"

We continue the retreat. There are two battalions of us in all--no soldier in front of us; no French soldier behind us. I have neighbors who are unknown to me, motley men, routed and stupefied, artillery and engineers; unknown men who come and go away, who seem to be born and seem to die.

At one time we get a glimpse of some confusion in the orders from above. A Staff officer, issuing from no one knew where, throws himself in front of us, bars our way, and questions us in a tragic voice:--

"What are you miserable men doing? Are you running away? Forward in the name of France! I call upon you to return. Forward!"

The soldiers, who would never have thought of retiring without orders, are stunned, and can make nothing of it.

"We're going back because they told us to go back."

But they obey. They turn right about face. Some of them have already begun to march forward, and they call to their comrades:--

"Hey there! This way, it seems!"

But the order to retire returns definitely, and we obey once more, fuming against those who do not know what they say; and