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

He yields and sinks. I cling to him as if it were salvation. The words in his throat make a lifeless noise. He brandishes a hand which has only three fingers--I saw it clearly outlined against the clouds like a fork.

Just as he totters in my arms, resisting death, a thunderous blow strikes him in the back. His arms drop, and his head also, which is violently doubled back, but his body is hurled against me like a projectile, like a superhuman blast.

I have rolled on the ground; I get up, and while I am hastily trying to find myself again I feel a light blow in the waist. What is it? I walk forward, and still forward, with my empty hands. I see the others pass, they go by in front of me. _I_, I advance no more. Suddenly I fall to the ground.

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CHAPTER XIV


THE RUINS

I fall on my knees, and then full length. I do what so many others have done.

I am alone on the earth, face to face with the mud, and I can no longer move. The frightful searching of the shells alights around me. The hoarse hurricane which does not know me is yet trying to find the place where I am!

Then the battle goes away, and its departure is heartrending. In spite of all my efforts, the noise of the firing fades and I am alone; the wind blows and I am naked.

I shall remain nailed to the ground. By clinging to the earth and plunging my hands into the depth of the swamp as far as the stones, I get my neck round a little to see the enormous burden that my back supports. No--it is only the immensity on me.

My gaze goes crawling. In front of me there are dark things all linked together, which seem to seize or to embrace one another. I look at those hills which shut out my horizon and imitate gestures and men. The multitude downfallen there imprisons me in its ruins. I am walled in by those who are lying down, as I was walled in before by those who stood.

I am not in pain. I am extraordinarily calm; I am drunk with tranquillity. Are they dead, all--those? I do not know. The dead are specters of the living, but the living are specters of the dead. Something warm is licking my hand. The black mass which overhangs me is trembling. It is a foundered horse, whose great body is emptying itself, whose blood is flowing like poor touches of a tongue on to my hand. I shut my eyes, bemused, and think of a bygone merry-making; and I remember that I once saw, at the end of a hunt, against the operatic background of a forest, a child-animal whose life gushed out amid general delight.

A voice is speaking beside me.

No doubt the moon has come out--I cannot see as high as the cloud escarpments, as high as the sky's opening. But that blenching light is making the corpses shine like tombstones.

I try to find the low voice. There are two bodies, one above the other. The one underneath must be gigantic--his arms are thrown backward in a hurricane gesture; his stiff, disheveled hair has crowned him with a broken crown. His eyes are opaque and glaucous, like two expectorations, and his stillness is greater than anything one may dream of. On the other the moon's beams are setting points and lines a-sparkle and silvering gold. It is he who is talking to me, quietly and without end. But although his low voice is that of a friend, his words are incoherent. He is mad--I am abandoned by him! No matter, I will drag myself up to him to begin with. I look at him again. I shake myself and blink my eyes, so as to look better. He wears on his body a uniform accursed! Then with a start, and my hand claw-wise, I stretch myself towards the glittering prize to secure it. But I cannot go nearer him; it seems that I no longer have a body. He has looked at me. He has recognized my uniform, if it is recognizable, and my cap, if I have it still. Perhaps he has recognized the indelible seal of my race that I carry printed on my features. Yes, on my face he has recognized that stamp. Something like hatred has blotted out the face that I saw dawning so close to me. Our two hearts make a desperate effort to hurl ourselves on each other. But we can no more strike each other than we can separate ourselves.

But has he seen me? I cannot say now. He is stirred by fever as by the wind; he is choked with blood. He writhes, and that shows me the beaten-down wings of his black cloak.

Close by, some of the wounded have cried out; and farther away one would say they are singing--beyond the low stakes so twisted and shriveled that they look as if guillotined.

He does not know what he is saying. He does not even know that he is speaking, that his thoughts are coming out. The night is torn into rags by sudden bursts; it fills again at random with clusters of flashes; and his delirium enters into my head. He murmurs that logic is a thing of terrible chains, and that all things cling together. He utters sentences from which distinct words spring, like the scattered hasty gleams they include in hymns--the Bible, history, majesty, folly. Then he shouts:--

"There is nothing in the world but the Empire's glory!"

His cry shakes some of the motionless reefs. And I, like an invincible echo, I cry:--

"There is only the glory of France!"

I do not know if I did really cry out, and if our words did collide in the night's horror. His head is quite bare. His slender neck and bird-like profile issue from a fur collar. There are things like owls shining on his breast. It seems to me as if silence is digging itself into the brains and lungs of the dark prisoners who imprison us, and that we are listening to it.

He rambles more loudly now, as if he bore a stifling secret; he calls up multitudes, and still more multitudes. He is obsessed by multitudes--"Men, men!" he says. The soil is caressed by some sounds of sighs, terribly soft, by confidences which are interchanged without their wishing it. Now and again, the sky collapses into light, and that flash of instantaneous sunshine changes the shape of the plain every time, according to its direction. Then does the night take all back again athwart the rolling echoes.

"Men! Men!"

"What about them, then?" says a sudden jeering voice which falls like a stone.

"Men _must_ not awake," the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollow tones.

"Don't worry!" says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifies me.

Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness--I see them by their heavy groans--and look around them.

The shadow talks to himself and repeats his insane words:--

"Men _must_ not awake."

The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle, says again:--

"Don't worry!"

Yonder, in the hemisphere of night, comets glide, blending their cries of engines and owls with their flaming entrails. Will the sky ever recover the huge peace of the sun and the stainless blue?

A little order, a little lucidity are coming back into my mind. Then I begin to think about myself.

Am I going to die, yes or no? Where can I be wounded? I have managed to look at my hands, one by one; they are not dead, and I saw nothing in their dark trickling. It is extraordinary to be made motionless like this, without knowing where or how. I can do no more on earth than lift my eyes a little to the edge of the world where I have rolled.

Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying. I see that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eating grass. I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment--I know him by the white in his mane--rearing and whinnying like the true battle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the truly unhappy are. Once again, I recall the red deer's little one, mutilated on its carpet of fresh crimson, and the emotion which I had not on that bygone day rises into my throat. Animals are innocence incarnate. This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little child, but a horse. My neck gives way, I utter a groan, and my face gropes upon the ground.

The animal's start has altered my place and shot me on my side, nearer still to the man who was talking. He has unbent, and is lying on his back. Thus he offers his face like a mirror to the moon's pallor, and shows hideously that he is wounded in the neck. I feel that he is going to die. His words are hardly more now than the rustle of wings. He has said some unintelligible things about a Spanish painter, and some motionless portraits in the palaces--the Escurial, Spain, Europe. Suddenly he is repelling with violence some beings who are in his past:--

"Begone, you dreamers!" he says, louder than the stormy sky where the flames are red as blood, louder than the falling flashes and the harrowing wind, louder than all the night which enshrouds us and yet continues to stone us.

He is seized with a frenzy which bares his soul as naked as his neck:--

"The truth is revolutionary," gasps the nocturnal voice; "get you gone, you men of truth, you who cast disorder among ignorance, you who strew words and sow the wind; you contrivers, begone! You bring in the reign of men! But the multitude hates you and mocks you!"

He laughs, as if he heard the multitude's laughter.

And around us another burst of convulsive laughter grows hugely bigger in the plain's black heart:--

"Wot's 'e sayin' now, that chap?"

"Let him be. You can see 'e knows more'n 'e says."

"Ah, la, la!"

I am so near to him that I alone gather the rest of his voice, and he says to me very quietly:--

"I have confidence in the abyss of the people."

And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes with horror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understood what he was saying! A picture comes to life before my eyes--that prince, whom I saw from below,