Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse (chrome ebook reader TXT) 📕

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From our listening-post we see towards the east a light spreading like a conflagration, but bluer and sadder than buildings on fire. It streaks the sky above a long black cloud which extends suspended like the smoke of an extinguished fire, like an immense stain on the world. It is the returning morning.

It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering fatigue. We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth chatter. Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes from the sky into the slender framework of the black clouds. All is frozen, colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere. There is rime and snow under a burden of mist. Everything is white. Paradis moves--a heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white. I had placed my shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and it looks as if wrapped in paper. In the bottom of the hole a little snow floats, fretted and gray in the black foot-bath. Outside the hole, on the piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded dead, snow rests like muslin.

Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow darker as they approach and hail us. They are the men who come to relieve us. Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.

Paradis hoists himself out. Over the plain I follow his Father Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up white-felted soles. Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty whiteness that covers the ground.

Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which tarpaulins are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white velvet or mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and between the watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to fight against the cold, to exclude it from the meager fireside of their own chests, or who are simply frozen. A dead man has slid down, upright and hardly askew, with his feet in the trench and his chest and arms resting on the bank. He was clasping the earth when life left him. His face is turned skyward and is covered with a leprosy of ice, the eyelids are white as the eyes, the mustache caked with hard slime. Other bodies are sleeping, less white than that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on lifeless things.

"We must sleep." Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where we may hide ourselves and shut our eyes. "It can't be helped if there are stiffs in the dugouts," mutters Paradis; "in a cold like this they'll keep, they won't be too bad." We go forward, so weary that we can only see the ground.

I am alone. Where is Paradis? He must have lain down in some hole, and perhaps I did not hear his call. I meet Marthereau. "I'm looking where I can sleep, I've been on guard," he says.

"I, too; let's look together."

"What's all the row and to-do?" says Marthereau. A mingled hubbub of trampling and voices overflows from the communication trench that goes off here. "The communication trenches are full of men. Who are you?"

One of those with whom we are suddenly mixed up replies, "We're the Fifth Battalion." The newcomers stop. They are in marching order. The one that spoke sits down for a breathing space on the curves of a sand-bag that protrudes from the line. He wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve.

"What are you doing here? Have they told you to come?"

"Not half they haven't told us. We're coming to attack. We're going yonder, right up." With his head he indicates the north. The curiosity with which we look at them fastens on to a detail. "You've carried everything with you?"--"We chose to keep it, that's all."

"Forward!" they are ordered. They rise and proceed, incompletely awake, their eyes puffy, their wrinkles underlined. There are young men among them with thin necks and vacuous eyes, and old men; and in the middle, ordinary ones. They march with a commonplace and pacific step. What they are going to do seems to us, who did it last night, beyond human strength. But still they go away towards the north.

"The revally of the damned," says Marthereau.

We make way for them with a sort of admiration and a sort of terror. When they have passed, Marthereau wags his head and murmurs, "There are some getting ready, too, on the other side, with their gray uniforms. Do you think those chaps are feeling it about the attack? Then why have they come? It's not their doing, I know, but it's theirs all the same, seeing they're here.--I know, I know, but it's odd, all of it."

The sight of a passer-by alters the course of his ideas: "Tiens, there's Truc, the big one, d'you know him? Isn't he immense and pointed, that chap! As for me, I know I'm not quite hardly big enough; but him, he goes too far. He always knows what's going on, that two-yarder! For savvying everything, there's nobody going to give him the go-by! I'll go and chivvy him about a funk-hole."

"If there's a rabbit-hole anywhere?" replies the elongated passer-by, leaning on Marthereau like a poplar tree, "for sure, my old Caparthe, certainly. Tiens, there"--and unbending his elbow he makes an indicative gesture like a flag-signaler--"'Villa von Hindenburg.' and there, 'Villa Glucks auf.' If that doesn't satisfy you, you gentlemen are hard to please. P'raps there's a few lodgers in the basement, but not noisy lodgers, and you can talk out aloud in front of them, you know!"

"Ah, nom de Dieu!" cried Marthereau a quarter of an hour after we had established ourselves in one of these square-cut graves, "there's lodgers he didn't tell us about, that frightful great lightning-rod, that infinity!" His eyelids were just closing, but they opened again and he scratched his arms and thighs: "I want a snooze! It appears it's out of the question. Can't resist these things."

We settled ourselves to yawning and sighing, and finally we lighted a stump of candle, wet enough to resist us although covered with our hands; and we watched each other yawn.

The German dug-out consisted of several rooms. We were against a partition of ill-fitting planks; and on the other side, in Cave No. 2, some men were also awake. We saw light trickle through the crannies between the planks and heard rumbling voices. "It's the other section," said Marthereau.

Then we listened, mechanically. "When I was off on leave," boomed an invisible talker, "we had the hump at first, because we were thinking of my poor brother who was missing in March--dead, no doubt--and of my poor little Julien, of Class 1915, killed in the October attacks. And then bit by bit, her and me, we settled down to be happy at being together again, you see. Our little kid, the last, a five-year-old, entertained us a treat. He wanted to play soldiers with me, and I made a little gun for him. I explained the trenches to him; and he, all fluttering with delight like a bird, he was shooting at me and yelling. Ah, the damned young gentleman, he did it properly! He'll make a famous poilu later! I tell you, he's quite got the military spirit!"

A silence; then an obscure murmur of talk, in the midst of which we catch the name of Napoleon; then another voice, or the same, saying, "Wilhelm, he's a stinking beast to have brought this war on. But Napoleon, he was a great man!"

Marthereau is kneeling in front of me in the feeble and scanty rays of our candle, in the bottom of this dark ill-enclosed hole where the cold shudders through at intervals, where vermin swarm and where the sorry crowd of living men endures the faint but musty savor of a tomb; and Marthereau looks at me. He still hears, as I do, the unknown soldier who said, "Wilhelm is a stinking beast, but Napoleon was a great man," and who extolled the martial ardor of the little boy still left to him. Marthereau droops his arms and wags his weary head--and the shadow of the double gesture is thrown on the partition by the lean light in a sudden caricature.

"Ah!" says my humble companion, "we're all of us not bad sorts, and we're unlucky, and we're poor devils as well. But we're too stupid, we're too stupid!"

Again he turns his eyes on me. In his bewhiskered and poodle-like face I see his fine eyes shining in wondering and still confused contemplation of things which he is setting himself to understand in the innocence of his obscurity.

We come out of the uninhabitable shelter; the weather has bettered a little; the snow has melted, and all is soiled anew. "The wind's licked up the sugar," says Marthereau.

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I am deputed to accompany Mesnil Joseph to the refuge on the Pylones road. Sergeant Henriot gives me charge of the wounded man and hands me his clearing order. "If you meet Bertrand on the way," says Henriot, "tell him to look sharp and get busy, will you?" Bertrand went away on liaison duty last night and they have been waiting for him for an hour; the captain is getting impatient and threatens to lose his temper.

I get under way with Joseph, who walks very slowly, a little paler than usual, and still taciturn. Now and again he halts, and his face twitches. We follow the communication trenches, and a comrade appears suddenly. It is Volpatte, and he says, "I'm going with you to the foot of the hill." As he is off duty, he is wielding a magnificent twisted walking-stick, and he shakes in his hand like castanets the precious pair of scissors that never leaves him.

All three of us come out of the communication trench when the slope of the land allows us to do it without danger of bullets--the guns are not firing. As soon as we are outside we stumble upon a gathering of men. It is raining. Between the heavy legs planted there like little trees on the gray plain in the mist we see a dead man. Volpatte edges his way in to the horizontal form upon which these upright ones are waiting; then he turns round violently and shouts to us, "It's Pepin!"

"Ah!" says Joseph, who is already almost fainting. He leans on me and we draw near. Pepin is full length, his feet and hands bent and shriveled, and his rain-washed face is swollen and horribly gray.

A man who holds a pickax and whose sweating face is full of little black trenches, recounts to us the death of Pepin: "He'd gone into a funk-hole where the Boches had planked themselves, and behold no one knew he was there and they smoked the hole to make sure of cleaning it out, and the poor lad, they found him after the operation, corpsed, and all pulled out like a cat's innards in the middle of the Boche cold meat that he'd stuck--and very nicely stuck too, I may say, seeing I was in business as a butcher in the suburbs of Paris."

"One less to the squad!" says Volpatte as we go away.

We are now on the edge of the ravine at the spot where the plateau begins that our desperate charge traversed last evening, and we