Books: Under Fire
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Henri Barbusse >> Under Fire
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25 Edited by Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com
Under Fire
The Story of a Squad
By Henri Barbusse
(1874-1935)
Translated by Fitzwater Wray
To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side
at Crouy and on Hill 119
January, May, and September, 1915
Contents
The Vision
In the Earth
The Return
Volpatte and Fouillade
Sanctuary
Habits
Entraining
On Leave
The Anger of Volpatte
Argoval
The Dog
The Doorway
The Big Words
Of Burdens
The Egg
An Idyll
The Sap
A Box of Matches
Bombardment
Under Fire
The Refuge
Going About
The Fatigue-Party
The Dawn
I
The Vision
MONT BLANC, the Dent du Midi, and the Aiguille Verte look across at
the bloodless faces that show above the blankets along the gallery
of the sanatorium. This roofed-in gallery of rustic wood-work on the
first floor of the palatial hospital is isolated in Space and
overlooks the world. The blankets of fine wool--red, green, brown,
or white--from which those wasted cheeks and shining eyes protrude
are quite still. No sound comes from the long couches except when
some one coughs, or that of the pages of a book turned over at long
and regular intervals, or the undertone of question and quiet answer
between neighbors, or now and again the crescendo disturbance of a
daring crow, escaped to the balcony from those flocks that seem
threaded across the immense transparency like chaplets of black
pearls.
Silence is obligatory. Besides, the rich and high-placed who have
come here from all the ends of the earth, smitten by the same evil,
have lost the habit of talking. They have withdrawn into themselves,
to think of their life and of their death.
A servant appears in the balcony, dressed in white and walking
softly. She brings newspapers and hands them about.
"It's decided," says the first to unfold his paper. "War is
declared."
Expected as the news is, its effect is almost dazing, for this
audience feels that its portent is without measure or limit. These
men of culture and intelligence, detached from the affairs of the
world and almost from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened
by suffering and meditation, as far remote from their fellow men as
if they were already of the Future--these men look deeply into the
distance, towards the unknowable land of the living and the insane.
"Austria's act is a crime," says the Austrian.
"France must win," says the Englishman.
"I hope Germany will be beaten," says the German.
They settle down again under the blankets and on the pillows,
looking to heaven and the high peaks. But in spite of that vast
purity, the silence is filled with the dire disclosure of a moment
before.
War!
Some of the invalids break the silence, and say the word again under
their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the
age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which
they gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage.
The tranquil expanses of the valley, adorned with soft and smooth
pastures and hamlets rosy as the rose, with the sable shadow-stains
of the majestic mountains and the black lace and white of pines and
eternal snow, become alive with the movements of men, whose
multitudes swarm in distinct masses. Attacks develop, wave by wave,
across the fields and then stand still. Houses are eviscerated like
human beings and towns like houses. Villages appear in crumpled
whiteness as though fallen from heaven to earth. The very shape of
the plain is changed by the frightful heaps of wounded and slain.
Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing
from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force. One's
eyes follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of
Death. To north and south and west ajar there are battles on every
side. Turn where you will, there is war in every corner of that
vastness.
One of the pale-faced clairvoyants lifts himself on his elbow,
reckons and numbers the fighters present and to come--thirty
millions of soldiers. Another stammers, his eyes full of slaughter,
"Two armies at death-grips--that is one great army committing
suicide."
"It should not have been," says the deep and hollow voice of the
first in the line. But another says, "It is the French Revolution
beginning again." "Let thrones beware!" says another's undertone.
The third adds, "Perhaps it is the last war of all." A silence
follows, then some heads are shaken in dissent whose faces have been
blanched anew by the stale tragedy of sleepless night--"Stop war?
Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease."
Some one coughs, and then the Vision is swallowed up in the huge
sunlit peace of the lush meadows. In the rich colors of the glowing
kine, the black forests, the green fields and the blue distance,
dies the reflection of the fire where the old world burns and
breaks. Infinite silence engulfs the uproar of hate and pain from
the dark swarmings of mankind. They who have spoken retire one by
one within themselves, absorbed once more in their own mysterious
malady.
But when evening is ready to descend within the valley, a storm
breaks over the mass of Mont Blanc. One may not go forth in such
peril, for the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great
veranda, to that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these
victims of a great internal wound encompass with their gaze the
elemental convulsion.
They watch how the explosions of thunder on the mountain upheave the
level clouds like a stormy sea, how each one hurls a shaft of fire
and a column of cloud together into the twilight; and they turn
their wan and sunken faces to follow the flight of the eagles that
wheel in the sky and look from their supreme height down through the
wreathing mists, down to earth.
"Put an end to war?" say the watchers.--"Forbid the Storm!"
Cleansed from the passions of party and faction, liberated from
prejudice and infatuation and the tyranny of tradition, these
watchers on the threshold of another world are vaguely conscious of
the simplicity of the present and the yawning possibilities of the
future.
The man at the end of the rank cries, "I can see crawling things
down there"--"Yes, as though they were alive"--"Some sort of plant,
perhaps"--"Some kind of men"--
And there amid the baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark
disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like
evil spirits, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which
to their seeing is made of mud and water, while figures appear and
fast fix themselves to the surface of it, all blinded and borne down
with filth, like the dreadful castaways of shipwreck. And it seems
to them that these are soldiers.
The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and
scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who
strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty
million slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt
and error, uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning
Will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly
certain that the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose
number and whose misery alike are infinite will transform the old
world.
2
In the Earth
THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation
reveals together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the
night, and a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up
there--so high and so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of
dreadful birds goes circling up with strong and palpitating cries to
look down upon the earth.
The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools
and gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the
water and sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the
convoys of the night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that
glisten in the weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken
stakes protruding from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in
tangled coils. With its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be
an endless gray sheet that floats on the sea and has here and there
gone under. Though no rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing,
washed out and drowned, and even the wan light seems to flow.
Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with
a layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.
I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are
"us." We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking
wrap us up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch
themselves, yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden,
dirt-disfigured, pierced by the little lamps of dull and
heavy-lidded eyes, matted with uncut beards and foul with forgotten
hair.
Crack! Crack! Boom!--rifle fire and cannonade. Above us and all
around, it crackles and rolls, in long gusts or separate explosions.
The flaming and melancholy storm never, never ends. For more than
fifteen months, for five hundred days in this part of the world
where we are, the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning
to night and from night to morning. We are buried deep in an
everlasting battlefield; but like the ticking of the clocks at home
in the days gone by--in the now almost legendary Past--you only hear
the noise when you listen.
A babyish face with puffy eyelids, and cheek-bones as lurid as if
lozenge-shaped bits of crimson paper had been stuck on, comes out of
the ground, opens one eye, then the other. It is Paradis. The skin
of his fat cheeks is scored with the marks of the folds in the
tent-cloth that has served him for night-cap. The glance of his
little eye wanders all round me; he sees me, nods, and
says--"Another night gone, old chap."
"Yes, sonny; how many more like it still?"
He raises his two plump arms skywards. He has managed to scrape out
by the steps of the dug-out and is beside me. After stumbling over
the dim obstacle of a man who sits in the shadows, fervently
scratches himself and sighs hoarsely, Paradis makes off--lamely
splashing like a penguin through the flooded picture.
One by one the men appear from the depths. In the corners, heavy
shadows are seen forming--human clouds that move and break up. One
by one they become recognizable. There is one who comes out hooded
with his blanket--a savage, you would say, or rather, the tent of a
savage, which walks and sways from side to side. Near by, and
heavily framed in knitted wool, a square face is disclosed,
yellow-brown as though iodized, and patterned with blackish patches,
the nose broken, the eyes of Chinese restriction and red-circled, a
little coarse and moist mustache like a greasing-brush.
"There's Volpatte. How goes it, Firmin?"
"It goes, it goes, and it comes," says Volpatte. His heavy and
drawling voice is aggravated by hoarseness. He coughs--"My number's
up, this time. Say, did you hear it last night, the attack? My boy,
talk about a bombardment--something very choice in the way of
mixtures!" He sniffles and passes his sleeve under his concave nose.
His hand gropes within his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds
the skin, and scratches. "I've killed thirty of them in the candle,"
he growls; "in the big dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are
some like crumbs of metal bread. You can see them running about in
the straw like I'm telling you."
"Who's been attacking? The Boches?"
"The Boches and us too--out Vimy way--a counterattack--didn't you
hear it?"
"No," the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; "I was
snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."
"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or
rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look,
see, there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the
ground level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just
body-room for one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares,
wagging the rough and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had
never been finished. "I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was
woke up by the relief of the 129th that went by--not by the noise,
but the smell. Ah, all those chaps with their feet on the level with
my nose! It woke me up, it gave me nose-ache so."
I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the
trail of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.
"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.
"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you
smell, the more you have of 'em."
"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I
was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in
time to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those
muck-heaps was going to pinch it off me."
"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came
could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning
had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful,
he squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes
blinked among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of
his toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His
hands were horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the
palms plastered in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight,
exhaled the scent of an ancient stewpan. Though busily scratching,
he chatted with big Barque, who leaned towards him from a little way
off.
"I wasn't as mucky as this when I was a civvy," he said.
"Well, my poor friend, it's a dirty change for the worse," said
Barque.
"Lucky for you," says Tirette, going one better; "when it comes to
kids, you'll present madame with some little niggers!"
Blaire took offense, and gathering gloom wrinkled his brow. "What
have you got to give me lip about, you? What next? It's war-time. As
for you, bean-face, you think perhaps the war hasn't changed your
phizog and your manners? Look at yourself, monkey-snout,
buttock-skin! A man must be a beast to talk as you do." He passed
his hand over the dark deposit on his face, which the rains of those
days had proved finally indelible, and added, "Besides, if I am as I
am, it's my own choosing. To begin with, I have no teeth. The major
said to me a long time ago, 'You haven't a single tooth. It's not
enough. At your next rest,' he says, 'take a turn round to the
estomalogical ambulance.'"
"The tomatological ambulance," corrected Barque.
"Stomatological," Bertrand amended.
"You have all the making of an army cook--you ought to have been
one," said Barque.
"My idea, too," retorted Blaire innocently. Some one laughed. The
black man got up at the insult. "You give me belly-ache," he said
with scorn. "I'm off to the latrines."
When his doubly dark silhouette had vanished, the others scrutinized
once more the great truth that down here in the earth the cooks are
the dirtiest of men.
"If you see a chap with his skin and toggery so smeared and stained
that you wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole, you can say to
yourself, 'Probably he's a cook.' And the dirtier he is, the more
likely to be a cook."
"It's true, and true again," said Marthereau.
"Tiens, there's Tirloir! Hey, Tirloir!"
He comes up busily, peering this way and that, on an eager scent.
His insignificant head, pale as chlorine, hops centrally about in
the cushioning collar of a greatcoat that is much too heavy and big
for him. His chin is pointed, and his upper teeth protrude. A
wrinkle round his mouth is so deep with dirt that it looks like a
muzzle. As usual, he is angry, and as usual, he rages aloud.
"Some one cut my pouch in two last night!"
"It was the relief of the 129th. Where had you put it?"
He indicates a bayonet stuck in the wall of the trench close to the
mouth of a funk-hole--"There, hanging on the toothpick there."
"Ass!" comes the chorus. "Within reach of passing soldiers! Not
dotty, are you?"
"It's hard lines all the same," wails Tirloir. Then suddenly a fit
of rage seizes him, his face crumples, his little fists clench in
fury, he tightens them like knots in string and waves them about.
"Alors quoi? Ah, if I had hold of the mongrel that did it! Talk
about breaking his jaw--I'd stave in his bread-pan, I'd--there was a
whole Camembert in there, I'll go and look for it." He massages his
stomach with the little sharp taps of a guitar player, and plunges
into the gray of the morning, grinning yet dignified, with his
awkward outlines of an invalid in a dressing-gown. We hear him
grumbling until he disappears.
"Strange man, that," says Pepin; the others chuckle. "He's
daft and crazy," declares Marthereau, who is in the habit of
fortifying the expression of his thought by using two synonyms at
once.
* * * * * *
"Tiens, old man," says Tulacque, as he comes up. "Look at this."
Tulacque is magnificent. He is wearing a lemon-yellow coat made out
of an oilskin sleeping-sack. He has arranged a hole in the middle to
get his head through, and compelled his shoulder-straps and belt to
go over it. He is tall and bony. He holds his face in advance as he
walks, a forceful face, with eyes that squint. He has something in
his hand. "I found this while digging last night at the end of the
new gallery to change the rotten gratings. It took my fancy
off-hand, that knick-knack. It's an old pattern of hatchet."
It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old
brown bone--quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.
"Very handy," said Tulacque, fingering it. "Yes, not badly thought
out. Better balanced than the regulation ax. That'll be useful to
me, you'll see." As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he
would himself pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking
in the bowels of the earth.
One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand's squad and the half-section,
at an elbow of the trench. Just here it is a little wider than in
the straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you
must throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and
your stomach against the stomach of the other.
Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel. No night
watchman works here. At night we are ready for making earthworks in
front, but as long as the day lasts we have nothing to do. Huddled
up together and linked arm in arm, it only remains to await the
evening as best we can.
Daylight has at last crept into the interminable crevices that
furrow this part of the earth, and now it finds the threshold of our
holes. It is the melancholy light of the North Country, of a
restricted and muddy sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is
heavy with the smoke and smell of factories. In this leaden light,
the uncouth array of these dwellers in the depths reveals the stark
reality of the huge and hopeless misery that brought it into being.
But that is like the rattle of rifles and the verberation of
artillery. The drama in which we are actors has lasted much too long
for us to be surprised any more, either at the stubbornness we have
evolved or the garb we have devised against the rain that comes from
above, against the mud that comes from beneath, and against the
cold--that sort of infinity that is everywhere. The skins of
animals, bundles of blankets, Balaklava helmets, woolen caps, furs,
bulging mufflers (sometimes worn turban-wise), paddings and
quiltings, knittings and double-knittings, coverings and roofings
and cowls, tarred or oiled or rubbered, black or all the colors
(once upon a time) of the rainbow--all these things mask and magnify
the men, and wipe out their uniforms almost as effectively as their
skins. One has fastened on his back a square of linoleum, with a big
draught-board pattern in white and red, that he found in the middle
of the dining-room of some temporary refuge. That is Pepin.
We know him afar off by his harlequin placard sooner even than by
his pale Apache face. Here is Barque's bulging chest-protector,
carven from an eiderdown quilt, formerly pink, but now fantastically
bleached and mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises
like a ruined tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass
of moleskin, with the fur inside, adorns little Eudore with the
burnished back of a beetle; while the golden corselet of Tulacque
the Big Chief surpasses all.
The "tin hat" gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the
beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing
it--on the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like
Cadilhac, or on a cotton cap like Barque--produce a complicated
diversity of appearance.
And our legs! I went down just now, bent double, into our dug-out,
the little low cave that smells musty and damp, where one stumbles
over empty jam-pots and dirty rags, where two long lumps lay asleep,
while in the corner a kneeling shape rummaged a pouch by
candle-light. As I climbed out, the rectangle of entry afforded me a
revelation of our legs. Flat on the ground, vertically in the air,
or aslant; spread about, doubled up, or mixed together; blocking the
fairway and cursed by passers-by, they present a collection of many
colors and many shapes--gaiters, leggings black or yellow, long or
short, in leather, in tawny cloth, in any sort of waterproof stuff;
puttees in dark blue, light blue, black, sage green, khaki, and
beige. Alone of all his kind, Volpatte has retained the modest
gaiters of mobilization. Mesnil Andre has displayed for a
fortnight a pair of thick woolen stockings, ribbed and green; and
Tirette has always been known by his gray cloth puttees with white
stripes, commandeered from a pair of civilian trousers that was
hanging goodness knows where at the beginning of the war. As for
Marthereau's puttees, they are not both of the same hue, for he
failed to find two fag-ends of greatcoat equally worn and equally
dirty, to be cut up into strips.
There are legs wrapped up in rags, too, and even in newspapers,
which are kept in place with spirals of thread or--much more
practical--telephone wire. Pepin fascinated his friends and
the passers-by with a pair of fawn gaiters, borrowed from a corpse.
Barque, who poses as a resourceful man, full of ideas--and Heaven
knows what a bore it makes of him at times!--has white calves, for
he wrapped surgical bandages round his leg-cloths to preserve them,
a snowy souvenir at his latter end of the cotton cap at the other,
which protrudes below his helmet and is left behind in its turn by a
saucy red tassel. Poterloo has been walking about for a month in the
boots of a German soldier, nearly new, and with horseshoes on the
heels. Caron entrusted them to Poterloo when he was sent back on
account of his arm. Caron had taken them himself from a Bavarian
machine-gunner, knocked out near the Pylones road. I can hear
Caron telling about it yet--
"Old man, he was there, his buttocks in a hole, doubled up, gaping
at the sky with his legs in the air, and his pumps offered
themselves to me with an air that meant they were worth my while. 'A
tight fit,' says I. But you talk about a job to bring those
beetle-crushers of his away! I worked on top of him, tugging,
twisting and shaking, for half an hour and no lie about it. With his
feet gone quite stiff, the patient didn't help me a bit. Then at
last the legs of it--they'd been pulled about so--came unstuck at
the knees, and his breeks tore away, and all the lot came, flop!
There was me, all of a sudden, with a full boot in each fist. The
legs and feet had to be emptied out."
"You're going it a bit strong!"
"Ask Euterpe the cyclist if it isn't true. I tell you he did it
along of me, too. We shoved our arms inside the boots and pulled out
of 'em some bones and bits of sock and bits of feet. But look if
they weren't worth while!"
So, until Caron returns, Poterloo continues on his behalf the
wearing of the Bavarian machine-gunner's boots.
Thus do they exercise their wits, according to their intelligence,
their vivacity, their resources, and their boldness, in the struggle
with the terrible discomfort. Each one seems to make the revealing
declaration, "This is all that I knew, all I was able, all that I
dared to do in the great misery which has befallen me."
* * * * * *
Mesnil Joseph drowses; Blaire yawns; Marthereau smokes, "eyes
front." Lamuse scratches himself like a gorilla, and Eudore like a
marmoset. Volpatte coughs, and says, "I'm kicking the bucket."
Mesnil Andre has got out his mirror and comb and is tending
his fine chestnut beard as though it were a rare plant. The
monotonous calm is disturbed here and there by the outbreaks of
ferocious resentment provoked by the presence of parasites--endemic,
chronic, and contagious.
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