Twilight and Dawn

Sunday, September 6.

WE have been here since one o’clock, all five of us, in a beetfield strewn with sheaves of wheat — flotsam left high and dry by the wave of attack. We bind them firmly together and stack them; the day of fighting ends with the gestures of the harvester. Some sort of instinct, I suppose, makes us carry the sheaves to the farm-house at our right, where we stop to rest, the German machine-gun in the tree keeping watch over our huge shadows. Over yonder some one is creeping along: a man of the telegraph corps, followed by several comrades, twenty yards or so behind him. They have no water, they tell us, only Chartreuse.

News travels quickly on the battlefield. From time to time a new soldier comes crawling up to us, holding his hand before his face, protecting himself against the machine-gun as one shelters a lantern, and gives an account of what he has seen on the way: a corpse, a German, two wounded men. From every man who comes up we demand water; he eagerly hands over his canteen, but (bootless miracle!) we invariably find some dregs of cognac, or crême de menthe, or rum. Each newcomer’s bayonet is still fixed: the last remnant of the charge. As he takes his place in the straw beside us, he removes it, with the innocent gesture of a woman taking off her rings at night; then flings himself down full length.

It is cold, but what utter repose! The men are smoking, taking great care on account of the straw. A corporal (once a masseur at Vichy) is conscientiously kneading his comrades who have stiff backs. He is very popular: his services are preëmpted in advance, as he moves from sheaf to sheaf. He will not allow himself to be hurried, however. He amuses himself by telling each man the names of his various muscles.

A haystack is on fire over yonder. My neighbors, who are peasants, discuss its cost. I find out exactly what it is worth; also the value of a single sheaf of wheat — the one I am lying on, for instance. We chew a few grains of this wheat, and find it excellent. It would seem that we are in a rich countryside: splendid poplars, immense beets, abundant harvests. This battlefield of ours is no cheap affair. I hear the masseur say that he saw Michal’s body; the bullet had taken him full in the heart. Why did it have to be the masseur, I wonder? Now there is no more hope.

Every now and then German voices come down the wind to us. A soldier comes in, standing erect; he makes the ceiling seem higher, and somehow it becomes easier for us to breathe. Another soldier recognizes me with a shout of joy, — ' Why, here’s the sergeant interpreter!’— and questions me eagerly, as if he had been waiting for me to translate for him everything he had seen during the day. The conversationalists have already won the advantage over the quieter spirits, and are telling how they will never to their dying day forget the adventures of the afternoon. They talk slowly, as one talks by the fire on a winter’s evening. Dolléro, resting against my shoulder, is listening without moving a muscle to sentences that are stirring his heart to the very depths. Bernard, his chum, is dead; when the Germans advanced in the darkness, shouting that they were Englishmen, his cousin, believing them, stood up, then fell, never to rise.

The machine-gun, better aimed now, lets fly, the bullets grazing our caps. We stop talking. We are feeling the effects of all the liqueurs that have been passed around — bénédictine, kirsch, cognac. We press our lips to the canteen, then hand it to the next man. The alcohol showers all its hot kisses on us. The bullets whine. We think of the word with which we shall acclaim the first one that strikes us; it hangs on our lips, all ready for the impact, and back of it follows a whole procession of other words, waiting for the succeeding bullets.

A riderless horse gallops by into the night, dodging blows aimed at him, and drawing a rain of death from the shadows as he passes.

Now the wounded are calling to us from over beyond the poplars. We form patrolling parties: later we shall try to get to some village. The bolder spirits put the timid ones to shame, so that it is these latter who lead the way. We hear them talking as they stop beside the wounded men: —

‘Don’t make a noise. We’re here. Do you see us?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s all right. You’re not frightened any more?’

‘No.’

Away in the distance we hear the colonel himself, answering in that cadenced tone which is the very voice of anguish.

‘Do you feel badly, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are we hurting you, sir?’ ‘No.’

And we carry away as many wounded as we can, as from a fire, to the rear of this crackling, smoking fringe of France.

We are off. Every fifty yards we let the colonel rest a little, and change places. Jeudit, who had lain close by his chief’s side since he was wounded, carries his cap and his sword. He takes entire charge of the poor pale head: now he supports it with his hand, now he makes a pillow of a knapsack stuffed with straw. He wipes the colonel’s brow, for he is hot; he draws a hood over his head, for he is cold. Each soldier, following Jeudit’s example, lavishes his solicitude on an arm, a hand, or a shoulder, none venturing, in his boundless respect, even to think of his commander as a whole. The colonel, out of gratitude, divides himself between us.

‘Jeudit! My neck! Dolléro! My arm!’

A big countryman stammers out a few words which he has been getting ready ever since we left the haymow: —

‘Everything’s going finely, sir; everything’s going first-rate!’

The colonel smiles. He is trembling with cold. We take away the cloak of the man who has fewest straps to unfasten, and spread it over our chief. He is wandering a bit now.

‘Shut the windows!’

‘Yes, sir; we’ll shut them,’ answer the men.

He opens his eyes and sees the burning village. He murmurs, — speaking aloud to avoid thinking, —

‘That fire hurts my eyes — it hurts my eyes.’

‘We’ll put it out, sir,’ answer the men.

Cries come to us from out of the darkness on all sides — city-dwellers, who call us by our rank, and peasants, who shout inarticulately. All differ according to the regiment to which they belong. ' Holà, holà!' call the men of the Loire country; those from the North, ‘Lo, lo!’ and the Bourbonnais, ‘Voilà, voilà!’

‘Voila! my shoulder!’ cries a voice.

The colonel shudders to hear this outcry from a man who is wounded in the same place as he himself. ‘Take me too!’ comes the voice. ‘We can’t do it, old man!’ ‘But you’re taking somebody else!' ‘It’s the colonel.’

That gives him a moment of resignation. Whenever we can, we try to come to a halt close to a wounded man. He tells us all about his bad luck, his wound, and when we move on, he keeps silent. Then, after we have gone a little way, we hear him calling in torment, —

‘Take me too, colonel! Take me too!’

We shout that we are coming back. Some of them curse us. Others innocently believe what we say, and give us directions for finding them again.

‘I’m just to the left of the big haystack, near the hedge. Do you see? I '11 light a match every now and then.’

‘Bring that man along too,’says the colonel.

‘Very well, sir,’ answer the men.

We leave him lying there, but the colonel thinks a second stretcher is following along behind, and bites his lips the better to repress his anguish. From time to time an alarm is given: a riderless horse gallops up to us, but we barely touch him before he is off toward the poplars, only to come thundering back from the German hands that reach out for him. Wounded men everywhere. We feel glad when some sullen fellow refuses to look at us, or to answer our questions; glad, too, if they do not call us by name, as one poor man has just done, for to-night our names seem more rawly sensitive than our hearts. Occasionally we make a détour which the colonel cannot understand; it is to avoid a corpse. Every so often the big peasant, taken by a spasm of optimism, stammers out, —

‘Everything’s going finely, sir. It could n’t be better.’

The fires die down, then flare up as if fresh fuel had been brought them. The four of us who are not carrying the colonel take the eight knapsacks, the eight guns, the eight cartridge-belts, stooping as we go to pick up a sword, another knapsack, thus making a heavier burden still for those who are to relieve us. From time to time the colonel bids farewell to some wounded man, and tells me to remember his name. They should have had short, simple names, however — names of week-days, like Jeudit. I have forgotten them all.

Monday, September 7.

‘Get up, old man!’

A hand awakens me gently. It is a chaplain, who has discovered me in the depths of a broken-seated chair. He extracts me with difficulty, pulling aside the shattered slats, and helps me escape from the wreckage of yesterday.

‘So the old Boches dropped you there, did they?'

The word ‘old’ is the only antidote that chaplains have been able to discover against the war. They say ‘the old shell,’ ‘the old Crown Prince.’

‘Come along with me. There’s a cot in your colonel’s room.’

At six o’clock I wake up again. Through a hole in the curtains I get a sample of daylight; it is bright and clear. The cannon are growling. Never has a traveler, arriving at a strange inn at midnight, felt greater curiosity and disquiet. Am I in a village? In a forest? Are we retreating? Have we been victorious? I can get answers to all these questions merely by opening that door, and yet I do not hurry. I dress in the darkness, and with the clinking of my accoutrements things begin to come back to me. Over there, on the table, lie the objects Jeudit gave me in exchange for his knapsack: a cap with five stripes, a gold watch, a wallet. Never was a soldier’s knapsack ransomed so dearly. The colonel is asleep in a white bedstead. His croix d’honneur is pinned to the curtain. I open the door softly and leave the room abashed, feeling out of place in so august a picture.

Outside, a long corridor, like that of a provincial hotel, with yellow doors opening off it. By the doors lie boots, swords — the belongings of wounded officers. On a high shelf are piled rubber boots and hats—the leavings of the farm-hands who used to live here.

‘What place is this?’

It is the sort of question one asks when one’s train makes a stop. The orderly does n’t know.

‘Is it much of a town?’

The orderly says that he arrived here only last night, and has no idea. He thinks, though, that it is very small.

He leads me to a wooden staircase. As I go down the winding steps I begin to see, in a great room, pale heads, sallow heads, bloody heads. The orderly pushes me on, and before I know what has happened I have wound down into the very heart of human anguish. The stretchers are fairly overflowing: they lie close-packed, and, in order to reach the door, I must walk all the way round certain wounded men who stare at me, longing to know who I am. I lose my way in a labyrinth which brings me up short before the impassable stretcher of a soldier who has fainted dead away. There is no going on; I have to return. The men of the medical corps gruffly ask me my business — for even officers are forbidden to enter here. They move about, these doctors, silencing any man who tries to talk, so that one hears nothing but the groans. The wounded soldiers, uneasy as to the meaning of the pink or green labels they wear, watch for the label of each corpse as it is carried out, and turn pale or sigh contentedly according as its color does or does not match their own.

At the end of the room there is a glass door through which one sees into a kitchen where a strapping young woman is walking calmly to and fro. Every now and then she puts her face up against the glass, and all the wounded men with pink labels — the light cases — try to sit up and look at her. Wasps are buzz-buzzing against the panes. Every time some one cries out in pain, a shortsighted soldier puts on his glasses and peers about to see who it is.

On the road again. I am hunting for the flag which Flamond’s company has just captured from the Germans.

Night is falling. Stray soldiers trudge along in the ditches; they look as if they were dragging the heavy-laden stretchers which follow two hundred yards or so behind. Along come some slightly wounded men; confident that help is at hand, they ask no questions. No dead men here, no dying: this part of the battlefield near the hospital is kept cleared, for sweet sanitation’s sake. The haystacks and the hedgerows are robbed of their Wounded, just as the lower branches of an orchard are stripped of fruit. One sees motionless groups: stretcherbearers grow weary of their burden, lower it to the ground, and go back for a lighter one. Tired feet drag along; in the distance a spasm of coughing; country night-sounds.

All those who have been carrying on the day’s fighting alone — munition convoy men, telegraphers — are streaming back to the village; you may know the countrymen by the way they say ‘Good-evening’ to you. Then one begins to meet fewer passers-by. The road shoulders itself up above the meadows, and there, far, far below me, spreads out the war-infested plain. From where I stand it already looks ravaged, with its ploughed fields in disorder, its scars, and all the odds and ends cast up by the earth when it covers dead men — caps, shoes — here a pair of suspenders spread out as if for sale, there a stiff hand reaching up out of a furrow. I plod along. The day is to come when, looking back on this solitary walk after years in the trenches, I shall have much the same feeling as if I had walked one evening on the surface of the waters.

Now we are on our way back, in three groups. The first is bringing Captain Flamond, dead with a bullet in his neck. His arms hang down, the fingers purple. Soldiers die with bloodstained hands, just as the fingers of dead writers are stained with ink. The men carrying him walk with broken step, just as they have seen the stretcherbearers do. Next comes the group with the German flag. (The men were uncertain as to whether they should stretch it over the captain’s body, but they had a vague suspicion that this might not be the correct thing. Should they spread it, under him, perhaps?) It is a great purple flag, black-starred, and decorated with a cross which we remove before the eyes of the prisoners who are following behind. I walk at the end of the procession with a Fähnrich, who is already trying to air his French. Artaud points to me and says that I have been to Berlin. After that the fellow sticks to me like a burr. He comes from Berlin, it seems. I say nothing, but the smell and the accent of Berlin remain with me.

It is midnight when we come up with Captain Lambert, who is writing to his daughters while waiting for the bread convoys to arrive. He used to send one letter for all three of them, but since yesterday each has taken on a separate existence for him.

‘Are we ever going to get bread?’ he asks.

All night long he will get up to put this question to cavalrymen, quartermasters, dispatch-riders, who will feel obliged to offer him some chocolate or the remnants of a sausage. The riflebullets are making a tremendous racket; we have stuffed cotton in our ears to keep the sound out — all of us except the captain, whom we see jumping up every now and then, turning pale, and then settling down again. His agitation seems a bit absurd to us, just as Ulysses’ excitement amused the sailors whose ears had been stopped.

Now and again, a blade of grass comes to life for an instant beneath my hand, against my cheek, and quivers like a woman’s eyelash. Again, suddenly awaking, I see peering down at me a new, unknown face, the very sight of which wearies me, as if I were in some way responsible for it — as if I had to imagine for the first time goodness, suffering, or sadness, according as the face is good, agonized, or sad. The cotton makes these strangers believe that we have ear-ache, that we are threatened with inflammation, or that our teeth are giving us trouble; sympathetic, yet annoyed that so much suffering must be, they go away, shrugging their shoulders toward God.

Four o’clock. Everything is silent. The burning villages, with no one to watch them, flickered out sullenly before dawn. Cold, dew, everything that can turn a man’s limbs to stone, has showered down on us out of the night. The quiet is astonishing; I remember the cotton in my ears and remove it, fearing that I have been reveling in an artificial stillness; but nothing is to be heard here save the tick of a watch, and over yonder a squeaking barrow. Never did day in war-time come on more noiselessly. Here and there, out of the ditches and furrows, men are stumbling up and rising to their full height, just as though there were no such thing as war; then, remembering suddenly, they crouch down again and try to straighten their cramped fingers out of harm’s way. Not a word. No one wishes to give the day an excuse for beginning; no one will betray these hundred thousand men who are trying, in the dawn’s glow, to pretend that it is still night; no one brushes the dirt from his uniform, or grinds coffee, or starts off to fetch water. Turpin is snoring again. Then suddenly the first cannon goes off, the shell goes wailing over our heads; and all is up with our little make-believe.

I start forth to wake my scouts, who are scattered far and wide, like a shattered compass. They struggle up, growling oaths that gather force as they go the rounds: ‘Ah,vingt dieux! Ah,millédieux! ’ Their faces show swollen, moist, greenish, as though it had been necessary, to make them sleep, to hold their heads under water — in the river of oblivion, perhaps. Poor heads!

‘Why wake us?’ they all ask. Then they remember that they still have a crust of bread; that a few sardines still remain in that open box hidden under a tree: this modest bait suffices to lure them back into war once more.

We have not even the poor consolation of relaxing and stretching our limbs: the general in person has just taken up this position at our crossroads; his leopard-skin dispatch-bag, swollen with papers, lies on the ground, and he kneels beside it, fumbling, like a priest consulting the entrails for omens. We are to attack, it seems. Major Gerard and his companies are to assault Nogeon.

The general takes each captain aside and shows him an order. All read quickly and bow assent, some smiling, others a bit pale, — all except Viard, who has to have the manœuvre explained to him on the terrain itself, the general making him count the poplar trees as if he were doing the multiplication table. Perret, always methodical and paternal, draws his men round him and repeats the order to each one; such is his custom.

’So much the worse for you,’ says he to a couple of late-comers. ‘Now you won’t know anything.’

Then he makes every man hand over to Dolléro the odds and ends taken from the Germans, which would mean sure death if he were to fall into the enemy’s hands. Dolléro is soon covered with helmets, spurs, and white sword-knots, striped with green.

‘What would they do to me if they took me prisoner now?’ he remarks.

Captain Jean passes the order on to his favorites; Viard, to his sergeants; Perrin, to the most intelligent; then off we go, led, according to the company we are in, by friendship, rank, or cleverness. Half-way to Nogeon, a lieutenant of dragoons asks Perrin for two subalterns to help cut off the stream of stray soldiers who are going and coming between the poplar trees and FosseMartin. Mourlin and I are chosen.

We follow the ditches by the roadside, stopping stragglers and questioning them.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the village.’

‘ What for? ’

They reply, guilelessly, that they are going to rest; and when we order them to right-about-face, they look at us as if we were traitors. A little bit ashamed of ourselves, we offer them a swallow of cool water. They drink, and, thinking they have got on the good side of us, set out again for Fosse-Martin. We take them by the arm, however, and swing them round toward Nogeon, which is in flames. They start off, the surlier spirits shrugging their shoulders.

We keep on our way, using t he haystacks for shelter and dodging this way or that, according as the shells come from Puisieux or Vincy or Bouillancy. At the bottom of each stack we find something to eat — leavings of the early breakfast: here a scrap of bread, there a spattering of jam; since they cannot in decency present us with their wheat, the stacks offer what they have. A stack with a letter. stack with an unexploded German shell, and, on the French side, the mocking emptiness of a wine-bottle. A stack from which two motionless boots stick out. Mourlin takes hold of one, I of the other; we pull, cautiously at first, but we can feel that the soldier resists and is unwounded. He wriggles. He is wondering what he will catch if it is a colonel ~— two colonels, perhaps — tugging at his legs. Out he comes. He has been asleep there since yesterday.

‘Sneaks!’ he says to us. ‘How much do they pay you to do their dirty work?’

We let fly a box on the ears, a kick or two; he tries to defend himself, but gets a couple of whacks for his pains, and makes off toward the poplars, horribly offended.

Along the roadside lie yesterday’s wounded, overtaken by dawn and its shrapnel before they could get to cover. Here and there a soldier helps himself along with his rifle, the stock under his arm, the muzzle to earth. Groups of three, their arms entwined, struggle ahead, the most severely wounded man in the middle. They turn very slowly when some one calls to them; like Laocoön and his sons, they are hampered and tormented by an invisible serpent. We pass a mere boy of a corporal who seems to have strange ideas as to the fate of wounded men, for he tries to give us a letter for his family. Over yonder lies a thread of blood which, instead of coming away from the fighting, leads toward it. Here are two soldiers of my regiment, greatly amused because the same bullet wounded them both — one in the head, the other in the foot. Mourlin sends them into convulsions of mirth by asking what the deuce they were doing together.

We pass a bearded fellow, in agony, who drops to his knees like a stricken beast when he reaches the end of his strength, and falls full length on the ground. A big blond trooper comes along, walking slowly and evenly amid all his limping comrades, and taking infinite care, for he has a bullet in his lungs. In spite of this he flings himself down when a shell lands near-by; then, inch by inch, he rises again, as slowly as a child grows. Here is a lieutenant with his skull laid open, whose hand, groping for his eyeglass, flutters near his brain. Behind the haystacks which have been found out by the enemy’s artillery lie heaps of terribly wounded men who, for fear of offering a better mark, drive away newcomers, as from a raft at sea. Some have stripped off their tunics and march along in their shirt-sleeves, hoping that the Germans will not fire on them. Above all the groans a loud cry rings out: a wounded man has been hit a second time, and so there is a jet of fresh blood, a fresh vivid scream amid all this dull whimpering.

Then, all of a sudden, a regiment of reinforcements charges by in close waves toward Nogeon, sweeping the highway and meadows clear of wounded men for a minute, as if they had been miraculously healed and had fallen into step. Strange faces, all; and in wartime one somehow thinks of every unknown soldier that he has no personal interest at stake — that he is fighting for you.

The shadows of these newcomers cower to the left, away from the sun, as they enter Nogeon; almost immediately the distillery sticks out tongues of flame. In ten minutes it is all ablaze with a sullen fire, the tall chimneys doing their best with the smoke, out of sheer habit. The soldiers emerge again and withdraw to the rear; they are followed by stragglers, — the braver spirits, and those who best resist the heat, — a crimson-faced rear-guard, leisurely withdrawing, and yielding the fire a bare ten yards. Out leaps a fellow from the very flames. Here comes another. That is the end. Glowing papers and embers whirl about, the soldiers taking pains to catch them and put them out with a clap of the hands when they fall near an officer, just as children catch moths to please the mistress of the house.

Again the little procession of stragglers begins to trickle along over to the right of Nogeon; we must once more stop the poor fellows who have found a pretext for seeking a bit of rest. We requisition the services of a little corporal of the 60th Regiment, a timid lad of twenty-two, who ventures to accost only the younger soldiers, and who, instead of shouting his orders, runs and plants himself in the way of the man he is trying to stop, like a dog. We meet some wily stragglers who pretend they have been sent for water, and have unfolded their canvas buckets. Others, more modest, ask only for a little shade. Here is a zouave who, to distract my attention, shows me a Prussian revolver and tries to lead me to a shell-hole a hundred yards away where, he says, a lot of dead Germans are still wearing their spectacles. It is my turn to resist now. Then come some older men, with fine hard faces, who find it annoying to be sent about their business by two whippersnapper sergeants. One fellow takes his revenge by staring fixedly at the nose of Mourlin, whose sunburn has been concentrated there. (Every few minutes afterwards, Mourlin asks for my pocket-mirror.)

In this reflux there occasionally appears one of our own men, who says simply, ‘So-and-so has been killed.’ It costs one death, at least, to meet an acquaintance to-day. Here is a soldier, deathly pale, to whom I point out an aeroplane while slipping a rifle into his hand, just as one cajoles a child into eating soup. Now and then comes a scout, returning from the brigade full of hard words about the village, where he has found neither water nor bread — nothing but shrapnel and the general, who took him for a deserter and threatened him with his revolver.

We are holding the stragglers we meet now. Those who come up are amazed at being received as though we expected them, and take the places pointed out to them without a word.

‘Forward, march!’

The lieutenant, who wishes to be rid of his horse, simply lets him go, and we advance. The bullets are flying lower and lower, so that we must crawl. Every so often a man gets wedged between two beets and extracts himself with difficulty.

Here we are at the poplars. We have fallen in with a company deployed as skirmishers, which receives us without enthusiasm in its ditch, for we have momentarily disturbed its comfort. The Germans are over yonder, thirty yards distant — among them a great hulking fellow who rises up every few minutes; nobody can succeed in sniping him. This interests us newcomers exceedingly. There he is: a gray-green back suddenly floats above the tops of the beets. Two shots go off; up he bobs again. Many a Frenchman whose only sight of the enemy has been that poor jumping-jack. By evening, they get him.

All is quiet again. This is the hour when the first lines on both sides, worn out, form the only neutral zone in all the two countries; they mount guard only before battle. Let our second lines snipe at the German second line; let our cannon blaze away at their howitzers, let our civilians hate their civilians: we do not shoot. We reserve our wrath, rather, for a company of our own reinforcements, fifty yards behind us, which insists on taking us for wounded. The captain, greatly excited, shouts that he is coming to deliver us, and also keeps yelling, ‘Vorwärts, vorwärts!’ to stir up the Germans.

Mourlin, to calm them, yells still louder a German word which he wrongly believes to mean, ‘Be quiet!’ The two voices battle for the mastery, while the Saxons, fearing some trick, lie quiet before us, wondering what the French can be getting ready to do when they bellow forth in the Imperial language, ‘Peace! Peace!’

Day has begun.

Tuesday, September 8.

The sun has set. A German aviator makes the most of the dying glow by coming to see what he can see just above my company. Full five minutes he wheels over us. He does not miss a single gesture. He can tell Von Kluck: ‘Mourlin’s nose is still sunblistered; Dolléro is reading a letter which begins, “My heart’s beloved”; Giraudoux is munching beets as he waits for night to bring up her reinforcements.’

We close our eyes, starting sharply when our drowsiness clashes within us against sleep itself. No trenches here; we leave on the earth nothing save the imprint of our bodies; above ground we still find that resignation and confidence for which we shall later have to dig deep and still deeper.

Every now and then Jalicot shouts, ‘Surrender!’ to tease the Germans, who are unable to see the joke and reply, ‘No, no!’ in throaty French, so that there will be no possible mistake. Then, in their turn, they call on us to surrender, and we reply, in chorus, with one single word. They are annoyed: did they not answer us politely?

Midnight. We have sought sleep in a sort of pit, and those not on duty are joining us. Here comes the captain, the man of all men whom we are least eager to see, for he snores. All in a heap, our legs are pinned down by heavy legs; unknown arms — we prefer not to know whose — embrace us. Now and again one defends one’s head stubbornly against a knee, a shoe, another head. Sometimes a newcomer, not knowing that weapons have been laid aside, drops down on us with his rifle. Violent and anonymous kicks are launched against an unfortunate leg which turns out to be the captain’s. A soldier down at the bottom shivers, giving the whole living mass a feverish motion; two latecoming guests generously spread their cloaks over the whole crowded pit. An officer, on his rounds, orders us to get up; we answer not a word, whereupon he threatens us, so that our captain must needs stick out his head and command us, like the voice of our conscience, not to stir from our position.

From all four corners of the plateau the machine-guns are rattling like dead men’s bones. One of our cannon is firing wildly in the direction of Germany. The bugle-blasts of the chasseurs ring out, then break off short, as though all the musicians had rushed forward to pick up a wounded man. One of the soldiers at the bottom of our heap tries to free himself; the others make themselves heavier, to keep him quiet. He keeps moving convulsively, until, the resistance crushed out of him, he gives up.

One o’clock. We are returning to Fosse-Martin by the road — silent, sullen. Friendship keeps us close together, and each one leans on a comrade, but we have developed an unspeakable obstinacy. No one yields an inch to any one else. Dolléro tries to make me eat his remnant of bread.

‘Eat this bread.’

‘Keep it yourself.'

’You won’t, won’t you? Well, look!’

He throws it away; and God alone knows what bread meant to us that night.

‘Throw it away. I don’t care.’

Then he sees that the rheumatism in my shoulder is not improving, and insists on carrying my rifle. We struggle. He hurts me. I hurt him still more, it seems, for I can see the tears in his eyes.

The sky, the trees are dumb. Speech seems to have been torn from the farflung brigades. Never has Night’s silence been so breathless; those soldiers who rise for a moment to stretch their arms seem to be apostrophizing her in sign-talk. One wakes up suddenly, stung by the cold on some unprotected surface of wrist or calf or neck, and wraps a handkerchief round the spot as one dresses a wound. The man nearest the snoring captain whistles softly, not daring to touch him. A telegrapher has tangled a sleeping comrade in his wire; for a full half-hour he tries to work him free without waking him. Sleep everywhere— sleep, and that respect for life which one holds in times of peace. By way of reinforcement the dragoons, as soon as they have tended their horses, come and fling themselves down to the rear of us, forming a second snoring line of sleepers.

Four o’clock. I see a man who yesterday lost his dearest friend open vacant eyes, remember everything, and close them again. Sabots clattering down the road, greenish light, an acid breeze — a dawn-promise full of despair.

You get to your feet; you see the frontier marked out, so to speak, by that chain of exhausted soldiers. For a second a wave of ingratitude sweeps over you toward all those civilians back in France who are thinking of you. Why must they exist? But for them, war would be beautiful. Then comes repentance, and, out of sheer affection for them, you begin to think of yourself with a tenderness much like theirs. ‘Poor old fellow,’ you say to yourself. You call yourself by your first name. Courage flows back into you, and you steal the best rifle and the best bayonet from the men who are still sleeping.

A cheerful sergeant-major is waking his men by tickling them with spears of grass. ’Hey, old sport,’ he says to each one, ‘take a look at your watch.’ The ‘old sports’ open yellow eyes and leaden mouths which seem to engulf the very morning. Then, in the dawn light, — a sundial without sun, — our matutinal cannon roars, while at the very same instant a big shell drops in from Germany, covering us with stones, dirt, and shreds of turf. The ‘ old sports,’ stagger to their feet, cursing, and today begins.

A superb day. The sun leaps from cloud to cloud, gilding the one on which it rests for the moment. The sky is keenest blue. From those ash trees yonder the shells are bringing down showers of foliage; autumn is at work upon them, too, but to her touch the yellowing leaves yield only one by one. No orders as yet; that means an hour of idleness. The road is full of lightly wounded men who had no wish to get lost during the night, tramping gayly along now, each with his splinter of grenade or bullet just under the skin, where one can feel it. Here comes Trinqualard, shot in the left arm. In exchange for the news that yesterday we took a hundred prisoners, he hands me over a real live German whom he is bringing back from Puisieux. We play with the fellow a moment; he becomes tame, and is anxious not to leave us. When a shell drops near-by, however, he groans and bewails his lot. We shout to him to be silent.

‘How can one be silent in such a war?’ he replies.

Now we are meeting new convoy men, new drivers who are under fire for the first time. They scurry about, their eyes full of curiosity and dread, asking where the Germans are. Is it the Prussian Guard? What are the commonest wounds? Are we winning? They wear little gaiters such as one sees in countries where there are snakes; and, in the midst of our dull life, they lead all day long a fevered existence, their plaques d’identité very much in evidence, rushing here and there to help carry any one’s bag, any one’s rifle — new servants of the battlefield, with the names of children, wives, relatives, everything they have to lose trembling on their lips, unexpectedly distributing tins of sardines and pineapple, and falling flat at the faintest breath from a bursting shell, as if they were lighter than we.

An unscented breeze drifts in from the east; not one of our words will be carried toward the enemy, so we talk and laugh, heedless of noise. The air is light. We expand in the freedom of it all, advancing as skirmishers through the fields in order to prepare the coming assault. We visit the haystacks, and from each one, — just as one extracts a bullet from under the skin by pressing on each side of it, — we squeeze out a groaning German, wounded yesterday or the day before. There can be no vestige of doubt about these fellows: did we not wound them ourselves? We have pierced their lungs, their heads, their thighs, or — by way of a little Christian lesson — the palms of their hands. Each one of them trails along behind a Frenchman — a little clumsier, a little weaker than his leader, but scarcely less calm. The lips of both are a trifle greedy and scornful, for they have just traded tobacco and are sampling it.

Our orders have arrived. The division commander has issued an urgent call for men who can speak Turkish. One need only know Turkish, it seems, in order not to be killed to-day. A mocking hope, this; for have we not been searching in vain in the depths of our souls for a single word — to say nothing of a whole language — which will be a talisman and give us the pledge of life? No one in our company knows Turkish; no one, in a prodigious effort to live, suddenly acquires it. Horn knows Danish, and offers himself rather hopelessly to the sergeant-major, who takes down his name. All day long he will be making trips to headquarters and coming back again — a poor spurned Hamlet.

‘Bergeot knows how to talk the Auvergne dialect,’ shouts Forest.

Each one then airs the accomplishments of his friends. Jalicot, we learn, speaks the language of the Pions of La Palisse; Charles knows Tunisian, Pupion the patois of Charlieu. Masseret makes sounds like a partridge, Dolléro imitates a motorbus. Then the captain whistles.

In five minutes we are off again toward the poplars. We get control of ourselves, we make everything ready; then, each man, as if he were taking the worst for granted, says good-bye to the captain in his best French, and calmly writes a last postcard, reading it over when he has finished, for mistakes in spelling.