Light - Henri Barbusse (short novels to read .txt) 📗

dying. We heard Brisbille, drunk, hammering with all his might on his anvil. The same old shadows and the same lights were taking their places in the houses. It seemed that ordinary life was coming back as it had been into our corner after six days of supernatural disturbance, and that the past was already stronger than the present.

Before mounting our steps we saw, crouching in front of his shop door by the light of a lamp that was hooded by whirling mosquitoes, the mass of Crillon, who was striving to attach to a cudgel a flap for the crushing of flies. Bent upon his work, his gaping mouth let hang the half of a globular and shining tongue. Seeing us with our parcels, he threw down his tackle, roared a sigh, and said, "That wood! It's touchwood, yes. A butter-wire's the only thing for cutting that!"

He stood up, discouraged; then changing his idea, and lighted from below by his lamp so that he flamed in the evening, he extended his tawny-edged arm and struck me on the shoulder. "We said war, war, all along. Very well, we've got war, haven't we?"

In our room I said to Marie, "Only three days left."

Marie came and went and talked continually round me, all the time sewing zinc buttons onto the new pouch, stiff with its dressing. She seemed to be making an effort to divert me. She had on a blue blouse, well-worn and soft, half open at the neck. Her place was a great one in that gray room.

She asked me if I should be a long time away, and then, as whenever she put that question she went on, "Of course, you don't a bit know." She regretted that I was only a private like everybody. She hoped it would be over long before the winter.

I did not speak. I saw that she was looking at me secretly, and she surrounded me pell-mell with the news she had picked up. "D'you know, the curate has gone as a private, no more nor less, like all the clergy. And Monsieur the Marquis, who's a year past the age already, has written to the Minister of War to put himself at his disposition, and the Minister has sent a courier to thank him." She finished wrapping up and tying some toilet items and also some provisions, as if for a journey. "All your bits of things are there. You'll be absolutely short of nothing, you see."

Then she sat down and sighed. "Ah," she said, "war, after all, it's more terrible than one imagines."

She seemed to be having tragic presentiments. Her face was paler than usual; the normal lassitude of her features was full of gentleness; her eyelids were rosy as roses. Then she smiled weakly and said, "There are some young men of eighteen who've enlisted, but only for the duration of the war. They've done right; that'll be useful to them all ways later in life."

* * * * * *


On Monday we hung about the house till four o'clock, when I left it to go to the Town Hall, and then to the station.

At the Town Hall a group of men, like myself, were stamping about. They were loaded with parcels in string; new boots hung from their shoulders. I went up to mix with my new companions. Tudor was topped by an artilleryman's cap. Monsieur Mielvaque was bustling about, embarrassed--exactly as at the factory--by the papers he held in his hand; and he had exchanged his eyeglasses for spectacles, which stood for the beginning of his uniform. Every man talked about himself, and gave details concerning his regiment, his depot, and some personal peculiarity.

"I'm staying," says the adjutant master-at-arms, who rises impeccably in his active service uniform, amid the bustle and the neutral-tinted groups; "I'm not going. I'm the owner of my rank, and they haven't got the right to send me to join the army."

We waited long, and some hours went by. A rumor went round that we should not go till the next day. But suddenly there was silence, a stiffening up, and a military salute all round. The door had just opened to admit Major de Trancheaux.

The women drew aside. A civilian who was on the lookout for him went up, hat in hand, and spoke to him in undertones.

"But, my friend," cried the Major, quitting the importunate with a quite military abruptness, "it's not worth while. In two months the war will be over!"

He came up to us. He was wearing a white band on his cap.

"He's in command at the station," they say.

He gave us a patriotic address, brief and spirited. He spoke of the great revenge so long awaited by French hearts, assured us that we should all be proud, later, to have lived in those hours, thrilled us all, and added, "Come, say good-by to your folks. No more women now. And let's be off, for I'm going with you as far as the station."

A last confused scrimmage--with moist sounds of kisses and litanies of advice--closed up in the great public hall.

When I had embraced Marie I joined these who were falling in near the road. We went off in files of four. All the causeways were garnished with people, because of us; and at that moment I felt a lofty emotion and a real thrill of glory.

At the corner of a street I saw Crillon and Marie, who had run on ahead to take their stand on our route. They waved to me.

"Now, keep your peckers up, boys! You're not dead yet, eh!" Crillon called to us.

Marie was looking at me and could not speak.

"In step! One-two!" cried Adjutant Marcassin, striding along the detachment.

We crossed our quarter as the day declined over it. The countryman who was walking beside me shook his head and in the dusky immensity among the world of things we were leaving, with big regular steps, fused into one single step, he scattered wondering words. "Frenzy, it is," he murmured. "_I_ haven't had time to understand it yet. And yet, you know, there are some that say, I understand; well, I'm telling you, that's not possible."

The station--but we do not stop. They have opened before us the long yellow barrier which is never opened. They make us cross the labyrinth of hazy rails, and crowd us along a dark, covered platform between iron pillars.

And there, suddenly, we see that we are alone.

* * * * * *


The town--and life--are yonder, beyond that dismal plain of rails, paths, low buildings and mists which surrounds us to the end of sight. A chilliness is edging in along with twilight, and falling on our perspiration and our enthusiasm. We fidget and wait. It goes gray, and then black. The night comes to imprison us in its infinite narrowness. We shiver and can see nothing more. With difficulty I can make out, along our trampled platform, a dark flock, the buzz of voices, the smell of tobacco. Here and there a match flame or the red point of a cigarette makes some face phosphorescent. And we wait, unoccupied, and weary of waiting, until we sit down, close-pressed against each other, in the dark and the desert.

Some hours later Adjutant Marcassin comes forward, a lantern in his hand, and in a strident voice calls the roll. Then he goes away, and we begin again to wait.

At ten o'clock, after several false alarms, the right train is announced. It comes up, distending as it comes, black and red. It is already crowded, and it screams. It stops, and turns the platform into a street. We climb up and put ourselves away--not without glimpses, by the light of lanterns moving here and there, of some chalk sketches on the carriages--heads of pigs in spiked helmets, and the inscription, "To Berlin!"--the only things which slightly indicate where we are going.

The train sets off. We who have just got in crowd to the windows and try to look outside, towards the level crossing where, perhaps, the people in whom we live are still watching for us; but the eye can no longer pick up anything but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon and jumbled with nature. We are blind and we fall back each to his place. When we are enveloped in the iron-hammered rumble of advance, we fix up our luggage, arrange ourselves for the night, smoke, drink and talk. Badly lighted and opaque with fumes, the compartment might be a corner of a tavern that has been caught up and swept away into the unknown.

Some conversation mixes its rumble with that of the train. My neighbors talk about crops and sunshine and rain. Others, scoffers and Parisians, speak of popular people and principally of music-hall singers. Others sleep, lying somehow or other on the wood. Their open mouths make murmur, and the oscillation jerks them without tearing them from their torpor. I go over in my thoughts the details of the last day, and even my memories of times gone by when there was nothing going on.

* * * * * *


We traveled all night. At long intervals some one would let a window drop at a station; a damp and cavernous breath would penetrate the overdone atmosphere of the carriage. We saw darkness and some porter's lantern dancing in the abyss of night.

Several times we made very long halts--to let the trains of regular troops go by. In one station where our train stood for hours, we saw several of them go roaring by in succession. Their speed blurred the partitions between the windows and the huge vertebrae of the coaches, seeming to blend together the soldiers huddled there; and the glance which plunged into the train's interior descried, in its feeble and whirling illumination, a long, continuous and tremulous chain, clad in blue and red. Several times on the journey we got glimpses of these interminable lengths of humanity, hurled by machinery from everywhere to the frontiers, and almost towing each other.


CHAPTER X


THE WALLS

At daybreak there was a stop, and they said to us, "You're there."

We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to a platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet of mist which was torn by blasts of distant whistling. Disinterred from the carriages, our shadows heaped themselves there and waited, like bales of goods in the dawn's winter.