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

itself. The rain had ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky, clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the detonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road we met Red Cross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not see inside them. In the first stages we were interested in everything, and asked questions, like foreigners. A man who had been wounded and was rejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, and invariably added, "That's nothing; you'll see in a bit." Then the march made men retire into themselves.

My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociously full; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled and then wounded my back at each step. The pain quickly became acute, unbearable. I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at the end of the fifty minutes' march. But I did all the same, because I had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and because I could thus always _do one step more_. I knew later that this is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.

The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through the softened plains which evening was darkening. At one halt I saw one of those men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front. He had sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made him almost unrecognizable, and he told me that he had had enough of war! And little Mélusson, whom I once used to see at Viviers, lifted to me his yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemed drawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick the next day.

After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over a colorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chilly top of a hill, where a village was beginning. An epidemic of gloom overspread us. Why were we stopped in that way? No one knew anything.

In the evening we engulfed ourselves in the village. But they halted us in a street. The sky had heavily darkened. The fronts of the houses had taken on a greenish hue and reflected and rooted themselves in the running water of the street. The market-place curved around in front of us--a black space with shining tracks, like an old mirror to which the silvering only clings in strips.

At last, night fully come, they bade us march. They made us go forward and then draw back, with loud words of command, in the tunnels of streets, in alleys and yards. By lantern light they divided us into squads. I was assigned to the eleventh, quartered in a village whose still standing parts appeared quite new. Adjutant Marcassin became my section chief. I was secretly glad of this; for in the gloomy confusion we stuck closely to those we knew, as dogs do.

The new comrades of the squad--they lodged in the stable, which was open as a cage--explained to me that we were a long way from the front, over six miles; that we should have four days' rest and then go on yonder to occupy the trenches at the glass works. They said it would be like that, in shifts of four days, to the end of the war, and that, moreover, one had not to worry.

These words comforted the newcomers, adrift here and there in the straw. Their weariness was alleviated. They set about writing and card-playing. That evening I dated my letter to Marie "at the Front," with a flourish of pride. I understood that glory consists in doing what others have done, in being able to say, "I, too."

* * * * * *


Three days went by in this "rest camp." I got used to an existence crowded with exercises in which we were living gear-wheels; crowded also with fatigues; already I was forgetting my previous existence.

On the Friday at three o'clock we were paraded in marching order in the school yard. Great stones, detached from walls and arches, lay about the forsaken grass like tombs. Hustled by the wind, we were reviewed by the captain, who fumbled in our cartridge-pouches and knapsacks with the intention of giving imprisonment to those who had not the right quantity of cartridges and iron rations. In the evening we set off, laughing and singing, along the great curves of the road. At night we arrived swaying with fatigue and savagely silent, at a slippery and interminable ascent which stood out against stormy rain-clouds as heavy as dung-hills. Many dark masses stumbled and fell with a crash of accoutrements on that huge sloping sewer. As they swarmed up the chaos of oblique darkness which pushed them back, the men gave signs of exhaustion and anger. Cries of "Forward! Forward!" surrounded us on all sides, harsh cries like barks, and I heard, near me, Adjutant Marcassin's voice, growling, "What about it, then? It's for France's sake!" Arrived at the top of the hill, we went down the other slope. The order came to put pipes out and advance in silence. A world of noises was coming to life in the distance.

A gateway made its sudden appearance in the night. We scattered among flat buildings, whose walls here and there showed black holes, like ovens, while the approaches were obstructed with plaster rubbish and nail-studded beams. In places the recent collapse of stones, cement and plaster had laid on the bricks a new and vivid whiteness that was visible in the dark.

"It's the glass works," said a soldier to me.

We halted a moment in a passage whose walls and windows were broken, where we could not make a step or sit down without breaking glass. We left the works by sticky footpaths, full of rubbish at first, and then of mud. Across marshy flats, chilly and sinister, obscurely lighted by the night, we came to the edge of an immense and pallid crater. The depths of this abyss were populated with glimmers and murmurs; and all around a soaked and ink-black expanse of country glistened to infinity.

"It's the quarry," they informed me.

Our endless and bottomless march continued. Sliding and slipping we descended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropingly encountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guard of the regiment we were relieving. We passed heaped-up hutments at the foot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn among the black circles of space. The sound of shots drew near and multiplied on all sides; the vibration of artillery fire outspread under our feet and over our heads.

I found myself suddenly in front of a narrow and muddy ravine into which the others were plunging one by one.

"It's the trench," whispered the man who was following me; "you can see its beginning, but you never see its blinking end. Anyway, on you go!"

We followed the trench along for three hours. For three hours we continued to immerse ourselves in distance and solitude, to immure ourselves in night, scraping its walls with our loads, and sometimes violently pulled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by the sudden wedging of our pouches. It seemed as if the earth tried continually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us. Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space was shot-riddled. A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections of the night, revealing the excavations' wet entrails and conjuring up a file of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a black and black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies. When great guns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted and then fell darkly back.

"Look out! The open crossing!"

A wall of earth rose in tiers before us. There was no outlet. The trench came to a sudden end--to be resumed farther on, it seemed.

"Why?" I asked, mechanically.

They explained to me: "It's like that." And they added, "You stoop down and get a move on."

The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one by one and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was the dark. The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air here and there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were. In spite of the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn with all my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded and rattling body which ran in front; and I found myself again in a trench, breathless. In my passage I had glimpses of a somber field, bullet-smacked and hole pierced, with silent blots outspread or doubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic as tall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and night immensely fought.

"I believe I saw some corpses," I said to him who marched in front of me; and there was a break in my voice.

"_You've_ just left your village," he replied; "you bet there's some stiffs about here!"

I laughed also, in the delight of having got past. We began again to march one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness of this furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, panting under the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushed forward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight of bullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated with light. At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimes left, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the company fleeing blindly towards its bourne.

For the last time they halted us in the middle of the night. I was so weary that I propped my knees against the wet wall and remained kneeling for some blissful minutes.

My sentry turn began immediately, and the lieutenant posted me at a loophole. He made me put my face to the hole and explained to me that there was a wooded slope, right in front of us, of which the bottom was occupied by the enemy; and to the right of us, three hundred yards away, the Chauny road--"They're there." I had to watch the black hollow of the little wood, and at every star-shell the creamy expanse which divided our refuge from the distant hazy railing of the trees along the road. He told me what to do in case of alarm and left me quite alone.

Alone, I shivered. Fatigue had emptied my head and was weighing on my heart. Going close to the loophole, I opened my eyes wide through the enemy night, the fathomless, thinking night.

I thought I could see some of the dim shadows of