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

that's the glory of France--to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraine back, and money, that's where they're taking you, and that's all about it. Once that's done, all's over. It's simple enough, even for a blockhead like you. If you don't understand it, it's because you can't lift your pig's head to see an ideal, or because you're only a Socialist and a confiscator!"

[Footnote 1: Outbreak of the French Revolution.--Tr.]

Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he went away from the now silent ranks. A moment later, as he passed near me, I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved to see tears in his eyes!

He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficulty restrained, and masked by a contraction of the face. He invokes Déroulède, and says that faith comes at will, like the rest. He lives in perpetual bewilderment and distress that everybody does not think as he does. He exerts real influence, for there are, in the multitudes, whatever they may say, beautiful and profound instincts always near the surface.

The captain, who was a well-balanced man, although severe and prodigal of prison when he found the least gap in our loads, considered the adjutant animated by an excellent spirit, but he himself was not so fiery. I was getting a better opinion of him; he could judge men. He had said that I was a good and conscientious soldier, that many like me were wanted.

Our lieutenant, who was very young, seemed to be an amiable, good-natured fellow. "He's a good little lad," said the grateful men; "there's some that frighten you when you speak to them, and they solder their jaws up. But _him_, he speaks to you even if you're stupid. When you talk to him about you and your family, which isn't, all the same, very interesting, well, he listens to you, old man."

* * * * * *


St. Martin's summer greatly warmed us as we tramped into a new village. I remember that one of those days I took Margat with me and went with him into a recently shelled house. (Margat was storming against the local grocer, the only one of his kind, the inevitable and implacable robber of his customers.) The framework of the house was laid bare, it was full of light and plaster, and it trembled like a steamboat. We climbed to the drawing-room of this house which had breathed forth all its mystery and was worse than empty. The room still showed remains of luxury and elegance--a disemboweled piano with clusters of protruding strings; a cupboard, dislodged and rotting, as though disinterred; a white-powdered floor, sown with golden stripes and rumpled books, and with fragile débris which cried out when we trod on it. Across the window, which was framed in broken glass, a curtain hung by one corner and fluttered like a bat. Over the sundered fireplace, only a mirror was intact and unsullied, upright in its frame.

Then, become suddenly and profoundly like each other, we were both fascinated by the virginity of that long glass. Its perfect integrity lent it something like a body. Each of us picked up a brick and we broke it with all our might, not knowing why. We ran away down the shaking spiral stairs whose steps were hidden under deep rubbish. At the bottom we looked at each other, still excited and already ashamed of the fit of barbarism which had so suddenly risen in us and urged our arms.

"What about it? It's a natural thing to do--we're becoming men again, that's all," said Margat.

Having nothing to do we sat down there, commanding a view of the dale. The day had been fine.

Margat's looks strayed here and there. He frowned, and disparaged the village because it was not like his own. What a comical idea to have built it like that! He did not like the church, the singular shape of it, the steeple in that position instead of where it should have been.

Orango and Rémus came and sat down by us in the ripening sun of evening.

Far away we saw the explosion of a shell, like a white shrub. We chuckled at the harmless shot in the hazy distance and Rémus made a just observation. "As long as it's not dropped here, you might say as one doesn't mind, eh, s'long as it's dropped somewhere else, eh?"

At that moment a cloud of dirty smoke took shape five hundred yards away at the foot of the village, and a heavy detonation rolled up to where we were.

"They're plugging the bottom of the village," Orango laconically certified.

Margat, still ruminating his grievance, cried, "'Fraid it's not on the grocers it's dropped, that crump, seeing he lives right at the other end. More's the pity. He charges any old price he likes and then he says to you as well, 'If you're not satisfied, my lad, you can go to hell.' Ah, more's the pity!"

He sighed, and resumed. "Ah, grocers, they beat all, they do. You can starve or you can bankrupt, that's their gospel; 'You don't matter to me, _I've_ got to make money!'"

"What do you want to be pasting the grocers for," Orango asked, "as long as they've always been like that? They're Messrs. Thief & Sons."

After a silence, Rémus coughed, to encourage his voice, and said, "I'm a grocer."

Then Margat said to him artlessly, "Well, what about it, old chap? We know well enough, don't we, that here on earth profit's the strongest of all."

"Why, yes, to be sure, old man," Rémus replied.

* * * * * *


One day, while we were carrying our straw to our billets, one of my lowly companions came up and questioned me as he walked. "I'd like you to explain to me why there isn't any justice. I've been to the captain to ask for leave that I'd a right to and I shows him a letter to say my aunt's shortly deceased. 'That's all my eye and Betty Martin,' he says. And I says to myself, that's the blinking limit, that is. Now, then, tell me, you. When the war began, why didn't there begin full justice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no one wouldn't have raised no objection just then. Why is it all just the contrary? And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, but there's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an' all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten times stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven't sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells us!"

I replied that complete justice was impossible, that we had to look at the great mass of things generally. And then, having said this, I became embarrassed in face of the stubborn inquisitiveness, clumsily strict, of this comrade who was seeking the light all by himself!

Following that incident, I often tried, during days of monotony, to collect my ideas on war. I could not. I am sure of certain points, points of which I have always been sure. Farther I cannot go. I rely in the matter on those who guide us, who withhold the policy of the State. But sometimes I regret that I no longer have a spiritual director like Joseph Bonéas.

For the rest, the men around me--except when personal interest is in question and except for a few chatterers who suddenly pour out theories which contain bits taken bodily from the newspapers--the men around me are indifferent to every problem too remote and too profound concerning the succession of inevitable misfortunes which sweep us along. Beyond immediate things, and especially personal matters, they are prudently conscious of their ignorance and impotence.

One evening I was coming in to sleep in our stable bedroom. The men lying along its length and breadth on the bundles of straw had been talking together and were agreed. Some one had just wound it up--"From the moment you start marching, that's enough."

But Termite, coiled up like a marmot on the common litter, was on the watch. He raised his shock of hair, shook himself as though caught in a snare, waved the brass disk on his wrist like a bell and said, "No, that's not enough. You must think, but think with your own idea, not other people's."

Some amused faces were raised while he entered into observations that they foresaw would be endless.

"Pay attention, you fellows, he's going to talk about militarism," announced a wag, called Pinson, whose lively wit I had already noticed.

"There's the question of militarism----" Termite went on.

We laughed to see the hairy mannikin floundering on the dim straw in the middle of his big public-meeting words, and casting fantastic shadows on the spider-web curtain of the skylight.

"Are you going to tell us," asked one of us, "that the Boches aren't militarists?"

"Yes, indeed, and in course they are," Termite consented to admit.

"Ha! That bungs you in the optic!" Pinson hastened to record.

"For my part, old sonny," said a Territorial who was a good soldier, "I'm not seeking as far as you, and I'm not as spiteful. I know that they set about us, and that we only wanted to be quiet and friends with everybody. Why, where I come from, for instance in the Creuse country, I know that----"

"You know?" bawled Termite, angrily; "you know nothing about nothing! You're only a poor little tame animal, like all the millions of pals. They gather us together, but they separate us. They say what they like to us, or they don't say it, and you believe it. They say to you, 'This is what you've got to believe in!' They----"

I found myself growing privately incensed against Termite, by the same instinct which had once thrown me upon his accomplice Brisbille. I interrupted him. "Who are they--your 'they'?"

"Kings," said Termite.

At that moment Marcassin's silhouette appeared in the gray of the alley which ended among us. "Look out--there's Marc'! Shut your jaw," one of the audience benevolently advised.

"I'm not afeared not to say what I think!" declared Termite, instantly lowering his voice and worming his way through the straw that divided the next stall from ours.

We laughed again. But Margat was serious. "Always," he said, "there'll be the two sorts of people there's always been--the grousers and the obeyers."

Some one asked, "What for did you chap 'list?"

"'Cos there was nothing to eat in the house,"