Under Fire - Henri Barbusse (best book series to read txt) 📗

up a bit of a track to a field, a great quadrangle within tall trees, and full of the scent of hay.

“Tiens!” I said, looking at the ground, “it’s all trampled here; there’s been something to do.”

“Come,” said Suilhard to me. He led me into the field, not far from its gate. There was a group of soldiers there, talking in low voices. My companion stretched out his hand. “It’s there,” he said.

A very short post, hardly a yard high, was implanted a few paces from the hedge, composed just there of young trees. “It was there,” he said, “that they shot a soldier of the 204th this morning. They planted that post in the night. They brought the chap here at dawn, and these are the fellows of his squad who killed him. He tried to dodge the trenches. During relief he stayed behind, and then went quietly off to quarters. He did nothing else; they meant, no doubt, to make an example of him.”

We came near to the conversation of the others. “No. no, not at all,” said one. “He wasn’t a ruffian, he wasn’t one of those toughs that we all know. We all enlisted together. He was a decent sort, like ourselves, no more, no less—a bit funky, that’s all. He was in the front line from the beginning, he was, and I’ve never seen him boozed, I haven’t.”

“Yes, but all must be told. Unfortunately for him, there was a ‘previous conviction.’ There were two, you know, that did the trick—the other got two years. But Cajard, [note 1] because of the sentence he got in civil life couldn’t benefit by extenuating circumstances. He’d done some giddy-goat trick in civil life, when he was drunk.”

“You can see a little blood on the ground if you look,” said a stooping soldier.

“There was the whole ceremonial,” another went on, “from A to Z—the colonel on horseback, the degradation; then they tied him to the little post, the cattle-stoup. He had to be forced to kneel or sit on the ground with a similar post.”

“It’s past understanding,” said a third, after a silence, “if it wasn’t for the example the sergeant spoke about.”

On the post the soldiers had scrawled inscriptions and protests. A croix de guerre, cut clumsily of wood, was nailed to it, and read: “A. Cajard, mobilized in August, 1914, in gratitude to France.”

Returning to quarters I met Volpatte, still surrounded and talking. He was relating some new anecdotes of his journey among the happy ones.

[note 1:] I have altered the name of this soldier as well as that of the village.—H. B.

11

The Dog

THE weather was appalling. Water and wind attacked the passers-by; riddled, flooded, and upheaved the roads.

I was returning from fatigue to our quarters at the far end of the village. The landscape that morning showed dirty yellow through the solid rain, and the sky was dark as a slated roof. The downpour flogged the horse-trough as with birchen rods. Along the walls. human shapes went in shrinking files, stooping, abashed, splashing.

In spite of the rain and the cold and bitter wind, a crowd had gathered in front of the door of the barn where we were lodging. All close together and back to back, the men seemed from a distance like a great moving sponge. Those who could see, over shoulders and between heads, opened their eyes wide and said, “He has a nerve, the boy!” Then the inquisitive ones broke away, with red noses and streaming faces, into the down-pour that lashed and the blast that bit, and letting the hands fall that they had upraised in surprise, they plunged them in their pockets.

In the center, and running with rain, abode the cause of the gathering—Fouillade, bare to the waist and washing himself in abundant water. Thin as an insect, working his long slender arms in riotous frenzy, he soaped and splashed his head, neck, and chest, down to the upstanding gridirons of his sides. Over his funnel-shaped cheeks the brisk activity had spread a flaky beard like snow, and piled on the top of his head a greasy fleece that the rain was puncturing with little holes.

By way of a tub, the patient was using three mess-tins which he had filled with water—no one knew how—in a village where there was none; and as there was no clean spot anywhere to put anything down in that universal streaming of earth and sky, he thrust his towel into the waistband of his trousers, while the soap went back into his pocket every time he used it.

They who still remained wondered at this heroic gesticulation in the face of adversity, and said again, as they wagged their heads, “It’s a disease of cleanliness he’s got.”

“You know he’s going to be carpeted, they say, for that affair of the shell-hole with Volpatte.” And they mixed the two exploits together in a muddled way, that of the shell-hole, and the present, and looked on him as the hero of the moment, while he puffed, sniffled, grunted, spat, and tried to dry himself under the celestial shower-bath with rapid rubbing and as a measure of deception; then at last he resumed his clothes.

*

After his wash, Fouillade feels cold. He turns about and stands in the doorway of the barn that shelters us. The arctic blast discolors and disparages his long face, so hollow and sunburned; it draws tears from his eyes, and scatters them on the cheeks once scorched by the mistral; his nose, too, weeps increasingly.

Yielding to the ceaseless bite of the wind that grips his ears in spite of the muffler knotted round his head, and his calves in spite of the yellow puttees with which his cockerel legs are enwound, he reenters the barn, but comes out of it again at once, rolling ferocious eyes, and muttering oaths with the accent one hears in that corner of the land, over six hundred miles from here, whence he was driven by war.

So he stands outside, erect, more truly excited than ever before in these northern scenes. And the wind comes and steals into him, and comes again roughly, shaking and maltreating his scarecrow’s slight and flesh-less figure.

Ye gods! It is almost uninhabitable, the barn they have assigned to us to live in during this period of rest. It is a collapsing refuge, gloomy and leaky, confined as a well. One half of it is under water—we see rats swimming in it—and the men are crowded in the other half. The walls, composed of laths stuck together with dried mud, are cracked, sunken, holed in all their circuit, and extensively broken through above. The night we got here—until the morning—we plugged as well as we could the openings within reach, by inserting leafy branches and hurdles. But the higher holes, and those in the roof, still gaped and always. When dawn hovers there, weakling and early, the wind for contrast rushes in and blows round every side with all its strength, and the squad endures the hustling of an everlasting draught.

When we are there, we remain upright in the ruined obscurity, groping, shivering, complaining.

Fouillade, who has come in once more, goaded by the cold, regrets his ablutions. He has pains in his loins and back. He wants something to do, but what?

Sit down? Impossible; it is too dirty inside there. The ground and the paving-stones are plastered with mud; the straw scattered for our sleeping is soaked through, by the water that comes through the holes and by the boots that wipe themselves with it. Besides, if you sit down, you freeze; and if you lie on the straw, you are troubled by the smell of manure, and sickened by the vapors of ammonia. Fouillade contents himself by looking at his place, and yawning wide enough to dislocate his long jaw, further lengthened by a goatee beard where you would see white hairs if the daylight were really daylight.

“The other pals and boys,” said Marthereau, “they’re no better off than we are. After breakfast I went to see a jail-bird of the 11th on the farm near the hospital. You’ve to clamber over a wall by a ladder that’s too short—talk about a scissor-cut!” says Marthereau, who is short in the leg; “and when once you’re in the hen-run and rabbit-hutch you’re shoved and poked by everybody and a nuisance to ‘em all. You don’t know where to put your pasties down. I vamoosed from there, and sharp.”

“For my part,” says Cocon, “I wanted to go to the blacksmith’s when we’d got quit of grubbing, to imbibe something hot, and pay for it. Yesterday he was selling coffee, but some bobbies called there this morning, so the good man’s got the shakes, and he’s locked his door.”

Lamuse has tried to clean his rifle. But one cannot clean his rifle here, even if he squats on the ground near the door, nor even if he takes away the sodden tent-cloth, hard and icy, which hangs across the doorway like a stalactite; it is too dark. “And then, old chap, if you let a screw fall, you may as well hang yourself as try to find it, ‘specially when your fists are frozen silly.”

“As for me, I ought to be sewing some things, but—what cheer!”

One alternative remains—to stretch oneself on the straw, covering the head with handkerchief or towel to isolate it from the searching stench of fermenting straw, and sleep. Fouillade, master of his time to-day, being on neither guard nor fatigues, decides. He lights a taper to seek among his belongings, and unwinds the coils of his comforter, and we see his emaciated shape, sculptured in black relief, folding and refolding it.

“Potato fatigue, inside there, my little lambs!” a sonorous voice bellows at the door. The hooded shape from which it comes is Sergeant Henriot. He is a malignant sort of simpleton, and though all the while joking in clumsy sympathy he supervises the evacuation of quarters with a sharp eye for the evasive malingerer.

Outside, on the streaming road in the perpetual rain. the second section is scattered, also summoned and driven to work by the adjutant. The two sections mingle together. We climb the street and the hillock of clayey soil where the traveling kitchen is smoking.

“Now then, my lads, get on with it; it isn’t a long job when everybody sets to—Come—what have you got to grumble about, you? That does no good.”

Twenty minutes later we return at a trot. As we grope about in the barn, we cannot touch anything but what is sodden and cold, and the sour smell of wet animals is added to the vapor of the liquid manure that our beds contain.

We gather again, standing, around the props that hold the barn up, and around the rills that fall vertically from the holes in the roof—faint columns which rest on vague bases of splashing water. “Here we are again!” we cry.

Two lumps in turn block the doorway, soaked with the rain that drains from them—Lamuse and Barque. who have been in quest of a brasier, and now return from the expedition empty-handed, sullen and vicious. “Not a shadow of a fire-bucket, and what’s more, no wood or coal either, not for a fortune.” It is impossible to have any fire. “If I can’t get any, no one can,” says Barque, with a pride which a hundred exploits justify.

We stay motionless, or move slowly in the little space we have, aghast at so much misery. “Whose is the paper?”

“It’s mine,” says Becuwe.

“What does it say? Ah, zut, one can’t read in this darkness!”