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

crests of black smoke went up like cypresses. On both sides, in front and behind, we heard the fearful suicide of shells.

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We marched in the earth's interior until evening. From time to time one hoisted the pack up or pressed down one's cap into the sweat of the forehead; had it fallen it could not have been picked up again in the mechanism of the march; and then we began again to fight with the distance. The hand contracted on the rifle-sling was tumefied by the shoulder-straps and the bent arm was broken.

Like a regular refrain the lamentation of Mélusson came to me. He kept saying that he was going to stop, but he did not stop, ever, and he even butted into the back of the man in front of him when the whistle went for a halt.

The mass of the men said nothing. And the greatness of this silence, this despotic and oppressive motion, irritated Adjutant Marcassin, who would have liked to see some animation. He rated and lashed us with a vengeance. He hustled the file in the narrowness of the trench as he clove to the corners so as to survey his charge. But then he had no knapsack.

Through the heavy distant noise of our tramping, through the funereal consolation of our drowsiness, we heard the adjutant's ringing voice, violently reprimanding this or the other. "Where have you seen, swine, that there can be patriotism without hatred? Do you think one can love his own country if he doesn't hate the others?"

When some one spoke banteringly of militarism--for no one, except Termite, who didn't count, took the word seriously--Marcassin growled despairingly, "French militarism and Prussian militarism, they're not the same thing, for one's French and the other's Prussian!"

But we felt that all these wrangles only shocked and wearied him. He was instantly and gloomily silent.

We were halted to mount guard in a part we had never seen before, and for that reason it seemed worse than the others to us at first. We had to scatter and run up and down the shelterless trench all night, to avoid the plunging files of shells. That night was but one great crash and we were strewn in the middle of it among black puddles, upon a ghostly background of earth. We moved on again in the morning, bemused, and the color of night. In front of the column we still heard the cry "Forward!" Then we redoubled the violence of our effort, we extorted some little haste from out us; and the soaked and frozen company went on under cathedrals of cloud which collapsed in flames, victims of a fate whose name they had no time to seek, a fate which only let its force be felt, like God.

During the day, and much farther on, they cried "Halt!" and the smothered sound of the march was silent. From the trench in which we collapsed under our packs, while another lot went away, we could see as far as a railway embankment. The far end of the loophole-pipe enframed tumbledown dwellings and cabins, ruined gardens where the grass and the flowers were interred, enclosures masked by palings, fragments of masonry to which eloquent remains of posters even still clung--a corner full of artificial details, of human things, of illusions. The railway bank was near, and in the network of wire stretched between it and us many bodies were fast-caught as flies.

The elements had gradually dissolved those bodies and time had worn them out. With their dislocated gestures and point-like heads they were but lightly hooked to the wire. For whole hours our eyes were fixed on this country all obstructed by a machinery of wires and full of men who were not on the ground. One, swinging in the wind, stood out more sharply than the others, pierced like a sieve a hundred times through and through, and a void in the place of his heart. Another specter, quite near, had doubtless long since disintegrated, while held up by his clothes. At the time when the shadow of night began to seize us in its greatness a wind arose, a wind which shook the desiccated creature, and he emptied himself of a mass of mold and dust. One saw the sky's whirlwind, dark and disheveled, in the place where the man had been; the soldier was carried away by the wind and buried in the sky.

Towards the end of the afternoon the piercing whistle of the bullets was redoubled. We were riddled and battered by the noise. The wariness with which we watched the landscape that was watching us seemed to exasperate Marcassin. He pondered an idea; then came to a sudden decision and cried triumphantly, "Look!"

He climbed to the parapet, stood there upright, shook his fist at space with the blind and simple gesture of the apostle who is offering his example and his heart, and shouted, "Death to the Boches!"

Then he came down, quivering with the faith of his self-gift.

"Better not do that again," growled the soldiers who were lined up in the trench, gorgonized by the extraordinary sight of a living man standing, for no reason, on a front line parapet in broad daylight, stupefied by the rashness they admired although it outstripped them.

"Why not? Look!"

Marcassin sprang up once more. Lean and erect, he stood like a poplar, and raising both arms straight into the air, he yelled, "I believe only in the glory of France!"

Nothing else was left for him; he was but a conviction. Hardly had he spoken thus in the teeth of the invisible hurricane when he opened his arms, assumed the shape of a cross against the sky, spun round, and fell noisily into the middle of the trench and of our cries.

He had rolled onto his belly. We gathered round him. With a jerk he turned on to his back, his arms slackened, and his gaze drowned in his eyes. His blood began to spread around him, and we drew our great boots away, that we should not walk on that blood.

"He died like an idiot," said Margat in a choking voice; "but by God it's fine!"

He took off his cap, saluted awkwardly and stood with bowed head.

"Committing suicide for an idea, it's fine," mumbled Vidaine.

"It's fine, it's fine!" other voices said.

And these little words fluttered down like leaves and petals onto the body of the great dead soldier.

"Where's his cap, that he thought so much of?" groaned his orderly, Aubeau, looking in all directions.

"Up there, to be sure: I'll fetch it," said Termite.

The comical man went for the relic. He mounted the parapet in his turn, coolly, but bending low. We saw him ferreting about, frail as a poor monkey on the terrible crest. At last he put his hand on the cap and jumped into the trench. A smile sparkled in his eyes and in the middle of his beard, and his brass "cold meat ticket" jingled on his shaggy wrist.

They took the body away. The men carried it and a third followed with the cap. One of us said, "The war's over for him!" And during the dead man's recessional we were mustered, and we continued to draw nearer to the unknown. But everything seemed to recede as fast as we advanced, even events.

* * * * * *


We wandered five days, six days, in the lines, almost without sleeping. We stood for hours, for half-nights and half-days, waiting for ways to be clear that we could not see. Unceasingly they made us go back on our tracks and begin over again. We mounted guard in trenches, we fitted ourselves into some stripped and sinister corner which stood out against a charred twilight or against fire. We were condemned to see the same abysses always.

For two nights we bent fiercely to the mending of an old third-line trench above the ruin of its former mending. We repaired the long skeleton, soft and black, of its timbers. From that dried-up drain we besomed the rubbish of equipment, of petrified weapons, of rotten clothes and of victuals, of a sort of wreckage of forest and house--filthy, incomparably filthy, infinitely filthy. We worked by night and hid by day. The only light for us was the heavy dawn of evening when they dragged us from sleep. Eternal night covered the earth.

After the labor, as soon as daybreak began to replace night with melancholy, we buried ourselves methodically in the depth of the caverns there. Only a deadened murmur penetrated to them, but the rock moved by reason of the earthquakes. When some one lighted his pipe, by that gleam we looked at each other. We were fully equipped; we could start away at any minute; it was forbidden to take off the heavy jingling chain of cartridges around us.

I heard some one say, "In _my_ country there are fields, and paths, and the sea; nowhere else in the world is there that."

Among these shades of the cave--an abode of the first men as it seemed--I saw the hand start forth of him who existed on the spectacle of the fields and the sea, who was trying to show it and to seize it; or I saw around a vague halo four card-players stubbornly bent upon finding again something of an ancient and peaceful attachment in the faces of the cards; or I saw Margat flourish a Socialist paper that had fallen from Termite's pocket, and burst into laughter at the censored blanks it contained. And Majorat raged against life, caressed his reserve bottle with his lips till out of breath and then, appeased and his mouth dripping, said it was the only way to alleviate his imprisonment. Then sleep slew words and gestures and thoughts. I kept repeating some phrase to myself, trying in vain to understand it; and sleep submerged me, ancestral sleep so dreary and so deep that it seems there had only and ever been one long, lone sleep here on earth, above which our few actions float, and which ever returns to fill the flesh of man with night.

Forward! Our nights are torn from us in lots. The bodies, invaded by caressing poison, and even by confidences and apparitions, shake themselves and stand up again. We extricate ourselves from the hole, and emerge from the density of buried breath; stumbling we climb into icy space, odorless, infinite space. The oscillation of the march, assailed on both sides by the trench, brings brief and paltry halts, in which we recline against the walls, or cast ourselves on them. We embrace the earth, since nothing else is left us to embrace.

Then Movement seizes us again. Metrified by regular jolts, by the shock of each step, by our prisoned breathing, it