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

all directions, blubbering because they had no coal or wood. But he’d got a fire. When he hadn’t any, he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see you through.’ And he wasn’t long about it, either.”

“He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his kitchen, you’d never guess what he’d got the stew going with! With a violin that he’d found in the house!”

“Rotten, all the same,” says Mesnil Andre. “One knows well enough that a violin isn’t worth much when it comes to utility, but all the same—”

“Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching one for a cane, but the rest—into the fire! Then the arm-chairs in the drawing-room went by degrees—mahogany, they were. He did ‘em in and cut them up by night, case some N.C.O. had something to say about it.”

“He knew his way about,” said Pepin. “As for us, we got busy with an old suite of furniture that lasted us a fortnight.”

“And what for should we be without? You’ve got to make dinner, and there’s no wood or coal. After the grub’s served out, there you are with your jaws empty, with a pile of meat in front of you, and in the middle of a lot of pals that chaff and bullyrag you!”

“It’s the War Office’s doing, it isn’t ours.”

“Hadn’t the officers a lot to say about the pinching?”

“They damn well did it themselves, I give you my word! Desmaisons, do you remember Lieutenant Virvin’s trick, breaking down a cellar door with an ax? And when a poilu saw him at it, he gave him the door for firewood, so that he wouldn’t spread it about.”

“And poor old Saladin, the transport officer. He was found coming out of a basement in the dusk with two bottles of white wine in each arm, the sport, like a nurse with two pairs of twins. When he was spotted, they made him go back down to the wine-cellar, and serve out bottles for everybody. But Corporal Bertrand, who is a man of scruples, wouldn’t have any. Ah, you remember that, do you, sausage-foot!”

“Where’s that cook now that always found wood?” asks Cadilhac.

“He’s dead. A bomb fell in his stove. He didn’t get it, but he’s dead all the same—died of shock when he saw his macaroni with its legs in the air. Heart seizure, so the doc’ said. His heart was weak—he was only strong on wood. They gave him a proper funeral—made him a coffin out of the bedroom floor, and got the picture nails out of the walls to fasten ‘em together, and used bricks to drive ‘em in. While they were carrying him off, I thought to myself, ‘Good thing for him he’s dead. If he saw that, he’d never be able to forgive himself for not having thought of the bedroom floor for his fire.’—Ah, what the devil are you doing, son of a pig?”

Volpatte offers philosophy on the rude intrusion of a passing fatigue party: “The private gets along on the back of his pals. When you spin your yarns in front of a fatigue gang, or when you take the best bit or the best place, it’s the others that suffer.”

“I’ve often,” says Lamuse, “put up dodges so as not to go into the trenches, and it’s come off no end of times. I own up to that. But when my pals are in danger, I’m not a dodger any more. I forget discipline and everything else. I see men, and I go. But otherwise, my boy, I look after my little self.”

Lamuse’s claims are not idle words. He is an admitted expert at loafing, but all the same he has brought wounded in under fire and saved their lives. Without any brag, he relates the deed—

“We were all lying on the grass, and having a hot time. Crack, crack! Whizz, whizz! When I saw them downed, I got up, though they yelled at me, ‘Get down!’ Couldn’t leave ‘em like that. Nothing to make a song about, seeing I couldn’t do anything else,”

Nearly all the boys of the squad have some high deed of arms to their credit, and the Croix de Guerre has been successively set upon their breasts.

“I haven’t saved any Frenchmen,” says Biquet, “but I’ve given some Boches the bitter pill.” In the May attacks, he ran off in advance and was seen to disappear in the distance, but came back with four fine fellows in helmets.

“I, too,” says Tulacque, “I’ve killed some.” Two months ago, with quaint vanity, he laid out nine in a straight row, in front of the taken trench. “But,” he adds, “it’s always the Boche officer that I’m after.”

“Ah, the beasts!” The curse comes from several men at once and from the bottom of their hearts.

“Ah, mon vieux,” says Tirloir, “we talk about the dirty Boche race; but as for the common soldier, I don’t know if it’s true or whether we’re codded about that as well, and if at bottom they’re not men pretty much like us.”

“Probably they’re men like us,” says Eudore.

“Perhaps!” cries Cocon, “and perhaps not.”

“Anyway,” Tirloir goes on, “we’ve not got a dead set on the men, but on the German officers; non, non, non, they’re not men, they’re monsters. I tell you, they’re really a specially filthy sort o’ vermin. One might say that they’re the microbes of the war. You ought to see them close to—the infernal great stiff-backs, thin as nails, though they’ve got calf-heads.”

“And snouts like snakes.”

Tirloir continues: “I saw one once, a prisoner, as I came back from liaison. The beastly bastard! A Prussian colonel, that wore a prince’s crown, so they told me, and a gold coat-of-arms. He was mad because we took leave to graze against him when they were bringing him back along the communication trench, and he looked down on everybody—like that. I said to myself, ‘Wait a bit, old cock, I’ll make you rattle directly!’ I took my time and squared up behind him, and kicked into his tailpiece with all my might. I tell you, he fell down half-strangled.”

“Strangled?”

“Yes, with rage, when it dawned on him that the rump of an officer and nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor private! He went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an epileptic—”

“I’m not spiteful myself,” says Blaire, “I’ve got kiddies. And it worries me, too, at home, when I’ve got to kill a pig that I know—but those, I shall run ‘em through—Bing!—full in the linen-cupboard.”

“I, too.”

“Not to mention,” says Pepin, “that they’ve got silver hats, and pistols that you can get four quid for whenever you like, and field-glasses that simply haven’t got a price. Ah, bad luck, what a lot of chances I let slip in the early part of the campaign! I was too much of a beginner then, and it serves me right. But don’t worry, I shall get a silver hat. Mark my words, I swear I’ll have one. I must have not only the skin of one of Wilhelm’s red-tabs, but his togs as well. Don’t fret yourself; I’ll fasten on to that before the war ends.”

“You think it’ll have an end, then?” asks some one.

“Don’t worry!” replies the other.

*

Meanwhile, a hubbub has arisen to the right of us, and suddenly a moving and buzzing group appears, in which dark and bright forms mingle.

“What’s all that?”

Biquet has ventured on a reconnaissance, and returns contemptuously pointing with his thumb towards the motley mass: “Eh, boys! Come and have a squint at them! Some people!”

“Some people?”

“Oui, some gentlemen, look you. Civvies, with Staff officers.”

“Civilians! Let’s hope they’ll stick it!” [note 3]

It is the sacramental saying and evokes laughter, although we have heard it a hundred times, and although the soldier has rightly or wrongly perverted the original meaning and regards it as an ironical reflection on his life of privations and peril.

Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes. Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.

With an arm where a brassard glitters in gold-edged silk and golden ornament, a captain indicates the firing-step in front of an old emplacement and invites the visitors to get up and try it. The gentleman in the touring suit clambers up with the aid of his umbrella.

Says Barque, “You’ve seen the station-master at the Gare du Nord, all in his Sunday best, and opening the door of a first-class compartment for a rich sportsman on the first day of the shooting? With his ‘Montez, monsieur le Propritaire!’—you know, when the toffs are all togged up in brand-new outfits and leathers and ironmongery, and showing off with all their paraphernalia for killing poor little animals!”

Three or four poilus who were quite without their accouterments have disappeared underground. The others sit as though paralyzed. Even the pipes go out, and nothing is heard but the babble of talk exchanged by the officers and their guests.

“Trench tourists,” says Barque in an undertone, and then louder—“This way, mesdames et messieurs”—in the manner of the moment.

“Chuck it!” whispers Farfadet, fearing that Barque’s malicious tongue will draw the attention of the potent personages.

Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He has a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another follows him, wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black beard, a white tie and an eyeglass.

“Ah, ah! There are some poilus,” says the first gentleman. “These are real poilus, indeed.”

He comes up to our party a little timidly, as though in the Zoological Gardens, and offers his hand to the one who is nearest to him—not without awkwardness, as one offers a piece of bread to the elephant.

“He, he! They are drinking coffee,” he remarks.

“They call it ‘the juice,’” corrects the magpie-man.

“Is it good, my friends?” The soldier, abashed in his turn by this alien and unusual visitation, grunts, giggles, and reddens, and the gentleman says, “He, he!” Then, with a slight motion of the head, he withdraws backwards.

The assemblage, with its neutral shades of civilian cloth and its sprinkling of bright military hues—like geraniums and hortensias in the dark soil of a flowerbed—oscillates, then passes, and moves off the opposite way it came. One of the officers was heard to say, “We have yet much to see, messieurs les journalistes.”

When the radiant spectacle has faded away, we look at each other. Those who had fled into the funk-holes now gradually and head first disinter themselves. The group recovers itself and shrugs its shoulders.

“They’re journalists,” says Tirette.

“Journalists?”

“Why, yes, the individuals that lay the newspapers. You don’t seem to catch on, fathead. Newspapers must have chaps to write ‘em.”

“Then it’s those that stuff up our craniums?” says Marthereau.

Barque assumes a shrill treble, and pretending that he has a newspaper in front of his nose, recites—“‘The Crown Prince is mad, after having been killed at the beginning of the campaign, and meanwhile he has all the diseases you can name. William will die this evening, and again to-morrow. The Germans have no more munitions and are chewing wood. They cannot hold out, according to the most authoritative calculations, beyond the