Fear (9 page)

‘Three o’clock . . .’

‘There’ll be no sleep for us tonight.’

We were all ready, waiting for a lull, and for orders. We waited a long time. We had taken off our packs and sat down again. Shells still rained down. Then suddenly, blasting apart our drowsiness like a shell, came the short, imperative shout from outside:

‘Forward!’

‘Forward! Forward!’ repeated the sergeants. ‘Clear the entrance.’

The candle went out. Men moved up the steps – and then rapidly moved back.

‘Watch out!’ shouted the soldier standing on the top steps.

A burst of gunfire very close. The entrance was a red square, blinding us. The cellar shook. Our breath came in gasps.

‘Forward! On the double! Hurry!’

We threw ourselves out, tumbling over, clutching each other, shouting. We threw ourselves into the cold night, the whistling, burning night, the night full of obstacles and snares and shards of metal and clamour, the night which hid the unknown and death, that silent prowler with explosions for eyes, seeking its terrified prey. Abandoned creatures, wounded, lying out there somewhere, perhaps from our regiment, howled like injured dogs. Ammunition wagons, the thunder’s supply-train, passed by at full speed, wobbling and rattling, crushing everything in their mad rush to escape. We ran with all our might, on inadequate legs, overburdened, too small, too weak to get out of the way of the sudden trajectories. Our packs and bags squeezed our lungs, pulled us back, cast us out into the zone of sparks, and roaring and crashing, where it was suddenly too hot. And we always had our rifles which kept slipping off our shoulders, such useless, ridiculous weapons, never staying put, always a hindrance. And the bayonets that get in our way! We ran, following the back of the person in front, eyes wide but ready to shut so as not to see the fire, to shut on our shrivelled brains, which refused to work, which didn’t want to know, didn’t want to understand, which were dead weights on our racing bodies, driven on by the sharp lash of steel, fleeing the leaded knout howling at our ears. We ran, leaning forwards, ready to fall to the ground, faster than the shell. We ran, like beasts, no longer soldiers but deserters, yet towards the enemy, with this one word resounding in us: enough!, through the shaking houses, lifted up and falling back in clouds of dust on to their foundations.

A salvo, so direct that it caught us still standing, roared up out of the earth like a volcano, roasted our faces, burned our eyes, cut into our column as if cutting into the flesh of each one of us.

Panic booted us in the arse. Like tigers we leaped over the shells’ smoking craters, rimmed with the wounded, and we leaped over the cries of our brothers, cries that come from the guts and strike at the guts, we leaped over pity, honour, shame, we eliminated all feeling, all that makes us human, according to moralists – imposters who are not enduring an artillery bombardment and yet exalt courage! We were cowards and we knew it and we could be nothing else. The body was in charge and fear gave the orders.

We ran faster than ever, hearts pummelled by the panic of our bodies, with such a rush of blood that it made purple sparks dance in front of our eyes, that it gave us hallucinations of yet more explosions. ‘Trenches?’ we asked. ‘Where are the trenches?’

We were still bracketed by the artillery fire, suffocating with anxiety. Then we moved away from it, away from the village.

We managed to reach a wide trench, half-collapsed, a calm spot in the night, which hid us from the enemy’s deadly vigilance. We slid down to the ground, utterly exhausted, trying to deepen the darkness above us, like children hiding. We heard houses blowing up five hundred metres away, not understanding how we had been able to save ourselves, overwhelmed with horror at such bombardments against which there is no defence. We hesitated between futile revolt and the resignation of beasts in a slaughterhouse. We clung on to this calm for dear life, refusing to imagine the next stage of this adventure, which was only beginning. Other men in their turn ran up. We could hear their gasping breath. We waited for our hearts and lungs to return to their normal rhythms before asking questions, finding out who was missing. We put off the moment when we would know. We let the darkness fill the gaps in our ranks. Every fallen comrade increased the chances of our own deaths. But the cold, which penetrated our soaking garments, gradually calmed us down. This new discomfort brought us back to life. Men once more, we sadly considered our destiny.

Questions went round:

‘Tell the captain: ten wounded in the 3rd section, six in the 2nd, and a machine gun out of action.’

Then came the orders, the same as ever:

‘Forward!’

We slung on our packs and set off, hunched over, wearier than ever and less confident. Shells were hunting their targets in the darkness and we were heading in their direction. We came into the range of this new bombardment. Heavy-calibre time-shells, methodical and precise, were bursting twenty metres above the trench every minute and showering us with their raging shrapnel. With every one, we dived down into the mud and waited, frozen with terror, for the explosion to seal our fate. And then we’d get up and push ourselves forward. Once again, some men were hit. The battalion advanced past them and witnessed their suffering. But the episode came to an end. Further on, the night was calm and endless, concealing from us unknown, deadly objectives. Fatigue, the struggle that every infantryman has to endure with the load he is carrying, which constricts and exhausts him, prevented us from thinking.

Our last reserves of strength were concentrated in the muscles of our necks and shoulders. Would these trenches never end? Yet we feared that they would indeed end. We were approaching a goal that we were in no hurry to reach. Every metre we covered, every effort that we could claw out of our exhaustion, took us ever deeper into danger, brought a great many lives closer to their end. Who would be struck down?

I had a trivial accident during this march to which the circumstances lent great importance and which caused me considerable suffering. As we were leaping through the harassing fire, gasping for breath, the puttee on my right leg came undone, unravelled, dragged in the mud, was stepped on by the person behind me, tripping me up. There was no question of stopping, resisting the pressure of hundreds of men blindly fleeing the shells. I had to keep going forward, holding my puttee, shackled like a beast. Whenever I heard the whistle of a shell I dropped down on one knee and profited from the explosion to wind round the strip of cloth as fast as I could. But the pause was too short, and I learned the hard way that a man who cannot move freely feels more vulnerable. This uncomfortable situation lasted for some time, until we made a proper halt.

We had lost all notion of the time, of duration, of distance. We kept on marching along identical trenches, in the endless night, numbed by the growing cold. We could no longer feel our flayed shoulders. We did not even have enough lucidity left to imagine, or fear, anything . . .

At last dawn broke through the grey rainclouds. A pale, silent dawn, revealing a foggy, lifeless desert. A strange scent hung in the air, at first rather sweet and sickly but then giving off the richer notes of a still-contained putrefaction – in the way that a thick sauce slowly reveals the strength of its seasoning.

I kept going, bent down, blank, all my faculties absorbed by my pack, my rifle and my cartridge pouches. I stepped over pools of water and shaky duckboards which added to the difficulty of our progress. We skirted round the blast-proof traverses, changed direction without trying to keep our bearings, all in silence, a metre apart, and banged into each other whenever the pace slackened. The trenches widened out, and there were more and more signs of damage and destruction.

All of a sudden the soldier in front of me crouched down on his knees in order to get under an overhanging pile of material. I crouched down behind him. When he got back on his feet, he revealed a man of wax, stretched out on his back, his unbreathing mouth wide open, his eyes expressionless, a cold, stiff man who must have slipped beneath this illusory shelter of old planks to die. I suddenly found myself face to face with the first fresh corpse that I had seen in my life. My face passed within a few centimetres of his, my gaze met his terrifying glassy stare, my hand touched his frozen one, darkened by the blood that had frozen in his veins. It felt as if this dead man, in the brief tête-à-tête he had forced on me, was blaming me for his death and threatening me with revenge. It was one of the most horrible impressions that I took away from the front.

But this dead man was like the watchman for a whole kingdom of the dead. This first French corpse preceded hundreds of other French corpses. The trench was full of them. (We had come out into our former front line, from where our attack had been launched the day before.) Corpses contorted into every possible position, corpses which had suffered every possible mutilation, every gaping wound, every agony. There were complete corpses, serene and perfectly composed like stone saints in a chapel; undamaged corpses without any evident injuries; foul, blood-soaked corpses like the prey of unclean beasts; calm, resigned, insignificant corpses; the terrifying corpses of men who had refused to die, raging, upright, bulging, haggard, cursing and crying out for justice. All with their twisted mouths, their glassy eyes, and their skin like that of drowned men. And then there were the pieces of corpses, the shreds of bodies and clothes, organs, severed members, red and purple human flesh, like rotten meat in a butcher’s, limp, flabby, yellow fat, bones extruding marrow, unravelled entrails, like vile worms that we crushed with a shudder. The body of a dead man is an object of utter disgust for those who are alive, and this disgust is itself the mark of utter prostration.

To escape such horror, I looked out at the plain. A new and greater horror: the plain was blue.[
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The plain was covered with our comrades, cut down by machine guns, their faces in the mud, arses in the air, indecent, grotesque like puppets, but pitiable like men, alas! Fields of heroes, cargo for the nocturnal carts . . .

A voice, from somewhere in our ranks, found words for the thought we suppressed: ‘Jesus, they copped it!’ which immediately echoed in all our minds as: Jesus, we’re going to cop it!

No life, no light, no colour caught the eye or distracted the mind. We had to follow the trench, look out for corpses, if only to avoid them. I had noticed that we no longer distinguished the living from the dead. We had encountered a few soldiers leaning on the parapet, not moving, and I had assumed they had fallen asleep. I saw that they were also dead and the slight slope had kept them upright against the side of the trench.

From a distance I saw the profile of a little bald man with a beard, sitting on the fire-step, who seemed to be laughing. It was the first relaxed, cheerful face we had seen, and I approached him thankfully, asking myself what he had to laugh about. He was laughing at being dead! His head was cleanly sliced down the middle. As I passed, I saw with a start that he had lost half this jovial head, the other profile.[
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] The head was completely empty. His brains, which had dropped out in one piece, were placed neatly beside him – like an item in a tripe butcher’s – next to his hand which pointed to them. This corpse was playing a macabre joke on us. Hence, perhaps, his posthumous laughter. The joke reached the nadir of horror when someone uttered a strangled cry and shoved us aside to run.

‘What’s got into you?’

‘I think that it’s . . . my brother!’

‘Good God, look more closely!’

‘I don’t dare . . .’ he said, as he fled the scene.

Before us in every direction spread a flat, dreary, silent expanse, as far as the rainy horizon, sunk beneath low clouds. The landscape was nothing but a pulverised mire, uniformly grey, overwhelmingly desolate. Though we knew that the bleeding armies paralysed with fear were somewhere down in that valley of devastation, there was no sign of their presence or their respective positions. It looked like a barren land, recently stripped bare by some terrible flood, which had retreated leaving in its wake shipwrecks and bodies buried under a coat of dark slime. The heavy sky weighed down on us like a tombstone. It all served to remind us of the inexorable fate for which we were destined.

We finally emerged into a kind of rallying point, with wide tracks running through it. The place must have been blown apart and then re-established using a vast number of sandbags. Marching in single file, we hadn’t seen each other since the previous day, and were surprised to recognise ourselves, so much had we changed. We were as pallid as the corpses that surrounded us, filthy and tired. Hunger gnawed at our bellies and the chill of morning made us shudder. I met Bertrand, who was with another unit. On his face that was worn and aged by the night’s anxieties, I recognised the signs of my own anguish. Seeing him made me aware of how I looked myself. He found a few words to express the fear and the astonishment of all the new recruits:

‘Is this what war is?’

‘What are we doing here?’ asked the men.

No one knew. We had no orders. We had been abandoned in this wasteland full of corpses, some of them sneering, holding us in the menacing gaze of their glaucous eyes, others turned away, indifferent, as if they were saying: ‘We’ve finished with all this. Get yourself ready to die. It’s your turn next.’

The yellow light of a day that seemed to falter as if it too was struck by horror, illuminated a lifeless, soundless battlefield. It felt as if everything around us and off into infinity was dead, and we did not dare raise our voices. It felt as if we had come to some place in the world which was part of a dream, that had gone beyond all the limits of reality and hope. Ahead and behind merged into limitless desolation, all covered with the same churned up grey mud. We were stranded on some ice-floe out in space, surrounded by clouds of sulphur, ravaged by sudden bursts of thunder. We prowled in these accursed limbos which at any moment now would turn into hell.