Under Fire (36 page)

When they leave his hands, some of the wounded are swallowed up by the black hole of the Refuge; others are sent back to the bigger clearing-station contrived in the trench on the Bethune road.

In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in the bottom of a sort of robbers' den, we waited two hours, buffeted, squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle, in an odor of blood and butchery. There are faces that become more distorted and emaciated from minute to minute. One of the patients can no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods, and as he shakes his head he sprinkles his neighbors. Another, bleeding like a fountain, shouts, "Hey, there! have a look at me!" A young man with burning eyes yells like a soul in hell, "I'm on fire!" and he roars and blows like a furnace.

* * * * * *

Joseph is bandaged. He thrusts a way through to me and holds out his hand: "It isn't serious, it seems; good-by," he says.

At once we are separated in the mob. With my last glance I see his wasted face and the vacant absorption in his trouble as he is meekly led away by a Divisional stretcher-bearer whose hand is on his shoulder; and suddenly I see him no more. In war, life separates us just as death does, without our having even the time to think about it.

They tell me not to stay there, but to go down into the Refuge to rest before returning. There are two entries, very low and very narrow, on the level of the ground. This one is flush with the mouth of a sloping gallery, narrow as the conduit of a sewer. In order to penetrate the Refuge, one must first turn round and work backwards with bent body into the shrunken pipe, and here the feet discover steps. Every three paces there is a deep step.

Once inside you have a first impression of being trapped--that there is not room enough either to descend or climb out. As you go on burying yourself in the gulf, the nightmare of suffocation continues that you progressively endured as you advanced along the bowels of the trenches before foundering in here. On all sides you bump and scrape yourself, you are clutched by the tightness of the passage, you are wedged and stuck. I have to change the position of my cartridge pouches by sliding them round the belt and to take my bags in my arms against my chest. At the fourth step the suffocation increases still more and one has a moment of agony; little as one may lift his knee for the rearward step, his back strikes the roof. In this spot it is necessary to go on all fours, still backwards. As you go down into the depth, a pestilent atmosphere and heavy as earth buries you. Your hands touch only the cold, sticky and sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on all sides and enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy breath touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor, one is assailed by a hot, unearthly clamor that rises from the hole as from a sort of kitchen.

When you reach at last the bottom of this laddered sap that elbows and compresses you at every step, the evil dream is not ended, for you find yourself in a lone but very narrow cavern where gloom reigns, a mere corridor not more than five feet high. If you cease to stoop and to walk with bended knees, your head violently strikes the planks that roof the Refuge, and the newcomers are heard to growl--more or less forcefully, according to their temper and condition--"Ah, lucky I've got my tin hat on:"

One makes out the gesture of some one who is squatting in an angle. It is an ambulance man on guard, whose monotone says to each arrival, "Take the mud off your boots before going in." So you stumble into an accumulating pile of mud; it entangles you at the foot of the steps on this threshold of hell.

In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of confused and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings. Some weak candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only relieve the darkness in the spots where they pierce it. At the farthest end faint daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon prisoner at the bottom of an oubliette. This obscure vent-hole allows one to make out some big objects ranged along the corridor; they are low stretchers, like coffins. Around and above them one then dimly discerns the movement of broken and drooping shadows, and the stirring of ranks and groups of specters against the walls.

I turn round. At the end opposite that where the faraway light leaks through, a mob is gathered in front of a tent-cloth which reaches from the ceiling to the ground, and thus forms an apartment, whose illumination shines through the oily yellow material. In this retreat, anti-tetanus injections are going on by the light of an acetylene lamp. When the cloth is lifted to allow some one to enter or leave, the glare brutally besplashes the disordered rags of the wounded stationed in front to await their treatment. Bowed by the ceiling, seated, kneeling or groveling, they push each other in the desire not to lose their turn or to steal some other's, and they bark like dogs, "My turn!"--"Me!"--"Me!" In this corner of modified conflict the tepid stinks of acetylene and bleeding men are horrible to swallow.

I turn away from it and seek elsewhere to find a place where I may sit down. I go forward a little, groping, still stooping and curled up, and my hands in front.

By grace of the flame which a smoker holds over his pipe I see a bench before me, full of beings. My eyes are growing accustomed to the gloom that stagnates in the cave, and I can make out pretty well this row of people whose bandages and swathings dimly whiten their beads and limbs. Crippled, gashed, deformed, motionless or restless, fast fixed in this kind of barge, they present an incongruous collection of suffering and misery.

One of them cries out suddenly, half rises, and then sits down again. His neighbor, whose greatcoat is torn and his head bare, looks at him and says to him--"What's the use of worrying?"

And he repeats the sentence several times at random, gazing straight in front of him, his hands on his knees. A young man in the middle of the seat is talking to himself. He says that he is an aviator. There are burns down one side of his body and on his face. In his fever he is still burning; it seems to him that he is still gnawed by the pointed flames that leaped from his engine. He is muttering, "Gott mit uns!" and then, "God is with us!"

A zouave with his arm in a sling, who sits awry and seems to carry his shoulder like a torturing burden, speaks to him: "You're the aviator that fell, aren't you?"

"I've seen--things," replies the flying-man laboriously.

"I too, I've seen some!" the soldier interrupts; "some people couldn't stick it, to see what I've seen."

"Come and sit here," says one of the men on the seat to me, making room as he speaks. "Are you wounded?"

"No; I brought a wounded man here, and I'm going back."

"You're worse than wounded then; come and sit down."

"I was mayor in my place," explains one of the sufferers, "but when I go back no one will know me again, it's so long now that I've been in misery."

"Four hours now have I been stuck on this bench," groans a sort of mendicant, whose shaking hand holds his helmet on his knees like an alms-bowl, whose head is lowered and his back rounded.

"We're waiting to be cleared, you know," I am informed by a big man who pants and sweats--all the bulk of him seems to be boiling. His mustache hangs as if it had come half unstuck through the moisture of his face. He turns two big and lightless eyes on me, and his wound is not visible.

"That's so," says another; "all the wounded of the Brigade come and pile themselves up here one after another, without counting them from other places. Yes, look at it now; this hole here, it's the midden for the whole Brigade."

"I'm gangrened, I'm smashed, I'm all in bits inside," droned one who sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; "yet up to last week I was young and I was clean. They've changed me. Now, I've got nothing but a dirty old decomposed body to drag along."

"Yesterday," says another, "I was twenty-six years old. And now how old am I?" He tries to get up, so as to show us his shaking and faded face, worn out in a night, to show us the emaciation, the depression of cheeks and eye-sockets, and the dying flicker of light in his greasy eye.

"It hurts!" humbly says some one invisible.

"What's the use of worrying?" repeats the other mechanically.

There was a silence, and then the aviator cried, "The padres were trying on both sides to hide their voices."

"What's that mean?" said the astonished zouave.

"Are you taking leave of 'em, old chap?" asked a chasseur wounded in the hand and with one arm bound to his body, as his eyes left the mummified limb for a moment to glance at the flying-man.

The latter's looks were distraught; he was trying to interpret a mysterious picture which everywhere he saw before his eyes--"Up there, from the sky, you don't see much, you know. Among the squares of the fields and the little heaps of the villages the roads run like white cotton. You can make out, too, some hollow threads that look as if they'd been traced with a pin-point and scratched through fine sand. These nets that festoon the plain with regularly wavy marks, they're the trenches. Last Sunday morning I was flying over the firing-line. Between our first lines and their first lines, between their extreme edges, between the fringes of the two huge armies that are up against each other, looking at each other and not seeing, and waiting--it's not very far; sometimes forty yards, sometimes sixty. To me it looked about a stride, at the great height where I was planing. And behold I could make out two crowds, one among the Boches, and one of ours, in these parallel lines that seemed to touch each other; each was a solid, lively lump, and all around 'em were dots like grains of black sand scattered on gray sand, and these hardly budged--it didn't look like an alarm! So I went down several turns to investigate.

"Then I understood. It was Sunday, and there were two religious services being held under my eyes--the altar, the padre, and all the crowd of chaps. The more I went down the more I could see that the two things were alike--so exactly alike that it looked silly. One of the services--whichever you like--was a reflection of the other, and I wondered if I was seeing double. I went down lower; they didn't fire at me. Why? I don't know at all. Then I could hear. I heard one murmur. one only. I could only gather a single prayer that came up to me en bloc, the sound of a single chant that passed by me on its way to heaven. I went to and fro in space to listen to this faint mixture of hymns that blended together just the same although they were one against the other; and the more they tried to get on top of each other, the more they were blended together up in the heights of the sky where I was floating.

"I got some shrapnel just at the moment when, very low down, I made out the two voices from the earth that made up the one--'Gott mit uns!' and 'God is with us!'--and I flew away."

The young man shook his bandage-covered head; he seemed deranged by the recollection. "I said to myself at the moment, 'I must be mad!'"

"It's the truth of things that's mad," said the zouave.

With his eyes shining in delirium, the narrator sought to express and convey the deep disturbing idea that was besieging him, that he was struggling against.

"Now think of it!" he said. "Fancy those two identical crowds yelling things that are identical and yet opposite, these identical enemy cries! What must the good God think about it all? I know well enough that He knows everything, but even if He knows everything, He won't know what to make of it."

"Rot!" cried the zouave.

"He doesn't care a damn for us, don't fret yourself."

"Anyway, what is there funny about it? That doesn't prevent people from quarreling with each other--and don't they! And rifle-shots speak jolly well the same language, don't they?"

"Yes," said the aviator, "but there's only one God. It isn't the departure of prayers that I don't understand; it's their arrival."

The conversation dropped.

"There's a crowd of wounded laid out in there," the man with the dull eyes said to me, "and I'm wondering all ways how they got 'em down here. It must have been a terrible job, tumbling them in here."

Two Colonials, hard and lean, supporting each other like tipsy men, butted into us and recoiled, looking on the ground for some place to fall on.

"Old chap, in that trench I'm telling you of," the hoarse voice of one was relating, "we were three days without rations, three full days without anything--anything. Willy-nilly, we had to drink our own water, and no help for it."

The other explained that once on a time he had cholera. "Ah, that's a dirty business--fever, vomiting, colics; old man, I was ill with that lot!"

"And then, too," suddenly growled the flying-man, still fierce to pursue the answer to the gigantic conundrum, "what is this God thinking of to let everybody believe like that that He's with them? Why does He let us all--all of us--shout out side by side, like idiots and brutes, 'God is with us!'--'No, not at all, you're wrong; God is with us'?"

A groan arose from a stretcher, and for a moment fluttered lonely in the silence as if it were an answer.

* * * * * *

Then, "I don't believe in God," said a pain-racked voice; "I know He doesn't exist--because of the suffering there is. They can tell us all the clap-trap they like, and trim up all the words they can rind and all they can make up, but to say that all this innocent suffering could come from a perfect God, it's damned skull-stuffing."

"For my part," another of the men on the seat goes on, "I don't believe in God because of the cold. I've seen men become corpses bit by bit, just simply with cold. If there was a God of goodness, there wouldn't be any cold. You can't get away from that."

"Before you can believe in God, you've got to do away with everything there is. So we've got a long way to go!"

Several mutilated men, without seeing each other, combine in head-shakes of dissent "You're right," says another, "you're right."

These men in ruins, vanquished in victory, isolated and scattered, have the beginnings of a revelation. There come moments in the tragedy of these events when men are not only sincere, but truth-telling, moments when you see that they and the truth are face to face.