Under Fire (40 page)

"Aren't we there? Nom de Dieu, shan't we ever get there?" The groan is breathed by the long procession that tosses about in these crevices of the earth, carrying rifles and shovels and pickaxes under the eternal torrent. We march and march. We are drunk with fatigue, and roll to this side and that. Stupefied and soaked, we strike with our shoulders a substance as sodden as ourselves.

"Halt!"--"Are we there?"--"Ah, yes, we're there!"

For the moment a heavy recoil presses us back and then a murmur runs along: "We've lost ourselves." The truth dawns on the confusion of the wandering horde. We have taken the wrong turn at some fork, and it will be the deuce of a job to find the right way again.

Then, too, a rumor passes from mouth to mouth that a fighting company on its way to the lines is coming up behind us. The way by which we have come is stopped up with men. It is the block absolute.

At all costs we must try to regain the lost trench--which is alleged to be on our left--by trickling through some sap or other. Utterly wearied and unnerved, the men break into gesticulations and violent reproaches. They trudge awhile, then drop their tools and halt. Here and there are compact groups--you can glimpse them by the light of the star-shells--who have let themselves fall to the ground. Scattered afar from south to north, the troop waits in the merciless rain.

The lieutenant who is in charge and has led us astray, wriggles his way along the men in quest of some lateral exit. A little trench appears, shallow and narrow.

"We most go that way, no doubt about it," the officer hastens to
say. "Come, forward, boys."

Each man sulkily picks up his burden. But a chorus of oaths and
curses rises from the first who enter the little sap: "It's a
latrine!"

A disgusting smell escapes from the trench, and those inside halt butt into each other, and refuse to advance. We are all jammed against each other and block up the threshold.

"I'd rather climb out and go in the open!" cries a man. But there are flashes rending the sky above the embankments on all sides, and the sight is so fearsome of these jets of resounding flame that overhang our pit and its swarming shadows that no one responds to the madman's saying.

Willing or unwilling, since we cannot go back, we must even take that way. "Forward into the filth!" cries the leader of the troop. We plunge in, tense with repulsion. Bullets are whistling over. "Lower your heads!" The trench has little depth; one must stoop very low to avoid being hit, and the stench becomes intolerable. At last we emerge into the communication trench that we left in error. We begin again to march. Though we march without end we arrive nowhere.

While we wander on, dumb and vacant, in the dizzy stupefaction of fatigue, the stream which is running in the bottom of the trench cleanses our befouled feet.

The roars of the artillery succeed each other faster and faster, till they make but a single roar upon all the earth. From all sides the gunfire and the bursting shells hurl their swift shafts of light and stripe confusedly the black sky over our heads. The bombardment then becomes so intense that its illumination has no break. In the continuous chain of thunderbolts we can see each other clearly--our helmets streaming like the bodies of fishes, our sodden leathers, the shovel-blades black and glistening; we can even see the pale drops of the unending rain. Never have I seen the like of it; in very truth it is moonlight made by gunfire.

Together there mounts from our lines and from the enemy's such a cloud of rockets that they unite and mingle in constellations; at one moment, to light us on our hideous way, there was a Great Bear of star-shells in the valley of the sky that we could see between the parapets.

* * * * * *

We are lost again, and this time we must be close to the first lines; but a depression in this part of the plain forms a sort of basin, overrun by shadows. We have marched along a sap and then back again. In the phosphorescent vibration of the guns, shimmering like a cinematograph, we make out above the parapet two stretcher-bearers trying to cross the trench with their laden stretcher.

The lieutenant, who at least knows the place where he should guide the team of workers, questions them, "Where is the New Trench?"--"Don't know." From the ranks another question is put to them, "How far are we from the Boches?" They make no reply, as they are talking among themselves.

"I'm stopping," says the man in front; "I'm too tired."

"Come, get on with you, nom de Dieu!" says the other in a surly tone and floundering heavily, his arms extended by the stretcher. "We can't step and rust here."

They put the stretcher down on the parapet, the edge of it overhanging the trench, and as we pass underneath we can see the prostrate man's feet. The rain which falls on the stretcher drains from it darkened.

"Wounded?" some one asks down below.

"No, a stiff," growls the bearer this time, "and he weighs twelve stone at least. Wounded I don't mind--for two days and two nights we haven't left off carrying 'em--but it's rotten, breaking yourself up with lugging dead men about." And the bearer, upright on the edge of the bank, drops a foot to the base of the opposite bank across the cavity, and with his legs wide apart, laboriously balanced, he grips the stretcher and begins to draw it across, calling on his companion to help him.

A little farther we see the stooping form of a hooded officer, and as he raises his hand to his face we see two gold lines on his sleeve. He, surely, will tell us the way. But he addresses us, and asks if we have not seen the battery he is looking for. We shall never get there!

But we do, all the same. We finish up in a field of blackness where a few lean posts are bristling. We climb up to it, and spread out in silence. This is the spot.

The placing of us is an undertaking. Four separate times we go forward and then retire, before the company is regularly echeloned along the length of the trench to be dug, before an equal interval is left between each team of one striker and two shovelers. "Incline three paces more--too much--one pace to the rear. Come, one pace to the rear--are you deaf?--Halt! There!"

This adjustment is done by the lieutenant and a noncom. of the Engineers who has sprung up out of the ground. Together or separately they run along the file and give their muttered orders into the men s ears as they take them by the arm, sometimes, to guide them. Though begun in an orderly way, the arrangement degenerates, thanks to the ill temper of the exhausted men, who must continually be uprooting themselves from the spot where the undulating mob is stranded.

"We're in front of the first lines," they whisper round me. "No." murmur other voices, "we're just behind."

No one knows. The rain still falls, though less fiercely than at some moments on the march. But what matters the rain! We have spread ourselves out on the ground. Now that our backs and limbs rest in the yielding mud, we are so comfortable that we are unconcerned about the rain that pricks our faces and drives through to our flesh, indifferent to the saturation of the bed that contains us.

But we get hardly time enough to draw breath. They are not so imprudent as to let us bury ourselves in sleep. We must set ourselves to incessant labor. It is two o'clock of the morning; in four hours more it will be too light for us to stay here. There is not a minute to lose.

"Every man," they say to us, "must dig five feet in length, two and a half feet in width, and two and three-quarter feet in depth. That makes fifteen feet in length for each team. And I advise you to get into it; the sooner it's done, the sooner you'll leave."

We know the pious claptrap. It is not recorded in the annals of the regiment that a trenching fatigue-party ever once got away before the moment when it became absolutely necessary to quit the neighborhood if they were not to be seen, marked and destroyed along with the work of their hands.

We murmur, "Yes, yes--all right; it's not worth saying. Go easy."

But everybody applies himself to the job courageously, except for some invincible sleepers whose nap will involve them later in superhuman efforts.

We attack the first layer of the new line--little mounds of earth, stringy with grass. The ease and speed with which the work begins--like all entrenching work in free soil--foster the illusion that it will soon be finished, that we shall be able to sleep in the cavities we have scooped: and thus a certain eagerness revives.

But whether by reason of the noise of the shovels, or because some men are chatting almost aloud, in spite of reproofs, our activity wakes up a rocket, whose flaming vertical line rattles suddenly on our right.

"Lie down!" Every man flattens himself, and the rocket balances and parades its huge pallor over a sort of field of the dead.

As soon as it is out one hears the men, in places and then all along, detach themselves from their secretive stillness, get up, and resume the task with more discretion.

Soon another star-shell tosses aloft its long golden stalk, and still more brightly illuminates the flat and motionless line of trenchmakers. Then another and another.

Bullets rend the air around us, and we hear a cry, "Some one wounded!" He passes, supported by comrades. We can just see the group of men who are going away, dragging one of their number.

The place becomes unwholesome. We stoop and crouch, and some are scratching at the earth on their knees. Others are working full length; they toil, and turn, and turn again, like men in nightmares. The earth, whose first layer was light to lift, becomes muddy and sticky; it is hard to handle, and clings to the tool like glue. After every shovelful the blade must be scraped.

Already a thin heap of earth is winding along, and each man has the idea of reinforcing the incipient breastwork with his pouch and his rolled-up greatcoat, and he hoods himself behind the slender pile of shadow when a volley comes--

While we work we sweat, and as soon as we stop working we are pierced through by the cold. A spell seems to be cast on us, paralyzing our arms. The rockets torment and pursue us, and allow us but little movement. After every one of them that petrifles us with its light we have to struggle against a task still more stubborn. The hole only deepens into the darkness with painful and despairing tardiness.

The ground gets softer; each shovelful drips and flows, and spreads from the blade with a flabby sound. At last some one cries, "Water!" The repeated cry travels all along the row of diggers--"Water--that's done it!"

"Melusson's team's dug deeper, and there's water. They've struck a swamp."--"No help for it."

We stop in confusion. In the bosom of the night we hear the sound of shovels and picks thrown down like empty weapons. The non-coms. go gropingly after the officer to get instructions. Here and there, with no desire for anything better, some men are going deliciously to sleep under the caress of the rain, under the radiant rockets.

* * * * * *

It was very nearly at this minute, as far as I can remember, that the bombardment began again. The first shell fell with a terrible splitting of the air, which seemed to tear itself in two; and other whistles were already converging upon us when its explosion uplifted the ground at the head of the detachment in the heart of the magnitude of night and rain, revealing gesticulations upon a sudden screen of red.

No doubt they had seen us, thanks to the rockets, and had trained
their fire on us.

The men hurled and rolled themselves towards the little flooded ditch that they had dug, wedging, burying, and immersing themselves in it, and placed the blades of the shovels over their heads. To right, to left, in front and behind, shells burst so near that every one of them shook us in our bed of clay; and it became soon one continuous quaking that seized the wretched gutter, crowded with men and scaly with shovels, under the strata of smoke and the falling fire. The splinters and debris crossed in all directions with a network of noise over the dazzling field. No second passed but we all thought what some stammered with their faces in the earth, "We're done, this time!"

A little in front of the place where I am. a shape has arisen and cried, "Let's be off!" Prone bodies half rose out of the shroud of mud that dripped in tails and liquid rags from their limbs, and these deathful apparitions cried also, "Let's go!" They were on their knees, on all-fours, crawling towards the way of retreat: "Get on, allez, get on!"

But the long file stayed motionless, and the frenzied complaints were in vain. They who were down there at the end would not budge, and their inactivity immobilized the rest. Some wounded passed over the others, crawling over them as over debris, and sprinkling the whole company with their blood.

We discovered at last the cause of the maddening inactivity of the detachment's tail--"There's a barrage fire beyond."

A weird imprisoned panic seized upon the men with cries inarticulate and gestures stillborn. They writhed upon the spot. But little shelter as the incipient trench afforded, no one dared leave the ditch that saved us from protruding above the level of the ground, no one dared fly from death towards the traverse that should be down there. Great were the risks of the wounded who had managed to crawl over the others, and every moment some were struck and went down again.

Fire and water fell blended everywhere. Profoundly entangled in the supernatural din, we shook from neck to heels. The most hideous of deaths was falling and bounding and plunging all around us in waves of light, its crashing snatched our fearfulness in all directions--our flesh prepared itself for the monstrous sacrifice! In that tense moment of imminent destruction, we could only remember just then how often we had already experienced it, how often undergone this outpouring of iron, and the burning roar of it, and the stench. It is only during a bombardment that one really recalls those he has already endured.

And still, without ceasing, newly-wounded men crept over us, fleeing at any price. In the fear that their contact evoked we groaned again, "We shan't get out of this; nobody will get out of it."

Suddenly a gap appeared in the compressed humanity, and those behind breathed again, for we were on the move.