III

We have no lights this evening.... We must learn to do without them....

I grope my way along the pa.s.sages, where the wind is muttering, to the great staircase. Here there is a fitful lamp which makes one prefer the darkness. I see the steps, which are white and smeared with mud, pictures and tapestries, a sumptuous scheme of decoration flooded at the bottom by filth and desolation. As I approach the room where the wounded are lying, I hear the calm sound of their conversation. I go in quietly.

They cease talking; then they begin to chat again, for now they know me.

At first one can only distinguish long forms ranged upon the ground. The stretchers seem to be holding forth with human voices. One of these is narrating:

"We were all three sitting side by side... though I had told the adjutant that corner was not a good place.... They had just brought us a ration of soup with a little bit of meat that was all covered with white frost. Then bullets began to arrive by the dozen, and we avoided them as well as we could, and the earth flew about, and we were laughing, because we had an idea that among all those bullets there was not one that would find its billet. And then they stopped firing, and we came back to sit on the ledge. There were Chagniol and Duc and I, and I had them both to the right of me. We began to talk about Giromagny, and about Danjoutin, because that's the district we all came from, and this went on for about half an hour. And then, all of a sudden, a bullet came, just a single one, but this time it was a good one. It went through Chagniol's head, then through Duc's, and as I was a little taller than they, it only pa.s.sed through my neck...."

"And then?"

"Then it went off to the devil! Chagniol fell forward on his face. Duc got up, and ran along on all fours as far as the bend in the trench, and there he began to scratch out the earth like a rabbit, and then he died.

The blood was pouring down me right and left, and I thought it was time for me to go. I set off running, holding a finger to each side of my neck, because of the blood. I was thinking: just a single bullet! It's too much! It was really a mighty good one! And then I saw the adjutant.

So I said to him: 'I warned you, mon adjutant, that that corner was not a good place!' But the blood rushed up into my mouth, and I began to run again."

There was a silence, and I heard a voice murmur with conviction:

"YOU were jolly lucky, weren't you?"

Mulet, too, tells his story:

"They had taken our fire... 'That's not your fire,' I said to him. 'Not our fire?' he said. Then the other came up and he said: 'Hold your jaw about the fire...' 'It's not yours,' I said. Then he said: 'You don't know who you're talking to.' And he turned his cap, which had been inside out... 'Ah! I beg your pardon,' I said, 'but I could not tell...'

And so they kept our fire...."

Maville remarks calmly: "Yes, things like that will happen sometimes."

Silence again. The tempest shakes the windows with a furious hand. The room is faintly illuminated by a candle which has St. Vitus' dance.

Rousselot, our little orderly, knits away industriously in the circle of light. I smoke a pipe at once acrid and consoling, like this minute itself in the midst of the infernal adventure.

Before going away, I think of Croquelet, the silent, whose long silhouette I see at the end of the room. "He sleeps all the time," says Mulet, "he sleeps all day." I approach the stretcher, I bend over it, and I see two large open eyes, which look at me gravely and steadily in the gloom. And this look is so sad, so poignant, that I am filled with impotent distress.

"You sleep too much, my poor Croquelet."

He answers me with his rugged accent, but in a feeble voice:

"Don't listen to him; it's not true. You know quite well that I can't sleep, and that you won't give me a draught to let me get a real nap.

This afternoon, I read a little.... But it wasn't very interesting....

If I could have another book...."

"Show me your book, Croquelet."

He thrusts out his chin towards a little tract. I strike a match, and I read on the grey cover: "Of the Quality of Prayers addressed to G.o.d."

"All right, Croquelet, I'll try to get you a book with pictures in it.

How do you feel this evening?"

"Ah! bad! very bad! They're thawing now...."

He has had frost-bite in his feet, and is beginning to suffer so much from them that he forgets the wound in his side, which is mortal, but less active.

IV

I have come to take refuge among my wounded to smoke in peace, and meditate in the shadow. Here, the moral atmosphere is pure. These men are so wretched, so utterly humiliated, so absorbed in their relentless sufferings that they seem to have relinquished the burden of the pa.s.sions in order to concentrate their powers on the one endeavour: to live.

In spite of their solidarity they are for the time isolated by their individual sufferings. Later on, they will communicate; but this is the moment when each one contemplates his own anguish, and fights his own battle, with cries of pain....

They are all my friends. I will stay among them, a.s.sociating myself with all my soul in their ordeal.

Perhaps here I shall find peace. Perhaps all ign.o.ble discord will call a truce on the threshold of this empire.

But a short distance from us the battle-field has thundered unceasingly for days. Like a noisy, complicated mechanism which turns out the products of its internal activity, the stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are, swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye; and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the damage.

How silent they are this evening! And how it makes one's heart ache to look at them! Here is Bourreau, with the brutal name and the gentle nature, who never utters a complaint, and whom a single bullet has deprived of sight for ever. Here is Bride, whom we fear to touch, so covered is he with bandages, but who looks at us with touching, liquid eyes, his mind already wandering. Here is Lerouet, who will not see next morning dawn over the pine-trees, and who has a gangrened wound near his heart. And the others, all of whom I know by their individual misfortunes.

How difficult it is to realise what they were, all these men who a year ago, were walking in streets, tilling the land, or writing in an office.

Their present is too poignant. Here they lie on the ground, like some fair work of art defaced. Behold them! The creature par excellence has received a great outrage, an outrage it has wrought upon itself.

We are ignorant of their past. But have they a future? I consider these innocent victims in the tragic majesty of the hour, and I feel ashamed of living and breathing freely among them.

Poor, poor brothers! What could one do for you which would not be insufficient, unworthy, mediocre? We can at least give up everything and devote ourselves heart and soul to our holy and exacting work.

But no! round the beds on which your solitary drama is enacted, men are still taking part in a sinister comedy. Every kind of folly, the most ign.o.ble and also the most imbecile pa.s.sions, pursue their enterprises and their satisfactions over your heads.

Neither the four corpses we buried this morning, nor your daily agonies will disarm these appet.i.tes, suspend these calculations, and destroy these ambitions the development and fruition of which even your martyrdom, may be made to serve.

I will spend the whole evening among my wounded, and we will talk together, gently, of their misery; it will please them, and they will make me forget the horrible atmosphere of discussion that reigns here.

Alas! during the outburst of the great catastrophe, seeing the volume of blood and fire, listening to the uproar, smelling the stench of the vast gangrene, we thought that all pa.s.sions would be laid aside, like c.u.mbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure hearts to meet the ordeal!

But no! The first explosion was tremendous, yet hardly had its echoes died away when the rag-pickers were already at work among the ruins, in quest of cutlet-bones and waste paper.

And yet, think of the sacred anguish of those first hours!

Well, so be it! For my part, I will stay here, between these stretchers with their burdens of anguish.

At this hour one is inclined to distrust everything, man and the universe, and the future of Right. But we cannot have any doubts as to the suffering of man. It is the one certain thing at this moment.

So I will stay and drink in this sinister testimony. And each time that Beal, who has a gaping wound in the stomach, holds out his hands to me with a little smile, I will get up and hold his hands in mine, for he is feverish, and he knows that my hands are always icy.

V