ON THE SOMME FRONT
I hadn’t the heart to laugh, but sometimes I felt vaguely envious. I thought of the men who were carrying on the war, in the newspapers—those who wrote: “The line has been pierced; why hesitate to throw in fifty divisions?” Or: “we have only to bring our reserves right up to the line. A hundred thousand men must at once fill the gap.”
I longed to see that brave set compelled to find between Fouilly and Maricourt a little corner as secure as their little heaps of paper plans, on which a purring cat might find repose. I swear they would have found it rather difficult.
I thought abstractedly about my work as I went along; from time to time I glanced round at the scene, and I assure you one hit upon some queer things.
Beneath the rows of poplar trees that stretched along the valley a huge army had taken cover, with its battalions, its animals and wagons, its iron and steel, its faded tarpaulins and leather trappings that stank,and its refuse heaps. Horses nibbled at the bark of large decaying trees, that were stricken with a premature autumnal disease. Three meagre elm trees served as a shelter for a whole encampment: a dusty hedge threw its protecting shadow over the ammunition train of a regiment. But the vegetation was scarce and the shelter it afforded most scanty, so that from all parts the army overflowed right on to the bare plain, tearing up the surface of the roads and leaving a regular network of tracks, as if great hordes of wild beasts had made their passage along it.
There were roads that marked off the British from the French. There you could see marching by the splendid artillery of the British, quite new and glistening, fitted with light-coloured harness and nickel-plated buckles, with special rugs for the horses, that were well fed and gleaming like circus mounts.
The infantry were also filing past—young men, all of them. They marched to the wild negro music of the flutes and gaily-coloured drums. Then cars fitted with beds, tier upontier, came slowly along, jolting as little as possible, carrying the wounded fair-haired boys with wondering eyes, looking as placid as a touring party of Cook’s.
Our villages were packed to suffocation. Man had got everywhere, like a plague or a flood.
He had driven the cattle from their shelter and fixed his abode in hutches, stables and cowsheds.
The shell depôts seemed like pottery fields full of earthenware pitchers. Barges floated on the slimy water of the canal. Some carried food and guns: others served as hospital-boats.
From the movements of this heaving mass of beings and the creaking of their machinery, the panting of a giant seemed to issue forth and fill the silence. The whole scene suggested a sinister fair, a festival of war, a gathering of Bohemian clans and dancers of evil repute.
The nearer you got to Bray the more congested the country appeared to be. The motor-riding population held tyrannic swayover the roads, forcing the lowlier horse-wagons to drive across the fields. Little trollies running on rails clanked along pompously, showing great independence, hugging the ground with their small wheels, and their back loaded with millions of cartridges: in amongst the boxes some fellows were squatting, half asleep, proclaiming to the world in general the pleasure of being seated on something which does all the walking for you.
When I got above Chipilly, I beheld an extraordinary scene. An immense plain undulated there, covered with so many men, things and beasts, that over vast stretches the ground was no longer visible. Beyond the ruined tower which looks upon Etinehem lay land of a reddish-brown colour. I saw later that this colour was due to a great mass of horses closely pressed against each other. Every day they were brought to the muddy trough of the Somme to slake their thirst. The tracks were turned into sloughs, and the air was filled with an overpowering smell of sweat and manure.
Then, towards the left, stood a veritabletown of unbleached tents, whose top coverings were marked with large red crosses. Farther on, the ground sank down, only to curve up again suddenly towards the battlefield quivering on the horizon in a black fog. From different points a burst of discharging shells sent up white clouds, side by side, in quick succession, like rows of trees on the roadside. In the open sky more than thirty balloons formed a ring, giving one the impression of spectators interested in a brawl.
The Adjutant, pointing out the tents, said to me, “That’s Hill 80. You will see more wounded passing there than there are hairs on your head, and more blood flowing than the water in the canal. All those who are hit between Combles and Bouchavesnes are brought to Hill 80.”
I nodded, and we relapsed again into silence and reflection. The day gave out in the unclean air of the marshes. The English were firing their big cannon not far from us, and their roar crashed along the alignment like an enraged horse dashingblindly away. The horizon was so thick with guns that you could hear a continuous gurgle as of a huge cauldron in the tormenting grip of a furnace.
The Adjutant turned again to me. “Three of your brothers have been killed,” he said. “In one sense you are out of the business. You won’t be very badly off as a stretcher-bearer. In another it is unfortunate, but a good thing for you. It’s hard work, stretcher-bearing, but it’s better than the line. Don’t you think so?”
I said nothing. I thought of that devastated little valley where I had spent the first few weeks of the summer in front of the Plémont hill—the deadly hours I spent looking at the ruins of Lassigny between the torn and jagged poplars, and the apple-trees blighted with the horror on the edge of the chaotic road, and the repulsive shell-holes full of green slime and swarming with life, and the mute face of the Château de Plessier, and the commanding hill which a cosmic upheaval alone had made capable of giving rise to grim forebodings. Thereduring long nights I had breathed the fetid air of the corpse-laden fields. In the most despairing loneliness I had been in turn terrified of death and longing for it. And then some one came along one day to tell me that “You can go back behind the lines. Your third brother has been killed.” And many of the men looked at me, seeming to think with the Adjutant, “Your third brother is dead. In a sense you are lucky.”
Those were my thoughts as I entered upon my new duties. We were walking along the plateau, which stood out before heaven, erect as an altar, piled with millions of creatures ready for the sacrifice.
It had been dry for several days, and we lived under the rule of King Dust. The dust is the price we pay for fine weather: it attacks the fighting pack, intrudes upon its work, its food and its thoughts; it makes your lips filthy, your teeth crunch, and your eyes inflamed. But when it disappears the reign of mud begins, and then we passionately desire to stagnate again in the dust.
Far away, like idly moving rivers, large columns of dust marked all the roads in the district, and were filtered by the wind as they flowed over the countryside. The light of day was polluted with it, as the sky was ravaged by great flights of aeroplanes, and the silence violated and degraded, and the earth with its vegetation torn and mutilated.
I was not that day by any means disposed to be happy, but all this plunged me into the deepest gloom.
Looking all around me I found the only places where I could rest my eyes were in the innocent looks of the horses or on some unfortunate timid men who worked on the roadside. Everything else was nothing but a bristling gesture of war.
Night had fallen when we arrived at the city of tents. The Adjutant took me to a tent and found me a place on some straw which was strongly reminiscent of the pigsty. I took off my knapsack, lay down and fell asleep.
I got up with the dawn and, wandering through the mist, tried to find my bearings.
There was the road leading from Albert—worn, hollowed, and terribly overrun. It bore the never-ending stream of wounded. Alongside of it stood the city of tents, with its streets, its suburbs, and its public squares. Behind the tents, a cemetery. That was all.
I was leaning on a fence and I looked at the cemetery. Though it was overflowing, its appetite was insatiable. A group of German prisoners were occupied in digging long dark pits that were like so many open and expectant mouths. Two officers went by: one was fat, and looked as if at any moment he would be struck with apoplexy. He was gesticulating wildly to the other. “We have,” he said, “got ready in advance 200 graves and almost as many coffins. No, you can’t say that this offensive has not been planned.”
As a matter of fact, a large number of coffins had been already completed. They filled the tent where the corpses were to be unceremoniously laid out. Outside in the open,a large gang of joiners were engaged in cutting up planks of pinewood. They were whistling and singing innocently, as is usual with those who work with their hands.
I realised once again how a man’s opinion of great events is determined by his vocation and aptitudes. There was a sergeant there whose views of Armageddon varied with the quality of the wood which he had to use. When the wood was bad he used to say, “This war is damned rot.” But when the wood was clear of knots his view was: “We’ll get them licked.”
The heavy and responsible task of running the hospital was entrusted to a nervy and excitable young man. He appeared at every moment, his fingers clutching bundles of papers, which he passed from one hand to the other. I had few opportunities of hearing him speak, but, when I did, each time I caught the same words: “That’s not my business—I am getting crazy with it all. I have enough worries of that sort.”
I knew then that he had to think of many things. Almost all day a processionof motor cars, heavily laden with a groaning mass of wounded, came along the winding road which was being hastily metalled, looking like the ravenous gullet of this vast organism. On the top of the bend the lorries were unloaded under a porch decorated with flags, bearing no small resemblance to the festooned arch which on wedding days is erected at church doors.
From the first day I was ordered on night duty to deal with the ambulance cars as they arrived. A dozen of us were grouped under the porch for this purpose.
Up to that time it was only in the trenches that I had seen my comrades, wounded beside me, starting out on a long and mysterious journey of which little was known to us. The man who was hit appeared to be spirited away—he vanished from the battlefield. I was going to know all the stages of the suffering existence he was then only beginning.
The night I went on duty there had been a scrap towards Maurepas or Le Forest. Happening between two days of tremendousfighting, it was one of those incidents which seldom call for a single line in the communiqués. Yet the wounded streamed in all night. As soon as they were lowered from the cars, we got them into a large tent. It was an immense canvas hall lit with electricity. It had been pitched on ground covered with stubble, and its rough soil was bristling with anæmic grass and badly pressed clods. Those among the wounded who could walk were directed along a passage railed off on both sides, as is done at theatre entrances to make the crowd line up into a queue. They seemed dazed and exhausted. We took away their arms, knives and grenades. They let you do anything to them: they were like children overcome with sleep. The massacre of Europe cannot proceed without organisation. All the acts of the play are based on the most detailed calculation. As these men filed past, they were counted and labelled; clerks verified their identity with the unconcerned accuracy of customs officials. They, on their part, replied with the patience of theeternal public at government inquiry offices. Sometimes they even ventured to make a remark.
“Your name is Menu,” one cavalryman was asked. “Isn’t it?”
And the cavalryman replied in a heart-rending tone:
“Alas! it is, unfortunately.”
I remember a little man whose arm was in a sling. A doctor was looking at his papers, and said:
“You have a wound in your right arm?”
And the man replied so modestly:
“Oh! it is not a wound. It is only a hole!”
In one corner of the tent they were giving out food and drink. A cook was carving slices of beef and cutting up a round of cheese. The wounded seized the food with their muddy and blood-stained hands; and they were eating slowly and with evident relish. The inference was plain. Many were suffering primarily from hunger and thirst. They sat timidly on a bench like some very poor guests at a buffet during a garden party.
In front of them there were a score of wounded Germans who had been placed there indiscriminately. They were dozing or throwing hungry glances on the food and the pails of steaming tea. Hitting on a popular slang expression, a grey-haired infantryman, who was munching large pieces of boiled beef, said suddenly to the cook:
“Hang it all! Why not give them a piece of bully-beef?”
“Do you know them then?” said the cook jocularly.
“Do I know them! The poor devils! We have been punching each other the whole blessed day. Chuck them a piece of meat. Why not?”
A frivolous young man, short-sighted, with a turned-up nose, added in a tense voice:
“Ought to be done, you know—our honour....”
And they went on gravely chatting and gulped down cupfuls of a hot brew which was poured from a metal jug. From another angle in the tent the scene was very different. The men were lying down: they had grave wounds. Placed side by side on the unevenground, they made a mosaic of pain stained with mud and blood, the colours of war; reeking with sweat and corruption, the smells of war; noisy with cries, moans and hiccups which are the sounds and music of war.
I shivered at the sight. I had known the bristling horror of the massacre and the charge. I was to learn another horror, that of thetableau—the accumulation of prostrate victims, the spectacle of the vast hall swarming with human larvæ, in heaps, on the floor.
I had finished my work with the stretcher and hastened to make my round of the wounded. I was so deeply moved that I was rather hindered in my work. Some of the men were vomiting, suffering unutterable agony, and their brows streaming with perspiration. Others were very quiet and could be more or less rational: they seemed to be following the internal progress of their illness. I was completely upset by one of them. He was a fair-haired sergeant with a slight moustache. His face was buried in his hands and he was sobbing with despair and what seemed like shame. I asked him if he wassuffering pain. He scarcely replied. Then, gently lifting his blanket, I saw that he had been terribly hit by grape shot in his virility. And I felt a deep pity for his youth and his tears.
There was also a boy who used to utter a queer plaint, current in his locality. But I could only catch these syllables: “Ah! mon ... don....” A doctor who was passing said to him:
“Come, come! a little patience! Do not cry out like that.”
The child paused a moment before replying: “I’d have to lose my voice first if I’m not to cry.”
His neighbour was a big, rough, good-natured fellow with a powerful jaw, strong and massive features, with the peculiar shape of the skull and growth of hair that characterise the folk of Auvergne.
He looked at the boy who was groaning at his side, and, turning to me, commented, with a shrug of the shoulders:
“Rotten luck being hit like that, poor child!”
“And what’s the matter with you?” I said to him.
“Oh, I think I have lost my feet; but I am fairly strong and my body is solid.”...
It was true! I saw that both his feet had been torn away.
Round the electric arcs, luminous rings were formed by the sickening vapour. On the sides of the tent, in the folds, you could see the flies sleeping in big black patches, overcome by the cold freshness of night.
Large waves rolled on the canvas, passing like a shudder or violently flapping, according as the wind or gunfire was the cause.
I stepped carefully over some stretchers and found myself outside, in a night that roared, illuminated by the aurora borealis of the battlefield.
I had walked, with my hands held out in front of me, until I came upon a fence. Suddenly I knew what it was to be leaning against the parapet of hell!
What a human tempest! What explosions of hatred and destruction! Youwould have said that a company of giants were forging the horizon of the earth with repeated blows that filled the air with countless sparks. Innumerable furtive lights gave one continuous great light that lived, throbbed and danced, dazzling the sky and the land. Jets of iridescent light were bursting in the open sky as if they fell from the blows of the steam-hammer on white-hot steel. To me who had only recently left the trenches, each of these firework displays meant something—advice, commands, desperate calls, signals for slaughter; and I interpreted this furnace as if it had expressed in words the fury and distress of the combatants.
Towards Combles, on the left of Maurepas, one section above all seemed to be raging. It was just there that the junction was made between the English and the French armies; and it was there that the enemy concentrated a tumultuous and never-slackening fire. Every night, during many weeks, I saw this place lighted up with the same devouring flame. It was at each instant so intense that every instant appeared tobe the decisive one. But hours, nights and months went slowly by in the eternity of time, and each of these terrible moments was only one intense outburst out of an infinity of them. Thus often the agony of wounds is such that you would hardly think it could be endured any longer. But death comes not willingly at the desire of men: it strikes at will, when it likes, where it likes, and hardly permits itself to be directed or coaxed.
Morning came. Those who have seen the daybreaks of the war, after nights spent in fighting, or in the bloody work of the ambulance, will understand what is the most ugly and mournful thing in the world.
For my part, I shall never forget the green and grudging light of the dawn, the desolating look of the lamps and the faces, the asphyxiating smell of men attacked by corruption, the cold shiver of the morning, like the last frozen breath of night in the congealed foliage of large trees.
My work as a stretcher-bearer was over. I could return to carpentry. I made heavy planks of green wood and thought of all sorts of things, as the mind does when robbed of sleep and overwhelmed with bitterness.
Towards eight o’clock in the morning the sun was hailed by a race of flies as it was emerging painfully from the mist; and these animals began to abandon themselves to their vast daily orgy.
All those who were on the Somme in 1916 will never forget the flies. The chaos of the battlefield, its wealth in carrion, the abnormal accumulation of animals, of men, of food that had gone bad—all these were factors in determining that year a gigantic swarm of flies. They seemed to have gathered there from all parts of the globe to attend a solemn function. Every possible kind of fly was there, and the human world, victim of its own hatreds, remained defenceless against this horrible invasion. During a whole summer they were the absolute monarchs and queens, and we did not dispute the food with them.
I have seen, on Ridge 80, wounds swarming with larvæ—sights which, since the battle of the Marne, we had been able to forget. I have seen flies dashing themselves on the blood and the pus of wounds and feeding themselves with such drunken frenzy that, before they could be induced to leave their feasting and fly away, they had to be seized with pincers or with one’s fingers. The army suffered cruelly from them, and it is amazing that, in the end, victory was not theirs.
Nothing had a more lugubrious and stripped appearance than the plateau on which stood the city of tents. Every morning heavy traction engines went up the Etinehem hill and brought water to the camp. Several casks placed in amongst the trees were filled with water of rather a sweet taste, and this provision was to suffice, for a whole day, to slake the thirst of the men and clean away the impurities and emissions of disease.
Except on the horizon line, not a bush was to be seen. Nowhere a tuft of freshgrass. Nothing but an immense stretch of dust or mud, according as the face of the sky was calm or stormy. To relieve this desolate scene with a little colour, someone had had the happy idea of cultivating a little garden between the tents. And the wounded, on being lowered from the cars, were astonished to see, in the midst of the ghastliness of military activity, the pale smile of a geranium, or juniper trees uprooted from the stony ridges of the valley and replanted hastily in the style of French gardens.
I cannot, without being strangely moved, recall the tent in which about twelve soldiers were dying of gaseous gangrene. Around this deathly spot ran a thin little border of flowers, and an assiduous fellow was calmly trying to bring into bloom crimson bell-flowers.
Sometimes the earth, torrid with the month of August, seemed to reel with the satiating deluge of a storm. At such moments the tents used to crackle furiously and seemed, like great livid birds, to cling tothe earth in order better to resist the blast of the south wind.
But neither the gusts of rain nor the galloping thunderclaps, none of these tumults of Nature, interrupted man from his war. The operations and the dressing of wounds continued on Hill 80 as, on neighbouring hills, the batteries ploughed up the disputed ground. Often it seemed that man insisted on speaking more loudly than Heaven, and the guns and the thunder seemed determined to outbid each other.
Once, I remember, the thunder had the last word: two sausage-shaped balloons took fire, and the artillery, stricken blind, stammered and then became mute.
In a few days, I was given the job of furnishing the tents with little pieces of joinery, benches and tables. I worked on the spot, taking my tools with me, and I did my best not to disturb the patients, who were already exhausted by the din of battle. This was very painful work, because it made me a helpless spectator of unutterable misery. I remember being greatlytouched on one occasion: a young artilleryman, wounded in the face, was being visited by his brother, a cadet in a neighbouring regiment. The latter, very pale, was looking at the face of the wounded man, of which only an eye could be seen and a stained bandage. He took his hands, and bent down quite naturally to kiss him; then he shrank back, only to come near again, victim of an emotion of mingled horror and pity. Then the wounded man, who could not speak, had an inspiration that was full of tenderness: with outspread fingers he began to stroke the hair and face of his brother. This silent affection told how willingly the soul gives up the spoken word and yields to its most intimate gestures.
In the same tent Lieutenant Gambin was dying.
He was rather a crude, simple-hearted man, who had been engaged in some obscure civilian employment, and who now, solely by dint of his stubborn courage, had gained a commission. His large frame lay exhausted from hæmorrhage, and for two days he laydying. The breath of life took two days to quit his ice-cold limbs, from which exuded large beads of glutinous sweat. From time to time he sighed. At last, leaving my screw-driver and iron nails, I asked him if he would like something. He looked at me with wide-open eyes, full of memories and sadness, and said:
“No, thank you. But oh, I’ve got the hump!”
I was almost glad to see him die: he was too conscious of his long, dragging, terrible death.
Little Lalau who died the same day was at least unconscious, though delirious, to the last.
He was a country lad, and had been struck in the spinal cord by a piece of shell. A kind of meningitis ensued, and, at once, he lost his reason. The pupils of his eyes swung to and fro with sickening rapidity; he never ceased moving his jaw, apparently chewing like a ruminant. One day I found him devouring a string of beads which had been hung round his neck by a chaplain.An orderly kept his mouth open while we removed several pieces of wood and steel. The poor wretch laughed softly, repeating: “It’s a bit hard. It’s a bit hard to chew”; and the lines of his face twitched with innumerable spasms of pain.
Delirium upsets and wounds the spirit. For it constitutes the uttermost disorder—that of the mind. But it perhaps betrays benevolence on the part of Nature when it deprives man of the consciousness of his misery. Life and death have it in their power to confer these mournful blessings. Once I saw a soldier struck in so many places that the doctors decided he was beyond the resources of their skill. Among other wounds there was a long splinter of steel driven like a dagger through his right wrist. The sight was so cruel and revolting that an attempt was made to remove the steel. A doctor gripped it firmly and tried to loosen it with sharp, short pulls.
“Is it giving you pain?” he said from time to time.
And the patient replied:
“No; but I’m thirsty!”
“How is it,” I asked the doctor, “that he can’t feel the pain you are giving him?”
“It’s because he is in a state of shock,” replied the surgeon.
And I understood how the very extremity of pain sometimes obtains for its victims a truce which is, in a way, a foretaste of the sweets of death—the prelude to extinction.
At each end of the large marquees one of those small bell tents had been erected to which the soldiers had given the name of “mosques.” They served as death chambers. There were placed the men who were lost to human succour, in a loneliness that presaged the tomb. And some of them were aware of this. There was a soldier with a riddled abdomen who asked, on entering the tent, to be dressed in clean linen.
“Don’t let me die,” he pleaded, “in an unclean shirt. Give me something white. If you are too busy, I’ll put it on myself.”
Sometimes, unutterably wearied by so much suffering, I asked for work outside the camp, in order to sort out my ideas and renewthe theme of my reflections. It was always with a sigh of comfort that I got away from the city of tents. I contemplated, from a distance, this sinister agglomeration, which certainly bore comparison with an itinerant fair. I tried to distinguish amid the white canvas and red crosses the tops of these little “mosques.” I gazed also at the cemetery where hundreds and hundreds of bodies had been buried; and, realising the sum of the misery, despair and rage accumulated on that spot of the earth, I thought of the people who, far away in the heart of France, were crowding the concert cafés, the drawing-rooms, the cinemas, the brothels, finding brazen enjoyment in themselves, in the world, in the weather; and, sheltered by this quivering rampart of the sacrificed, will not share in this universal anguish. I thought of these people with more shame than resentment.
The excursions in the open freshened me a little, and I found some comfort in the sight of healthy men spared by the battle.
Sometimes I went as far as the Englishsector. Masses of long-range artillery were to be seen there. The guns were served by soldiers in shirt-sleeves and long trousers stained by oil and cart-grease. They looked more like factory workers than soldiers. You felt then how war has become an industry—an engineering business devoted to mechanical slaughter and massacre.
One night, walking along the Albert road, I overheard the conversation of some men who were sitting on the upturned earth of a pit. By their accent they were peasants from the north and must have belonged to the regiments which had just been under fire.
“After the war,” said one of them, “those who are going to dabble in politics, they’ll have to say they had a hand in this confounded war.”
But this frank opinion, caught in passing one night along a road in the front—this inconsequent, unanswered comment was lost in the tumult of the gunfire.
I gained much by being stretcher-bearer. I came to know the men better than I had ever done until then—to know them bathed in a purer light,nakedbefore death, stripped even of the instincts which disfigure the divine beauty of simple souls.
In the midst of the greatest trials our race of peasants has remained vigorous, pure, worthy of the noblest human traditions. I have known them—Rebic, Louba, Ratier, Freyssinet, Calmel, Touche, and so many others whom I must not name if I am not to mention the whole country. It cannot be said that pain chose its victims, and yet, when I used to pass by their beds where their destiny struggled—when I looked at their faces, each one of them, they all seemed to me good, patient, energetic men, and all of them deserved to be loved.
Did Rebic, that grey-haired sergeant, not richly deserve that a loving family waited longingly for him at home? One day we came to dress the big gash in his side, and we hastened to bring him white linen and made him a warm bed; he began to weep,good and simple man, and we asked him why, and he made this sublime answer:
“I cry because of the agony and misery I am giving you.”
As for Louba, we could not expect to hear him speak: a shell had smashed in his face. There remained nothing of it except one immense cruel gash; an eye displaced, twisted; and forehead—a humble peasant forehead. Yet one day, as we whispered some brotherly words, Louba wished to show how pleased he was, and he smiled to us. They will remember, those who saw the soul of Louba smiling faceless.
Freyssinet, child of twenty, often lapsed into delirium, and was aware of it in his conscious moments, and asked pardon of those whom it might have disturbed. The hour came when he sank into the peace everlasting. A much-decorated personage was making the round of the wards attended by an imposing suite. He stopped at the foot of each bed and uttered, in a fitting voice, words conferring whatever honourwhich they represented in the minds of the patients. He stopped before Freyssinet’s bed and began his speech. As he was an important and methodical man, he said what he had to say without noticing the many signs that were being made to make him desist. Having spoken, he nevertheless asked those who were looking on:
“You wanted to tell me something?”
“Yes,” replied someone; “it is that the man is dead.”
But Freyssinet was so modest, so timid, that the very attitude of his corpse betrayed respect and confusion.
It is there, also, that I made the acquaintance of Touche.
He came to us, poor Touche! his head broken, having had to leave a temporary hospital owing to its catching fire. I saw him turning out with his groping hands a bag which contained all his possessions.
“No, no,” he was saying, “they are all lost, and I’ll never find them.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“I am looking for the little photos ofmy two boys and of my wife. Unfortunately, they are lost. I shall miss them.”
I helped him in his search, and then I saw that Touche was blind.
Poor Touche! He easily recognised me by my voice and always had a smile for me. He was awkward at table, as a man would naturally be who is not yet accustomed to his infirmity. But he tried to manage by himself, and used to tell us in a quiet voice:
“I am doing my best, you see: I scrape my plate until I feel there is nothing more.”
Could I forget the name of the man who was brought in, one night, with his two legs smashed, and who murmured simply:
“It’s hard to have to die! But come! I’ll be brave.”
But Calmel, Calmel! No one who knew him will ever wish to forget him. Never did a man more passionately desire to live! Never did a man attain greater nobility by his endurance and resignation! He sufferedmortal wounds which at every moment the light of the life within him repudiated. It was he who, during a night bombardment, addressed his hospital comrades, exhorting them to be calm, with his authoritative moribund voice.
“Come, come!” he used to say; “we are all men here, are we not?”
Such is the strength of the spirit that these words alone, uttered by such a man, were capable of restoring order and confidence in the hearts of everyone.
It was to Calmel that a plump civilian, entrusted with some business or other with the armies, said one day with jubilant conviction:
“You appear to be badly hit, my brave man. But if you knew what wounds we inflict on them, with our 75! Terrible wounds, old boy, terrible!”
Each day brought visitors to Hill 80. They came from Amiens in sumptuous motor cars. They chatted as they traversed the great canvas hall, as if at a prize exhibition of agricultural produce: to thewounded they addressed a few words that were in keeping with their personal station, their opinions and dignity. They wrote notes on memorandum-books and sometimes accepted invitations to supper from the officers. There were foreigners, philanthropists, politicians, actresses, millionaires, novelists, and “penny-a-liners.” Those who were looking for strange sensations were sometimes admitted to the “mosque” or the operation-room.
They went away, well content with their day when the weather was fine, in the sure knowledge that they had seen some queer things, heroic fighters, and a model establishment.
But silence! I have pronounced their names—Freyssinet, Touche, Calmel—and the memories which they leave in my heart are too noble to be mingled with bitterness.
What has become of Hill 80 deserted? The battle has advanced towards the east. Winter has come; the city of tents has furledits canvas, as a fleet of sailing ships which must prepare for new destinies.
Often, in imagination, I see again the bare plateau and the immense burial ground left derelict in the fields and the mists, like the wreckage of innumerable ships down in the depths of the sea.