"Wounded?" asked somebody.
"No," came the answer from a passingcar. "It's the 7th Division from Paris. They're off to the front!"
Tuesday, September 8
"Attention!"
It was still pitch-dark. Cinders continued to smoulder on the hearths. The guns were still roaring, and the vivid jets of fire startled us like flashes of lightning. A little way off, to the east, a farm or hayrick was burning. The weather was sultry and a persistent smell of putrefying flesh permeated the air.
The battery started; we were off to the firing-line.
At daybreak we reached Dammartin, where, on the doors and closed shutters, notices and billeting directions were chalked up in German. On the front door of one house I saw two words scrawled in pointed, Gothic handwriting: "Gute Leute" (Good people). I wondered who it was that lived there....
We continued on our way. The dull boom of the guns seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, and continued uninterruptedly.
By the side of the road a grave had been dug and marked by a white deal cross bearing a name painted in tar and capped by a Chasseur's shako with a brass chain. The dead man had evidently not been buriedsoon enough, and a sickening smell rose up from the freshly turned soil, which had cracked under the hot sun.
The road was still staked out with dead horses, swollen like wine-skins, their stiffened legs with shining shoes threatening the sky. From a gaping wound in the flank of a big chestnut mare worms were wriggling into the grass; others were swarming in her nostrils and mouth, and in a bullet-hole behind her ear.
"Trot!"
The battery became almost invisible in its own dust. We began to pass wounded, hundreds of wounded—infantry of the line, Alpine troops, and Colonial infantry white with dust, their wounds dressed with red bandages. They helped each other along.
The majority were marching in small groups. Many had stopped to rest. It was very hot, and I saw several of them round an apple-tree, shaking down the fruit in order to slake their thirst.
We had halted while the Major received orders from an A.D.C. I questioned one of the Colonials, who was wounded in the head.
"Well, how are things going down there?"
"Phew! they're falling thick!"
I did not know whether he was referring to bullets, shell, or men, but from the expression of the drawn and haggard faces it was easy to see that the fighting had been severe.
"Been fighting long here?"
"Yes."
"How many days?"
"It had begun when we came."
"And when did you come?"
"The day before yesterday."
And he repeated:
"Yes, they're falling thick!"
We restarted, again at a trot.
The clear sky, of a pure limpid blue on the northern and eastern horizon, was fleeced with the white smoke of shrapnel shell; in the distance black clouds were rising from burning buildings and high-explosive projectiles.
We were still pursued by the smell of dead flesh, which harassed and obsessed us, making us peer about in all directions for hidden corpses.
Suddenly one of the horses of my ammunition wagon foundered and refused to go any farther, stopping the whole team. He had to be unharnessed and abandoned. The other carriages had passed us, and with our five remaining horses we galloped across countryin order to rejoin the column. The furrows nearly shook us off our seats and we had to hold on to the box-rails with might and main, bracing our legs against the foot-rests in order not to fall off.
We overtook the battery in a village which had been visible from afar on the flat and bare countryside. The enemy had evidently quartered there. The doors had been broken in with blows from the butt-ends of rifles; almost all the windows had been smashed, and were now mere frames bristling with jagged splinters of glass. Dirty curtains flapped through them on the outside. Torn-down shutters lay strewn on the pavement among broken bottles, shattered tiles, and empty tins of preserves. Others, hanging by one hinge, beat against the fronts of the houses.
Through the wide-open doors we could see staved-in wardrobes which had been thrown down the staircases. Empty drawers, mantelpiece ornaments, photographs, pictures and prints littered the red-tiled floors. Mud-stained sheets with the mark of hobnailed boots on them trailed to the middle of the street, giving to these unfortunate houses something of the horror of ripped-up corpses.
The pavements were a mass of furniturethrown out of the windows, perambulators, go-carts, and broken wine-casks. Wood crunched under the wheels of the wagon. A pair of pink corsets was lying in the gutter.
On one of the Michelin danger signals, at the other end of the village, I read the warning: "Attention aux enfants—Sennevières," and on the other side a derisive and mournful "Merci."[1]
We halted where the road traced a straight white line through a plain covered with mangel-wurzels. The desolate nakedness of the fields was only broken by a shed, three hayricks, and, farther off, some little, square-shaped copses and a long line of poplars. To the east and north the battle growled, whistled and roared like a storm at sea. One would have thought that the infernal noise came from some deep, subterranean earthquake.
We had waited a few minutes when suddenly the countryside sprang to life. Battalions, debouching from Sennevières, deployed in skirmishing order, and other soldiers—hundreds and thousands whose presence one would never have suspected—rose up from the bosom of the earth and swarmed like ants over the fields, their breeches making redpatches on the sombre green of the grass. Frightened hares fled from before the oncoming lines.
Small groups of wounded again began to go by. They could be seen far off, black specks on the straight white road dazzling in the sun.
Some Cuirassiers appeared to be billeted somewhere in the surroundings. One or two passed by on foot, without helmets or breast-plates, their chests covered with buff-coloured felt pads fitted with wadded rings round the armholes. They were carrying large joints of fresh beef. In the shade of three poplars to the right of the road, just outside the village, some men were slaughtering cattle and selling the meat. Near-by lay a dead horse.
Presently came the order:
"Reconnoitre!"
The battery was going into action. Once more I was unable to escape the little shiver of fear which follows this word of command.
In the firing position the battery was only masked by a hedge of brambles and some tangled shrubs, so that from several points of the horizon we must have been visible to the enemy. The position was not a good one, but it was the best the surroundings offered.
The officers had taken up their position near the first gun on a narrow path cutting across the plain. The battlefield opened out wide before us. But on the almost flat countryside which bore such an everyday aspect, and upon which we nevertheless knew the destiny of France was at stake, not a man, not a gun was to be seen. The thunder-ridden plain seemed to lie motionless under the shells.
We had covered our guns with sheaves; yellow under the yellow straw they might deceive at a distance. Besides, straw affords good protection against shrapnel bullets and shell splinters.
We at once fell asleep in the sun with the apathy of pawns who let themselves be moved, with that fatalism which is an inevitable result of the life fraught with hourly danger we had been living for a month.
I was awakened by a word of command. Behind us the sun was sinking.
"To your guns!"
Something dark, artillery possibly, was moving yonder at the foot of some wooded hills more than five thousand yards off. We opened fire. On the right, on the left, and even in front of us ·75 batteries came into action one by one. When our own guns weresilent for a few seconds we heard their volleys echoing in fours.
In the distance in front of us all had become still. The Captain gave the word to cease fire. But the smoke from the powder and the dust raised from the parched field by the concussion of the rounds had hardly cleared away when some heavy shells hurtled through the hedge masking us, leaving three gaping breaches in their wake and obliterating with their smoke the whole of the eastern horizon.
"They must have seen the fire of our guns," said Bréjard.
"And they've got theirs trained to a T," added Hutin. "Six-inchers, too!"
As ill-luck would have it, just at that moment a refilling wagon from the first line, conducted by a corporal riding a big white mare, came up at a trot.
While they were still some way off we shouted:
"Dismount!"
"Dismount! You'll get us killed!"
The drivers seemed not to hear.
"Dismount, you—! Walk!... Walk!..."
They had already unhooked the full ammunition-wagon, hooked the empty one to thelimber, and were off at a gallop in spite of our cries.
Shells were not long in arriving, their whistling modulated by the wind. One second passed ... two ... three....
This fear of death—the death which falls slowly from the sky—was an interminable torture. Everything trembled. The shells burst, and the wind blew their smoke down upon us.
I heard a choking groan:
"Ah.... Ah.... Ah!..."
Our battery remained intact. The refilling wagon was still galloping away in the distance. One of the numbers of the adjoining battery had fallen forward in his death agony, and his forehead, pierced by a shell splinter, was bathing the bottoms of the cartridge-cases with blood.
Hutin, still sitting on the layer's seat, suddenly cried out:
"Why, I can see the swine firing! I can see them ... long way off ... down there, about ten thousand yards ... I saw the flash.... It's coming ... it's coming ... look out!..."
Sure enough, we were shaken by fresh explosions. I shut my eyes instinctively and felt my face lashed by the cast-up earth, butI was not touched. The bottom of one of the cartridge-cases hummed loud and long, and once again the battery was smothered in smoke. I heard the clear voice of the Captain as he shouted to the senior N.C.O.:
"Daumain, get everybody under cover on the right! Major's orders. No use getting killed as long as we aren't firing."
We called each other, got clear of the smoke and hurried out of the line of fire of the Howitzers. But the enemy's shells pursued us over the field as we ran, crouching down, in scattered order.
A projectile, the flash of which blinded me for a moment, knocked down a sergeant of the 12th Battery, who was running by my side. The man picked himself up immediately. Just above his eyes a couple of splinters had drilled two horribly symmetrical red holes. He made off, bending his head so that the blood should not run into his eyes. I offered to help him, but he said:
"No, leave me.... Run! It's nothing, this ... skull isn't smashed to bits!"
We took cover behind some large hayricks and waited for orders.
The roll was called:
"Eleventh?"
"Eleventh!"
"Hutin?"
"Here!"
"Not wounded?"
"No, and you?"
"No."
The four detachments were complete.
"And the Captain?"
"Still down there at the observation-post. Look ... you can see his elbow sticking out behind that tree. He's all right!"
Two more volleys of shell burst close to our guns, which still appeared to have escaped damage.
How long the night seemed in coming! How we cursed the sun which, its blood-red disk almost touching the horizon, seemed as though it would never sink down behind the mangel-wurzel field! It looked absolutely motionless, stationary.
Hutin swore and shook his fist at the crimson sphere.
The Captain signalled for us to come up.
Behind the hayricks the cry was repeated: "To the guns!"
We thought we were going to fire, but found that other orders had arrived.
"Limbers!"
A mist, rising from the hollows of the plain, blotted out distant objects one by one. Thefar-off hills occupied by the Howitzer battery were lost in a purple haze, but quite possibly we could still be seen thence as we stood silhouetted against the clear western sky.
We limbered up and rolled off. The Howitzers kept silent.
The rifle-fire now began to grow fitful, and the guns were hushed in their turn. A death-like stillness settled down on the plain, which, as the sun sank, became illuminated by burning buildings, the flare of which blazed ever more brightly as the night crept on.
The day of severe fighting which was just drawing to a close had decided nothing. Each of the adversaries slept in his own positions.
Wednesday, September 9
In a field near Sennevières, in position of readiness, we brewed our coffee. The weather was very hot. This morning the battle had been slow in opening, but now to the east and north-east the guns were roaring as incessantly as yesterday.
Suddenly, about midday, the firing-line on our left opened out and became slightly curved. We were occupying the extreme wing of the French army, and were at once seized with misgivings. Was the enemy outflanking us again?
We questioned the Captain, who was also intently observing the woods which yesterday had been out of the enemy's range, and which were now being heavily shelled.
"What does that mean, sir?"
"I don't know any more than you, I'm afraid. I only obey, you know.... I go where I am told to go.... That's all!"
But Déprez insisted:
"They're turning our left again!"
The Captain's finely chiselled face was puckered with anxiety.
"Well," said he, "they're certainly bombarding woods which they weren't bombarding yesterday. But that at any rate proves that they haven't reached them. On the contrary, perhaps they've been threatened on that side by an enveloping movement of our troops.... Who knows?... Besides, if they do outflank us we aren't alone here.... We'll face them!"
He gave us a searching look with his intelligent hazel eyes, and repeated:
"We'll face them, won't we?"
"Of course we will, sir!"
Coffee was ready. The Captain pulled his aluminium cup out of his pocket and dipped it into the black beverage smoking in the kettle. The gunners stood round him, their drinking-tins in their hands, waiting their turn, and when he had filled his cup helped themselves one after the other. Conversation ceased, and the men sipped their coffee.
After a while the cook said:
"There's some more!"
"How much?" asked the Captain, anxious not to deprive any one.
"A good half-pint each."
The Captain helped himself and the men followed suit. Then, as there still remained a little coffee mixed with grounds the operation was repeated.
With that startling rapidity which we had observed each time we had had to retire on the Meuse, the country became alive with lines of infantry. Companies and battalions were emerging from the woods and from behind the hedges, and overspread the stubble-fields, massing in the hollows.
"Hallo! what does that mean?" asked Bréjard.
"Are those swine turning tail?" exclaimed Millon, crossing his arms.
The Captain anxiously observed the movements of the infantry.
"No," said he. "Those are reserve troops advancing towards the north in order to face the enemy if he outflanks us."
Orders came for us to go and take up position between Sennevières and Nanteuil-le-Haudoin.
There could be no doubt about it. The enemy was turning our lines.
We were seized with a fit of wild rage. Would they manage to pass us, and get to Paris? To Paris ... to our homes ... to kill, sack, rape?...
"Ah," growled Hutin, "what wouldn't I give to murder some of those savages!"
"Trot!" commanded the Captain.
Bending down over their horses' necks the drivers urged the teams forward with voice, knees, whip, and spur.
The same gust of wind seemed to carry with it men, horses, and guns—all this artillery let loose like a tide on the barren fields, over whose furrows it billowed and surged.
We took up position with our guns pointing north-east. Behind us the sun, already low in the western sky, lit up the railway-line and the road from Nanteuil to Paris, flanked with tall trees.
Sections of infantry began to fall back.
"You see?" repeated Millon. "They can't stick it, the beasts! Haven't they read the Army Order then?"
Suddenly, almost behind us, rifle-fire broke out. We had been outflanked.
On the main road to Paris, and between the road and the railway, dense masses of infantry were debouching from behind Nanteuil. We were encircled by a huge hostile horseshoe, and it now seemed as if the only means of retreat open to the 4th Army Corps was the narrow road running south-east between Sennevières and Silly.
An officer wearing an aviator's cap arrived in a motor-car and hurried up to the observation-post. Shortly afterwards the Major ordered us to turn the guns right round.
At any moment we might be caught between two fires, for, to the north-west of Nanteuil, on the hills commanding the road, there could be no doubt that the enemy's artillery was taking up position in order to support the infantry attack.
Our batteries opened fire.
The same wild frenzy immediately gained possession of men and guns. The latter became roaring monsters—raging dragons, which from their gaping mouths belched fire at the sun as it sank to rest in the soft summer twilight. Piles of smoking cartridges-cases mounted up behind the guns. In the stricken zone in front of us we could see men waver,turn tail, run, and fall in heaps. From the heights above Nanteuil, from which our guns could have been counted, came no answering roar of artillery.
For a long time the slaughter continued.
"Ah!Thatlot will never get to Paris!"
Night fell. The infantry regiments began to retire in order down the hollow of which we were occupying one of the slopes. Some mounted Chasseurs passed by at a trot, followed by a whole brigade of Cuirassiers. It was the retreat!
We were beaten!... beaten!...
The enemy was marching on Paris!
The sun was now but a red crescent on the horizon. The horsemen advancing towards Silly disappeared in their own dust. We still continued firing, lavishing shrapnel on the plain where men still moved here and there.
"Cease firing!"
The gunners either had not heard, or did not want to hear.... Three guns still barked. Shouting at the top of his voice the Major repeated the command.
Perspiring and brick-red with heat the gunners sponged themselves over and then, with folded arms, stood silently behind their guns, contemplating the fields of which not one square inch had been spared.
We were expecting orders to retire in our turn, but eventually received instructions to pass the night here. A battalion of infantry had been sent to support us, and the men deployed in skirmishing order and took up positions about two hundred yards from the park, which we had had to form on the spot.
We heard that in front of us not a single French unit remained. We were at the mercy of a cavalry night attack.
Thursday, September 10
After yesterday's engagement we had expected a furious cannonade to begin at dawn. But not a sound was heard. The sun illuminated the plain and the slopes upon which we were waiting for the enemy in firing position. Not a single gun was fired, and we began to grow surprised and uneasy.
A Lieutenant-Colonel at the head of a passing column recognized the Major and hailed him.
"Hallo! Solente!"
"Hallo!"
"How are you?"
"I'm all right, thanks."
"What's your Group doing there?"
"Guarding the Nanteuil road."
"Then you don't know what's happened?"
"No, what?"
"The enemy retired during the night."
"No!"
"Yes, it's quite true! We've got orders to advance.... The Germans are retiring all along the line."
The two officers looked at each other and smiled.
"Then in that case...."
"It's victory!"
The news passed rapidly from gun to gun and nearly set the men dancing with joy. Victory, victory! And just when we were not expecting it!
Towards midday we also received orders to advance.
At Nanteuil a slight recrudescence of life was noticeable. A grocer was taking down the wooden shutters of his shop, and some of the windows were thrown open as we went by. As at Dammartin I read on several of the doors the notice: "Gute Leute."
The road we were following skirted the fields on which we repulsed the enemy yesterday. We halted, doubtless waiting for fresh orders.
The surrounding country was motionless, but, between the Paris road and the railway, grey-coated corpses lay among the mangel-wurzels as far as the eye could reach. On the fringe of some large maize-fields six Germanshad fallen in a heap. The last to die had toppled backwards on to the others, his stiffened legs pointing skywards. His neck was doubled up under the weight of his body, and his chin touched his chest. His eyes were wide open and his mouth twisted in a horrible grimace of agony. With a single exception, nothing could be seen of the other corpses under him save the shoulders, necks, and feet. But one of them, who had not been killed outright and who lay half buried beneath the rest, must have died hard. Scalped by a shell splinter he had tried to rid himself of the ghastly burden crushing his back and legs, but his strength had failed him. Propped up on one elbow, his mouth wide open as though his last breath had been a shout, he had died stretching a huge knotted fist towards the hills we had just left, whence death had come to him.
His cheeks, already turning grey, had begun to fall in, and in the stiffening features from which all semblance of life was rapidly departing one already seemed to see the hollow-eyed, square-chinned, grinning mask of Death.
A little farther on three Army Service Corps men were standing round a Prussian lying on his back, his arms clasped as if in some awful embrace. As one of them lifted his head in order to take off his helmet a stream of blackblood gushed from the dead man's mouth and covered the soldier's hands.
"Pig!" growled he, and wiped his gory hands on the skirts of the German's grey coat.
Near-by a Sub-Lieutenant of Engineers was counting the corpses for burial.
"So it's you gunners who have given me all this work! I've already counted seventeen hundred, and I haven't finished yet! There'll be more than two thousand."
As I returned, sick at heart, across the maize-fields I stumbled against something soft. Suspecting a corpse I hastily jumped to one side.
Again we advanced, towards the north.
The roadside was strewn with Mausers, bayonets as short as butchers' knives, cartridge-pouches, helmets, cowhide-packs, wallets, saddles, dead horses....
On the evening of the Battle of Virton the Ruettes road had borne a similar appearance. Upon that occasion I had dejectedly said to myself: "This is a French defeat," and now I was equally astonished to realize that I had taken part in a victory, of which these remains were the proofs, a victory which had snatched Paris from the jaws of the Germans, savedFrance, and which conceivably might open a new era for us all. In sight of this Calvary of the German army we told ourselves that the enemy would evacuate France as quickly as he had entered it.
Across one of the broad, flat fields ran a yellow line of freshly turned earth, staked out with rifles planted butt-end upwards. Hundreds of men—thousands perhaps—had been buried there side by side, and the air was tainted with all the pestilential odours of decomposition which escaped through the cracks and fissures in the sun-baked soil. On approaching one of the scattered clumps of trees under which other corpses had been buried, the same sickening smell assailed our nostrils. Despite ourselves we kept sniffing the air with an uneasiness like that shown by dogs when they are said to scent death.
Farther down the road we came upon a party of sappers busily plying pick and shovel. At the bottom of a hole they had just finished digging lay a brown crupper marked "Uh. 3" (3rd Uhlans), and on the ploughed land at the edge of the ditch lay a dead horse covered with clayey earth. Worms were swarming in the putrid blood surrounding him.
One of the sappers, who was covering upthe carrion with large spadefuls of earth, looked up.
"Phew! he smells bad, doesn't he?" he said. "Nasty job, this! I shan't apply for undertakers' work when I've finished soldiering! And horses smell worse than men. We shall end by getting the plague!"
"When I started to drag him," said another, "his hoof came off in my hand."
And he pointed with his foot to an iron-shod hoof lying on the ground like a stone.
Close by, in a newly harrowed field, undisturbed save for the hoof-prints of a couple of horses which had galloped across it, lay two lances, one of them broken, a light cavalry sword, a Uhlan's helmet, and a water-bottle.
The weather gradually became foggy. The fields, monotonous and drab under the grey sky, and littered at intervals with uniforms, arms, and corpses, imbued us with a sadness which bordered on fear. We had to keep repeating to ourselves "Victory, victory!" in order once again to feel the joy—which nevertheless was so deep—of knowing that the Country was saved.
Saturday, September 12
For two days it has rained incessantly, and we have advanced about twenty-two milesunder the downpour. The enemy is still retiring, his retreat covered by a few Howitzers which appear to be short of ammunition. Each hour that passes confirms our victory, and we should be in excellent spirits were it not raining so heavily.
The Captain has sent me to pass a few days with the first line of wagons, partly on account of persistent diarrhœa, which was weakening me considerably, and partly owing to a rather serious cut in the wrist. Life in my new billet is far less strenuous; one's rations are better cooked, and one gets plenty of sleep.
While our batteries keep up a lively bombardment on the rear of the German columns in retreat, the first lines of wagons are installed in a wide ravine cut right across the plateau as if by giant swordstroke. It almost seems as if the rain converged in this hollow from all points of the compass. Shells fall also, but they bury themselves without bursting in the marsh near-by, raising geysers of mud.
To-day the N.C.O. of the 6th gun, to which I am temporarily attached, called the men round him:
"Les poilus!"[2]
"Here we are!" answered a voluntarily re-enlisted man who was already grey about the temples. "Hairies without a dry hair on our bodies!"
"Listen to this!"
And the N.C.O. in a hoarse voice began to read an order of the day:
"For five days, without interruption or respite, the 6th Army has been engaged in combat with a foe strong in numbers, whose morale has hitherto been exalted by success. The struggle has been a hard one, and the loss of life due to gun-fire, and the exhaustion caused by want of sleep and sometimes food, have exceeded all that could have been imagined. The courage, fortitude, and endurance with which you have borne all these hardships cannot be adequately extolled in words."Comrades, the G.O.C. has asked you, in the name of your Country, to do more than your duty; you have responded even more heroically than seemed possible. Thanks to you, victory has now crowned our arms, and now that you know the satisfaction of success you will never let it escape you."For my part, if I have done anything worthy of merit, I have been rewarded by the greatesthonour which in a long career has fallen to my lot—that of commanding men such as you."From my heart I thank you for what you have done, for to you I owe that which has been the aim of all my efforts and all my energy for the last forty-four years—the Revenge for 1870."All honour and thanks to you and to all combatants of the 6th Army."Claye (Seine-et-Marne) 10th September 1914."Signed: Joffre."Countersigned: Manoury."
"For five days, without interruption or respite, the 6th Army has been engaged in combat with a foe strong in numbers, whose morale has hitherto been exalted by success. The struggle has been a hard one, and the loss of life due to gun-fire, and the exhaustion caused by want of sleep and sometimes food, have exceeded all that could have been imagined. The courage, fortitude, and endurance with which you have borne all these hardships cannot be adequately extolled in words.
"Comrades, the G.O.C. has asked you, in the name of your Country, to do more than your duty; you have responded even more heroically than seemed possible. Thanks to you, victory has now crowned our arms, and now that you know the satisfaction of success you will never let it escape you.
"For my part, if I have done anything worthy of merit, I have been rewarded by the greatesthonour which in a long career has fallen to my lot—that of commanding men such as you.
"From my heart I thank you for what you have done, for to you I owe that which has been the aim of all my efforts and all my energy for the last forty-four years—the Revenge for 1870.
"All honour and thanks to you and to all combatants of the 6th Army.
"Claye (Seine-et-Marne) 10th September 1914.
"Signed: Joffre.
"Countersigned: Manoury."
"Hear, hear!" cried some one.
"I say, sergeant," shouted the old soldier who had spoken before, "as the General is pleased with us, can't you get them to ask him to turn off some of this water?"
We started off again. The country through which we had been marching since dawn, with halts of one and sometimes two hours during which the guns went into action, seemed, at the first glance, an endless and almost deserted plain. The beetroot-and corn-fields where the crops, often in sheaves, had now rotted, seemed to succeed each other without interruption from one side of the horizon to the other under the lowering, cheerless sky, from which the cold rain poured relentlessly down. Butsuddenly, in the middle of the flat and barren country, there opened a dale whose existence one would never have suspected, well wooded and so deep that even the church steeple of the village nestling in its lap was hidden from view.
Under the stinging rain the teams walked on with heads held low and twitching ears, their coats shining like oil-skin. By this time many of our horses were only kept on their legs as if by a miracle. The foul weather had put the final touch to their ruin, and we had to abandon three of them, one after the other. They keep going until they reach the extreme limit of their strength, and then suddenly they stumble and stop dead; after that no power on earth will make them advance another inch. They have to be taken out of the traces, unharnessed, and abandoned where they stand. They remain in the same place until they die.
The men were apathetic and taciturn under their black cloaks. Water ran down our backs and made us shiver. Many of the drivers had turned their képis round so that the peaks protected their necks. Their faces, wincing under the sting of the lashing rain, were half hidden in their upturned collars. Our shirts clave to our shoulders and our trousers to our knees. The soaking garments absorbed thewarmth of the body, and we experienced the horrible sensation of gradually becoming chilled to the marrow. It seemed as if life was slowly ebbing from our limbs and as if we were dying by inches.
We passed a group of miserable, saturated foot-soldiers, from the skirts of whose coats the rain ran in streams. Some of them had thrown sacks full of straw over their shoulders. One man was sheltering his head and back underneath a woman's skirt, and others under capes, neckerchiefs, and flowery-patterned bed-curtains.
The road was a river of liquid clay upon which neither the men's boots, horseshoes, nor the tyres of the wheels left a trace.
As night approached the grey vault of the sky seemed to sink still lower, drawing in the horizon over the fields, and almost to touch the earth itself. A dense fog first surrounded and then smothered us. We could not have told upon which side the sun was setting; the west was as opaque as the east. The yellow, diffused light gradually became weaker. Here and there by the wayside we could still distinguish the dark forms of dead horses. Night fell. The rain was trickling down my back as far as my loins. I was very cold and now felt more acutely than ever that indescribablesensation as if my life's blood was being slowly sucked from my veins. The battery lumbered on and on....
It was perhaps ten o'clock when we finally halted on the outskirts of a village and ranged up our carriages by the side of the road. We had to wait there some time, sitting motionless on the limbers and becoming more frozen every minute. Our teeth chattered with cold. The delay was probably caused by a cross-roads, a block in the transport traffic, a passing convoy, or some other obstacle; in any case we could not move on. I began to wonder whether we should have to pass the whole night in the rain....
Eventually we reached a field in which we bivouacked, stretching the lines between the carriages. The hurricane lamps formed large yellow points in the opaque darkness, piercing the night without lighting anything. There was no sound save the squelching of dragging footsteps as the exhausted men and horses moved about in the mud.
The sergeant-major summoned the corporals for the issue of rations. But the distribution between the guns had not been finished and the men immediately went away again, preferring to wait until the next day to get their rations. The sergeant-major shouted afterthem, declaring that if there should be an alarm they would risk going for a whole day without food. He was perfectly right, but no one listened to him.
The darkness was so intense that it was difficult to follow the road, and in order to keep together the men kept shouting:
"Eleventh!... This way.... Eleventh!..."
Convoys passed by, splashing us with mud. A wheel just grazed me. After a long march the only shelter we could find was some rickety old barns, open to the four winds of heaven, in which a thin sprinkling of straw hardly separated us from the beaten-down earth. Here the battery, silent, soaked to the skin and smelling like wet animals, sank shivering into a troubled sleep, continually interrupted by the cries of men dreaming.
Sunday, September 13
This morning the sun was shining. Clouds were still banked up to the west, but the blue, which cheered us up wonderfully, eventually spread over the whole sky. We continued our march forward.
The enemy's Howitzers were still bombarding the country round us, but spasmodically and at haphazard. The Germans were being hotly pursued; in the villages welearned that less than two hours previously stragglers were still passing through. It seems that yesterday the enemy's retreat almost became a rout. Disbanded infantrymen without arms, gunners, dismounted horsemen—all fled pell-mell, pursued by the fire of our ·75's and harassed by our advanced guard.
At Vic-sur-Aisne, while waiting till the pontoon bridge should be clear, I entered a pretty little house, the doors and windows of which had been left wide open by the Germans on their departure. The wardrobes and chests of drawers had all been broken into and pillaged. Women's chemises and drawers together with other underlinen were trailing down the staircase. A meal was served on the dining-room table, but the overturned chairs bore witness to the precipitation with which the guests had fled. I was hungry and sat down without hesitation. The food was good although cold.
The leading carriages of the column had already begun to cross the bridge before I learned that the luncheon I had just eaten had been prepared for the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but had been interrupted by the arrival of the French advanced guard.
We crossed the Aisne without difficulty. How came it that the enemy was allowingus to cross the river? The thought of a trap, such as that we laid for the Germans when they crossed the Meuse, made me a little uneasy.
Near Attichy our batteries went off to take up position, while the first lines of wagons halted on a winding road leading to the plateau through some extremely dense woods, all damp and odorous after the rains of yesterday. In a little quarry of white stone yawning on one side of the road in the full glare of the sun, I lay down with a few comrades in some tall ferns. I was nearly asleep when, suddenly, the noise of a bursting shell, which had just fallen close by, spread in vibrant waves through the trees, of which every leaf seemed to rustle.
At the entrance to the quarry appeared a gunner staggering from side to side, his face deathly pale. He grasped his right elbow with his left hand and let himself fall among the bracken.
"Oh!" he murmured, "I'm hit!"
"Where?"
With a slight movement of the head he indicated his elbow, which was cut open and bleeding. And, suddenly, from the road which at this point made two successive bends and then plunged beneath a dark vault of bigbeech-trees, came a confused sound of groans, cries, and stamping.
A driver hurried up without his képi, his face streaming with blood.
"Come quickly ... it's fallen down there ... it's fallen on the road! Everything's all messed up, the horses are on top.... Oh, my God!...
"Are you wounded?"
"No ... where?"
"Your cheek...."
"Oh, that's nothing—it's a horse, my off-horse.... Come on!"
More shells whistled overhead. We started to run. Suddenly, at the bend of the road I stopped dead, breathless, paralysed by a ghastly sight.
Under the sun, which, breaking through the branches, marbled the white road, lay a shapeless mass of mangled men and horses. The entire teams of the forge and store wagon were welded together in a writhing heap of bleeding flesh. Men were struggling underneath. In the middle of the road lay two gunners, face downwards; others were dragging themselves about on their hands among the fallen saddle-horses. Wounded were moving in the ditches.
From this shambles rose long-drawn-outgroans similar to the harrowing cries made by certain animals at night, a muffled and interminable "Aaah!... aaah!" rising and falling like some savage song. Blood was running in streams in the gutters on each side of the way. A nauseating stale stench, like that of a slaughter-house, a sort of warmth, an odour of steaming flesh and flowing blood, a smell of horses, entrails, and animal gasses gripped our throats and turned our stomachs.
One man, who lay buried beneath the team of the forge, had succeeded in passing his arm through a mass of tangled intestines, but the viscera had gripped his wrist in a tenacious grasp. He shook them furiously, scattering jets of blood in all directions. Round him the horses lay writhing in their death agony, breaking wind, dunging, staling, and scraping the ground with their stiffening limbs, their shoes grating stridently on the flints. In their death-throes they strained at the traces and one heard a noise of cracking chains. The vehicle to which they were harnessed advanced a few inches, and then rolled back.
Near-by lay a dead foot-soldier, his whole chest one gaping wound. In his wide-open blue eyes was a fixed expression of horror that went to my heart like a knife. An artilleryman, his stomach ripped open, had beenpinned to the road in an almost erect posture by a wounded horse which, bleeding at the nostrils, had fallen across his feet.
Whenever the groaning and wailing stopped for a second one heard the noise of the blood as it burbled and trickled stream by stream and drop by drop, and the gurgle of the intestines which lay in an entangled pink and white mass on the road.
I ran to help the man buried under the forge team. His face was red all over, and horribly convulsed, his hair and beard glued with blood, and his white eyeballs rolling like those of one asphyxiated. A horse in its agony was threatening to kill a gunner wounded in the loins who was dragging himself along on his hands, so I quickly killed the animal with a revolver shot. It was only then that I perceived, stretched out between two horses, my friend M——, very pale, with closed eyes. I ran up and put my arm round him in order to lift him up.... All my blood suddenly ceased to flow, my heart stopped beating.... My arm had sunk up to the elbow in an enormous wound in my friend's back....
I stood up. For an instant the ghastly scene turned round and round.... I thought that I should faint with horror. I put myhand—dripping with blood—to my forehead.... I daubed my face with gore. In order not to fall I had to lean up against the wheel of the forge.
A hospital orderly had succeeded in extricating a couple of untouched stretchers from the ambulance, which had also been shattered by the shell. On one side of the road the Medical Officer, still much upset, himself slightly wounded by the explosion, was occupied with some first-aid dressing. Three of us hoisted on to one of the stretchers a big, fair-haired gunner with a Gaulois moustache, whose foot, almost completely severed from the leg, dangled in the air, and who was yelling with pain. We remembered that there was a dressing-station at the foot of the hill on the fringe of the woods.
We started off, bending our knees in order to jolt the stretcher as little as possible, but we continually had to step over the scattered limbs of horses and pick our way between corpses so disfigured as to be unrecognizable.
A wounded man clasped my leg as we passed, lifting up a deathly face which the blood, running from his ear, had surrounded with a gory collar. His eyes implored us to stop, and in a low voice of profound supplication he murmured:
"For God's sake don't leave me here!"
But we could not carry two men at a time. I bent down a little:
"The others will be along in a minute or two with the other stretcher. They'll take you. Come, now, let go of my foot!..."
We left the shambles and began to breathe again....
The closely meshed cloth of the stretcher retained the blood of the wounded man, whose foot swam in a red pool. He was suffering horribly and twisted his arms together, groaning:
"Oh, my foot!... You're shaking me.... Oh, how you're shaking me!"
And then:
"For God's sake walk slowly!"
In spite of all our efforts we could not avoid the shaking which caused him so much pain, and he continued to murmur, his voice getting fainter and fainter:
"Walk, walk ... slowly!..."
His lips silently repeated "walk" until a fresh jolt made him cry out.
In front of the field-hospital some medical officers had improvised an operating-table in a shady part of the road. The wounded were laid out in rows on the edge of the ditch. Afat doctor with four stripes on his arm ran hither and thither, shouting.
Carried on stretchers or limping on foot, either alone or with the aid of their comrades, the wounded arrived. One man's chin was no more than a bloody jelly; one of his eyes was shut and the other wide open.
The veterinary surgeon's horse, shot through by a shell splinter, had followed the wounded as far as the ambulance, but as soon as he stopped he sank to his knees by the side of the road. The eyes of the animal were full of a suffering almost human, and as he turned his head towards me I fired my revolver in his ear. With a dull, heavy thud like that of an axe as it sinks deep in a tree-trunk, the animal fell on his flank, and from the top of the slope skirting the road rolled over twice into the field below.
We had at once to return to the scene of slaughter, where we were badly needed. As soon as I left the fresh air and sunshine and re-entered the woods I felt almost paralysed by the thought of what I was going to see, and the shadows of the trees, growing darker as the daylight waned, helped to intensify my fear.
"Come on!..."
Two saddle-horses with bleeding wounds were walking away from the shambles byinstinct. With faltering steps they slowly descended the road towards the sun. The dead horses had been unharnessed and dragged to one side of the way, but two artillerymen had been left lying in the middle of the road, and some one, either out of force of habit or out of pity for the dead, had broken two branches off one of the beeches and had covered their faces with leaves.
In the gutters the rivers of blood had become congealed. The hot, fetid smell, imprisoned under the vault of the trees, still floated in the air, more nauseating and terrifying than ever. The efforts the men had made in order to unharness the horses and clear the roadway had caused the intestines to split and break, and they now trailed about everywhere, covered with dust, separated by several yards from the gaping, empty bodies from which they had been torn.
Two prisoners, tall men whose height was increased by their long grey cloaks and pointed helmets, came down from the plateau. The foot-soldiers accompanying them, fearing that this spectacle of death might cause their enemies too keen a delight, had blindfolded them, and led them by the hand in and out the corpses. But the Germans had recognized the smell of blood. A line of uneasiness barredtheir foreheads and they continually sniffed the tainted air.
Monday, September 14
At Attichy we spent the night in some splendid, well-closed barns in which the hay lay deep, but our rest was disturbed by horrible nightmares. I dreamt that I was rolling among mutilated corpses in rivers of blood. When I awoke it was raining.
A countryman with a drooping white moustache brought us some beer and wine in buckets. He lived in an isolated house easily visible from our barn, in a copse on the side of the hill. During the German occupation he had left his house as being too solitary and had taken up his quarters in the village. When the enemy took their departure the day before yesterday he had returned to his house accompanied by a foot-soldier. He was going on ahead when through the broken-in front door he saw, in the hall, a helmeted German in the act of aiming at him. He jumped to one side, exposing the French soldier behind him, whereupon the German at once dropped his rifle and threw up his hands. The two Frenchmen seized him and, sitting him down on a chair in the kitchen, shot him through the head. There they left him, still sitting, his head on his breast and the blood drippingfrom his forehead between his knees on to the tiled floor, and went off to reconnoitre the surroundings of the house and the garden. They could discover nothing suspicious, but when they returned to the kitchen they found it empty. Nothing remained of the German save a pool of blood in front of the chair. But near the door and on the stairs were red stains and they heard groans coming from the garret.
We asked the peasant:
"Well, what did you do with your Boche?"
"Oh, he's still in my garret," he answered placidly.
"But you must get him out of that. He'll soon begin to smell!"
"Yes, I'm going to dig a hole for him to-night near the dung-heap."
And, as I ventured to say that instead of killing the man treacherously they might have taken him prisoner, seeing that he had surrendered:
"Why?" asked the peasant. "Wouldn't he have killed me if I'd been all alone? And yet I'm a civilian!"
"No!" he added, "we shall never kill enough of those swine!"
The wind had risen and the rain ceased.Our Group advanced along the Compiègne road, which runs by the side of the river. But we had hardly gone a mile when the word was given to halt. We prepared to make our soup, but there was no water, and I searched in vain for a spring or well. Finally we decided to draw water from the Aisne. On the opposite bank a dead German was lying among the rushes, half his body submerged in the stream. Well, we would boil the water, that was all! One must eat!
As night fell a horseman arrived with orders. We set off at a trot.
Under the lee of a high wall some Spahis were resting, their burnous making red patches in the dusk. Near them their little horses stood motionless under their complicated harness. Against an apple-tree leaned an Arab with magnificently cut features, as regular as those of a statue. Under the purple, woollen hood his brown face bore an expression of that resigned melancholy, at once so pitiful and so noble, in which men of his race always languish when far from the desert. His large, apathetic black eyes, which seemed fixed upon something in the distance, had a mystic look in them. He appeared to feel cold. The gunners greeted him smiling:
"Hallo! old Sidi!"
But the Arab, without moving, only replied with a condescending blink of his eyes.
The batteries took up position, the first line of wagons halting behind a screen of acacias. The silence of the night was hardly broken by a confused murmur of the far-off battle when suddenly, as if at a given signal, more than forty French field-guns, almost in unison, fired a terrific volley across the plateau.
The vivid flashes from the muzzles cleft the twilight like red lightning. The air continued to vibrate. It was as though the atmosphere were filled with huge sound-waves dashing and splitting one against the other like the waves of the ocean in a storm. The earth quivered in response to the twanging air. Gradually the night became darker.
Our batteries were certainly firing at registered aiming-points. The enemy only replied now and again, and then at haphazard.
Suddenly a rumour began to circulate:
"The Germans are entraining! That station is being bombarded!..."
"Oh, well, I shouldn't prevent 'em taking their tickets," said an imperturbable-looking reservist. "I shouldn't interfere with 'em. Let them clear out and let us go back home.I've a wife and two kiddies. It's no joke, war!..."
It was pitch-dark when the guns, one by one, gradually became silent. In a few moments there was complete stillness, a stillness almost surprising, almost disturbing after the deafening cannonade.
We rejoined the batteries. Noiselessly, one behind the other, the carriages plunged like phantoms into the darkness, the soft field, as it yielded under the wheels, giving a strange impression of cotton-wool. The nocturnal clarity, diffused and as if floating, did not enable us to see what kind of field it was which the long column was crossing without a jolt or jangle, with only an occasional creaking of badly oiled wheels.
The whole countryside smelt of death, and this was not due to imagination. Far off a burning building stood out like a fixed point of light. The massive trees of a neighbouring park filled us with nameless fears.
The wheel of the limber passed over something soft and elastic which yielded under the weight. I felt sure that it was a dead man, and looked behind me fearfully. But I could see nothing.
We halted on the outskirts of a village called Tracy-le-Mont, where the supply-train waswaiting for us. Rations were issued, the men in their cloaks standing in a black circle round the provision wagon, which was lit by a solitary lantern. Hutin and Déprez were among them. Somebody was calling out the guns:
"Third!... Fourth!..."
"First!" cried Hutin.
"You've missed your turn. You'll have to come last now."
We talked while waiting. Hutin was very tired and hungry.
"There's some good grub going," said he. "We're going to get some fresh meat."
"Yes, but fires will be forbidden."
"I suppose you haven't seen the postmaster?" he asked suddenly.
"No, why?"
"Because in the first line you see him more often than we do."
"Well, I've begun to doubt whether there is such a person."
"It's true.... The brute never turns up! Confound it all! If only we got letters sometimes the time would pass quicker. The last I had was simply to say that they hadn't any news of me. It does seem hard!"
"First gun!"
"At last," said Hutin. "Good-bye, oldchap! I'm off to get my grub. Try to get back to us soon."
Tuesday, September 15
It was splendid weather when we awoke. During the night it had rained a little, but we had surrounded our guns with armfuls of hay gathered from some large ricks near-by. I slept under the ammunition wagon, which sheltered me as far as the knees, and I had covered my feet with a couple of sheaves. The ground was not very damp and I slept well in spite of the shower.
With the dawn the sky cleared. The air was soft and warm, and the tall trees in their infinite variety of green shades stood out in clear-cut silhouettes against the pale blue of the sky. The grass, although cut short, now that the summer was ending, had regained some of its lost freshness.
Here and there in the fields dark heaps arrested the eye. These were the bodies of fallen Germans. Once one has seen three or four one instinctively searches for them everywhere, and a forgotten wheat-sheaf in the distance looks like a corpse.
We started, the wheels of the leading carriages tracing a well-marked track across the fields. On one side lay a dead German. The vehicles had brushed by him as theypassed and would have crushed his feet had the drivers not seen him in time. His face was still waxen in colour, and the eye-sockets alone had begun to turn green. The solemn, regular features were not lacking in a certain virile beauty.
The man sitting next me on the wagon looked long at the dead man's face as if trying to catch his last expression.
"Poor devil!" said he, shrugging his shoulders.
A little moved myself, I echoed:
"Yes, poor devil!"
But the wheel-driver, who had left a wife and children behind him, and was wondering how they fared, turned in his saddle:
"Dirty pig!" he growled.
This morning the battle started early and with unusual violence on a front which appeared to stretch from east to west. As far as one could see the sky was fleecy with shell smoke.
"There!... And they said the Germans were going—were entraining! Do you see them over there?... Brutes!"
"Yes. They were detraining!"
The men bitterly cursed their erstwhile credulity. Nevertheless I knew that thisevening they would be ready to believe the news that the Russians had reached Berlin, provided that it was sufficiently vigorously affirmed.
We learned the truth from some passing foot-soldiers. The Germans had entrenched themselves strongly on the wooded hills and in the quarries. The pursuit was held up, and a new battle was about to begin.
I asked a sergeant:
"But those aren't the Germans we were on the heels of yesterday and the day before, are they?"
"No," he answered, "these must be troops which were behind them in Belgium."
The first line, installed in a narrow valley, replenished every half-hour the battery which, in position near a large farm, was emptying wagonful after wagonful of shells. The German artillery swept the plain, and some six-inch Howitzers, whose objective seemed to be the bend of a neighbouring road, aiming too high, threatened to catch us in enfilading fire at any moment. On the other hand, one of their 77 mm. batteries had opened fire on a wood commanding the other end of the valley. There could be no thought of trying to get out of this uncomfortable position by way of the plain. The enemy would see us and hisHowitzers would reach us with ease. The officer in charge of the train, Lieutenant Boutroux, was perplexed. Finally he decided to face the 77 mm. guns, and we began to work round the edge of the wood, shrapnel shell bursting over our heads. Soon the valley curved inwards. The danger zone was passed. Unscathed, and keeping well screened from the enemy, we took up a fresh position in another gully almost exactly similar to that we had just left.
We lacked water, and in order to find it had to follow a path leading across the field to some barns, from the roofs of which pipes ran down into a couple of water-tanks. A ladder was propped up against one of the latter, and I climbed up out of curiosity. The metal plating of the inside was covered with rust, and out of the turbid water, which was slowly sinking, emerged an old boot, a felt cap, and all sorts of shapeless objects of cloth or metal, coated with green slime. We had nevertheless to content ourselves with this water!...
The sound of the battle was indicative of no decision; it neither approached nor became fainter. The wounded who passed told us that since the morning the infantry had been continually launched against the strong entrenchments without being able to break through them. The gun-fire did not slacken until nightfall.
We rejoined the batteries, cutting across the plain now hidden from the enemy by the falling darkness. Somewhere a machine-gun was still crackling. A thin rain was floating in the air and we rapidly became wet through. We had to lie in the open among the mangel-wurzels, and the horses were not taken out of the vehicles.
It was almost impossible to sleep. The moment we lay still we began to shiver and our teeth chattered. I had a vague fear that the cold, which ran down my spine in long shudders, might kill me unawares if I went to sleep.
My feet resting on the wheel, I curled up on the top of the ammunition wagon, preferring the icy contact of the steel to the dampness of the ground. The rain began to fall more heavily.
Wednesday, September 16
Quite early this morning the dull, far-off thud of a Howitzer echoed and re-echoed, and immediately afterwards, as if fired by a train of powder, all the guns on the plateau began to roar.
Astruc came up:
"Lord!" said he, "I had a funny experience last night! Just think ... the others had bagged all the places under the wagons, and, as I was looking about, I saw a great big chap, at least six feet long, covered over with a blanket in the middle of the field. 'Well,' said I to myself, 'if there's room for one there's room for two,' and I lifted up the blanket and snuggled in beside him. But as I went to sleep I pulled it little by little to my side. Suddenly the long 'un sits up, wide awake, and starts shaking me!... At first I said nothing—pretended to be asleep. I was so tired! But he went on shaking me, and then he shouted: 'What the blazes do you think you're doing?' Finally I grunted, 'All right! No need to make such a row....' And then I rubbed my eyes, and got up.... Do you know who it was?... It was the Major! I'd pulled his blanket off him! I didn't lose my head. I told him that I felt awfully ill—fit to die—and that there wasn't any more room underneath the wagon.... Then he muttered something, I don't know what, and settled down again. I didn't hesitate an instant, but lay down beside him. Then he said: 'Well, for God's sake don't take all the blanket, at any rate!'"
The battery went off to take up position, and the first line of wagons returned to the gully where we sheltered yesterday.
My wrist was hurting me. In spite of the dressing the wound had been poisoned by the blood of the wounded and dead at Attichy.
The postmaster arrived with a sackful of letters.
"At home they seem to think the war will last until New Year," said somebody.
"But the Russians?"
"Oh! the Russians...."
"Well, let's see ... October, November, December.... That makes another three months and a half.... Why, we shall all be dead of exposure before then!"
Hardly five hundred yards away from our park some big farm buildings suddenly burst into flames, the walls surrounding the yard showing up on the bare fields like a massive square of luminous masonry. The smoke at first rose in heavy, dark spirals pierced here and there by yellow flashes and then shot straight up into the clear sky in a tall column.
We knew that there were sheep in the farm. The bombardment had ceased, and I decided to save one or two of the animals in order tosupplement our ordinary rations. Two gunners of the 12th Battery, the carriages of which were lined up close to ours, had the same idea.
We set out for the farm as rapidly as possible. The field we had to cross had been ploughed up yesterday by the German Howitzers. The enemy doubtless thought that infantry lay concealed behind the buildings, and the whole day long his heavy guns had vainly mown down the mangel-wurzels.
"They've gone to work as though they wanted to plant trees in fives," remarked one of my companions. And he added:
"And they've done the job jolly well! I know something about it, for I'm a gardener."
On the edge of a shell crater two gendarmes lay stretched side by side among the scattered clods of earth. One of them, a big, red-haired man, had a great gaping wound in his chest, and his right arm, doubled up in a strange posture, looked as if it had two elbows. The body of the other, a grey-headed corporal, seemed untouched, but in one of his eye-sockets there was nothing but a clot of blood, and the eye itself was hanging on his temple at the end of a white tendon.