Under Fire: The Story of a Squad

"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.

The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't done. But military glory—it isn't even true for us common soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies."

"To hell with it all," replies a man, "we've got other things to think about."

"But all that," hiccupped a face which the mud concealed like a hideous hand, "may you even say it? You'd be cursed, and 'shot at dawn'! They've made around a Marshal's plumes a religion as bad and stupid and malignant as the other!"

The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given for the healing of the world.

The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of men are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of clouds, round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles, churches, royal and military palaces and temples. They seem to multiply there, shutting out the stars that are fewer than mankind; it seems even as if these apparitions are moving in all directions in the excavated ground, here, there, among the real beings who are thrown there at random, half buried in the earth like grains of corn.

My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb, laid out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge simplicity out of the earth's depths—a profoundity like that of ignorance—they move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and their fists extended towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm. They are struggling against victorious specters, like the Cyranos and Don Quixotes that they still are.

One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.

But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the boundless simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with a dawn of hope, but raises on it a renewal of strength and courage.

"That's enough talk about those others!" one of the men commanded; "all the worse for them!—Us! Us all!" The understanding between democracies, the entente among the multitudes, the uplifting of the people of the world, the bluntly simple faith! All the rest, aye, all the rest, in the past, the present and the future, matters nothing at all.

And a soldier ventures to add this sentence, though he begins it with lowered voice, "If the present war has advanced progress by one step, its miseries and slaughter will count for little."

And while we get ready to rejoin the others and begin war again, the dark and storm-choked sky slowly opens above our heads. Between two masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of light, so blackedged and beset, brings even so its proof that the sun is there.

THE END

1

The popular and international name for a French soldier. Its literal meaning is "hairy, shaggy," but the word has conveyed for over a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose strength lay in his locks.—Tr.

2

6250 miles.

3

Pourvu que les civils tiennent. In the early days of the war it was a common French saying that victory was certain—"if the civilians hold out."—Tr.

4

Pity to spoil this jest by translation, but Biquet's primary meaning was "You're cross because you've a throat like a lime-kiln." His secondary or literal meaning is obvious.—Tr.

5

See p. 34 ante; [chapter 5, note 3] another reference to the famous phrase. "Pourvu que les civils tiennent."—Tr.

6

Every French village has a plaque attached to the first house on each road of approach, giving its name and the distance to the next.—Tr.

7

The word is likely to become of international usage. It stands for the use of paint in blotches of different colors, and of branches and other things to disguise almost any object that may be visible to hostile aircraft.—Tr.

8

Non-combatant.—Tr.

9

Akin to the British A.S.C.—Tr.

10

Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.—Tr.

11

A-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the duration of service at the front.—Tr.

12

Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three, four, or five years. Those enlisted for four or five year' have the right to choose their arm of the service, subject to conditions.—Tr.

13

I have altered the name of this soldier as well as that of the village.—H. B.

14

French soldiers have extensively developed a system of corresponding with French women whom they do not know from Eve and whose acquaintance they usually make through newspaper advertisements. As typical of the latter I copy the following: "Officier artilleur, 30 ans, desire correspondance discrete avec jeune marraine, femme du monde. Ecrire," etc. The "lonely soldier" movement in this country is similar.—Tr.

15

All these high roads are stone-paved, and traffic is noisy.—Tr.

16

There is a complete set for each squad—stoves, canvas buckets, coffee-mill, pan, etc—and each man carries some item on march.—Tr.

17

Cantine vivres, chest containing two days' rations and cooking utensils for four or five officers.—Tr.

18

Military slang for machine-gun—Tr.

19

See p. 117.