Authors: Gabriel Chevallier
Thus I have got to know everyone, and everyone knows me, asking me questions about what’s happening at the rear: a runner is also a vital source of information. Even the platoon leaders, who cannot leave the front line, hold me in respect and I sometimes help them prepare their reports. But the main benefit for me from this toing and froing, where the time we take isn’t rigidly controlled, is that it allows me to stop at different shelters and talk to the men. Their numbers swollen by successive reinforcements, the units are made up of men from every part of the country and every part of the front, most of them having been wounded and having belonged to other regiments. They all have their own memories. Through their stories, I get to know every aspect of the war, for it is their favourite topic of conversation, being the thing that has brought them together and filled their lives for the last two years.
Naturally Verdun comes up a lot. There the use of artillery, the accumulation of means of destruction, reached a level of intensity hitherto unknown, and everyone agrees it was a hell in which you lost your mind. With the help of their accounts, confused as they often are, I reconstitute the epic story of the regiment in this terrible sector. It’s a shameful epic, if, as historians will, you judge by the results. But a soldier judges from his experience under fire and knows that the conduct of a unit usually results from the situation in which it has been placed, and has little do with the courage of the combatants. This is what I learned.
Last April, the regiment was engaged in front of Malancourt, in a salient, a position ‘out in the open’, with no communication or support on the flanks, and it was kept in this position despite all the warnings from battalion leaders who had pointed out its vulnerability under concentrated fire. When the action started, two battalions stood to face the attack, but they were outflanked, overwhelmed by the masses of troops that swarmed out of the shell smoke, and taken prisoner, almost to a man. Only some support elements were able to fall back and these included one ambitious captain. This cunning officer, displaying considerable nerve in his presentation of the facts, estimated that no official enquiry would come and investigate what had happened on the ground. His report transformed our accidental defeat into a tale of defence to the last man, of the sacrifice made by a thousand soldiers, refusing to yield an inch of ground, and now buried in the ruins. This version, in perfect concordance with military doctrine, was immediately adopted by the colonel, who transmitted it to the division, adding a few amplifications of his own. For it is accepted, by some strange aberration, that a great loss of men proves the courage of those who command them – by virtue of that axiom of the military hierarchy which states that the valour of soldiers is created by the valour of their leaders, an axiom which does not have a converse form. So the colonel published a dispatch in which he exalted the nobility of the sacrifice and proclaimed his pride at commanding such valiant troops. The regiment would have therefore left Verdun crowned in glory, had a German aeroplane not had the poor taste to scatter leaflets on our lines in which the enemy command boasted of its success at Malancourt and added a list of the prisoners taken that day – several hundred men, officers as well as soldiers, all from that same regiment. There was no room for doubt: the sacrifice had not been consummated. Learning that these men, over whose loss tears were still being shed, were in fact alive enraged the colonel, who published a furious, scathing counter-dispatch.
The surrender of two battalions taken by surprise cast suspicion on a regiment that had been sent out into untenable positions. As someone had to be held responsible, the high command incriminated those who had disappeared, as they weren’t there to defend themselves. It was recalled that the regiment came from the Midi and absurd old grievances that dated back to the beginning of the war were used against it. This military vilification put it into the category of unreliable units which had displayed weakness under fire. And that has earned us a long stay in the Vosges, exiled from honour. The colonel, who sees his chances of promotion jeopardised, complains bitterly. But the men don’t hide their delight, and are in no hurry to regain ‘esteem’ which is so often deadly.
The survivors, men who have already endured dangers and torment beyond normal human comprehension, speak of Verdun with special horror. They say that when they got out they couldn’t eat properly for several days because their stomachs had been so knotted with fear, because everything filled them with disgust. They have remembered nothing from Verdun except terror and madness. Except one thing, which always brings a smile to their lips. They tell of a crossroads behind the lines where they saw three gendarmes who had been strung up from a tree by colonial troops as they passed through. This is the only happy memory they have retained from Verdun! It never crosses their minds that gendarmes are men like them. The hatred of the gendarme, so traditional in France, has been intensified in the war by the scorn – or envy – that soldiers feel towards the non-combatant. And gendarmes not only do not fight, but they force others to do so. Behind the lines they form a network of jailers who force us back into the prison of the war. It is also said that during the retreat of 1914 they killed stragglers who no longer had the strength to march. So the execution of a few gendarmes lifts the spirits and avenges the forced labour they have inflicted on the men. Everyone feels like that and I have not seen a single soldier show the slightest pity for the three hanged men. There’s no doubt that this ‘special operation’ has done more to boost the reputation of colonial troops that any brilliant military action would have done. Who can say whether it hasn’t indeed done a service to the High Command by getting the army of Verdun to laugh? Of course it’s immoral. So this is the occasion to use the famous phrase which has already excused so many other immoralities:
It’s war!
A sergeant who has just arrived offers me another picture of Verdun. He describes a feat of arms:
‘I was a grenadier sergeant. One evening we take up position on the flank of a devastated slope. No trace of barbed wire, or shell holes, position of Boche unknown. Once we’d sorted ourselves out, the commander, Moricault, an old bloke with a big mouth, summoned me. I found him in his little dugout, smoking his pipe. Handing me a quarter-litre of brandy he says: “Ah, good, th-there you are, Simon. I have need of you. Have y’self a nip of this!”
‘He unrolls his map. “You’re there, see? There, on the side, is, er, Permezel (another NCO). Good! You see? And there is a Boche machine gun that’s bothering us. Now, you go and work it out with Permezel. You’ll come from the front with your chaps, and he’ll, er, come from the right with his. And at midnight, you blow the bloody machine gun to hell. Understood?” “Understood, sir!”
‘You can’t argue with the old buffer! So off I go and find Permezel, tell him the plan, sort out the details and synchronise watches. I pick three blokes to come with me: Rondin, a tall, beefy chap, Cartouchier, a miner from the north, and Zigg, an ace with the knife. Choice of weapons: bombs, shooters and shivs. We crawl forwards, hopping from one hole to the next, guided by flares. The racket from the bombardment helps a bit. The further we get from our side, the slower we go. It takes us a good hour. All of a sudden, Zigg tugs at my arm, makes a sign. I poke my head out of the hole, very carefully, and I see two helmets, maybe six metres away, Boche heads. I tell you, we were eye to eye, without making a peep. We all huddle down in our holes but don’t take our eyes off each other. Don’t stop to think! I give the nod to the others and, hop!, with one move we pile into them. There were three Boche, two get away and we nab the other one. But the pig rolls on the ground, trying to grab his rifle. Rondon catches him, gives him half a dozen good kicks in the ribs to calm him down and then we all get out quick, back to the commandant’s dugout. Once inside we take a good look at our Fritz, a young bloke, brand new uniform, his mug a bit the worse for wear thanks to Rondin. Old man Moricault interrogates him in German but he’s not saying anything. So our quartermaster captain gets up, and puts his revolver against his temple. My god, did he go white! And then he told us everything: they were all behind the ridge and were supposed to attack at four in the morning. That saved our bacon. The machine gunners put one belt through after another and at ten to four started firing even faster.’
‘So the Germans didn’t attack?’
‘Not at four they didn’t, but at nine. We were knackered, half-asleep. Only old father Moricault was up and about, with his pipe and cane and big mouth. He was the one who sounded the alarm, and then he grabbed hold of a machine gun. He had balls, that old bloke. The Boche were swarming around only sixty metres away and they were coming up fast.’
‘They didn’t get there?’
‘No chance. We had six machine guns in action right off. Can’t do anything against machine guns! . . . I never seen so many going down as I did then!’
‘Not as many as I have’, says the machine gunner sergeant who is listening to us. ‘When we were fighting in open country, I was with the Zouaves. There was one time when there were three of us gunners dug in behind tree trunks on the edge of a forest, on a little rise. We opened fire on battalions that were coming out at four hundred metres, and we didn’t stop firing. A surprise attack. It was frightful. The terrified Boche couldn’t get out of the way of our bullets. Bodies piled up in heaps. Our gun crews were shaking with horror and wanted to run.
Killing made us afraid!
. . . I’ve never seen such a massacre. We had three Saint-Étiennes, they spit out six hundred a minute. Imagine it.’
‘But when you saw the Boche six metres away in the shell-hole’, I asked the grenadier sergeant, curious to know more, ‘how did you decide to rush them?’
‘It just needs a nod and a wave, like I say. We know the way it works. While the Boche were still making up their minds, we got going. It’s the ones with balls that scare the others, and the ones who are scared most are buggered. You mustn’t think in a situation like that. It’s all bluff, war!’
Before moving to Verdun, for a long time the regiment had held the F— sector, which was so dangerous that units were replaced after three days on the front line. The men all tell me that during those three days they had practically no sleep at all, because of the great quantity of German trench mortars that were smashing up their positions. The ‘aerial torpedoes’ and heavy trench mortar shells are stealthy projectiles which cause terrible damage because of their considerable explosive charge. The explosion is not preceded by the whistle that alerts you to incoming shells. The only way to avoid falling victim to them is to spot them in the air after the small bang when they’re launched, and try to work out where they will land, so as to get out the way. At night they provoke an obsessive fear that makes this method of attack the most demoralising of all. And on top of all this the mortar shells necessitate an exhausting amount of digging in order to repair collapsed trenches; cases of men being buried alive are common. Nerves are strained to breaking point. After a while, depression makes soldiers capable of just about anything. It’s an open secret that at F— there were cases of soldiers deliberately injuring themselves. Many wounds were so suspicious that one brutal army doctor kept corpses on which to test the effects of projectiles fired at short range so that he could spot similar results on the injured men who were brought to him. This same doctor had some men court-martialled for having frostbitten feet. The soldiers who admit self-injury consider this is iniquitous: frostbite is an involuntary result of standing in frozen mud.
Initially, the easiest way of getting a good wound was to place your hand over a lookout slit that had been targeted by snipers. This had been used in several places. But bullets in the hand, particularly the left hand, quickly became inadmissible. Another method was to ignite the fuse on a grenade and put it and your own hand on one side of a splinter-proof shield: your forearm is blown off. It seems that some men had recourse to this. It could not be denied that to perform such an act of cowardice requires considerable courage and terrible despair. Despair, in the most punishing sectors, can provoke the most absurd decisions; men have assured me that at Verdun soldiers killed themselves for fear of suffering an agonising death. It is also whispered that at F— some veterans from the Bat d’Af wounded their own comrades. They polished shell shrapnel to make it look new, put it in a cartridge from which they had removed the bullet and then fired it into the person’s leg at a spot agreed on in advance. They charged for it, and made a bit of money out of this dirty work. I have certainly heard soldiers expressing the wish to have a limb amputated to escape the front line. In general, the rougher, simpler men fear death but can bear pain and mutilation. Whereas the more sensitive ones are less afraid of death itself than the forms it takes here, of the agony and suffering that precedes it.
Soldiers talk plainly of these things, without approving or condemning, because war has accustomed them to seeing what is monstrous as natural. To them, the greatest injustice is that others dispose of their lives without asking them, and have lied to them in bringing them here. This legalised injustice cancels out all morality, and in their opinion all conventions decreed by those far away from the fighting concerning honour, courage, noble attitudes, and so on, cannot concern them, soldiers on the front line. The shellfire zone has its own laws, of which they are the only judges. They declare, without the slightest trace of shame: ‘We’re only there because we don’t have any choice!’ They are the navvies of war, and they know that the only person who profits from their labour is the boss. The dividends will go the generals, the politicians, the factory owners. The heroes will return to the plough and the work bench, as poor as before. They laugh bitterly when they hear that word, ‘heroes’. They refer to themselves as
good lads
, that is, ordinary chaps, neither bellicose nor aggressive, the ones who march and kill without knowing why. The good lads, that is, the pitiful, mud-caked, moaning, bleeding brotherhood of the P.C.D.F.,[
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] as they call themselves sarcastically. Cannon fodder, in short. ‘Coffin candidates’, as Chassignole puts it.