Under Fire (37 page)

"As for me," said a new speaker, "if I don't believe in God, it's--" A fit of coughing terribly continued his sentence.

When the fit passed and his cheeks were purple and wet with tears, some one asked him, "Where are you wounded?"

"I'm not wounded; I'm ill."

"Oh, I see!" they said, in a tone which meant "You're not
interesting."

He understood, and pleaded the cause of his illness:

"I'm done in, I spit blood. I've no strength left, and it doesn't come back, you know, when it goes away like that."

"Ah, ah!" murmured the comrades--wavering, but secretly convinced all the same of the inferiority of civilian ailments to wounds.

In resignation he lowered his head and repeated to himself very quietly, "I can't walk any more; where would you have me go?"

* * * * * *

A commotion is arising for some unknown reason in. the horizontal gulf which lengthens as it contracts from stretcher to stretcher as far as the eye can see, as far as the pallid peep of daylight, in this confused corridor where the poor winking flames of candles redden and seem feverish, and winged shadows cast themselves. The odds and ends of heads and limbs are agitated, appeals and cries arouse each other and increase in number like invisible ghosts. The prostrate bodies undulate, double up, and turn over.

In the heart of this den of captives, debased and punished by pain, I make out the big mass of a hospital attendant whose heavy shoulders rise and fall like a knapsack carried crosswise, and whose stentorian voice reverberates at speed through the cave. "You've been meddling with your bandage again, you son of a lubber, you varmint!" he thunders. "I'll do it up again for you, as long as it's you, my chick, but if you touch it again, you'll see what I'll do to you!"

Behold him then in the obscurity, twisting a bandage round the cranium of a very little man who is almost upright, who has bristling hair and a beard which puffs out in front. With dangling arms, he submits in silence. But the attendant abandons him, looks on the ground and exclaims sonorously, "What the--? Eh, come now, my friend, are you cracked? There's manners for you, to lie down on the top of a patient!" And his capacious hand disengages a second limp body on which the first had extended himself as on a mattress; while the mannikin with the bandaged head alongside, as soon as he is let alone, puts his hands to his head without saying a word and tries once more to remove the encircling lint.

There is an uproar, too, among some shadows that are visible against a luminous background; they seem to be wildly agitated in the gloom of the crypt. The light of a candle shows us several men shaken with their efforts to hold a wounded soldier down on his stretcher. It is a man whose feet are gone. At the end of his legs are terrible bandages, with tourniquets to restrain the hemorrhage. His stumps have bled into the linen wrappings, and he seems to wear red breeches. His face is devilish, shining and sullen, and he is raving. They are pressing down on his shoulders and knees, for this man without feet would fain jump from the stretcher and go away.

"Let me go!" he rattles in breathless, quavering rage. His voice is low, with sudden sonorities, like a trumpet that one tries to blow too softly. "By God, let me go, I tell you! Do you think I'm going to stop here? Allons, let me be, or I'll jump over you on my hands!"

So violently he contracts and extends himself that he pulls to and fro those who are trying to restrain him by their gripping weight, and I can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose other arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely that he wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the rest. On all sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen to the incoherent lamentations which end by dying in the dark. At the same moment, in another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified on the ground, so curse each other that one of them has to be removed before the frantic dialogue is broken up.

I go farther away, towards the point where the light from outside comes through among the tangled beams as through a broken grating, and stride over the interminable stretchers that take up all the width of the underground alley whose oppressive confinement chokes me. The human forms prone on the stretchers are now hardly stirring under the Jack-o'-lanterns of the candles; they stagnate in their rattling breath and heavy groans.

On the edge of a stretcher a man is sitting, leaning against the wall. His clothes are torn apart, and in the middle of their darkness appears the white, emaciated breast of a martyr. His head is bent quite back and veiled in shadow, but I can see the beating of his heart.

The daylight that is trickling through at the end, drop by drop, comes in by an earth-fall. Several shells. falling on the same spot, have broken through the heavy earthen roof of the Refuge.

Here, some pale reflections are cast on the blue of the greatcoats, on the shoulders and along the folds. Almost paralyzed by the darkness and their own weakness, a group of men is pressing towards the gap, like dead men half awaking, to taste a little of the pallid air and detach themselves from the sepulcher. This corner at the extremity of the gloom offers itself as a way of escape, an oasis where one may stand upright, where one is lightly, angelically touched by the light of heaven.

"There were some chaps there that were blown to bits when the shells burst," said some one to me who was waiting there in the sickly ray of entombed light. "You talk about a mess! Look, there's the padre hooking down what was blown up."

The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter's chestnut waistcoat which gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails twisted among the beams of the shattered woodwork. For the purpose he is using a rifle with fixed bayonet, since he could not find a stick long enough; and the heavy giant, bald, bearded and asthmatic, wields the weapon awkwardly. He has a mild face, meek and unhappy, and while he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the corners, he mutters a string of "Oh's!" like sighs. His eyes are masked by blue glasses; his breathing is noisy. The top of his head is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape. To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a butcher at some fiendish task.

But I let myself fall in a corner with my eyes half closed, seeing hardly anything of the spectacle that lies and palpitates and falls around me. Indistinctly I gather some fragments of sentences--still the horrible monotony of the story of wounds: "Nom de Dieu! In that place I should think the bullets were touching each other.--"His head was bored through from one temple to the other. You could have passed a thread through."

"Those beggars were an hour before they lifted their fire and stopped peppering us." Nearer to me some one gabbles at the end of his story, "When I'm sleeping I dream that I'm killing him over again!"

Other memories are called up and buzz about among the buried wounded; it is like the purring of countless gear-wheels in a machine that turns and turns. And I hear afar him who repeats from his seat, "What's the use of worrying?" in all possible tones, commanding a pitiful, sometimes like a prophet and anon like one shipwrecked; he metrifies with his cry the chorus of choking and plaintive voices that try so terribly to extol their suffering.

Some one comes forward, blindly feeling the wall with his stick, and reaches me. It is Farfadet! I call him, and he turns nearly towards me to tell me that one eye is gone, and the other is bandaged as well. I give him my place, take him by the shoulders and make him sit down. He submits, and seated at the base of the wall waits patiently, with the resignation of his clerkly calling, as if in a waiting-room.

I come to anchor a little farther away, in an empty space where two prostrate men are talking to each other in low voices; they are so near to me that I hear them without listening. They are two soldiers of the Foreign Legion; their helmets and greatcoats are dark yellow.

"It's not worth while to make-believe about it," says one of them banteringly. "I'm staying here this time. It's finished--my bowels are shot through. If I were in a hospital, in a town, they'd operate on me in time, and it might stick up again. But here! It was yesterday I got it. We're two or three hours from the Bethune road, aren't we? And how many hours, think you, from the road to an ambulance where they can operate? And then, when are they going to pick us up? It's nobody's fault, I dare say; but you've got to look facts in the face. Oh, I know it isn't going to be any worse from now than it is, but it can't be long, seeing I've a hole all the way through my parcel of guts. You, your foot'll get all right, or they'll put you another one on. But I'm going to die."

"Ah!" said the other, convinced by the reasoning of his neighbor. The latter goes on--"Listen, Dominique. You've led a bad life. You cribbed things, and you were quarrelsome when drunk. You've dirtied your ticket in the police register, properly."

"I can't say it isn't true, because it is," says the other; "but what have you got to do with it?"

"You'll lead a bad life again after the war, inevitably; and then you'll have bother about that affair of the cooper."

The other becomes fierce and aggressive. "What the hell's it to do
with you? Shut your jaw!"

"As for me, I've no more family than you have. I've nobody, except Louise--and she isn't a relation of mine, seeing we're not married. And there are no convictions against me, beyond a few little military jobs. There's nothing on my name."

"Well, what about it? I don't care a damn."

"I'm going to tell you. Take my name. Take it--I give it you; as long as neither of us has any family."

"Your name?"

"Yes; you'll call yourself Leonard Carlotti, that's all. 'Tisn't a big job. What harm can it do you? Straight off, you've no more convictions. They won't hunt you out, and you can be as happy as I should have been if this bullet hadn't gone through my magazine."

"Oh Christ!" said the other, "you'd do that? You'd--that--well, old
chap, that beats all!"

"Take it. It's there in my pocket-book in my greatcoat. Go on, take it, and hand yours over to me--so that I can carry it all away with me. You'll be able to live where you like, except where I come from, where I'm known a bit, at Longueville in Tunis. You'll remember that? And anyway, it's written down. You must read it, the pocket-book. I shan't blab to anybody. To bring the trick off properly, mum's the word, absolutely."

He ponders a moment, and then says with a shiver "I'll p'raps tell Louise, so's she'll find I've done the right thing, and think the better of me, when I write to her to say good-by."

But he thinks better of it, and shakes his head with an heroic effort. "No--I shan't let on, even to her. She's her, of course, but women are such chatterers!"

The other man looks at him, and repeats, "Ah, nome de Dieu!"

Without being noticed by the two men I leave the drama narrowly developing in this lamentable corner and its jostling and traffic and hubbub.

Now I touch the composed and convalescent chat of two poor wretches--"Ah, my boy, the affection he had for that vine of his! You couldn't find anything wrong among the branches of it--"

"That little nipper, that wee little kid, when I went out with him, holding his tiny fist, it felt as if I'd got hold of the little warm neck of a swallow, you know."

And alongside this sentimental avowal, here is the passing revelation of another mind: "Don't I know the 547th! Rather! Listen, it's a funny regiment. They've got a poilu in it who's called Petitjean, another called Petitpierre, and another called Petitlouis. Old man, it's as I'm telling you; that's the kind of regiment it is."

As I begin to pick out a way with a view to leaving the cavern, there is a great noise down yonder of a fall and a chorus of exclamations. It is the hospital sergeant who has fallen. Through the breach that he was clearing of its soft and bloody relics, a bullet has taken him in the throat, and he is spread out full length on the ground. His great bewildered eyes are rolling and his breath comes foaming. His mouth and the lower part of his face are quickly covered with a cloud of rosy bubbles. They place his head on a bag of bandages, and the bag is instantly soaked with blood. An attendant cries that the packets of lint will be spoiled, and they are needed. Something else is sought on which to put the head that ceaselessly makes a light and discolored froth. Only a loaf can be found, and it is slid under the spongy hair.

While they hold the sergeant's hand and question him, he only slavers new heaps of bubbles, and we see his great black-bearded head across this rosy cloud. Laid out like that, he might be a deep-breathing marine monster, and the transparent red foam gathers and creeps up to his great hazy eyes, no longer spectacled.

Then his throat rattles. It is a childish rattle, and he dies moving his head to right and to left as though he were trying very gently to say "No."

Looking on the enormous inert mass, I reflect that he was a good man. He had an innocent and impressionable heart. How I reproach myself that I sometimes abused him for the ingenuous narrowness of his views, and for a certain clerical impertinence that he always had! And how glad I am in this distressing scene--yes, happy enough to tremble with joy--that I restrained myself from an angry protest when I found him stealthily reading a letter I was writing, a protest that would unjustly have wounded him! I remember the time when he exasperated me so much by his dissertation on France and the Virgin Mary. It seemed impossible to me that he could utter those thoughts sincerely. Why should he not have been sincere? Has he not been really killed today? I remember, too, certain deeds of devotion, the kindly patience of the great man, exiled in war as in life--and the rest does not matter. His ideas themselves are only trivial details compared with his heart--which is there on the ground in ruins in this corner of Hell. With what intensity I lamented this man who was so far asunder from me in everything!

Then fell the thunder on us! We were thrown violently on each other by the frightful shaking of the ground and the walls. It was as if the overhanging earth had burst and hurled itself down. Part of the armor-plate of beams collapsed, enlarging the hole that already pierced the cavern. Another shock--another pulverized span fell in roaring destruction. The corpse of the great Red Cross sergeant went rolling against the wall like the trunk of a tree. All the timber in the long frame-work of the cave, those heavy black vertebrae, cracked with an ear-splitting noise, and all the prisoners in the dungeon shouted together in horror.