Fear (10 page)

Our bugles sounded the charge and unleashed all the instruments of war.

Rifles and grenades, guardians of space, threw up their deadly barriers, at the level of French soldiers’ stomachs.

Shells of every calibre were crashing down on us, barrage after barrage, a mixture of shrapnel and high explosive. The burning sky fell on our backs, squeezing our necks, buffeting us from side to side, twisting our guts with waves of dry, painful colic. Our pounding hearts tore at our bodies, tried to burst out of our chests. Terror suffocated us, like an attack of angina. And our souls were on our tongues, like bitter communion wafers, and we kept gulping them down, kept swallowing, because we did not want to spit out our souls.

The bugles sounded again, a death knell. We knew that just a few hundred metres ahead our ashen-faced brothers were about to offer themselves up to the eager machine guns. We knew that once they had fallen, and then others had fallen too, men just like us, just as obsessed with staying alive, with running away, with putting an end to their torment, it would be our turn, that we were worth no more than them in the mass of sacrificed manpower. We knew that the massacre was well underway, that new corpses were piling up on the earth, their arms frozen in the last, despairing gestures of drowning men.

The shellfire had caught us at a crossroads pinpointed by the German artillery. We ducked down into a Russian sap to shelter from the explosions.

The attack quickly subsided. The roar of the guns died away. Now we could hear the screams, those terrible screams that we had heard before . . .

We stayed in that sap for three days and two nights.

Once we realised that we were being left there, we organised ourselves. There were twenty of us in a tunnel some twenty metres long; we had to crouch down, chins on knees, only going out to answer calls of nature.

Several times a day we heard the ominous bugle calls and the artillery barrage began again. The smallest shell would have shattered the thin layer of soil that protected us but we had piled up our packs by the entrance to cover ourselves on that side. The entrance was guarded by a dead body, buried right there. As if he had been buried standing up, his head still stuck out of the ground, along with one hand, a finger pointing in our direction, seeming to indicate: there they are! Whenever we crawled out we nearly bumped into the cold head. It reminded us what awaited us in this chaos.

We did not receive any new provisions. We ate our emergency rations, and some men who had gone out in the dark to rummage in the packs of the dead brought back biscuits and chocolate. But we were desperately thirsty. I had a little flask of peppermint liqueur in my haversack. We passed it round but no one was allowed to drink. Twenty mouths sucked at the rim to moisten their lips. That was our only drink throughout those three days. But a few men took water from the puddles where corpses bathed.

We also sorted ourselves out so that we could sleep and avoid cramp. We arranged ourselves like oarsmen, each making space between his legs for his neighbour. At night the whole row of us leaned back so that stomachs served as pillows.

The sap became a rather cosy little place that we did not dare leave. We cherished the illusion that we had been forgotten and no order would ever find us there. But the orders came on the third day. We set off at night.

In the morning, after various halts and hesitations, we found ourselves in recently taken German positions. We walked past big dugouts that echoed with the cries of the wounded who had been brought there to wait until they could be transported to the rear. There were so many of them that it held up their evacuation; there were not enough stretcher-bearers.

Finally we were left in a trench where we could just about stand upright. It began to drizzle and we were soon wet. Our feet sank into the mud, which held them so firmly that in order to extricate them we had to pull at our knees with both hands. We warmed up each leg in turn. Still no new provisions. Fortunately shells rarely fell in this spot.

In the evening we had the idea to dig out small niches in the trench wall, just deep enough to hold our backs and stop us from slipping. Over the front of these little niches we spread out our tent canvases, held in place by cartridges stuck in the ground. Sitting behind the dripping canvas, squeezed together in pairs, with our feet in the water and shivering with cold, we managed to get a few hours’ sleep.

In the middle of the night we were woken. The call came that I had dreaded: ‘Bombers to the front!’ The Germans must have launched a counter-attack. But the firing died down before we reached the front line.

The next day we were moved forward again.

We took up positions in a trench perpendicular to the enemy lines, closed off by a barricade of sandbags, at the furthest point of our advance.

We were dirtier, more exhausted, paler and more silent than ever. We knew that our hour was approaching.

After all that we had seen, we could have no more illusions. As soon as one battalion was out of action, the next battalion was pushed forward to attack, over the same ground covered in our dead and wounded, after an inadequate artillery barrage, which did more to alert the enemy than to harm them. The useless victory which consisted of capturing a bit of the enemy trenches was paid for by the massacre of our soldiers. We could see the dead men in blue spread out between the lines. We knew that their sacrifice had been in vain and ours, which was about to follow, would be too. We knew that it was absurd and criminal to throw men against unbroken barbed wire protecting weapons that spat out hundreds of bullets per minute. We knew that invisible machine-gunners were waiting for the targets that we would be as soon as we went over the top, and would pick us off like game birds. Only the assailants were exposed to view, while the men we were attacking, dug in behind their earthen ramparts, would stop us getting to them as long as they kept a cool head for a couple of minutes.

As for a deep advance, all hope was lost. This offensive, which was supposed to take us twenty-five kilometres forward in one go, destroying every obstacle in its path, had just about managed to gain a few hundred metres in a week. A handful of senior officers had to justify their role to the nation by a few lines of communiqué that bore the scent of victory. We were there for no other reason than to purchase those few lines with our blood. It was now a matter of politics, not strategy.

One thing still gave us pause for thought. Among all the dead that surrounded us, we saw very few Germans. There was no equivalence of losses; our feeble territorial gains were lies, because we were the only ones to die. Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence. Our attacking troops, supposed conquerors, muttered to themselves: ‘These fools are just killing us all.’

As a witness to this chaos and carnage, it seemed to me that ‘fools’ was an inadequate word. In the Revolution they sent incompetent generals to the guillotine. An excellent measure. Why should men who had set up courts martial, advocated summary justice, escape the sanctions they imposed on others? Such a threat would cure these wielders of thunderbolts of their Olympian arrogance, force them to reflect on what they were doing. No dictatorship could compare with theirs. They prohibit any scrutiny of what they are doing by the nations, the families, who have blindly put their trust in them. And if those of us who can see that their glory is an imposture, their power a menace, if we tell the truth, they will have us shot.

These were the thoughts that haunted us on the eve of the attack. Bowed down beneath the rain and the shells, the pale soldiers sneered:

‘Morale is high! The troops are raring to go!’

Now begins our final agony.

The attack is certain. But, since frontal assaults that get nowhere must be abandoned, we are to move forward through the trenches. My battalion will attack the German defences with grenades. As a bomber, I will march in the front ranks.

We still don’t know the hour of the attack. Around midday they tell us: ‘It will be this evening or tonight.’

From the latrines which were above the trenches we can see the enemy line. The gently rising plain is crowned in the distance by a wood that has been blasted to pieces, ‘Folly Wood’, and our command apparently proposes to occupy it. A rumour goes round that we are facing the German Imperial Guard and they will greet us with exploding bullets.

What can we do until evening? I have little faith in my grenades, which I do not know how to use. I strip down my rifle, clean it carefully, oil it and wrap it in a cloth. I also check my bayonet. I have no idea how one fights in a trench, in Indian file. But a rifle is a weapon after all, the only one I understand, and I have to get ready to protect my life. I have no faith in my knife either.

Above all, I must not think . . . What could I expect? To die?
I must not
expect that. To kill? That is the unknown and I have no wish to kill. Glory? This isn’t the place where you get glory; that happens much further back. To advance one, two, three hundred metres into the German positions? I have seen only too well that this will make no difference to events. I have no hatred, no ambition, and no motivation. Yet I must attack . . .

I have a single idea: get through the bullets, the grenades, the shells, get through them all, whether victorious or defeated. And moreover,
to be alive is to be victorious
. This was also the sole idea of everyone around me.

The old hands are anxious and grumble to calm themselves down. They refuse to do guard duty, but all eagerly volunteer to go to the rear in search of provisions.

Bursts of artillery and machine-gun fire sweep the plain. There’s a bit of sunshine. Far off we can still hear bugles, gunfire, bombardments.

We would like to halt the march of time. Yet dusk descends on the battlefield, separates us from each other, makes us shiver with cold . . . the cold of death . . .

We wait.

Nothing gets any clearer.

I crouch down in a hole to get some sleep. Better not to know in advance!

I remember that I am twenty years old. The age of which the poets sing.

Daylight again. I stretch my stiff legs in the deserted trench and then go to our corporal’s dugout.

‘We’re not attacking?’

‘It’s postponed to this evening.’

Here we go again! One more grim day!

It’s early, and all is quiet on the front. Mist covers the plain and through it come long, heart-rending groans, punctuated by hoarse death-rattles. Our wounded lie between the lines, crying for help. ‘Comrades, brothers, friends, come and get me . . . don’t leave me, I can still live . . .’ You can make out women’s names, and the screams of those who are in unbearable pain: ‘Finish me off!’ And those who curse us: ‘Cowards, cowards!’ There is nothing we can do but pity them, and shudder. In their cries we can hear the cries that are inside us, and which will come out, perhaps this evening . . . It is as if the two armies have kept quiet to hear them and must be red with shame in their trenches.

I withdraw to my hole, cover my head so as not to hear, and try to sleep.

I am awoken a few hours later. Food has finally come: a stew congealed in the dixies, wine, cold coffee, brandy. Our squad gathers round the corporal and he distributes it. I have no appetite, force it down, and finish first. The corporal gives me an armful of newspapers:

‘Read us the news.’

‘Yeah, let’s hear the latest claptrap!’ agree the men, clustering round so as not to miss anything.

First there was the rather confused official statement on the progress of the war. They shake their heads.

‘Meaning, we’re stuck in this shit for the winter!’

Then I scan the columns signed by great names: academicians, retired generals, even men of the Church, and pluck out these rare and precious flowers of prose:

‘That war has an educational value can never be doubted by anyone with the slightest powers of observation . . .’

‘It was time war came to France to revive the true meaning of the Ideal and the Divine.’

‘One of the surprises of this war, and one of the wonders, is the brilliant role played by poetry.’

Someone interrupted:

‘How much do these blokes get paid to write this fucking rubbish?’

Continuing, I indulged my audience:

‘O dead, would that you were alive!’

‘Merriment reigns in the trenches!’

‘Now I can follow you into the attack; I can feel the joy that overwhelms you at the moment of supreme effort, the ecstasy, the transmigration of the soul, the unfettered flight of the spirit.’

They reflect for a moment. And then Bougnou, self-effacing, obedient little Bougnou, who never says a word, passes judgement on these famous writers in his little-girl voice:

‘Oh, what scum!’

In the afternoon the corporal takes me aside: ‘I want you to join a fatigue party this evening. We’re going to go and collect some wicker hurdles.’[
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]

‘Oh no, not that. I am already a bomber. I don’t want to go on fatigues as well.’

‘Shut up. This way we’ll miss the attack . . .’

His assurance calms me down. I pass quite a pleasant evening.

It has already been dark for some time when we set off. There are five of us. I’ve left my rifle and my pack in a little corner of the trench where I can get them later and just kept a haversack and the rest of my kit. We walk fast along the dark trenches that have been battered by shells, in a hurry to get to the rear where we can shelter.

Unfortunately the wet weather in the last few days and the damp biscuits I’ve eaten have brought back my upset stomach. I have to make frequent stops and force the others to wait, complaining, afraid that a shot will catch us at any moment. It isn’t easy for me to find a suitable spot in the dark. At one point a man suddenly jumps up and tries to chase me off.

‘Get out of here! These are the commandant’s latrines.’