Authors: Gabriel Chevallier
We fight against the cold as best we can. The icy north wind pierces and slashes us with blades of steel. Our woollen caps protect our heads and ears, we wrap mufflers round our faces leaving only our eyes uncovered and our corneas freeze so that all we see is blurred as if we were looking through water. Above this construction of scarves we balance our helmets and sometimes add a blanket over them which hangs down on to our shoulders like a big hood. We’ve been given rubber mountain boots which we wear over felt slippers. But the boots are uncomfortable and dangerous, the insides get soaked with sweat and they cause us to fall over on the slippery snow. I have found another way of protecting myself from the cold, less effective but sufficient as long as I jump up and down on the spot every now and then. I keep my shoes on and put my legs inside two empty sandbags which I tie on at the knees. Then I take other sacks from which I’ve cut out the bottoms and make myself thigh covers. This outfit has the advantage of giving a surer grip on ice; it allows you to run and I am well aware that running is the first necessity for a fighter, who must always be prepared for a rapid retreat. On my hands I wear three pairs of gloves on top of each other.
The nights seem to last forever. Cracking ice mimics the sound of wire cutters but we have stopped worrying about it. We concentrate on guarding ourselves, on the sectors of our bodies which stiffen up as if our arteries were carrying ice floes. Standing still gives us a treacherous sense of warmth, wraps us in a dangerous fleece of inertia, and it takes an effort of will to start moving again, which stirs up the cold before rekindling the fires of our blood. The first glimmers of dawn seem like deliverance.
Around seven we get coffee, frozen wine which tinkles in the cans, and loaves of bread that’s so hard you’d need an axe to cut it. We put the loaves on the stove where they soften and give out water, then gorge ourselves on the tepid, spongy bread. And we take little sips of the boiling hot coffee heated up in our tin mugs. After a winter night, a polar night, it’s life itself that we’re gulping down.
It didn’t take Captain Bovin long to show his measure. The Germans leave us in peace on our mountain, but he has burdened us with more and more duties that can only add to our suffering without having any military benefit whatsoever. Profiting from the passivity that the low temperatures have imposed on all soldiers, he has transformed our sector into a barracks. He swamps us with tasks that aren’t urgent, takes no account of our exhaustion, and robs us of the scant free time that would be left to us by duties that are already quite onerous enough.
Several times a week, he summons the company to alert in the middle of the night. All the men have to line up in the trenches and await his inspection. He thus makes us endure two extra hours of cold. These alerts have no value. Most of the men are old hands by now and know far better than the captain how to defend a forward post like ours. In any case, we have the feeling that a few shells would quickly take the wind out of his sails, and we wait for the time when we’re in an active sector so that we can show what we think of him. The men respect a leader who is strict in critical moments and risks his own skin, but they have the deepest contempt for one who persecutes them without having proved himself.
During the day the captain puts us to work on the grounds that we should not be idle: maintaining the trenches, digging latrines, cleaning anything that can be cleaned – the results of which are soon covered by the snow. He has also come up with the idea of sending detachments to the rear for training exercises, something unheard of until now.
Getting fuel is enough to keep us busy in the afternoons. We get through a great deal of wood. Every day we have to cut down a pine in the forest and carry it piece by piece to the shelter where we saw it into smaller sections and then chop these into logs before stacking them up inside. Always busy, we are also always tired since we can only sleep for short periods between our turns at guard duty.
Our worst enemy now is our captain. We fear him more than German patrols and during the night we’re more alert to noise from behind than in front. Through his tyranny he has managed to produce the ridiculous result that we turn our attention from the enemy facing us to focus it in our own camp. Two guards who warmed themselves up, with the approval of their comrades, were court-martialled for abandoning their post in the face of the enemy, and NCOs have been reduced to the ranks for pointless reasons. It has reached a point where we’ve set up a system of alarms to protect ourselves from our leader. As soon as he pops up somewhere, his presence is announced through a network of strings, hidden in the barbed wire, linking the positions, which rattle empty bully beef tins. The garrisons on the slope also pour water down the trench every evening so as to add to the layer of ice that makes the approach to the bunkers hazardous. We’re the first to suffer from this, but it obtained the desired result. During one of his rounds, the captain slipped and fell heavily, injuring his back. His runners had to hold him up so he could get back to his command post. This news was greeted with whooping and firing in the air, rather like an Arab equestrian fantasia. After that, the tyrant doesn’t show himself in our patch. But he takes his revenge by leaving us no respite.
Our silent hatred for the captain continues to grow. Here is a man who should be helping us to bear our suffering and instead is causing us more misery than the enemy. The soldiers would kill him more readily than a German – and with more reason, they believe.
I’m living like an animal, an animal who has to eat and then sleep. I have never felt so stupefied, so blank, and I realise that wearing people out, leaving them no time to think, reducing them to a state where they feel nothing but the most basic needs, is the surest way of controlling them. I understand now how slaves submit so easily, because they have no strength left for revolt, nor imagination to conceive it, nor energy to organise it. I understand the wisdom of oppressors who prevent those they exploit from using their brains by crushing them with exhausting labour. I sometimes feel I’ve almost reached that state of utter subjection that comes from weariness and monotony, that animal passivity that accepts anything. I feel close to submission, which destroys the individual. My critical faculties are dulled; I hesitate, waver, and capitulate. Military routine, with all its petty rules and regulations, doesn’t need my consent and drafts me into the herd. I am becoming a true infantryman, one whose intellect stands permanently to attention; I do what I’m told, one little cog in the machine. Everyone, from a general down to a corporal, gives me orders by right, absolute and unquestionable, and can strike me off the list of the living. In the field of human activities, mine consist of digging a latrine or carrying a tree trunk. Could I tell an NCO that these things are harder for me than for others? It would be useless for he’d probably misunderstand me; it would be unwise because he’d take advantage of it. Captain Bovin had certainly guessed it, and he put me here. (And consequently he’s the only person in front of whom I’ll slave away with a cheerful smile on my face.)
And first and foremost I have to mix in with, identify with, those with whom I share my life, to whom I am bound by a pact of self-preservation. I must go back to being a caveman and make my contribution to sating the appetites of my horde. I must dig and saw and carry and clean and make fire, think only of my body. How can I explain to my comrades that in the conflict between body and mind, in my case the latter is usually the winner? But my mind, here, is a privilege and it has been withdrawn; it is out of line, it causes a nuisance to the squad. The riches of the mind are monopolised by the General Staff, who redistribute them as shells showered down on the rabble.
And yet sometimes at night, looking out at the snow shining into infinity beneath dazzling moonlight like an aurora borealis, I come to think that there, alone before my icy ramparts, I am watching over the sleeping country, that it depends on me for some part of its security, that my chest is its frontier, and I feel a little bit of pride in keeping with the traditions of GCHQ. To while away the hours I experiment with noble motives, try out the joys of simple patriotism. But I’m already quite aware that a well-aimed burst of gunfire will restore my disgust for such fine sentiments.
If a German should come to attack me, I know for sure that I will do all I can to kill him. So that he doesn’t kill me, above all; and then because I am responsible for the safety of four men in our bunker, and if I don’t shoot I could expose them to danger. I am bound to these farmers who are always bullying me for being lazy. The solidarity of a chain gang.
But in the daytime if I looked down the sight of my rifle and saw an exposed German at 150 metres, who didn’t know that I could see him, it’s very unlikely I’d shoot. I don’t see how I could kill someone like that, in cold blood, my rifle resting comfortably on my elbows while I slowly take aim, how I could kill with premeditation and not as a reflex.
Fortunately there is so little question of killing that we don’t even bother to hide the lights of our cigarettes. Perhaps we risk a bullet. But there’s something in the little act of defiance of smoking openly that avenges the terrible biting cold.
Now that I’m a soldier of the trenches once more, I can understand the kind of fatalism to which my comrades succumb, in this war where nothing ever happens, nothing changes, everything looks the same; a war where all we do is keep watch and dig ditches, suffer silently in the muck and mud; a war without limit or respite, where we don’t do anything, don’t even defend ourselves, just wait for the chance shell that has our name on it. I can understand what these two long years, the hundreds of nights on sentry duty, the thousands of endless hours looking out into the dark, what they represent for those who’ve endured them. I can understand that they have stopped asking themselves questions. And yet it still amazes me that this herd of cattle, of which I have become a part, still struggles so much against death.
As I’m ferrying back supplies, I go past the highest point of the position, bent down from the weight of a dixie in each hand and a large haversack on my back. In a trench I bump into an NCO. We’re in each other’s way, I raise my head. Oh . . .
‘Nègre!’
‘Hey, my old son!’
Once we’ve stopped telling each other how happy we are to meet again, my old neighbour from hospital explains that he’s been in the same regiment as me for the last two months, as a sergeant-observer working with the colonel. But he was detached to the 1st battalion, which explains why I hadn’t bumped into him before.
‘Incidentally, how’s our dear friend Poculotte doing?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘And what’s he saying?’
‘Sssh! The general has become very circumspect. But between you and me, I think he’s got something big planned.’
‘So, still going on the offensive?’
‘More than ever! We are preparing Austerlitz.’
‘What are we waiting for?’
‘Sunshine. We have to wait till spring.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime, the general is busy raising the pay of NCOs. He sets great store by this measure for the maintenance of morale, based on the principle that a factory’s output is always highest when the foremen are well paid.’
‘And the workers?’
‘They are far less important. The baron is truly becoming a great politician and a profound thinker!’
‘And what about you, what are you doing?’
‘I’m observing. First of all I observe the places where shells fall, so that I don’t go near them. Wisdom teaches us: God saves those who save themselves. For save yourself read keep a low profile. You understand that I’m too interested in the war not to want to see it through to the end . . . And then, during quiet periods, I observe what the Barbarians are up to with my little lorgnette.’
‘Nègre, I’d like to ask you a question that still bothers me. What do you think of courage?’
‘You’re still stuck on that one! That question has now been definitively answered. Specialists were closeted away working on it. So here’s what you need to know: a Frenchman is naturally courageous; no one else is. Technicians have proved that the only way to get a German into combat is to give him ether. This artificial courage is not the real thing. And what are you up to?’
‘Me? Between you and me, I’m working like a dog.’
I ask Nègre to recommend me as an observer. He promises to do his best, and to come back and see me.
After two months in the bunker, we are relieved, just as it’s getting warmer. We are almost sorry to leave the mountain peaks. Life was very tough but we were not in any real danger. Down in the valley we learn that Captain Bovin is on sick leave. The men sneer at the news:
‘He’s scared of going to a sector where things are hot! Rule number one: you can always be sure that a bastard who does his service at the rear will be yellow when it comes to fighting.’
A young reserve lieutenant by the name of Larcher, a cheerful, cordial man, comes to take command of the 9th. We return to our old sector and find the battalion resting in a village at the foot of the mountain.
The company adjutant, whom I knew when I was a runner, attaches me to command HQ as a secretary-topographer. Once again I’ve been saved from the squad, once again I’ve got myself a cushy job.
We soon go back up to the front lines. This time I’m staying in an encampment in the forest, with comfortable log cabins for shelter. The windows look out on to a clearing at the top of which are the trenches leading to the front line. I’ve got a basic office job: I transcribe orders in several copies, prepare summaries for the colonel, keep the campaign plans up to date.
Weeks go by quietly, disturbed only by the usual surprise attacks. For a couple of hours, the mountain is shaken, the ridge breaks up under an avalanche of mortar shells, our batteries roar in response, explosions resound in the mountain gorges, and heavy artillery shells burst in our vicinity. In the evening we draw up lists of our losses in men and matériel. Thus we learn of the fatalities, rather inattentively, like town-hall clerks registering deaths.