Authors: Gabriel Chevallier
‘But wasn’t there fighting going on around you?’
‘That I couldn’t tell you. I suppose so, but I didn’t see anything. We weren’t sober for the whole three weeks in our crater. We ate and drank our way through eight hundred francs.’
‘How’s that?’
‘The regiment got the bill a month later. The territorials had sent the dockets on up to the commissariat. It seems the nosh had to be paid for.’
‘Was there any trouble?’
‘You bet there was. They had themselves an inquiry. But what you gonna do with an inquiry at Verdun! They couldn’t suppose that two blokes had treated themselves to eight hundred francs’ worth of brandy and chocolate in three weeks. You can say only two, because the sarge didn’t have much.’
‘Life was cushy at Verdun, believe you me!’ declares Oripot.
‘The funniest thing,’ Pacard goes on, ‘is Oripot’s brother, who’s a priest . . .’
‘He’s a decent lad!’ exclaims Oripot.
‘Decent he may be, but he’s still a twat! He was writing to this sod here, telling him you mustn’t drink too much, think of your family. I was reading his letters cos it’s easier to see when he’s asleep . . . Mustn’t drink, says his brother. Damn it! If you don’t get pissed, what’s the point of having a war?’
One morning at reveille, the front starts to growl fiercely on our left, beside Chauny. We recognise the thunder, the hammering that the earth transmits like a conductor and which passes through the air in mournful waves. Something very bad is going on and it isn’t far away.
We are not getting any information. The rumbling goes on all day and starts again the next morning. We don’t get any letters or newspapers, always a bad sign.
On the third day we learn that the German offensive has broken through the British front. We learn that artillery is firing on Paris. The battle is turning to a disaster. But optimistic informants claim that the retreat is a trap laid for the Germans in order to ‘thrash’ them in open country. For what it is worth, we make do with this rumour and wait to hear more.
A new military doctrine is being spread around: ‘territory is not what matters.’ How true! And yet we are rather close to Paris to start innovating. And why if this is true have so many men been massacred to take a salient or occupy a ridge?
On the fourth day, enemy observation balloons are openly flying behind us. We are going to be outflanked . . . It seems unlikely that we will emerge unscathed from this situation.
Leave is suspended. Orders come, instructing us to transport weaponry and munitions to the rear. We are on fatigues for two nights.
Then the orders are countermanded. We restock with cartridges and boxes of grenades. After that no one knows. We have battle orders, some dealing with resistance where we are, others with evacuation. Our command is hesitating between the two. Our own preference is for the latter, and it seems to us impossible to resist a heavy attack with the small numbers we have holding our lines.
More days of uncertainty go by. The sector livens up. We are getting some heavy incoming shells, which are obviously range-finding. Our fate is clear!
‘They’ll have another go to get it right!’ mutter the men in the trenches.
‘Will it stand up to a 210?’ we ask ourselves as we look at our shelter.
‘With a long-range 210 they can’t miss!’
This realisation does not do much for our morale, and we would dearly like to avoid fighting. We are now in the first days of April and the Germans are near Amiens.
Without any warning, our front lines are evacuated at night. The companies have been brought back to our second lines on the ridges, and we have just set up our battalion command post in the rear, in a huge cave, full of men, its approaches crowded with vehicles laden with matériel and with ragged territorials.
The following morning the bombardment resounds opposite us and we get the last ricochets. The Germans are smashing up our abandoned positions. Then we are informed that they have broken through and are making slow progress. Our troops are falling back but doing them some damage on the way. All day long the artillery roars and machine guns crackle. Coucy is heavily bombarded. We do not leave the command post, we cannot see what is happening ahead of us, and we do not know where our units are.
The companies take advantage of the night to take up new positions. The battle starts again at daybreak and there is much confusion. Shells fall at random. We abandon the cave, retreat across the countryside, following the ravines. We spend part of the day on the slopes of a wooded hill. Every quarter of an hour the sky is filled with a tremendous whistling noise. 380s crash down into the soft earth of the valley but none of them explodes. Later on we skirt the ridges and come back down on to the plain following the slopes of a spur.
There we learn that the battalion has mustered ahead of us, on the far side of the canal, and runners get the order to rejoin it. In groups of two or three we set off along a quiet stretch of road. On our way we pass some of our men leading a tall German prisoner, wearing a leather helmet, looking extremely cross and agitated. He is an airman who was flying a spotter plane very low over our platoons and was shot down with rifle fire.
The battalion is drawn up along a bank going up from the road. We are pointed to a sloping field that blocks the horizon and told that ‘the Boches are up there, in the grass behind the ridge’. They must be able to see us and are hesitating: the battle would degenerate into hand-to-hand combat. No one fires and our little detachments continue to move around freely in the open. The proximity of our enemies does not bother us, far less than a bombardment would. We fix bayonets. We hold our fire until they stand up: we will see clearly. They are only men like us. But the Germans do not try anything.
At sunset we get the order to fall back. We cross back over the canal, which must mark the furthest point of the enemy advance. We do all this in silence, without casualties. We return to the high ground. Ammunition wagons gallop by. Around us the 75s open fire. Fresh troops arrive whose duty will be to defend our new positions. The retreat has been carried out in good order, without too much damage, without our leaving the enemy with prisoners. It must be said that the attack was somewhat half-hearted, the Germans counting on their strategic advantage to compel us to withdraw.
We vanish into the night, heading for the rear. We are marching towards fresh dangers but there will be time enough to think of them when we have to face them. For now, our role here is over. This happy retreat feels like a victory. Soon sounds can be heard from our column, the men are singing and swearing. We’ve got out of it alive, one more time.
5. IN CHAMPAGNE
A MARCH LASTING SEVERAL HOURS
in torrential rain has brought us to the heart of ‘dry’ Champagne.[
38
] The downpours pen us like cattle in a slough of despond, where all we can see is running water, dampening and depressing our spirits. Miserable huts, soiled with the mud that cakes our boots, remind us of prison camps. Our clothes are soaked, our food cold, and we have no way of making a fire. Fatigue stretches us out on the damp straw of our pallets but steam rises from our bodies and we cannot get warm. We had not seen a single tree or house in our surroundings. This is an inhospitable, hostile land, where nature itself denies us the smallest bit of joy.
We stay for a week in the tarpaulin shacks, surrounded by deep puddles, lacking anything which could make our lives more agreeable.
One morning the captain who is temporarily in command takes us off to reconnoitre the support positions that we must soon occupy. Our sector is located between Tahure and the Main des Massiges, names made famous by our offensive in 1915. It is well equipped and the trench system is very deep, as it was in Artois. Everywhere we find old battery emplacements and empty shelters, in the walls of the trenches. The reserve battalion occupies the reverse slope of a ridge, behind another ridge that hides the summits where the trenches are. On our right you can see in the distance a great expanse of green, which contrasts with the bare, grey landscape, like a desert, that we have under our noses. They say it is the Argonne.
The battalion command post is a dugout in a trench, roofed with a good thickness of logs, and with openings at ground level to let in the light. It is relatively comfortable. We are not going any further forward today.
On our way back we make a halt in a ruined village some four kilometres from the front lines, where the colonel has set up his headquarters in some very fine shelters built against the wall of a quarry. They look as stylish as mountain chalets and are fronted by an arcade protected by sandbags in zigzag rows. The neat and tidy surroundings are impressive.
Through the windows we can see secretaries in their indoor clothes, writing and drawing at large tables, cigarettes in hand. Typewriters imitate the sound of machine guns in a way that is silly and unseemly. Batmen hurry about, bringing bowls and bottles of eau de cologne, and cooks carry folded napkins over their arms, like maîtres d’hôtel. We hardly go near these privileged ones, these courtiers, who keep us at a distance as if we were of no account. They are afraid lest among our number are Gascon cadets[
39
] who might rise too swiftly in their careers under the benevolent eyes of the great and powerful. Everyone here is defending his position and scents a rival a mile off. A fall from favour may mean a return to the front line, the threat of death. This world of employees knows all the servants’ gossip and office secrets. The desire to flatter, to make oneself indispensable, leads to an excess of zeal. There are corporals here who would strike fear in the heart of a battalion leader.
The officers of the colonel’s entourage (his deputy officer, an information officer, an officer for the 37mm cannon, flag bearer, etc.) are carefully shaved, powdered and scented; these are men who have time to devote to their toilet. In particular they must be good company, clubbable, able to tell a funny story over dinner. They do not concern themselves with the actual war except in extremis, and, if at all possible, at a good distance.
Finally the colonel shows up. He’s tall and slim, with a long Gallic moustache, dressed in khaki, cap pulled down over one ear, chest pushed out – very much the musketeer. (In civilian life, with light trousers and white gaiters, he would make a classic ageing philanderer.) He pulls himself to his full height when he sees a soldier, fixes his magnetic gaze upon him, and salutes him with a fulsome gesture which might signify ‘All honour to you, bravest of the brave!’ or ‘Always follow my plume!’[
40
] Unfortunately, at the moment of a skirmish, that plume will stay put rather far in the rear . . . I am only going by appearances, and I do not know the true worth of the colonel, apart from his theatrical salute. But I never trust people who give themselves airs.
His audience over, the captain rejoins us. We leave Versailles . . .
Just before we set off for the front, a new battalion leader has come to take command of our unit. This is our third commandant since I became a runner, not counting the temporary captains. Changes like this always worry us. Our fate can depend on the cool- headedness of our leader, and our well-being depends on his moods.
The newcomer has a distrustful manner. He handed me all the operations maps he found in the shelter and told me: ‘Check all these and bring them up to date.’
So twice a day I take my gas mask, my helmet, my revolver, my cane, my pencil and papers and set off alone on topographic reconnaissance. It is a hard job to identify the terrain because bombardments have levelled it all, destroyed all the landmarks. I have to establish a point using some detail from the trenches and determine other points on the basis of this one. The sector is absolutely vast, the front line for three companies stretching over about twelve hundred metres, on the flank of the first summits of the Champagne mountains, whose peaks are held by the Germans. Their dominant position compelled us to fill in parts of the trenches dating from their occupation and to dig new communication trenches which they could not see or hit with direct fire from machine guns. The result was a tangle of trenches that I have to explore to get my bearings, indications on the map being somewhat fanciful. I often climb over barriers of sandbags, making myself visible at ground level for a few seconds, and I wander through abandoned trenches which are crumbling away and getting covered by grass. The slope facing the Germans is deserted. I find myself in total solitude for hundreds of metres, and, if I were to get seriously wounded, no one would have the idea of looking for me in places where I am the only one to venture. In the beginning I had a few bullets fired at me, luckily from five hundred metres; they served to warn me of the danger presented by these old ditches. I go back there, though, taking all due precautions, as much for pleasure as necessity. I love the isolation, the silence, I love discovering old dugouts with mushrooms growing on their damp walls, which have all the poignant mystery of ruins. These particular ruins have their own pathos, and I imagine the destinies of the men who spent time here, many of them now dead. Along with pleasure comes pride in knowing secret places, which become my own domain, on this land that one army observes and another defends.
My first concern is to mark those shelters and dugouts that are in good condition. It inevitably happens that the zone I am exploring as I make my rounds gets hit by some shells. I then run for the nearest shelter. I am more afraid of shells than bullets. Because of their stupid noise and the way they rip apart the body. Bullets are more discreet and operate more cleanly.
I spend a lot of time at the front lines, to the point where look outs start to wonder what form of madness compels me to roam around places that they would dearly like to leave. The colonel wants the fullest details and demands that the thickness of each barbed-wire entanglement be indicated on the map. Since it is out of the question to go and take measurements in front of our lines, I estimate as best I can by looking over the parapet. It is a tricky task which could, with a moment’s distraction, earn me a bullet in the head.