Authors: Gabriel Chevallier
I went back slowly through a dusk pierced by the noise of gunfire and exploding shells, which heralded the night’s uneasy quarrel, when men shoot more to comfort themselves than to destroy.
Inside our shelter an old hand said to me:
‘You shouldn’t stay outside, young lad. You’ll come to harm!’
But I was proud of my afternoon discovery and at the thought that in one day at the front I had already found something that people at the rear could not imagine: this pathetic mask, this death mask of some Beethoven who had been savagely executed.
The next morning we were taken to the front lines and put to work.
Our job was to dig out ‘Russian saps’, in preparation for the next offensive, now imminent. These were low, narrow underground trenches, dug straight out from the front line for some twenty metres towards the enemy lines, so that our troops could advance and only appear at the last moment. Some unknown engineer had come up with this idea which was supposed to allow our assault units to move forward stealthily under cover, and to charge out close to the German positions, and at the same time to eliminate the need for taking down our own barbed wire so as not to warn the enemy of an impending attack. But the Germans had other sure ways of knowing, and the eventual surprise was not the one hoped for.
It was long and tiring job. One man, bent double, moved forward with his pick, and those behind passed back sacks full of earth, which those at the rear would empty in the second, reserve lines so that the digging wasn’t visible. One sap was allotted to each squad, with gaps between them, all the way along the front of the offensive as far as I knew. Completing the task took us a fortnight, interrupted by other bits of repair work, day and night, all over our sector. Our military function was limited to the role of navvies working under fire, exposed and passive, terms which in fact defined the general situation of soldiers in this war. But I did not know that yet and was disappointed that our initiation began with fatigues.
The sector was fairly quiet, as often happens in the periods before a big battle, and only disturbed by the bombardments of our own artillery, either for range-finding or to cause general damage. The German batteries, no doubt trying to save ammunition, only answered with short, concentrated fire on targeted objectives.
The only people we encountered at the front line were mud-encrusted men, who trudged about like peasants, wary and arrogant. When they ate they did it with intense concentration, as if it were the most important task in the world and their greasy mess-tins and battered dixies contained very possible pleasure. They would spend long hours just standing behind an observation slit, not talking, smoking their pipes, and cursing loudly whenever there was an explosion in the vicinity.
I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis. But I had to see it, and so I clambered up on a fire-step and stuck my head above the parapet. Through the tangle of barbed wire an embankment very like ours could be seen less than a hundred metres away, silent as if abandoned, yet full of eyes and gunsights focused on us. The other army was there, under cover, holding its breath to surprise us, and menacing us with its own guns and gadgets and the conviction of its strength. Between the two embankments, ours and theirs, lay this strip of shattered land, no man’s land, where anyone who stands up is a target immediately struck down, where rotting corpses serve as bait, where patrols venture only at night, suffocated by their pounding hearts and dizzied by the blood roaring in their temples, so loud it seems to hide all other sounds, when they creep out into this macabre land defended by dread and death.
But I didn’t have time for a good look. Someone had grabbed my feet and was pulling me down. I heard a low, angry voice:
‘If you really want to be a corpse there’s no rush, you’ll have plenty of chances. But don’t show the Boche where your pals are!’
I wanted to reply. But the shrugs and sneers of the other soldiers made me think better of it:
‘Berlin’s straight ahead, lad, you can’t miss it!’
‘Looks like the new boys are dead keen to win the war for us!’
‘Yeah, just look at this one! But they won’t be cocky for long, these bloody conscripts!’
I realised that they had taken my curiosity for some pointless display of bravado and that I should watch what I said to men who were old hands at this game. I must not allow myself to look ridiculous by appearing reckless, and the wisest counsel was to imitate their prudence and passivity. From then on I only looked out through the narrow slit of a loophole, hidden by sparse clumps of grey grass which also cut off the view at a few metres. Instead of the enemy army all I glimpsed were ants and the occasional grasshopper, the only visitors to a landscape forbidden to men.
In any case, bullets kept smashing into the parapet.
And our sergeant gave us wise advice:
‘Fritz will make sure he puts some lead in your brain. Leave it to him!’
We came under shellfire for the first time.
Since the days were still warm, we made ourselves comfortable in the afternoon among the ruins outside our cellar. Stripped to the waist, we inspected our underwear so we could kill the lice that were devouring us and which thrived in the rotten straw mixed with rubbish that we slept on. Lice-hunting was one of our most pressing tasks. We devoted an hour of our rest period to it, as well as a great deal of care. Our sleep depended on it.
One day, while we were thus occupied, a time-shell burst just over our squad, enveloping us in its hot breath and a chorus of shrill whistles. Shrapnel fell all around but, miraculously, no one was hit. It felt like I had been struck a blow on the neck and my head resounded with a painful, metallic vibration, as if someone had drilled into my skull. Instinctively, and too late, we had jumped down into the cellar. Then we gathered the shards of shell casing, still burning hot, and the way they were driven into the ground gave me an idea of their velocity.
One night while we were working behind the front line, repairing a trench that had been smashed by artillery fire, we were caught in an enfilade by two artillery batteries, to left and right. The Germans, having spotted the damage to our position, correctly assumed we were repairing it. Their gunfire alternated with perfect regularity. But they were ‘shooting long’ in both directions, so that we kept running to escape explosions first at one end then at the other. When we heard their guns fire, we hit the ground in a shameful heap of panting bodies, waiting for the explosion so we could breathe again, unclench our stomachs, and run further off. The artillery played with us in this way for an hour and forced us to roll in the mud. I was furious at being compelled to adopt such a posture and several times refused to ‘bow’ to the shells. Once they had stopped firing, a rocket revealed a sergeant on the planks over a latrine beside the trench, slowly pulling up his trousers.
‘Here’s another one they missed!’ he called to us cheerfully.
His calm composure brought back our smiles.
But when we all reassembled I saw that all the old hands had vanished, and the corporal wasn’t surprised. We found them further on, in the cellar, where some were already asleep.
On yet another occasion we endured a very fierce bombardment. All afternoon we had worked recklessly on a support trench, throwing the earth we dug over the parapet. The sun had just gone down, a perfect calm had descended over the battlefield, and we were rolling cigarettes while waiting for the relief section. Shells shattered the silence in an instant. They came in rapid succession, targeted right on us, landing within fifty metres. Sometimes they were so close that we were showered with earth and breathed in the smoke. Men who had been laughing were now nothing more than hunted prey, undignified animals whose bodies only moved instinctively. I saw my ashen-faced comrades jostling and huddling together so that they weren’t struck alone, jerking about like puppets in spasms of fear, hugging the ground, pushing their faces into the mud. The explosions were so continuous that their hot, acrid breath raised the temperature of the trench and we poured with sweat which froze on us yet still did not know whether this cold was not in fact heat. Our nerves contracted with every little scratch and bruise and more than one person believed he’d been hit and truly felt the terrible laceration of his flesh that fear made him imagine.
In this torment I was sustained by my reason, however wrong it was. I do not know where I had got the notion that field guns have a very straight trajectory. Which would mean that shells fired at us from in front could not land in the trench and it was only a matter of enduring the dreadful noise they made. This idiotic theory calmed me down and I suffered less than the others.
At last the relief arrived. But the shellfire pursued us. We ran and I found myself the last in the line. Shells came over very low, above my head, and exploded just a little further on. At the first turning, I came upon two men lying in their own blood, appealing with the expressions of beaten, imploring children that you see on people whom misfortune has suddenly struck, and I stepped over them shuddering at their awful cries. Since I could do nothing for them, I ran even faster to get away. Outside the shelters, their names were called out: Michard and Rigot, two young men we knew from the same class as us. The war had stopped being a game . . .
At night we were often woken up by runners shouting at the entrance to our cellar:
‘Alert! Everybody out!’
We lit our candle, took our packs and rifles and grudgingly climbed up the stairs behind our corporal. Outside, we were caught in a tornado of explosions. We came out into the main thoroughfare, now swarming with armed shadows, trying not to get mixed up, calling each other and heading to the support positions. The cold air woke us up, as did the clattering of bullets, thousands of which were smashing into the walls, deafening us with their sharp slaps. All the stray bullets from the German fusillade were converging on the ruins, and, if we had emerged from the trenches, nothing would have remained of this subterranean army that had suddenly filled the night. Ahead of us, on the front lines, grenades crackled like sparks on some piece of electrical equipment. Heavy shells, with no warning this time, burst at random, with a red flash, shaking us with their foetid breath, surrounding us with torrents of metal and stones, which sometimes reached our ranks. Long human screams would suddenly cut through the rest of the din, echoing in us in waves of horror and reminding us, enough to make us tremble, of the lamentable frailty of our flesh, amidst this eruption of steel and fire. Then the staccato frenzy of machine guns tore through the voices of the dying, riddled the night, pierced it with a stipple of bullets and sounds. Impossible to make oneself heard without shouting, to be seen except in the boreal light of rockets, to move forward except by squeezing into these trenches choked with men, all gripped with the same anxiety: was it an attack? Were we going to fight? For in the months before this sector had been fought over day and night with grenade and bayonet from one barricade to another, one house to another, one room to another in the same house. There was not a single metre of conquered ground that wasn’t paved with a corpse, not a hectare than had not cost a battalion.
Was the butchery beginning again?
At last we reached a trench in front of the village, outside the range of shells, peaceful as a suburb. With our loaded rifles on the parapet, awaiting the order to aim and fire, we watched the line of attack light up with bursts of flame, like embers in a hearth stoked back to life. We wondered what would become of us in this darkness, how we would distinguish attackers from our own soldiers falling back, and we tried to remember how to defend ourselves if, by chance, it soon became necessary. The bullets wove their whistling web, like the mesh of an aerial net that had been stretched over us and we kept our heads down. Little by little, we felt the cold and we yawned. Imperceptibly, shadows filled the corners of the horizon, the sky darkened, and the explosions became rare. We went back.
Once our corporal asked me: ‘You weren’t too scared?’
‘Oh,’ replied an old hand, ‘I was behind him and he never stopped whistling.’
This was true. I do not enjoy being suddenly woken up. So I brought to these alerts the ill humour of a man whose routine has been upset and who absolutely refuses to get interested in a spectacle that he blames for the disturbance. My whistling, which had so astonished the veteran, expressed my contempt for a war which prevented people from sleeping and made such a lot of racket for such small results. The conviction that my destiny was not to find its end on a battlefield had still not been shaken. I had not yet taken the war (I thought:
their war
) seriously, judging it absurd in all its manifestations which I had assumed would be quite different. There was too much squalor, too many lice, too much drudgery and too much excrement; too much destruction for what purpose? Finding the whole business so badly organised, I sulked. Sulking gave me strength and a kind of courage.
The morning after the night when we were relieved, lorries took us to an unknown village where we were put in barns to get some sleep. We believed we were going to have a rest. In fact we were being taken to the rear to regroup and take our place in the formations of assault troops.
After two days, we marched to a point near the front, which thundered without pause. In another village, the captain read us a proclamation from High Command, the gist of which was that the French army was attacking the Germans at two points, in Artois and Champagne, with every available division, every piece of artillery and ordnance, and with the certainty of carrying all before it. The commander didn’t hesitate to give us the numbers, whether true or false, of the troops engaged, so sure was he that the Germans would be incapable of stopping them.
While old hands were muttering, the captain concluded by stating that the first day’s objective was Douai, twenty-five kilometres behind the German lines, and our division would be there to support the artillery and occupy captured ground.