Fear (8 page)

The perspective of getting out of the trenches and advancing in open country and through towns, returning at last to traditional, imperial war, the kind we had been taught, with its surprise attacks, plunder, unforeseen events, happy encounters with beautiful women, all this enchanted class 15. But the stony-faced, sarcastic veterans dampened our enthusiasm.

‘We all know about their stupid offensives and the objectives they’ve dreamt up in the officer’s mess at HQ!’

‘You’ll see what a nice little job it is, an attack!’

‘It all comes down to the fact that we’re going to get smashed up one more time!’

Back in our billet, an old hand was carefully testing the strength of his belts and braces. Seeing I was watching him, he explained:

‘Surprised are you, young conscript, to see me taking a good dekko at my straps? But remember this: your future old age depends on whatever helps you run. Agility is the best weapon of any clear-thinking, well-organised infantryman, when things don’t quite turn out the way the general imagined – which isn’t unusual, with all due respect to the general who does what he can, which isn’t very much. You think the Boche are more stupid than we are? Well, there’s a bit of truth in that. But we are no more stupid than them. One day you fool them, the next day you’re one who’s fooled! War is all a matter of chance, a complete shambles, which no one’s ever understood. There are times you’d do better to whistle a tune than waste your spit on patriotic speeches. Just imagine you happen to run slap into three or four Fritz of a soldierly type . . . (just because you look like a decent young chap it doesn’t mean it won’t happen to you!) While you are affecting your strategic withdrawal, at the double, if your flies let you down and your trousers drop round your ankles, then you’re well and truly collared by the comrades from Berlin. I’m not saying that some of them aren’t good sorts in their way but it still ain’t healthy to hang around with them. Since you don’t speak the same lingo you might not be understood if you’re in a rush . . . Like I was saying: shoelaces, braces, flies, belts, everything that holds your clobber together, they are tools of the trade and you’d better look after them!’

We were all issued helmets. We didn’t like this rigid headgear, because, unlike the képi, you could not break off the visor, and adapt it to your own taste,
Bat d’Af
[
14
] style, with a braided chinstrap, which was the height of rakish elegance in the army. Under a helmet, you could not tell at first glance if someone was one of the lads. But orders were strict, and our képis were withdrawn. Many people kept theirs in a haversack, in the hope of better days back at the rear, when you could put it on and charm the women, skivvies in local bars – a mere glimpse of one could arouse a whole battalion.

Then the corporal chose the bombers or trench-clearers. I was one of them. He gave each of us a large kitchen knife with a white wood handle, apparently intended for slicing German guts. I took mine with revulsion. I found the bombs, the grenades, equally revolting. Considering these objects with my customary, gloomy reasoning, I told myself that a worker assembling the things was sooner or later bound to misjudge the length of the fuse to the detonator and that I was equally bound to pay the price of his distraction. And I was a bad thrower. The only proper weapon in my opinion was the revolver, with which a skilled shooter had a chance, and which avoided the need for repugnant hand-to-hand combat with an enemy whose smell could be disagreeable and who usually had the advantage of weight (those Germans are fatter than us), and of their supposed barbarity. I knew that the French were supposed to be wiry and fierce. But that is just hearsay and I did not want to test out its accuracy by grappling with the first enemy I encountered. Such, more or less, were my ideas on close combat. They did not square at all with the methods used. One more reason I had to blame this war.

While I was considering my knife, Poirier tugged at my sleeve.

‘Will you give me your place as a trench-clearer?’

This Poirier was short, red-faced, stocky and boastful, and I had held him in low esteem ever since I had surprised him with his hand in my food pack, which had become a great deal lighter. ‘There are a lot of rats in this sector,’ he had said, nonchalantly. What is more he had for some days been wearing a fine pair of new canvas and leather ‘rest’ shoes, bearing an uncanny resemblance to mine, which had vanished. But his proposition suited me. I was just handing over my knife when the corporal turned up. I explained to him what we were doing.

‘Poirier would like to take my place as a bomber, and it must be said that I don’t know how to use grenades.’

‘No!’

‘But Poirier wants to do it, and it disgusts me!’

‘Listen, Poirier won’t do it and you will! I have my orders.’

‘That’s all right then,’ I said with a smile, ‘that’s military reasoning.’

In fact our corporal, a very young, blond, cheerful Parisian, was a charming lad. But he had a lot of trouble leading our squad of twelve men, undisciplined, excitable newcomers or quarrelsome Norman malcontents. To get us to march he always put himself at the front, but en route he would sometimes lose part of his team. Their alacrity in escaping danger was a characteristic of the old hands, a result of their experience of the realities of war. I think that NCOs had been advised to pick men who had been tried and tested as bombers. Our young leader confused the curiosity I had displayed on our first time in the trenches with military merit, and he judged that I was more reliable than Poirier whom he knew well. It is true that the latter was to leave us, three days into the attack, on the pretext of getting some supplies, and never reappeared. It was later rumoured that he had been shot.

That same evening, 24 September, we moved off again for the front. It was raining.

5. THE PARAPET

‘Savary is an excellent man for secondary operations, but lacks the experience and calculation to be at the head of such a great machine. He understands nothing of this war.

You were ten leagues from your advance guard; General Lasalle, who commanded it, was five leagues from Burgos, as a result of which it was all ended by a colonel who did not know what was wanted of him. Is that, Marshal, how you have seen me make war?’

Napoléon

THE NEXT MORNING
I had a strange awakening. A metal monster was brushing up against me, threatening to crush me: I saw huge pistons and got a blast of steam. I was lying on the edge of a railway track, and an armoured train was passing right next to my head.

Then I remembered I had dropped out of the column during the night and completed the march on a wagon. Arriving after everyone else and not knowing where to shelter, I lay down by the track, under a bridge which protected me from the rain, not imagining a train could come this far.

Having survived this latest peril, I looked around me. My battalion was in shelters on the slopes and I found my squad without any difficulty.

The bombardment had become tremendously intense. Invisible guns were firing on all sides, and on top of that we were soon deafened by the armoured train. Aeroplanes flew very low overhead, under the grey clouds. Observation balloons, ‘sausages’, which had moved forwards by a few kilometres, loomed above us. Everywhere there was feverish activity. The attack had been underway for several hours. In some of the villages, on camouflaged roads, the cavalry was hidden, ready to move forward. Crossing the slope, I reached the neighbouring woods. They were full of men, all waiting their turn to march forward. We were certainly there in force. But we had to leave others, down below, the time to launch the first blows, to open the breeches where the army could go into action. Our own future depended on the success of our brothers-in-arms.

All day we waited anxiously, but no news came. Just rumours: the attack was advancing, the artillery was ready to follow. The sun broke through for a few hours then hid its face sadly. We despaired at knowing nothing and our immobility seemed a bad sign. It was already quite obvious that we would not get to Douai so easily.

We were supplied with a new kind of grenade, known as a racket bomb: a tin box attached to a wooden paddle, with a percussion detonator which you released by pulling a string with a kind of curtain ring at the end. This ring tended to slip off the nail which held it in place and dangle freely: I found the things terrifying and refused to touch the two I was given by our corporal. Instead of arguing, he simply took them himself and secured them beneath the flap on the top of my pack.

As evening fell, it started raining again. By now we had little faith left in the success of the offensive. At last we moved forward. Beyond Mont-Saint-Éloi, the battlefield, shrouded in smoke and fog, spread out before us on a gentle slope. We could make out red flames in the distance, and hear the terrible roaring, punctuated by diabolic machine guns. Silent and fearful, we all knew that was our destination. The sight of the wounded deepened our misery. Cadaverous and caked in mud, they had lost most of their kit and looked like fugitives; there was a glint of madness in their eyes, the madness that comes from proximity to death. They staggered away in groaning groups, holding each other up. We could not take our eyes off the white patches of field dressings, with blood seeping through. Blood still dripped from them, marking their trail. Next came the silent stretchers, from which hung white, contorted hands. Four medical orderlies transported on their shoulders one unfortunate whose arm had been torn apart, exposing the frayed muscles. His screams were terrible, rising up to the impassive heavens, enough to shame God.

The captain passed along the column:

‘Courage, lads! It seems the new helmets really do protect the head and they’ve already saved a lot of lives.’

That was the best he could find to say to us! We knew for sure then the attack was faltering and that our task down there in the fog would be a very hard one.

Shortly after, a shell burst just ahead of the column. We were ordered to take to the trenches. As we jumped down, one soldier cried out in pain. ‘I’ve sprained my ankle!’ ‘What perfect timing!’ muttered someone beside me.

It became very hard to advance at all. Trampled by thousands of men, the ground had turned into slippery dough, in which we kept getting stuck. We had to pull our feet out with every step forward. We also had to pass units going back to the rear. These encounters were a real torture, in trenches too narrow for two men to stand side by side, and where everyone was laden with packs which made them even bulkier. The two columns became entangled and we had to pull ourselves out of the ensuing crush. Suffering enough already, men lost their patience, cursed, even struck out at each other. Then, with horror, I remembered my grenades. I was carrying two potential explosions right beside my neck, which would be set off by a tug on a piece of string. In this melée, all it would need would be for a rifle barrel to bang into one of those wretched curtain rings to finish things off. So I was forced to march sideways, thus reducing the chances of an accident, and watch every move of anyone who bumped into me. And even so some uncontrollable, sneering voice in my brain kept repeating: ‘Look where your head’s going to be rolling!’

Night came. When it did, we got lost, as usual. The front had become a bit quieter. The two armies were tallying up the results of their first day and preparing for the morrow. After marching for two or three hours, we halted. We took over old dugouts, groping our way in the dark. Mine was waterlogged. Before settling down, I opened my pack and dumped my two grenades on the trench parapet, telling myself that I would surely find plenty of similar devices at the front line.

We were starting to fall asleep when the order came to set off again. It was a very dark night, streaked with rockets in the distance, too far off for us to see their flash, but which left mournful haloes in the sky. We came out on to a road cluttered with military transport. We encountered strange vehicles, like rubbish carts, full of stiffened debris, standing out against the sky, which we recognised with a shudder: ‘Corpses!’ So they were withdrawing our predecessors from the morning, the first waves of the unstoppable offensive that had come to a standstill ahead of us. They were cleaning the battlefield. ‘A fine turn-out by the hearse section,’ said one wag. Each cart carried grief to a score of families.

We came into a ruined village. My section took shelter in a cellar. There was very little room so we sat upright, squeezed between all our kit, leaning on our packs. A sergeant had stuck a candle on the point of a bayonet. The feeble light lent a tragic expression to our faces. One man expressed what we were all feeling:

‘It doesn’t look like this attack is working.’

‘Seems to me it’s the same old shit as always.’

‘Brothers, our duty is to die!’ sneered a pale corporal.

‘Shut your mouth!’ growled everyone.

Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality. Outside high explosive shells started coming in. We heard them fall near us, relentless in their attack on this wounded village, pounding it, shattering it all over again, tearing apart the very last walls, the very last wooden beams, showering brick and rubble over the paths. Sometimes their hot breath roared down into our cellar, extinguishing the candle, and the explosion shook everything. Then silence and darkness. ‘Anyone hit?’ asked a sergeant. ‘No – no – no one!’ came the response from the men on the steps, in turn, as they recovered from the shock. And so the candle was lit again, its yellow flame sealing us off, dulling the noise from outside.

‘A pity that the only time these fools give us a rest is in the middle of a bombardment!’

‘It’s never any different!’

A man ran up and shouted down the steps: ‘Get ready!’

‘Where are we going?’

But the runner was already gone, shouting into other cellars.

‘What’s the time?’ asked one of the sergeants.