We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to a platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet of mist which was torn by blasts of distant whistling. Disinterred from the carriages, our shadows heaped themselves there and waited, like bales of goods in the dawn's winter.

Adjutant Marcassin, who had gone in quest of instructions, returned at last. "It's that way."

He formed us in fours. "Forward! Straighten up! Keep step! Look as if you had something about you."

The rhythm of the step pulled at our feet and dovetailed us together. The adjutant marched apart along the little column. Questioned by one of us who knew him intimately, he made no reply. From time to time he threw a quick glance, like the flick of a whip, to make sure that we were in step.

I thought I was going again to the old barracks, where I did my term of service, but I had a sadder disappointment than was reasonable. Across some land where building was going on, deeply trenched, beplastered and soiled with white, we arrived at a new barracks, sinisterly white in a velvet pall of fog. In front of the freshly painted gate there was already a crowd of men like us, clothed in subdued civilian hues in the coppered dust of the first rays of day.

They made us sit on forms round the guard room. We waited there all the day. As the scorching sun went round it forced us to change our places several times. We ate with our knees for tables, and as I undid the little parcels that Marie had made, it seemed to me that I was touching her hands. When the evening had fallen, a passing officer noticed us, made inquiries, and we were mustered. We plunged into the night of the building. Our feet stumbled and climbed helter-skelter, between pitched walls up the steps of a damp staircase, which smelt of stale tobacco and gas-tar, like all barracks. They led us into a dark corridor, pierced by little pale blue windows, where draughts came and went violently, a corridor spotted at each end by naked gas-jets, their flames buffeted and snarling.

A lighted doorway was stoppered by a throng—the store-room. I ended by getting in in my turn, thanks to the pressure of the compact file which followed me, and pushed me like a spiral spring. Some barrack sergeants were exerting themselves authoritatively among piles of new-smelling clothes, of caps and glittering equipment. Geared into the jerky hustle from which we detached ourselves one by one, I made the tour of the place, and came out of it wearing red trousers and carrying my civilian clothes, and a blue coat on my arm; and not daring to put on either my hat or the military cap that I held in my hand.

We have dressed ourselves all alike. I look at the others since I cannot look at myself, and thus I see myself dimly. Gloomily we eat stew, by the miserable illumination of a candle, in the dull desert of the mess room. Then, our mess-tins cleaned, we go down to the great yard, gray and stagnant. Just as we pour out into it, there is the clash of a closing gate and a tightened chain. An armed sentry goes up and down before the gate. It is forbidden to go out under pain of court-martial. To westward, beyond some indistinct land, we see the buried station, reddening and smoking like a factory, and sending out rusty flashes. On the other side is the trench of a street; and in its extended hollow are the bright points of some windows and the radiance of a shop. With my face between the bars of the gate, I look on this reflection of the other life; then I go back to the black staircase, the corridor and the dormitory, I who am something and yet am nothing, like a drop of water in a river.

* * * * * *

We stretch ourselves on straw, in thin blankets. I go to sleep with my head on the bundle of my civilian clothes. In the morning I find myself again and throw off a long dream—all at once impenetrable.

My neighbor, sitting on his straw with his hair over his nose, is occupied in scratching his feet. He yawns into tears, and says to me, "I've dreamt about myself."

* * * * * *

Several days followed each other. We remained imprisoned in the barracks, in ignorance. The only events were those related by the newspapers which were handed to us through the gates in the morning. The war got on very slowly; it immobilized itself, and we—we did nothing, between the roll-calls, the parades, and from time to time some cleaning fatigues. We could not go into the town, and we waited for the evening—standing, sitting, strolling in the mess room (which never seemed empty, so strong was the smell that filled it), wandering about the dark stairs and the corridors dark as iron, or in the yard, or as far as the gates, or the kitchens, which last were at the rear of the buildings, and smelt in turns throughout the day of coffee-grounds and grease.

We said that perhaps, undoubtedly indeed, we should stay there till the end of the war. We moped. When we went to bed we were tired with standing still, or with walking too slowly. We should have liked to go to the front.

Marcassin, housed in the company office, was never far away, and kept an eye on us in silence. One day I was sharply rebuked by him for having turned the water on in the lavatory at a time other than placarded. Detected, I had to stand before him at attention. He asked me in coarse language if I knew how to read, talked of punishment, and added, "Don't do it again!" This tirade, perhaps justified on the whole, but tactlessly uttered by the quondam Pétrolus, humiliated me deeply and left me gloomy all the day. Some other incidents showed me that I no longer belonged to myself.

* * * * * *

One day, after morning parade, when the company was breaking off, a Parisian of our section went up to Marcassin and asked him, "Adjutant, we should like to know if we are going away."

The officer took it in bad part. "To know? Always wanting to know!" he cried; "it's a disease in France, this wanting to know. Get it well into your heads that you won't know! We shall do the knowing for you! Words are done with. There's something else beginning, and that's discipline and silence."

The zeal we had felt for going to the front cooled off in a few days. One or two well-defined cases of shirking were infectious, and you heard this refrain again and again: "As long as the others are dodging, I should be an ass not to do it, too."

But there was quite a multitude who never said anything.

At last a reinforcement draft was posted; old and young promiscuously—a list worked out in the office amidst a seesaw of intrigue. Protests were raised, and fell back again into the tranquillity of the depot.

I abode there forty-five days. Towards the middle of September, we were allowed to go out after the evening meal and Sundays as well. We used to go in the evening to the Town Hall to read the despatches posted there; they were as uniform and monotonous as rain. Then a friend and I would go to the café, keeping step, our arms similarly swinging, exchanging some words, idle, and vaguely divided into two men. Or we went into it in a body, which isolated me. The saloon of the café enclosed the same odors as Fontan's; and while I stayed there, sunk in the soft seat, my boots grating on the tiled floor, my eye on the white marble, it was like a strip of a long dream of the past, a scanty memory that clothed me. There I used to write to Marie, and there I read again the letters I received from her, in which she said, "Nothing has changed since you were away."

One Sunday, when I was beached on a seat in the square and weeping with yawns under the empty sky, I saw a young woman go by. By reason of some resemblance in outline, I thought of a woman who had loved me. I recalled the period when life was life, and that beautiful caressing body of once-on-a-time. It seemed to me that I held her in my arms, so close that I felt her breath, like velvet, on my face.

We got a glimpse of the captain at one review. Once there was talk of a new draft for the front, but it was a false rumor. Then we said, "There'll never be any war for us," and that was a relief.

My name flashed to my eyes in a departure list posted on the wall. My name was read out at morning parade, and it seemed to me that it was the only one they read. I had no time to get ready. In the evening of the next day our detachment passed out of the barracks by the little gate.

CHAPTER XI
AT THE WORLD'S END

"We're going to Alsace," said the well-informed. "To the Somme," said the better-informed, louder.

We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies. At long intervals the train would begin to move on again. It has left an impression with me that it was chiefly motionless.

We got out, one afternoon, under a sky crowded with masses of darkness, in a station recently bombarded and smashed, and its roof left like a fish-bone. It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foul whiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in the rain.

"'Pears we're in the Aisne country," they said.

A downpour was in progress. Shivering, we busied ourselves with unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see. Each looked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man. On each side of the road were deserts without limits, flat and flabby, with trees like posts, and rusty fields patched with green mud.

"Shoulder packs, and forward!" Adjutant Marcassin ordered.

Where were we going? No one knew. We crossed the rest of the village. The Germans had occupied it during the August retreat. It was destroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itself with fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself. The rain had ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky, clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the detonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road we met Red Cross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not see inside them. In the first stages we were interested in everything, and asked questions, like foreigners. A man who had been wounded and was rejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, and invariably added, "That's nothing; you'll see in a bit." Then the march made men retire into themselves.

My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociously full; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled and then wounded my back at each step. The pain quickly became acute, unbearable. I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at the end of the fifty minutes' march. But I did all the same, because I had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and because I could thus always do one step more. I knew later that this is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.

The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through the softened plains which evening was darkening. At one halt I saw one of those men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front. He had sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made him almost unrecognizable, and he told me that he had had enough of war! And little Mélusson, whom I once used to see at Viviers, lifted to me his yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemed drawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick the next day.

After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over a colorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chilly top of a hill, where a village was beginning. An epidemic of gloom overspread us. Why were we stopped in that way? No one knew anything.

In the evening we engulfed ourselves in the village. But they halted us in a street. The sky had heavily darkened. The fronts of the houses had taken on a greenish hue and reflected and rooted themselves in the running water of the street. The market-place curved around in front of us—a black space with shining tracks, like an old mirror to which the silvering only clings in strips.

At last, night fully come, they bade us march. They made us go forward and then draw back, with loud words of command, in the tunnels of streets, in alleys and yards. By lantern light they divided us into squads. I was assigned to the eleventh, quartered in a village whose still standing parts appeared quite new. Adjutant Marcassin became my section chief. I was secretly glad of this; for in the gloomy confusion we stuck closely to those we knew, as dogs do.

The new comrades of the squad—they lodged in the stable, which was open as a cage—explained to me that we were a long way from the front, over six miles; that we should have four days' rest and then go on yonder to occupy the trenches at the glass works. They said it would be like that, in shifts of four days, to the end of the war, and that, moreover, one had not to worry.

These words comforted the newcomers, adrift here and there in the straw. Their weariness was alleviated. They set about writing and card-playing. That evening I dated my letter to Marie "at the Front," with a flourish of pride. I understood that glory consists in doing what others have done, in being able to say, "I, too."

* * * * * *

Three days went by in this "rest camp." I got used to an existence crowded with exercises in which we were living gear-wheels; crowded also with fatigues; already I was forgetting my previous existence.

On the Friday at three o'clock we were paraded in marching order in the school yard. Great stones, detached from walls and arches, lay about the forsaken grass like tombs. Hustled by the wind, we were reviewed by the captain, who fumbled in our cartridge-pouches and knapsacks with the intention of giving imprisonment to those who had not the right quantity of cartridges and iron rations. In the evening we set off, laughing and singing, along the great curves of the road. At night we arrived swaying with fatigue and savagely silent, at a slippery and interminable ascent which stood out against stormy rain-clouds as heavy as dung-hills. Many dark masses stumbled and fell with a crash of accoutrements on that huge sloping sewer. As they swarmed up the chaos of oblique darkness which pushed them back, the men gave signs of exhaustion and anger. Cries of "Forward! Forward!" surrounded us on all sides, harsh cries like barks, and I heard, near me, Adjutant Marcassin's voice, growling, "What about it, then? It's for France's sake!" Arrived at the top of the hill, we went down the other slope. The order came to put pipes out and advance in silence. A world of noises was coming to life in the distance.

A gateway made its sudden appearance in the night. We scattered among flat buildings, whose walls here and there showed black holes, like ovens, while the approaches were obstructed with plaster rubbish and nail-studded beams. In places the recent collapse of stones, cement and plaster had laid on the bricks a new and vivid whiteness that was visible in the dark.

"It's the glass works," said a soldier to me.

We halted a moment in a passage whose walls and windows were broken, where we could not make a step or sit down without breaking glass. We left the works by sticky footpaths, full of rubbish at first, and then of mud. Across marshy flats, chilly and sinister, obscurely lighted by the night, we came to the edge of an immense and pallid crater. The depths of this abyss were populated with glimmers and murmurs; and all around a soaked and ink-black expanse of country glistened to infinity.

"It's the quarry," they informed me.

Our endless and bottomless march continued. Sliding and slipping we descended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropingly encountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guard of the regiment we were relieving. We passed heaped-up hutments at the foot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn among the black circles of space. The sound of shots drew near and multiplied on all sides; the vibration of artillery fire outspread under our feet and over our heads.

I found myself suddenly in front of a narrow and muddy ravine into which the others were plunging one by one.

"It's the trench," whispered the man who was following me; "you can see its beginning, but you never see its blinking end. Anyway, on you go!"

We followed the trench along for three hours. For three hours we continued to immerse ourselves in distance and solitude, to immure ourselves in night, scraping its walls with our loads, and sometimes violently pulled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by the sudden wedging of our pouches. It seemed as if the earth tried continually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us. Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space was shot-riddled. A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections of the night, revealing the excavations' wet entrails and conjuring up a file of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a black and black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies. When great guns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted and then fell darkly back.

"Look out! The open crossing!"

A wall of earth rose in tiers before us. There was no outlet. The trench came to a sudden end—to be resumed farther on, it seemed.

"Why?" I asked, mechanically.

They explained to me: "It's like that." And they added, "You stoop down and get a move on."

The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one by one and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was the dark. The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air here and there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were. In spite of the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn with all my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded and rattling body which ran in front; and I found myself again in a trench, breathless. In my passage I had glimpses of a somber field, bullet-smacked and hole pierced, with silent blots outspread or doubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic as tall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and night immensely fought.

"I believe I saw some corpses," I said to him who marched in front of me; and there was a break in my voice.

"You've just left your village," he replied; "you bet there's some stiffs about here!"

I laughed also, in the delight of having got past. We began again to march one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness of this furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, panting under the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushed forward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight of bullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated with light. At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimes left, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the company fleeing blindly towards its bourne.

For the last time they halted us in the middle of the night. I was so weary that I propped my knees against the wet wall and remained kneeling for some blissful minutes.

My sentry turn began immediately, and the lieutenant posted me at a loophole. He made me put my face to the hole and explained to me that there was a wooded slope, right in front of us, of which the bottom was occupied by the enemy; and to the right of us, three hundred yards away, the Chauny road—"They're there." I had to watch the black hollow of the little wood, and at every star-shell the creamy expanse which divided our refuge from the distant hazy railing of the trees along the road. He told me what to do in case of alarm and left me quite alone.

Alone, I shivered. Fatigue had emptied my head and was weighing on my heart. Going close to the loophole, I opened my eyes wide through the enemy night, the fathomless, thinking night.

I thought I could see some of the dim shadows of the plain moving, and some in the chasm of the wood, and everywhere! Affected by terror and a sense of my huge responsibility, I could hardly stifle a cry of anguish. But they did not move. The fearful preparations of the shades vanished before my eyes and the stillness of lifeless things showed itself to me.

I had neither knapsack nor pouches, and I wrapped myself in my blanket. I remained at ease, encircled to the horizon by the machinery of war, surmounted by claps of living thunder. Very gently, my vigil relieved and calmed me. I remembered nothing more about myself. I applied myself to watching. I saw nothing, I knew nothing.

After two hours, the sound of the natural and complaisant steps of the sentry who came to relieve me brought me completely back to myself. I detached myself from the spot where I had seemed riveted and went to sleep in the "grotto."

The dug-out was very roomy, but so low that in one place one had to crawl on hands and knees to slip under its rough and mighty roof. It was full of heavy damp, and hot with men. Extended in my place on straw-dust, my neck propped by my knapsack, I closed my eyes in comfort. When I opened them, I saw a group of soldiers seated in a circle and eating from the same dish, their heads blotted out in the darkness of the low roof. Their feet, grouped round the dish, were shapeless, black, and trickling, like stone disinterred. They ate in common, without table things, no man using more than his hands.

The man next me was equipping himself to go on sentry duty. He was in no hurry. He filled his pipe, drew from his pocket a tinder-lighter as long as a tapeworm, and said to me, "You're not going on again till six o'clock. Ah, you're very lucky!"

Diligently he mingled his heavy tobacco-clouds with the vapors from all those bodies which lay around us and rattled in their throats. Kneeling at my feet to arrange his things, he gave me some advice, "No need to get a hump, mind. Nothing ever happens here. Getting here's by far the worst. On that job you get it hot, specially when you've the bad luck to be sleepy, or it's not raining, but after that you're a workman, and you forget about it. The most worst, it's the open crossing. But nobody I know's ever stopped one there. It was other blokes. It's been like this for two months, old man, and we'll be able to say we've been through the war without a chilblain, we shall."

At dawn I resumed my lookout at the loophole. Quite near, on the slope of the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered with drops of water. In front, under the fatal space where the eternal passage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the field resembles a field, the road resembles a road. Ultimately one makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse in a field—a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of grass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it resembled the past.

Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the front line, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go, the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and of the deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full of marches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets, with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the different occasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harsh knocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in the orders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with the two hundred cartridges and the reserve rations. The regiment had no losses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes one or two deaths which were announced like accidents. We only underwent great weariness, which goes away as fast as it comes. The soldiers used to say that on the whole they lived in peace.

Marie would write to me, "The Piots have been saying nice things about you," or "The Trompsons' son is a second lieutenant," or "If you knew all the contrivances people have been up to, to hide their gold since it's been asked for so loudly! If you knew what ugly tales there are!" or "Everything is just the same."

* * * * * *

Once, when we were coming back from the lines and were entering our usual village, we did not stop there; to the great distress of the men who were worn out and yielding to the force of the knapsack. We continued along the road through the evening with lowered heads; and one hour later we dropped off around dark buildings—mournful tokens of an unknown place—and they put us away among shadows which had new shapes. From that time onwards, they changed the village at every relief, and we never knew what it was until we were there. I was lodged in barns, into which one wriggled by a ladder; in spongy and steamy stables; in cellars where undisturbed draughts stirred up the moldy smells that hung there; in frail and broken hangars which seemed to brew bad weather; in sick and wounded huts; in villages remade athwart their phantoms; in trenches and in caves—a world upside down. We received the wind and the rain in our sleep. Sometimes we were too brutally rescued from the pressure of the cold by braziers, whose poisonous heat split one's head. And we forgot it all at each change of scene. I had begun to note the names of places we were going to, but I lost myself in the black swarm of words when I tried to recall them. And the diversity and the crowds of the men around me were such that I managed only with difficulty to attach fleeting names to their faces.

My companions did not look unfavorably on me, but I was no more than another to them. In intervals among the occupations of the rest-camp, I wandered spiritless, blotted out by the common soldiers' miserable uniform, familiarly addressed by any one and every one, and stopping no glance from a woman, by reason of the non-coms.

I should never be an officer, like the Trompsons' son. It was not so easy in my sector as in his. For that, it would be necessary for things to happen which never would happen. But I should have liked to be taken into the office. Others were there who were not so clearly indicated as I for that work. I regarded myself as a victim of injustice.

* * * * * *

One morning I found myself face to face with Termite, Brisbille's crony and accomplice, and he arrived in our company by voluntary enlistment! He was as skimpy and warped as ever, his body seeming to grimace through his uniform. His new greatcoat looked worn out and his boots on the wrong feet. He had the same ugly, blinking face and black-furred cheeks and rasping voice. I welcomed him warmly, for by his enlistment he was redeeming his past life. He took advantage of the occasion to address me with intimacy. I talked with him about Viviers and even let him share the news that Marie had just written to me—that Monsieur Joseph Bonéas was taking an examination in order to become an officer in the police.

But the poacher had not completely sloughed his old self. He looked at me sideways and shook in the air his grimy wrist and the brass identity disk that hung from it—a disk as big as a forest ranger's, perhaps a trophy of bygone days. Hatred of the rich and titled appeared again upon his hairy, sly face. "Those blasted nationalists," he growled; "they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks' heads, and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and their military tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when their war does come they say 'Go and fight.'"

"There are some of them who have died in the first line. Those have done more than their duty."

With the revolutionary's unfairness, the little man would not admit it. "No—they have only done their duty,—no more."

I was going to urge Monsieur Joseph's weak constitution but in presence of that puny man with his thin, furry face, who might have stayed at home, I forebore. But I decided to avoid, in his company, those subjects in which I felt he was full of sour hostility and always ready to bite.

Continually we saw Marcassin's eye fixed on us, though aloof. His new bestriped personality had completely covered up the comical picture of Pétrolus. He even seemed to have become suddenly more educated, and made no mistakes when he spoke. He multiplied himself, was attentiveness itself and found ways to expose himself to danger. When there were night patrols in the great naked cemeteries bounded by the graves of the living, he was always in them.

But he scowled. We were short of the sacred fire, in his opinion, and that distressed him. To grumbles against the fatigues which shatter, the waiting which exhausts, the disillusion which destroys, against misery and the blows of cold and rain, he answered violently, "Can't you see it's for France? Why, hell and damnation! As long as it's for France–!"

One morning when we were returning from the trenches, ghastly in a ghastly dawn, during the last minutes of a stage, a panting soldier let the words escape him, "I'm fed up, I am!"

The adjutant sprang towards him, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, hog? Don't you think that France is worth your dirty skin and all our skins?"

The other, strained and tortured in his joints, showed fight. "France, you say? Well, that's the French," he growled.

And his pal, goaded also by weariness, raised his voice from the ranks. "That's right! After all, it's the men that's there."

"Great God!" the adjutant roared in their faces, "France is France and nothing else, and you don't count, nor you either!"