WE MOVED UP TO THE LINE at the beginning of September, on a quiet, cool evening. The trench system spread out over eight to ten kilometres, but we wandered around all night, packs on our backs, as the guides who led our column kept getting lost at the various junctions. We often had to retrace our steps and wait while scouts explored the desolate, silent labyrinth in which they, in their turn, got lost. Behind us, some small groups had vanished altogether, through the fault of men who had dropped back a few metres, lost sight of those in front of them, and then set off in the wrong direction. So we all had to take responsibility for those behind us. The march was forever being stopped by shouts of ‘Halt!’ and ‘Turn here!’ which made it very tiring.
I was sustained by the notion that this night was my baptism of fire, and my equipment seemed less of a burden than usual. Little by little we advanced into the active zone, the danger zone. It felt warmer and stuffier, like a place that was lived in; there was a powerful smell of human bodies, a mixture of fermentation and excrement, and food that had gone bad. Men were snoring behind the embankments we brushed past, and glimmers of light marked the openings of the dugouts where they lay. We had to keep ducking to avoid the tangle of wires, traverses, and plank bridges. The first stray bullets began to plough through the air, but the rifle shots themselves were scarcely audible. Shells passed over us like great birds of passage, way up high, then came to earth somewhere off in the depths of the battlefield where they burst with dull thuds. Now rockets were illuminating a flickering landscape, briefly bathing the tattered natural world in baleful moonlight. After these bursts of false day, the night was even blacker and we groped our way forward like blind men. The more we advanced, the more tortuous the passageways became, and the more densely populated too, so it seemed. We finally emerged into ruins and I had the impression that I was entering some town that had been exhumed from the dead. But now the night was nearly over. We saw our pale faces, tinged with green by the dawn and exhaustion. Our squad slipped down into the nearest cellar, settled in by the light of a candle, and slept.
When I woke a few hours later I remembered that I was in Neuville-Saint-Vaast, just a few hundred metres from the front lines. At last, I told myself, I was at the heart of the adventure, with my luck, my strength, and my curiosity intact. I hurried out like an eager tourist, leaving my weapons behind. I was greeted by a beautiful, clear sky, which seemed to me to bode well, and I set off to see the sights, drifting aimlessly along the main street, a real boulevard of war. It was crowded with soldiers bustling about who took no notice of me. The confusion was a delight. I had been transported to an unknown country, like none I had ever seen, and this chaos, which I intended to explore, enchanted me, for I saw it as the symbol of the freedom that surely awaited me here. Nothing remained of the houses except some walls and piles of rubble above the cellars where soldiers sheltered; a few kept parts of their broken timber frames, which stretched out their burned beams in anguish. Mutilated trees were frozen in the postures of supplicants. One, which still had leaves, made me think of the poignant good humour of an invalid. It was pleasant to lose myself in the infinite maze of streets, to feel alone and adrift, and then to find my path again, with the special sense of a true warrior.
The shelters, of all shapes and sizes, dug out of mounds of earth, offered a curious sight. What was particularly striking about these makeshift constructions was that the materials used were themselves just bits of scrap and rubbish: old pieces of wood, old weapons, old pots and pans. With no resources except their wits, the combatants had come up with this primitive solution. A few metal implements sufficed for all their needs and life thus returned to the most basic conditions, as if to the dawn of time.
I went back to our cellar, then set off once more. Continuing my explorations away from the main thoroughfares, I came upon the bodies of two long-dead Germans in the basement of a house. These men must have been hit by grenades and then walled up, in the haste of battle. In this airless space they had not decomposed but shrivelled and then a more recent shell had blown apart their tomb and scattered their remains. I spent some time in their company, turning them over with a stick, not out of hatred or disrespect but motivated rather by a kind of fraternal pity, as if asking them to deliver up the secret of their death. The flattened uniforms seemed empty. Of the scattered remains nothing really survived except for half a head, a mask, but a mask of magnificent horror. The skin on it had dried and turned green, taking on the dark tones of an antique bronze with its patina of age. A pitted eye socket was empty and around it had streamed like tears a paste, now hardened, which must have been brains. It was the only blemish that spoilt the whole thing, but perhaps it really added to it, like the marks of wear add something to the worn stone of ancient statues. It was as if a pious hand had closed the eye, and, beneath the eyelid you could imagine the smooth contour and the shape of the eyeball. The mouth was fixed in the last screams of a terrible death agony, with a rictus of the lips baring the teeth, a mouth wide open, spitting out the soul like a clot of blood. I wished I could have kept this mask that death had fashioned, on which its fatal genius had achieved a synthesis of war, so that a cast could be made and given to women and zealots. I did at least make a sketch which I’ve kept in my notebook, but it does not express the holy horror with which I was filled by its model. The skull lent the chiaroscuro of the ruins a grandeur that I found hard to leave behind, and I only went outside again when the fading daylight cast formless shadows over the forehead, cheek bones and teeth, turning it into a grinning Asian.
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.
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.