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.

‘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:

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!’

We were all ready, waiting for a lull, and for orders. We waited a long time. We had taken off our packs and sat down again. Shells still rained down. Then suddenly, blasting apart our drowsiness like a shell, came the short, imperative shout from outside:

A burst of gunfire very close. The entrance was a red square, blinding us. The cellar shook. Our breath came in gasps.

We threw ourselves out, tumbling over, clutching each other, shouting. We threw ourselves into the cold night, the whistling, burning night, the night full of obstacles and snares and shards of metal and clamour, the night which hid the unknown and death, that silent prowler with explosions for eyes, seeking its terrified prey. Abandoned creatures, wounded, lying out there somewhere, perhaps from our regiment, howled like injured dogs. Ammunition wagons, the thunder’s supply-train, passed by at full speed, wobbling and rattling, crushing everything in their mad rush to escape. We ran with all our might, on inadequate legs, overburdened, too small, too weak to get out of the way of the sudden trajectories. Our packs and bags squeezed our lungs, pulled us back, cast us out into the zone of sparks, and roaring and crashing, where it was suddenly too hot. And we always had our rifles which kept slipping off our shoulders, such useless, ridiculous weapons, never staying put, always a hindrance. And the bayonets that get in our way! We ran, following the back of the person in front, eyes wide but ready to shut so as not to see the fire, to shut on our shrivelled brains, which refused to work, which didn’t want to know, didn’t want to understand, which were dead weights on our racing bodies, driven on by the sharp lash of steel, fleeing the leaded knout howling at our ears. We ran, leaning forwards, ready to fall to the ground, faster than the shell. We ran, like beasts, no longer soldiers but deserters, yet towards the enemy, with this one word resounding in us: enough!, through the shaking houses, lifted up and falling back in clouds of dust on to their foundations.

A salvo, so direct that it caught us still standing, roared up out of the earth like a volcano, roasted our faces, burned our eyes, cut into our column as if cutting into the flesh of each one of us.

Panic booted us in the arse. Like tigers we leaped over the shells’ smoking craters, rimmed with the wounded, and we leaped over the cries of our brothers, cries that come from the guts and strike at the guts, we leaped over pity, honour, shame, we eliminated all feeling, all that makes us human, according to moralists – imposters who are not enduring an artillery bombardment and yet exalt courage! We were cowards and we knew it and we could be nothing else. The body was in charge and fear gave the orders.

We ran faster than ever, hearts pummelled by the panic of our bodies, with such a rush of blood that it made purple sparks dance in front of our eyes, that it gave us hallucinations of yet more explosions. ‘Trenches?’ we asked. ‘Where are the trenches?’

We were still bracketed by the artillery fire, suffocating with anxiety. Then we moved away from it, away from the village.

We managed to reach a wide trench, half-collapsed, a calm spot in the night, which hid us from the enemy’s deadly vigilance. We slid down to the ground, utterly exhausted, trying to deepen the darkness above us, like children hiding. We heard houses blowing up five hundred metres away, not understanding how we had been able to save ourselves, overwhelmed with horror at such bombardments against which there is no defence. We hesitated between futile revolt and the resignation of beasts in a slaughterhouse. We clung on to this calm for dear life, refusing to imagine the next stage of this adventure, which was only beginning. Other men in their turn ran up. We could hear their gasping breath. We waited for our hearts and lungs to return to their normal rhythms before asking questions, finding out who was missing. We put off the moment when we would know. We let the darkness fill the gaps in our ranks. Every fallen comrade increased the chances of our own deaths. But the cold, which penetrated our soaking garments, gradually calmed us down. This new discomfort brought us back to life. Men once more, we sadly considered our destiny.

‘Tell the captain: ten wounded in the 3rd section, six in the 2nd, and a machine gun out of action.’

We slung on our packs and set off, hunched over, wearier than ever and less confident. Shells were hunting their targets in the darkness and we were heading in their direction. We came into the range of this new bombardment. Heavy-calibre time-shells, methodical and precise, were bursting twenty metres above the trench every minute and showering us with their raging shrapnel. With every one, we dived down into the mud and waited, frozen with terror, for the explosion to seal our fate. And then we’d get up and push ourselves forward. Once again, some men were hit. The battalion advanced past them and witnessed their suffering. But the episode came to an end. Further on, the night was calm and endless, concealing from us unknown, deadly objectives. Fatigue, the struggle that every infantryman has to endure with the load he is carrying, which constricts and exhausts him, prevented us from thinking.

Our last reserves of strength were concentrated in the muscles of our necks and shoulders. Would these trenches never end? Yet we feared that they would indeed end. We were approaching a goal that we were in no hurry to reach. Every metre we covered, every effort that we could claw out of our exhaustion, took us ever deeper into danger, brought a great many lives closer to their end. Who would be struck down?

I had a trivial accident during this march to which the circumstances lent great importance and which caused me considerable suffering. As we were leaping through the harassing fire, gasping for breath, the puttee on my right leg came undone, unravelled, dragged in the mud, was stepped on by the person behind me, tripping me up. There was no question of stopping, resisting the pressure of hundreds of men blindly fleeing the shells. I had to keep going forward, holding my puttee, shackled like a beast. Whenever I heard the whistle of a shell I dropped down on one knee and profited from the explosion to wind round the strip of cloth as fast as I could. But the pause was too short, and I learned the hard way that a man who cannot move freely feels more vulnerable. This uncomfortable situation lasted for some time, until we made a proper halt.

We had lost all notion of the time, of duration, of distance. We kept on marching along identical trenches, in the endless night, numbed by the growing cold. We could no longer feel our flayed shoulders. We did not even have enough lucidity left to imagine, or fear, anything . . .

At last dawn broke through the grey rainclouds. A pale, silent dawn, revealing a foggy, lifeless desert. A strange scent hung in the air, at first rather sweet and sickly but then giving off the richer notes of a still-contained putrefaction – in the way that a thick sauce slowly reveals the strength of its seasoning.

I kept going, bent down, blank, all my faculties absorbed by my pack, my rifle and my cartridge pouches. I stepped over pools of water and shaky duckboards which added to the difficulty of our progress. We skirted round the blast-proof traverses, changed direction without trying to keep our bearings, all in silence, a metre apart, and banged into each other whenever the pace slackened. The trenches widened out, and there were more and more signs of damage and destruction.

All of a sudden the soldier in front of me crouched down on his knees in order to get under an overhanging pile of material. I crouched down behind him. When he got back on his feet, he revealed a man of wax, stretched out on his back, his unbreathing mouth wide open, his eyes expressionless, a cold, stiff man who must have slipped beneath this illusory shelter of old planks to die. I suddenly found myself face to face with the first fresh corpse that I had seen in my life. My face passed within a few centimetres of his, my gaze met his terrifying glassy stare, my hand touched his frozen one, darkened by the blood that had frozen in his veins. It felt as if this dead man, in the brief tête-à-tête he had forced on me, was blaming me for his death and threatening me with revenge. It was one of the most horrible impressions that I took away from the front.

But this dead man was like the watchman for a whole kingdom of the dead. This first French corpse preceded hundreds of other French corpses. The trench was full of them. (We had come out into our former front line, from where our attack had been launched the day before.) Corpses contorted into every possible position, corpses which had suffered every possible mutilation, every gaping wound, every agony. There were complete corpses, serene and perfectly composed like stone saints in a chapel; undamaged corpses without any evident injuries; foul, blood-soaked corpses like the prey of unclean beasts; calm, resigned, insignificant corpses; the terrifying corpses of men who had refused to die, raging, upright, bulging, haggard, cursing and crying out for justice. All with their twisted mouths, their glassy eyes, and their skin like that of drowned men. And then there were the pieces of corpses, the shreds of bodies and clothes, organs, severed members, red and purple human flesh, like rotten meat in a butcher’s, limp, flabby, yellow fat, bones extruding marrow, unravelled entrails, like vile worms that we crushed with a shudder. The body of a dead man is an object of utter disgust for those who are alive, and this disgust is itself the mark of utter prostration.

To escape such horror, I looked out at the plain. A new and greater horror: the plain was blue.[15]

The plain was covered with our comrades, cut down by machine guns, their faces in the mud, arses in the air, indecent, grotesque like puppets, but pitiable like men, alas! Fields of heroes, cargo for the nocturnal carts . . .

A voice, from somewhere in our ranks, found words for the thought we suppressed: ‘Jesus, they copped it!’ which immediately echoed in all our minds as: Jesus, we’re going to cop it!

No life, no light, no colour caught the eye or distracted the mind. We had to follow the trench, look out for corpses, if only to avoid them. I had noticed that we no longer distinguished the living from the dead. We had encountered a few soldiers leaning on the parapet, not moving, and I had assumed they had fallen asleep. I saw that they were also dead and the slight slope had kept them upright against the side of the trench.

From a distance I saw the profile of a little bald man with a beard, sitting on the fire-step, who seemed to be laughing. It was the first relaxed, cheerful face we had seen, and I approached him thankfully, asking myself what he had to laugh about. He was laughing at being dead! His head was cleanly sliced down the middle. As I passed, I saw with a start that he had lost half this jovial head, the other profile.[16] The head was completely empty. His brains, which had dropped out in one piece, were placed neatly beside him – like an item in a tripe butcher’s – next to his hand which pointed to them. This corpse was playing a macabre joke on us. Hence, perhaps, his posthumous laughter. The joke reached the nadir of horror when someone uttered a strangled cry and shoved us aside to run.

Before us in every direction spread a flat, dreary, silent expanse, as far as the rainy horizon, sunk beneath low clouds. The landscape was nothing but a pulverised mire, uniformly grey, overwhelmingly desolate. Though we knew that the bleeding armies paralysed with fear were somewhere down in that valley of devastation, there was no sign of their presence or their respective positions. It looked like a barren land, recently stripped bare by some terrible flood, which had retreated leaving in its wake shipwrecks and bodies buried under a coat of dark slime. The heavy sky weighed down on us like a tombstone. It all served to remind us of the inexorable fate for which we were destined.

We finally emerged into a kind of rallying point, with wide tracks running through it. The place must have been blown apart and then re-established using a vast number of sandbags. Marching in single file, we hadn’t seen each other since the previous day, and were surprised to recognise ourselves, so much had we changed. We were as pallid as the corpses that surrounded us, filthy and tired. Hunger gnawed at our bellies and the chill of morning made us shudder. I met Bertrand, who was with another unit. On his face that was worn and aged by the night’s anxieties, I recognised the signs of my own anguish. Seeing him made me aware of how I looked myself. He found a few words to express the fear and the astonishment of all the new recruits:

No one knew. We had no orders. We had been abandoned in this wasteland full of corpses, some of them sneering, holding us in the menacing gaze of their glaucous eyes, others turned away, indifferent, as if they were saying: ‘We’ve finished with all this. Get yourself ready to die. It’s your turn next.’

The yellow light of a day that seemed to falter as if it too was struck by horror, illuminated a lifeless, soundless battlefield. It felt as if everything around us and off into infinity was dead, and we did not dare raise our voices. It felt as if we had come to some place in the world which was part of a dream, that had gone beyond all the limits of reality and hope. Ahead and behind merged into limitless desolation, all covered with the same churned up grey mud. We were stranded on some ice-floe out in space, surrounded by clouds of sulphur, ravaged by sudden bursts of thunder. We prowled in these accursed limbos which at any moment now would turn into hell.

Rifles and grenades, guardians of space, threw up their deadly barriers, at the level of French soldiers’ stomachs.

Shells of every calibre were crashing down on us, barrage after barrage, a mixture of shrapnel and high explosive. The burning sky fell on our backs, squeezing our necks, buffeting us from side to side, twisting our guts with waves of dry, painful colic. Our pounding hearts tore at our bodies, tried to burst out of our chests. Terror suffocated us, like an attack of angina. And our souls were on our tongues, like bitter communion wafers, and we kept gulping them down, kept swallowing, because we did not want to spit out our souls.

The bugles sounded again, a death knell. We knew that just a few hundred metres ahead our ashen-faced brothers were about to offer themselves up to the eager machine guns. We knew that once they had fallen, and then others had fallen too, men just like us, just as obsessed with staying alive, with running away, with putting an end to their torment, it would be our turn, that we were worth no more than them in the mass of sacrificed manpower. We knew that the massacre was well underway, that new corpses were piling up on the earth, their arms frozen in the last, despairing gestures of drowning men.

The shellfire had caught us at a crossroads pinpointed by the German artillery. We ducked down into a Russian sap to shelter from the explosions.

The attack quickly subsided. The roar of the guns died away. Now we could hear the screams, those terrible screams that we had heard before . . .

Once we realised that we were being left there, we organised ourselves. There were twenty of us in a tunnel some twenty metres long; we had to crouch down, chins on knees, only going out to answer calls of nature.

Several times a day we heard the ominous bugle calls and the artillery barrage began again. The smallest shell would have shattered the thin layer of soil that protected us but we had piled up our packs by the entrance to cover ourselves on that side. The entrance was guarded by a dead body, buried right there. As if he had been buried standing up, his head still stuck out of the ground, along with one hand, a finger pointing in our direction, seeming to indicate: there they are! Whenever we crawled out we nearly bumped into the cold head. It reminded us what awaited us in this chaos.

We did not receive any new provisions. We ate our emergency rations, and some men who had gone out in the dark to rummage in the packs of the dead brought back biscuits and chocolate. But we were desperately thirsty. I had a little flask of peppermint liqueur in my haversack. We passed it round but no one was allowed to drink. Twenty mouths sucked at the rim to moisten their lips. That was our only drink throughout those three days. But a few men took water from the puddles where corpses bathed.

We also sorted ourselves out so that we could sleep and avoid cramp. We arranged ourselves like oarsmen, each making space between his legs for his neighbour. At night the whole row of us leaned back so that stomachs served as pillows.

The sap became a rather cosy little place that we did not dare leave. We cherished the illusion that we had been forgotten and no order would ever find us there. But the orders came on the third day. We set off at night.

In the morning, after various halts and hesitations, we found ourselves in recently taken German positions. We walked past big dugouts that echoed with the cries of the wounded who had been brought there to wait until they could be transported to the rear. There were so many of them that it held up their evacuation; there were not enough stretcher-bearers.

Finally we were left in a trench where we could just about stand upright. It began to drizzle and we were soon wet. Our feet sank into the mud, which held them so firmly that in order to extricate them we had to pull at our knees with both hands. We warmed up each leg in turn. Still no new provisions. Fortunately shells rarely fell in this spot.

In the evening we had the idea to dig out small niches in the trench wall, just deep enough to hold our backs and stop us from slipping. Over the front of these little niches we spread out our tent canvases, held in place by cartridges stuck in the ground. Sitting behind the dripping canvas, squeezed together in pairs, with our feet in the water and shivering with cold, we managed to get a few hours’ sleep.

In the middle of the night we were woken. The call came that I had dreaded: ‘Bombers to the front!’ The Germans must have launched a counter-attack. But the firing died down before we reached the front line.

We took up positions in a trench perpendicular to the enemy lines, closed off by a barricade of sandbags, at the furthest point of our advance.

We were dirtier, more exhausted, paler and more silent than ever. We knew that our hour was approaching.

After all that we had seen, we could have no more illusions. As soon as one battalion was out of action, the next battalion was pushed forward to attack, over the same ground covered in our dead and wounded, after an inadequate artillery barrage, which did more to alert the enemy than to harm them. The useless victory which consisted of capturing a bit of the enemy trenches was paid for by the massacre of our soldiers. We could see the dead men in blue spread out between the lines. We knew that their sacrifice had been in vain and ours, which was about to follow, would be too. We knew that it was absurd and criminal to throw men against unbroken barbed wire protecting weapons that spat out hundreds of bullets per minute. We knew that invisible machine-gunners were waiting for the targets that we would be as soon as we went over the top, and would pick us off like game birds. Only the assailants were exposed to view, while the men we were attacking, dug in behind their earthen ramparts, would stop us getting to them as long as they kept a cool head for a couple of minutes.

As for a deep advance, all hope was lost. This offensive, which was supposed to take us twenty-five kilometres forward in one go, destroying every obstacle in its path, had just about managed to gain a few hundred metres in a week. A handful of senior officers had to justify their role to the nation by a few lines of communiqué that bore the scent of victory. We were there for no other reason than to purchase those few lines with our blood. It was now a matter of politics, not strategy.

One thing still gave us pause for thought. Among all the dead that surrounded us, we saw very few Germans. There was no equivalence of losses; our feeble territorial gains were lies, because we were the only ones to die. Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence. Our attacking troops, supposed conquerors, muttered to themselves: ‘These fools are just killing us all.’

As a witness to this chaos and carnage, it seemed to me that ‘fools’ was an inadequate word. In the Revolution they sent incompetent generals to the guillotine. An excellent measure. Why should men who had set up courts martial, advocated summary justice, escape the sanctions they imposed on others? Such a threat would cure these wielders of thunderbolts of their Olympian arrogance, force them to reflect on what they were doing. No dictatorship could compare with theirs. They prohibit any scrutiny of what they are doing by the nations, the families, who have blindly put their trust in them. And if those of us who can see that their glory is an imposture, their power a menace, if we tell the truth, they will have us shot.

These were the thoughts that haunted us on the eve of the attack. Bowed down beneath the rain and the shells, the pale soldiers sneered:

The attack is certain. But, since frontal assaults that get nowhere must be abandoned, we are to move forward through the trenches. My battalion will attack the German defences with grenades. As a bomber, I will march in the front ranks.

We still don’t know the hour of the attack. Around midday they tell us: ‘It will be this evening or tonight.’

From the latrines which were above the trenches we can see the enemy line. The gently rising plain is crowned in the distance by a wood that has been blasted to pieces, ‘Folly Wood’, and our command apparently proposes to occupy it. A rumour goes round that we are facing the German Imperial Guard and they will greet us with exploding bullets.

What can we do until evening? I have little faith in my grenades, which I do not know how to use. I strip down my rifle, clean it carefully, oil it and wrap it in a cloth. I also check my bayonet. I have no idea how one fights in a trench, in Indian file. But a rifle is a weapon after all, the only one I understand, and I have to get ready to protect my life. I have no faith in my knife either.

Above all, I must not think . . . What could I expect? To die? I must not expect that. To kill? That is the unknown and I have no wish to kill. Glory? This isn’t the place where you get glory; that happens much further back. To advance one, two, three hundred metres into the German positions? I have seen only too well that this will make no difference to events. I have no hatred, no ambition, and no motivation. Yet I must attack . . .

I have a single idea: get through the bullets, the grenades, the shells, get through them all, whether victorious or defeated. And moreover, to be alive is to be victorious. This was also the sole idea of everyone around me.

The old hands are anxious and grumble to calm themselves down. They refuse to do guard duty, but all eagerly volunteer to go to the rear in search of provisions.

Bursts of artillery and machine-gun fire sweep the plain. There’s a bit of sunshine. Far off we can still hear bugles, gunfire, bombardments.

We would like to halt the march of time. Yet dusk descends on the battlefield, separates us from each other, makes us shiver with cold . . . the cold of death . . .

Daylight again. I stretch my stiff legs in the deserted trench and then go to our corporal’s dugout.

It’s early, and all is quiet on the front. Mist covers the plain and through it come long, heart-rending groans, punctuated by hoarse death-rattles. Our wounded lie between the lines, crying for help. ‘Comrades, brothers, friends, come and get me . . . don’t leave me, I can still live . . .’ You can make out women’s names, and the screams of those who are in unbearable pain: ‘Finish me off!’ And those who curse us: ‘Cowards, cowards!’ There is nothing we can do but pity them, and shudder. In their cries we can hear the cries that are inside us, and which will come out, perhaps this evening . . . It is as if the two armies have kept quiet to hear them and must be red with shame in their trenches.

I am awoken a few hours later. Food has finally come: a stew congealed in the dixies, wine, cold coffee, brandy. Our squad gathers round the corporal and he distributes it. I have no appetite, force it down, and finish first. The corporal gives me an armful of newspapers:

‘Yeah, let’s hear the latest claptrap!’ agree the men, clustering round so as not to miss anything.

First there was the rather confused official statement on the progress of the war. They shake their heads.

Then I scan the columns signed by great names: academicians, retired generals, even men of the Church, and pluck out these rare and precious flowers of prose:

‘That war has an educational value can never be doubted by anyone with the slightest powers of observation . . .’

‘It was time war came to France to revive the true meaning of the Ideal and the Divine.’

‘One of the surprises of this war, and one of the wonders, is the brilliant role played by poetry.’

‘Now I can follow you into the attack; I can feel the joy that overwhelms you at the moment of supreme effort, the ecstasy, the transmigration of the soul, the unfettered flight of the spirit.’

They reflect for a moment. And then Bougnou, self-effacing, obedient little Bougnou, who never says a word, passes judgement on these famous writers in his little-girl voice:

In the afternoon the corporal takes me aside: ‘I want you to join a fatigue party this evening. We’re going to go and collect some wicker hurdles.’[17]

‘Oh no, not that. I am already a bomber. I don’t want to go on fatigues as well.’

It has already been dark for some time when we set off. There are five of us. I’ve left my rifle and my pack in a little corner of the trench where I can get them later and just kept a haversack and the rest of my kit. We walk fast along the dark trenches that have been battered by shells, in a hurry to get to the rear where we can shelter.

Unfortunately the wet weather in the last few days and the damp biscuits I’ve eaten have brought back my upset stomach. I have to make frequent stops and force the others to wait, complaining, afraid that a shot will catch us at any moment. It isn’t easy for me to find a suitable spot in the dark. At one point a man suddenly jumps up and tries to chase me off.

I tell this dutiful servant in no uncertain terms that no commandant in the world could make my guts stand to attention. His nose and the noises from my bowels convince him that I am telling the truth. He makes himself scarce.

We find the hurdles in a depot and assemble our load. Then we sit in a covered shelter, huddled close together to keep warm, and light up our cigarettes.

Heavy shells start landing not far off and make a terrible racket in this deserted spot. We squeeze down into the depth of the shadows, telling ourselves that our shelter is solid. Above all, we are thinking of what’s about to happen to the battalion up ahead. Better to be where we are.

And then the shelling stops and silence returns. We stop talking. We listen to the confused sounds from the front, off in the distance. We doze, we let the time pass. We feel like deserters.

Off we go again. It is quite a struggle moving forward with the wicker hurdles that are wider than the trenches so that we have to carry them at an angle. In normal times we would never have wanted such a task. But now we feel privileged.

The message passes from man to man. I think of my rifle, and of going to get it . . . then an order comes:

This is the limit! What is that supposed to mean? But there’s no room for argument. We make our way through the battalion. Men move aside to let us pass, with unusual courtesy.

Beneath the parapet stands our captain, chinstrap in place, revolver in hand. He points to some boxes:

This is the truth. These are cylindrical tin grenades of a type I’ve never seen before. ‘Just do it!’ he snaps.

Yes sir! I dutifully take five or six grenades and slip them into my haversack. He points to the parapet.

I see a short ladder. I climb up. I straddle the sandbags and find myself on a level with the plain, above the trenches. I am blinded by flashes. Rockets, shells. Bullets whistling, whipping past me. I let myself drop down.

Thoughts flash through my mind: ‘OK, here I am, I’m going into the attack at the front of a battalion. My only weapons are five grenades of an unknown type and I am running towards the German Imperial Guard . . .’ That’s as far as I can think. I wish I had not left my well-oiled rifle behind.

Other men are running behind me. I mustn’t think of stopping, I don’t think of stopping. One flare after another bathes us in light. I spot a rifle on the edge of a trench and grab it. An old French rifle: bolt jammed, bayonet bent and rusty. Better than nothing.

I cannot imagine combat at all, I just can’t think like a soldier. I tell myself:

Behind the second parapet, four maniacs are lobbing grenades, bellowing to work themselves up into a frenzy.

So here we are, five chaps attacking the German army with tin cans. Unbelievable!

The man behind hands me his. I pass them on. Others follow, passed along from hand to hand.

The four of them keep going like a machine: shout, ignite, throw . . . Can this go on forever?

I am lifted up, deaf, blinded by a cloud of smoke, pierced by a sharp smell. Something is clawing at me, tearing me. I must be shouting without hearing myself.

My body leaps and runs. The explosion has set it off like some machine. Behind me, someone is shouting, ‘faster!’ in a voice of pain and madness. Only then do I actually realise I am running.

Some part of my reason returns, amazed, and starts to check: ‘What are you running on?’ I think I must be running on the stumps of my legs . . . My reason tells me to look. I come to a halt in the trench while invisible men run past. Fearful of finding something horrible, my hand goes slowly down the length of my limbs: thighs, calves, shoes. I still have my two shoes! . . . So my legs must be intact! Joy, but such incomprehensible joy. Yet something has happened to me, I’ve been hit . . .

My reason continues. ‘You’re running away . . . Have you the right to run away?’ A new anxiety. I no longer know if I am hurt, or where. I examine my body, feeling it in the darkness. I discover that my right hand no longer works, the fingers don’t close. A warm liquid is running out of my wrist. ‘OK, good, I’m wounded, I can go now!’

This discovery calms me down and also makes me aware of pain. I groan quietly. I am dazed and dumbfounded.

I make it back to the first parapet where a gap has been opened to speed the advance. The captain is still there. No one stops me. Soldiers from my battalion, with their gleaming bayonets, turn their pale, frightened faces to see this, the first of the wounded. I recognise men from class 15. ‘Lucky bastard!’ they call out.

Now all I have to do is get to the rear, not get lost in the trenches, or hit by a shell . . . ‘Lucky bastard!’ I keep telling myself.

I’m starting to feel cold. My legs are stiffening and I’m limping on my right foot, which hurts. I move forward with difficulty through the network of dark, deserted trenches. We only passed through this sector at night and I don’t know it. And now night covers it once more, and stretches to infinity. All I can do is to follow the most heavily trodden paths, the ones where more troops have passed. So I concentrate on the state of the ground and make sure I keep my back to the flares which must mark the front. I am alone and running out of strength.

My watch tells me it’s three in the morning. I find a broken rifle to use as a stick to keep myself up. I feel more and more tired but if I stop to rest I don’t think I’ll get up again. I had the good fortune to be the first to get out of the attack, without the aid of stretcher-bearers. I must profit from this and avoid being caught in artillery fire. In fact the bombardments seem quite a way off, on the front lines.

Four o’clock. I still don’t know where I am or where I am heading and I still haven’t met anyone. Some shells fall nearby. I find myself on a sunken path. I hear footsteps, voices, and then bump into a supply party. The men give me something to drink, some coffee and brandy, point me in the direction of the village and the first-aid post beside it. They tell me it’ll take an hour to get there.

An hour for them but a lot longer for me. In the village I leave the trenches and take the road, to save time. It’s one of those typical Pas-de-Calais villages, stretching out in a long line, a mournful spot. And now there are shells coming down on my right, high explosives that go off above ground level, and shrapnel shells that throw rocks everywhere. If they get to me I cannot run or shelter; I am hobbling like a cripple. Now I am truly afraid, afraid I’ll be finished off . . .

A red cross. I go down into a cellar. A medical officer gives me some first aid, is amazed at the number of shrapnel wounds I have, but is reassuring. The bottom of my coat is shredded and my leggings ripped apart. I haven’t the strength left to move again. An orderly takes me on his back to the nearby clearing station. Daylight comes. It’s now after six o’clock.

Outside the clearing station there are two stretchers, one of them occupied. I lie down on the other. I immediately feel a sense of well-being and safety; the worst is over, now I only have to let myself go, people will look after me.

A young priest with a pleasant face comes over and asks us kindly if we want anything. I ask for a cigarette. Once it’s lit I give him a smile of gratitude. He spreads his arms in a somewhat liturgical gesture, and says:

‘Such a spirit of self-sacrifice in our soldiers. Even in pain they have the courage to laugh!’

While he’s off looking for something for us to drink, my wounded neighbour says:

‘The old padre hasn’t got a clue! Only reason we’re laughing is that we’re getting the hell out!’

We’re taken down into a cellar that is still empty, with supports in place to take three rows of stretchers, one on top of the other. I am amazed that I have got here, at my incredible adventure . . . But I’m tired out and soon fall into a heavy sleep.

When I wake up some hours later the cellar is full of wounded men, screaming. All the places are full. Their occupants cover the whole range of expression of pain and despair. Some feel death approaching and struggle with it fiercely with imprecations and wild gestures. Others on the contrary let their lives slip away in a thin stream of liquid, with muffled sighs. Others try to soothe their suffering with measured, hoarse groans. Others plead for someone to stop their pain; others still beg to be finished off. Some call for help from beings we do not know. Some in their delirium are still fighting, uttering inhuman battle cries. Others confront us with their suffering and blame us for doing nothing for them. Some call upon God; some curse him, insult him, tell him to intervene if he is all-powerful.

To my left I recognise the young sub-lieutenant who led our section. From his flaccid mouth comes the monotonous, feeble cry of a little child. He is dying. He was a decent lad, and everyone liked him.

There isn’t enough room. The most unfortunate are laid out on the ground, muddy lumps crowned with haggard faces, bearing that terrible expression of resignation that pain brings with it. They look like beaten dogs. Holding their shattered limbs, they intone a mournful chant that rises up from the depths of their flesh. One has a broken jaw hanging down that he dares not touch. The hideous hole of his mouth, blocked by an enormous tongue, is a well of thick blood. A man who has been blinded, walled up behind the bandage around his face, raises his head to heaven in the hope of catching some faint glimmer of light through the loophole of his eye sockets then slumps back down sadly into the darkness of his cell. He gropes around in the emptiness like someone scrabbling at the damp, slippery walls of a dungeon. A third has lost both his hands, the hands of a farmer or a worker, his tools, his means of earning a living; once he would have said, proclaiming his independence: ‘When a man has two good, strong hands he’ll always find work.’ And now they are not even there to help him in his pain, to meet that most basic, habitual need of bringing them to the place that hurts, which they should hold, which they should calm. No hands to wring, no hands to clench, no hands to pray. Never again will he be able to touch. It occurs to me then that this is perhaps the most precious of all the senses.

They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thing, this being, screamed in a corner like a maniac. The revulsion that turned our stomachs told us that it would an act of generosity, a fraternal act, to finish him off.

The German artillery has cut the road; we can hear the dull thud of the shells. We cannot be evacuated. Outside, more and more new batches of wounded men wait in the rain for us to die so they can come in. The nurses are overwhelmed. They go from one berth to another, checking the death-rattles. Once these subside into faint murmurs, indicating that the moribund is on the threshold of oblivion, the man is taken outside, where he can die just as well, and his place is filled by another wounded man who still has a chance of life. No doubt the choices are not always right, but the nurses are doing their best, and in war everything is a lottery. This is how our sub-lieutenant makes his exit.

All those who are removed are destined to become corpses, battlefield debris that no longer evokes pity in anyone. The dead get in the way of the living, wear them out. They are forgotten completely during periods of high activity, until their smell becomes insistent. The gravediggers really find them too much, and moan about all the extra work that is costing them sleep. Anything dead is irrelevant. To feel sympathy would weaken us.

An overworked, preoccupied doctor, with no medicine to offer, moves through the rows. With rough words, he brings whatever comfort he can, displaying his badges of rank to the more credulous to convince them they’ll survive. His weariness is obvious, and you can smell the alcohol he uses to keep himself going. His face is streaked by so many splashes of blood that his smile, which he wants to be strong and kind, looks as cruel as an executioner’s.

Most of the wounded bear the number of my regiment but I haven’t been in it long enough to recognise them, and many of them are unrecognisable. From snatches of conversation I gather that the assault from the parapet had been murderous. It had cost the lives of more than a hundred and fifty men. After an initial advance we had been forced to retire to the positions we had started from. The Germans, less exhausted than we were, and well dug in to positions on the ridge, had then launched a vigorous counter-attack, profiting from the fact that our flanks were unprotected. I was curious to know the result of this action in which I had taken part in such an odd way. I also wanted to know what had become of my friends from class 15 and the men from my squad. We were such a disparate bunch in that squad, had so little in common, and quarrelled so often, but we were nonetheless a little family and I would have been distressed if harm had come to any one of them, especially to our young corporal. But I’m in a bad position, down at ground level, and can only see the wounded lying by the wall. They are too far away, too absorbed in their own suffering, for me to question them. And my wish to know more is less strong than my desire to avoid any effort.

I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I am suffering less than some of those around me and I have a whole berth to myself. I am ashamed but at the same time, while neither proud nor happy, I am satisfied with my fate. Despite everything egoism overwhelms the pity that I feel because I am not completely distracted by pain like all these unfortunates with terrible wounds. I am caught between two emotions: the discomfort of parading my good fortune in front of those who are suffering, and the somewhat insolent superiority of those whom destiny has favoured. My own body, turned towards hope, towards life, turns away from these other, smashed bodies; the animal in me, which wants to stay whole, tells me: ‘Rejoice, you are saved!’ But my mind keeps its solidarity with the poor men of the trenches, of whom I was one; it loves and pities them. We are united by the risks we have run together, the fear that has shaken us all. I am not yet detached from them and their cries find their echo in me. Is it just the sight of all these mutilations that could have been mine that moves me? Isn’t our pity really a contemplation of ourselves, via others? I do not know. What should excuse me in their eyes is that we were all exposed to the same shells and bullets, and that what hit them could have hit me. Yet, lying still beneath my blanket, eyes closed, I hide the injustice of my good fortune.

I also have my own reasons for concern. If I lie flat on my back the wound in my chest suffocates me. If I try to turn over it feels as if daggers are being thrust into me. It may be that the hand which weighs so heavily at the end of my arm will never regain its flexibility . . . If I wasn’t thinking of my comrades who are still out there in some ditch, up to their ankles in water, surrounded by corpses, their lives on the line at every moment, then no doubt I would be thinking that I have suffered a terrible misfortune. If something like this had happened to me outside of war I would surely have fainted away in shock. Whereas here I marched for three hours to find a first-aid post. The fact is that my fate has not been decided and I will only be reassured when the threat of amputation is lifted.

As evening falls, the cries and moans redouble, and delirium grips us. It is swelteringly hot, and the air is stifling, heavy with the sickly sweet smell of blood, of filthy dressings, and excrement. I am getting weaker, my head is spinning, and the cellar seems to be suffocating me, crushing down on my chest . . .

Fever claims me, makes me shudder, brings hallucinations. A parapet rises up before me, illuminated with flashes of light, a funeral pyre of flaming blue and grey men with the faces of grimacing corpses, with gumless jaws, like the death mask from Neuville-Saint-Vaast. They throw grenades at each other’s heads which crown them with explosions. The smoke clears and they fight on desperately, half-decapitated and dripping with blood. One has an eye hanging out. So as not to waste time he sticks his tongue out and swallows it down. Another, a big German, has the top of his head open; a flap of skin like a hinge holds his scalp which swings like a lid. When he runs out of ammunition he sticks his hand into his head and pulls out his brains which he throws into the face of a Frenchman, covering it with a foul porridge. The Frenchman wipes this off in fury and then opens his coat. From inside he unrolls his intestines and makes them into a noose. This he throws, like a lasso, round the German’s neck and then, pushing his foot against his enemy’s chest, leaning back with his whole weight, he strangles him with his guts. The German’s tongue comes out. The Frenchman cuts it off with his knife and then attaches it to his coat with a safety pin, like a medal. Then comes a woman suckling her baby. She removes the infant from her breast and places him on the top of the parapet where he starts to fry. The woman moves off sadly, moaning to herself: ‘Oh, dear God, how has it come to this?’ Then some officers’ batmen arrive. On to a tin plate they place the baby, now grilled à point like a suckling pig, and fill buckets up with blood, then take all this to the field marshal, who is drinking an aperitif off in the distance while observing the battlefield through binoculars and yawning, because he’s hungry. The parapet crumbles away and there are no victims or victors, because there’s nothing left but corpses.

Now here I am at the front line, in a little machine-gun post. All of a sudden a black butterfly, streaked with red, flutters up above the barbed wire. I have been ordered to kill this butterfly. Finger on the trigger, I look for it through the machine-gun sight. Then I realise something terrible: the butterfly is my heart. Panic-stricken I call the sergeant and explain. ‘It’s an order! Shoot it or you’ll be shot!’ So I shut my eyes and fire off belt after belt to kill my heart . . . and the butterfly is still fluttering . . . The general arrives, in a fury: ‘Where do you find these bloody useless conscripts? I’ll get it myself with the first shot!’ From a holster made of human skin he pulls out a golden revolver. He takes aim and kills my heart . . . I am crying . . . I will crawl out tonight and go and look for the poor little black butterfly . . .

And now I am alone, lying on a stretcher, between the trenches. Night is falling. The armies are leaving and abandoning me. I hear a bugle call, orders being shouted and down on the road I can see troops presenting arms. A colonel climbs out of a car with a flag on the bonnet. Despite the distance, I recognise him: he’s the one who made me go through the test on the parade ground at training camp . . . He squats down, strikes a match and lights something close to the ground. Then he gets back in his car and drives off quickly. Once again soldiers present arms, once again there are bugle calls. The troops form up in lines of four and march off without looking back. I want to call out but something is blocking my throat. I’m alone again and cold. I think of all the rats swarming over the plain that might attack me. How could I protect myself? I’ve no strength and I’m strapped to the stretcher. I look for help in this bleak, freezing expanse . . . I can see a little speck of light that at first I take for a glow worm. But it is coming in my direction, wiggling along the ground. I thought it was miles away but it is only the fact that it is tiny that gives the impression of distance. Actually it is close and still advancing. What can it be? Suddenly, all is clear! My hair stands on end, I break into a terrified sweat. Yes, that colonel became my enemy after I had saluted him with my left hand by mistake. The light is the flame at the end of a fuse that he has lit, a fuse which runs from the road to me, which runs round my throat and stops me shouting. And my chest, my stomach, are stuffed with explosives, I am sure of it . . .

The hospital train has been travelling for an hour, taking us away from the front. In the cattle truck fitted with bunks there are a dozen of us, wounded and feverish, exhausted from having already had to wait for some days on stretchers, moving from one first-aid post to another. Some have serious injuries and are in great pain.

Struck by a sudden revelation, a man with a shrapnel wound in his hip forgot his pain for a moment, and announced the dawning of a new era:

5. THE PARAPET