Part 25 (2/2)

The body is heavy, very heavy. We drag our sabots out of the clay laboriously. And we walk slowly, breathing hard.

How heavy he is!... He was called Fumat... He was a giant. He came from the mountains of the Centre, leaving a red-tiled village on a hill-side, among juniper-bushes and volcanic boulders. He left his native place with its violet peaks and strong aromatic scents and came to the war in Artois. He was past the age when men can march to the attack, but he guarded the trenches and cooked. He received his death-wound while he was cooking. The giant of Auvergne was peppered with small missiles.

He had no wound at all proportionate to his huge body. Nothing but splinters of metal. Once again, David has slain Goliath.

He was two days dying. He was asked: ”Is there anything you would like?”

And he answered with white lips: ”Nothing, thank you.” When we were anxious and asked him ”How do you feel?” he was always quite satisfied.

”I am getting on very well.” He died with a discretion, a modesty, a self-forgetfulness which redeemed the egotism of the universe.

How heavy he is! He was wounded as he was blowing up the fire for the soup. He did not die fighting. He uttered no historic word. He fell at his post as a cook.... He was not a hero.

You are not a hero, Fumat. You are only a martyr. And we are going to lay you in the earth of France, which has engulfed a n.o.ble and innumerable army of martyrs.

The shadow of the trees sweeps like a huge sickle across s.p.a.ce. An acrid smell of cold decay rises on the night. The wind wails its threnody for Fumat.

”Open the door, Monsieur Julien.”

The lout pushes the door, grumbling to himself. We lay the body on the pavement of the chapel.

Renaud covers the corpse carefully with a faded flag. And suddenly, as if to celebrate the moment, the brutal roar of guns comes to us from the depths of the woods, breaks violently into the chapel, seizes and rattles the trembling window-panes. A hundred times over, a whole nation of cannon yells in honour of Fumat. And each time other Fumats fall in the mud yonder, in their appointed places.

VII

They ought not to have cut off all the light in this manner, and it would not have been done, perhaps, if...

There is a kind of mania for organisation which is the sworn enemy of order; in its efforts to discover the best place for everything, it ends by diverting everything from its right function and locality, and making everything as inopportune as itself. It was a mistake to cut off all the lights this evening, on some pretext or the other. The rooms of the old mansion are not packed with bales of cotton, but with men who have anxious minds and tortured bodies.

A mournful darkness suddenly reigned; and outside, the incessant storm that rages in this country swept along like a river in spate.

Little Rochet was dreaming in the liquid light of the lamp, with hands crossed on his breast, and the delicate profile of an exhausted saint.

He was dreaming of vague and exquisite things, for cruel fever has moments of generosity between two nightmares. He was dreaming so sweetly that he forgot the abominable stench of his body, and that a smile touched the two deep wrinkles at the corners of his mouth, set there by a week of agony.

But all the lamps have been put out, and the noise of the hurricane has become more insistent, and the wounded have ceased talking, for darkness discourages conversation.

There are some places where the men with whom the sh.e.l.ls have dealt mercifully and whose wounds are only scratches congregate. These have only the honour of wounds, and what may be called their delights....

But here, we have only the worst cases; and here they have to await the supreme decision of death.

Little Rochet awoke to a reality full of darkness and despair. He heard nothing but laboured breathing round him, and rising above it all, the violent breath of the storm. He was suddenly conscious of his lacerated stomach, of his lost leg, and he realised that the fetid smell in the air was the smell of his flesh. And he thought of the loving letter he had received in the morning from his four big sisters with glossy hair, he thought of all his lost, ravished happiness....

Renaud hurries up, groping his way among the dark ambushes of the corridor.

”Come, come quickly. Little Rochet has thrown himself out of bed.”

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