Part 39 (1/2)
She saw the ditches, like long graves dug for the living, where the weary, listless men stood knee-deep in mud, hoping for wounds that would relieve them from the ghastly monotony of their existence; the holes of muddy water where the dead things lay, to which they crept out in the night to wash a little of the filth from their clammy bodies and their stinking clothes; the holes dug out of the mud in which they ate and slept and lived year after year: till brain and heart and soul seemed to have died out of them, and they remembered with an effort that they once were men.
After a time, the care of the convalescents pa.s.sed almost entirely into Joan's hands, Madame Lelanne being told off to a.s.sist her. By dint of much persistence she had succeeded in getting the leaky roof repaired, and in place of the smoky stove that had long been her despair she had one night procured a fine calorifere by the simple process of stealing it. Madame Lelanne had heard about it from the gossips. It had been brought to a lonely house at the end of the village by a major of engineers. He had returned to the trenches the day before, and the place for the time being was empty. The thieves were never discovered. The sentry was positive that no one had pa.s.sed him but two women, one of them carrying a baby. Madame Lelanne had dressed it up in a child's cloak and hood, and had carried it in her arms. As it must have weighed nearly a couple of hundred-weight suspicion had not attached to them.
s.p.a.ce did not allow of any separation; broken Frenchmen and broken Germans would often lie side by side. Joan would wonder, with a grim smile to herself, what the patriotic Press of the different countries would have thought had they been there to have overheard the conversations. Neither France nor Germany appeared to be the enemy, but a thing called ”They,” a mysterious power that worked its will upon them both from a place they always spoke of as ”Back there.” One day the talk fell on courage. A young French soldier was holding forth when Joan entered the hut.
”It makes me laugh,” he was saying, ”all this newspaper talk. Every nation, properly led, fights bravely. It is the male instinct. Women go into hysterics about it, because it has not been given them. I have the Croix de Guerre with all three leaves, and I haven't half the courage of my dog, who weighs twelve kilos, and would face a regiment by himself.
Why, a game c.o.c.k has got more than the best of us. It's the man who doesn't think, who can't think, who has the most courage--who imagines nothing, but just goes forward with his head down, like a bull. There is, of course, a real courage. When you are by yourself, and have to do something in cold blood. But the courage required for rus.h.i.+ng forward, shouting and yelling with a lot of other fellows--why, it would take a hundred times more pluck to turn back.”
”They know that,” chimed in the man lying next to him; ”or they would not drug us. Why, when we stormed La Haye I knew nothing until an ugly-looking German spat a pint of blood into my face and woke me up.”
A middle-aged sergeant, who had a wound in the stomach and was sitting up in his bed, looked across. ”There was a line of Germans came upon us,”
he said, ”at Bras. I thought I must be suffering from a nightmare when I saw them. They had thrown away their rifles and had all joined hands.
They came dancing towards us just like a row of ballet girls. They were shrieking and laughing, and they never attempted to do anything. We just waited until they were close up and then shot them down. It was like killing a lot of kids who had come to have a game with us. The one I potted got his arms round me before he coughed himself out, calling me his 'liebe Elsa,' and wanting to kiss me. Lord! You can guess how the Boche ink-slingers spread themselves over that business: 'Sonderbar!
Colossal! Unvergessliche Helden.' Poor devils!”
”They'll give us ginger before it is over,” said another. He had had both his lips torn away, and appeared to be always laughing. ”Stuff it into us as if we were horses at a fair. That will make us run forward, right enough.”
”Oh, come,” struck in a youngster who was lying perfectly flat, face downwards on his bed: it was the position in which he could breathe easiest. He raised his head a couple of inches and twisted it round so as to get his mouth free. ”It isn't as bad as all that. Why, the Thirty- third swarmed into Fort Malmaison of their own accord, though 'twas like jumping into a boiling furnace, and held it for three days against pretty nearly a division. There weren't a dozen of them left when we relieved them. They had no ammunition left. They'd just been filling up the gaps with their bodies. And they wouldn't go back even then. We had to drag them away. 'They shan't pa.s.s,' 'They shan't pa.s.s!'--that's all they kept saying.” His voice had sunk to a thin whisper.
A young officer was lying in a corner behind a screen. He leant forward and pushed it aside.
”Oh, give the devil his due, you fellows,” he said. ”War isn't a pretty game, but it does make for courage. We all know that. And things even finer than mere fighting pluck. There was a man in my company, a Jacques Decrusy. He was just a stupid peasant lad. We were crowded into one end of the trench, about a score of us. The rest of it had fallen in, and we couldn't move. And a bomb dropped into the middle of us; and the same instant that it touched the ground Decrusy threw himself flat down upon it and took the whole of it into his body. There was nothing left of him but sc.r.a.ps. But the rest of us got off. n.o.body had drugged him to do that. There isn't one of us who was in that trench that will not be a better man to the end of his days, remembering how Jacques Decrusy gave his life for ours.”
”I'll grant you all that, sir,” answered the young soldier who had first spoken. He had long, delicate hands and eager, restless eyes. ”War does bring out heroism. So does pestilence and famine. Read Defoe's account of the Plague of London. How men and women left their safe homes, to serve in the pest-houses, knowing that sooner or later they were doomed.
Read of the mothers in India who die of slow starvation, never allowing a morsel of food to pa.s.s their lips so that they may save up their own small daily portion to add it to their children's. Why don't we pray to G.o.d not to withhold from us His precious medicine of pestilence and famine? So is s.h.i.+pwreck a fine school for courage. Look at the chance it gives the captain to set a fine example. And the engineers who stick to their post with the water pouring in upon them. We don't reconcile ourselves to s.h.i.+pwrecks as a necessary school for sailors. We do our best to lessen them. So did persecution bring out heroism. It made saints and martyrs. Why have we done away with it? If this game of killing and being killed is the fine school for virtue it is made out to be, then all our efforts towards law and order have been a mistake. We never ought to have emerged from the jungle.”
He took a note-book from under his pillow and commenced to scribble.
An old-looking man spoke. He lay with his arms folded across his breast, addressing apparently the smoky rafters. He was a Russian, a teacher of languages in Paris at the outbreak of the war, and had joined the French Army.
”It is not only courage,” he said, ”that War brings out. It brings out vile things too. Oh, I'm not thinking merely of the Boches. That's the cant of every nation: that all the heroism is on one side and all the brutality on the other. Take men from anywhere and some of them will be devils. War gives them their opportunity, brings out the beast. Can you wonder at it? You teach a man to plunge a bayonet into the writhing flesh of a fellow human being, and twist it round and round and jamb it further in, while the blood is spurting from him like a fountain. What are you making of him but a beast? A man's got to be a beast before he can bring himself to do it. I have seen things done by our own men in cold blood, the horror of which will haunt my memory until I die. But of course, we hush it up when it happens to be our own people.”
He ceased speaking. No one seemed inclined to break the silence.
They remained confused in her memory, these talks among the wounded men in the low, dimly lighted hut that had become her world. At times it was but two men speaking to one another in whispers, at others every creaking bed would be drawn into the argument.
One topic that never lost its interest was: Who made wars? Who hounded the people into them, and kept them there, tearing at one another's throats? They never settled it.
”G.o.d knows I didn't want it, speaking personally,” said a German prisoner one day, with a laugh. ”I had been working at a printing business sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me, and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell the machinery to keep them all from starving.”
”But couldn't you have done anything to stop it?” demanded a Frenchman, lying next to him. ”All your millions of Socialists, what were they up to? What went wrong with the Internationale, the Universal Brotherhood of Labour, and all that Tra-la-la?”
The German laughed again. ”Oh, they know their business,” he answered.
”You have your gla.s.s of beer and go to bed, and when you wake up in the morning you find that war has been declared; and you keep your mouth shut--unless you want to be shot for a traitor. Not that it would have made much difference,” he added. ”I admit that. The ground had been too well prepared. England was envious of our trade. King Edward had been plotting our destruction. Our papers were full of translations from yours, talking about '_La Revanche_!' We were told that you had been lending money to Russia to enable her to build railways, and that when they were complete France and Russia would fall upon us suddenly. 'The Fatherland in danger!' It may be lies or it may not; what is one to do?
What would you have done--even if you could have done anything?”
”He's right,” said a dreamy-eyed looking man, laying down the book he had been reading. ”We should have done just the same. 'My country, right or wrong.' After all, it is an ideal.”
A dark, black-bearded man raised himself painfully upon his elbow. He was a tailor in the Rue Parnesse, and prided himself on a decided resemblance to Victor Hugo.