War. Pierre Loti
front, I should believe, in spite of the incessant cannonade, that he had made a mistake, for at first sight there is no sign either of army or of soldiers. We are in a place of sinister aspect, a vast plain; the greyish ground is stripped of its turf and torn up; trees here and there are shattered more or less completely, as if by some cataclysm of thunderbolts or hailstones. There is no trace of human existence, not even the ruins of a village; nothing characteristic of any period, either of historical or even of geological development. Gazing into the distance at the far-flung forest skyline fading on all sides into the darkening mists of twilight, we might well believe ourselves to have reverted to a prehistoric epoch of the world's history.
"Here we are."
That means that it is time to hide our motor car under some trees or it will attract a rain of shells and endanger the lives of our chauffeurs, for in that misty forest opposite there are many wicked eyes watching us through wonderful binoculars, by whose aid they are as keen of sight as great birds of prey. To reach the firing-line, then, it is incumbent on us to proceed on foot.
How strange the ground looks! It is riddled with shell-holes, resembling enormous craters; in another place it is scarred and pierced and sown with pointed bullets, copper cartridge-cases, fragments of spiked helmets, and barbarian filth of other sorts. But in spite of its deserted appearance, this region is nevertheless thickly populated, only the inhabitants are no doubt troglodytes, for their dwellings, scattered about and invisible at first sight, are a kind of cave or molehill, half covered with branches and leaves. I had seen the same kind of architecture once upon a time on Easter Island, and the sight of these dwellings of men in this scenery of primeval forest completes our earlier impression of having leapt backwards into the abyss of time.
Of a truth, to force upon us such a reversion was a right Prussian artifice. War, which was once a gallant affair of parades in the sunshine, of beautiful uniforms and of music, war they have rendered a mean and ugly thing. They wage it like burrowing beasts, and obviously there was nothing left for us but to imitate them.
In the meantime here and there heads look out from the excavations to see who is coming. There is nothing prehistoric about these heads, any more than there is about the service-caps they are wearing; these are the faces of our own soldiers, with an air of health and good humour and of amusement at having to live there like rabbits. A sergeant comes up to us; he is as earthy as a mole that has not had time to clean itself, but he has a merry look of youth and gaiety.
"Take two or three men with you," I say to him, "and go and unpack my motor car, down there behind the trees. You will find a thousand packets of cigarettes and some picture-papers which some people in Paris have sent you to help to pass the time in the trenches."
What a pity that I cannot take back and show, as a thanksgiving to the kind donors, the smiles of satisfaction with which their gifts were welcomed.
Another mile or two have still to be covered on foot before we reach the firing-line. An icy wind blows from the forests opposite that are yet more deeply drowned in black mists, forests in the enemy's hands, where the counterfeit thunderstorm is grumbling. This plain with its miserable molehills is a dismal place in the twilight, and I marvel that they can be so gay, these dear soldiers of ours, in the midst of the desolation surrounding them.
I cross this piece of ground, riddled with holes; the tempest of shot has spared here and there a tuft of grass, a little moss, a poor flower. The first place I reach is a line of defence in course of construction, which will be the second line of defence, to meet the improbable event of the first line, which lies farther ahead, having to be abandoned. Our soldiers are working like navvies with shovels and picks in their hands. They are all resolute and happy, anxious to finish their work, and it will be formidable indeed, surrounded as it is with most deadly ambushes. It was the Germans, I admit, whose scheming, evil brains devised this whole system of galleries and snares; but we, more subtle and alert than they, have, in a few days, equalled them, if we have not beaten them, at their own game.
A mile farther on is the first line. It is full of soldiers, for this is the trench that must withstand the shock of the barbarians' onset; day and night it is always ready to bristle with rifles, and they who hold the trench, gone to earth scarcely for a moment, know that they may expect at any minute the daily shower of shells. Then heads, rash enough to show themselves above the parapet, will be shot away, breasts shattered, entrails torn. They know, too, that they must be prepared to encounter at any unforeseen hour, in the pale sunlight or in the blackness of midnight, onslaughts of those barbarians with whom the forest opposite still swarms. They know how they will come on at a run, with shouts intended to terrify them, linked arm in arm into one infuriated mass, and how they will find means, as ever, to do much harm before death overtakes them entangled in our barbed wire. All this they know, for they have already seen it, but nevertheless they smile a serious, dignified smile. They have been nearly a week in this trench, waiting to be relieved, and they make no complaints.
"We are well fed," they say, "we eat when we are hungry. As long as it does not rain we keep ourselves warm at night in our fox-holes with good thick blankets. But not all of us yet have woollen underclothing for the winter, and we shall need it soon. When you go back to Paris, Colonel, perhaps you will be so kind as to bring this to the notice of Government and of all the ladies too, who are working for us."
("Colonel"—the soldiers have no other title for officers with five rows of gold braid. On the last expedition to China I had already been called colonel, but I did not expect, alas! that I should be called so again during a war on the soil of France.)
These men who are talking to me at the edge of, or actually in, the trench belong to the most diverse social grades. Some were leisured dandies, some artisans, some day labourers, and there are even some who wear their caps at too rakish an angle and whose language smacks of the ring, into whose past it is better not to pry too curiously. Yet they have become not only good soldiers, but good men, for this war, while it has drawn us closer together, has at the same time purified us and ennobled us. This benefit at least the Germans will, involuntarily, have bestowed upon us, and indeed it is worth the trouble. Moreover our soldiers all know to-day why they are fighting, and therein lies their supreme strength. Their indignation will inspire them till their latest breath.
"When you have seen," said two young Breton peasants to me, "when you have seen with your own eyes what these brutes do in the villages they pass through, it is natural, is it not, to give your life to try to prevent them from doing as much in your own home?"
The cannonade roared an accompaniment in its deep, unceasing bass to this ingenuous statement.
Now this is the spirit that prevails inexhaustibly from one end of the fighting-line to the other. Everywhere there is the same determination and courage. Whether here or there, a talk with any of these soldiers is equally reassuring, and calls forth the same admiration.
But it is strange to reflect that in this twentieth century of ours, in order to protect ourselves from barbarism and horror, we have had to establish trenches such as these, in double and treble lines, crossing our dear country from east to west along an unbroken front of hundreds of miles, like a kind of Great Wall of China. But a hundred times more formidable than the original wall, the defence of the Mongolians, is this wall of ours, a wall practically subterranean, which winds along stealthily, manned by all the heroic youth of France, ever on the alert, ever in the midst of bloodshed.
The twilight this evening, under the sullen sky, lingers sadly, and will not come to an end. It appeared to me to begin two hours ago, and yet it is still light enough to see. Before us, distinguishable as yet to sight or imagination, lie two sections of a forest, unfolding itself beyond range of vision, the contours of its more distant section almost lost in darkness. Colder still grows the wind, and my heart contracts with the still more painful impression of a backward plunge, without shelter and without refuge, into primeval barbarism.
"Every evening at this hour, Colonel, for the last week, we have had our little shower of shells. If you have time to stay a short while you will see how quickly they fire and almost without aiming."
As for time, well, I have really hardly any to spare, and, besides, I have had other opportunities of observing