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the tall apse of the abbey, breathing the cool night air, moist with mist,
in which now and then was the huddled, troubling smell of soldiers. At last
the moon, huge and swollen with gold, set behind the wooded hills, and they
went back to the car, where they rolled up in their blankets and went to
sleep.
Behind the square lantern that rose over the crossing, there was a trap
door in the broken tile roof, from which you could climb to the observation
post in the lantern. Here, half on the roof and half on the platform behind
the trap door, Martin would spend the long summer afternoons when there was
no call for the ambulance, looking at the Gothic windows of the lantern and
the blue sky beyond, where huge soft clouds passed slowly over, darkening
the green of the woods and of the weed-grown fields of the valley with their
moving shadows.
There was almost no activity on that part of the front. A couple of
times a day a few snapping discharges would come from the seventy-fives of
the battery behind the abbey, and the woods would resound like a shaken harp
as the shells passed over to explode on the crest of the hill that blocked
the end of the valley where the Boches were.
Martin would sit and dream of the quiet lives the monks must have
passed in their beautiful abbey so far away in the Forest of the Argonne,
digging and planting in the rich lands of the valley, making flowers bloom
in the garden, of which traces remained in the huge beds of sunflowers and
orange marigolds that bloomed along the walls of the Dormitory. In a room in
the top of the house he had found a few torn remnants of books; there must
have been a library in the old days, rows and rows of musty-smelling volumes
in rich brown calf worn by use to a velvet softness, and in cream-coloured
parchment where the fingermarks of generations showed brown; huge psalters
with notes and chants illuminated in green and ultramarine and gold;
manuscripts out of the Middle Ages with strange script and pictures in pure
vivid colours; lives of saints, thoughts polished by years of quiet
meditation of old divines; old romances of chivalry; tales of blood and
death and love where the crude agony of life was seen through a dawn-like
mist of gentle beauty.
"God! if there were somewhere nowadays where you could flee from all
this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous
reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred . . ." he would say to
himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint
letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in the deep-throated
passionate chanting of the endless offices of the Church.
One afternoon towards evening as he lay on the tiled roof with his
shirt open so that the sun warmed his throat and chest, half asleep in the
beauty of the building and of the woods and the clouds that drifted
overhead, he heard a strain from the organ in the church: a few deep notes
in broken rhythm that filled him with wonder, as if he had suddenly been
transported back to the quiet days of the monks. The rhythm changed in an
instant, and through the squeakiness of shattered pipes came a swirl of
fake-oriental ragtime that resounded like mocking laughter in the old vaults
and arches. He went down into the church and found Tom Randolph playing on
the little organ, pumping desperately with his feet.
"Hello! Impiety I call it; putting your lustful tunes into that pious
old organ."
"I bet the ole monks had a merry time, lecherous ole devils," said Tom,
playing away.
"If there were monasteries nowadays," said Martin, "I think I'd go into
one."
"But there are. I'll end up in one, most like, if they don't put me in
jail first. I reckon every living soul would be a candidate for either one
if it'd get them out of this God-damned war."
There was a shriek overhead that reverberated strangely in the vaults
of the church and made the swallows nesting there fly in and out through the
glassless windows. Tom Randolph stopped on a wild chord.
"Guess they don't like me playin'."
"That one didn't explode though."
"That one did, by gorry," said Randolph, getting up off the floor,
where he had thrown himself automatically. A shower of tiles came rattling
off the roof, and through the noise could be heard the frightened squeaking
of the swallows.
"I am afraid that winged somebody."
"They must have got wind of the ammunition dump in the cellar."
"Hell of a place to put a dressing-station--over an ammunition dump!"
The whitewashed room used as a dressing-station had a smell of blood
stronger than the chloride. A doctor was leaning over a stretcher on which
Martin caught a glimpse of two naked legs with flecks of blood on the white
skin, as he passed through on his way to the car.
"Three stretcher-cases for Les Islettes. Very softly," said the
attendant, handing him the papers.
Jolting over the shell-pitted road, the car wound slowly through
unploughed weed-grown fields. At every jolt came a rasping groan from the
wounded men.
As they came back towards the front posts again, they found all the
batteries along the road firing. The air was a chaos of explosions that
jabbed viciously into their ears, above the reassuring purr of the motor.
Nearly to the abbey a soldier stopped them.
"Put the car behind the trees and get into a dugout. They're shelling
the abbey."
As he spoke a whining shriek grew suddenly loud over their heads. The
soldier threw himself flat in the muddy road. The explosion brought gravel
about their ears and made a curious smell of almonds.
Crowded in the door of the dugout in the hill opposite they watched the
abbey as shell after shell tore through the roof or exploded in the strong
buttresses of the apse. Dust rose high above the roof and filled the air
with an odour of damp tiles and plaster. The woods resounded in a jangling
tremor, with the batteries that started firing one after the other.
"God, I hate them for that!" said Randolph between his teeth.
"What do you want? It's an observation post."
"I know, but damn it!"
There was a series of explosions; a shell fragment whizzed past their
heads.
"It's not safe there. You'd better come in all the way," someone
shouted from within the dugout.
"I want to see; damn it. . . . I'm goin' to stay and see it out, Howe.
That place meant a hell of a lot to me." Randolph blushed as he spoke.
Another bunch of shells crashing so near together they did not hear the
scream. When the cloud of dust blew away, they saw that the lantern had
fallen in on the roof of the apse, leaving only one wall and the tracery of
a window, of which the shattered carving stood out cream-white against the
reddish evening sky.
There was a lull in the firing. A few swallows still wheeled about the
walls, giving shrill little cries.
They saw the flash of a shell against the sky as it exploded in the
part of the tall roof that still remained. The roof crumpled and fell in,
and again dust hid the abbey.
"Oh, I hate this!" said Tom Randolph. "But the question is, what's
happened to our grub? The popote is buried four feet deep in Gothic art. . .
. Damn fool idea, putting a dressing-station over an ammunition dump."
"Is the car hit?" The orderly came up to them.
"Don't think so."
"Good. Four stretcher-cases for 42 at once."
At night in a dugout. Five men playing cards about a lamp-flame that
blows from one side to the other in the gusty wind that puffs every now and
then down the mouth of the dugout and whirls round it like something alive
trying to beat a way out.
Each time the lamp blows the shadows of the five heads writhe upon the
corrugated tin ceiling. In the distance, like kettle-drums beaten for a
dance, a constant reverberation of guns.
Martin Howe, stretched out in the straw of one of the bunks, watches
their faces in the flickering shadows. He wishes he had the patience to play
too. No, perhaps it is better to look on; it would be so silly to be killed
in the middle of one of those grand gestures one makes in slamming the card
down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of all the lives that must, in
these last three years, have ended in that grand gesture. It is too silly.
He seems to see their poor lacerated souls, clutching their greasy dogeared
cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, and there, in tobacco-stinking,
sweat-stinking rooms, like those of the little cafйs behind the lines, sit
in groups of five, shuffling, dealing, taking tricks, always with the same
slam of the cards on the table, pausing now and then to scratch their
louse-eaten flesh.
At this moment, how many men, in all the long Golgotha that stretches
from Belfort to the sea, must be trying to cheat their boredom and their
misery with that grand gesture of slamming the cards down to take a trick,
while in their ears, like tom-toms, pounds the death-dance of the guns.
Martin lies on his back looking up at the curved corrugated ceiling of
the dugout, where the shadows of the five heads writhe in fantastic shapes.
Is it death they are playing, that they are so merry when they take a trick?
THE three planes gleamed like mica in the intense blue of the sky.
Round about the shrapnel burst in little puffs like cotton-wool. A shout
went up from the soldiers who stood in groups in the street of the ruined
town. A whistle split the air, followed by a rending snort that tailed off
into the moaning of a wounded man.
"By damn, they're nervy. They dropped a bomb."
"I should say they did."
"The dirty bastards, to get a fellow who's going on permission. Now if
they beaded you on the way back you wouldn't care."
In the sky an escadrille of French planes had appeared and the three
German specks had vanished, followed by a trail of little puffs of shrapnel.
The indigo dome of the afternoon sky was full of a distant snoring of
motors.
The train screamed outside the station and the permissionaires ran for
the platform, their packed musettes bouncing at their hips.
The dark boulevards, with here and there a blue lamp lighting up a
bench and a few tree-trunks, or a faint glow from inside a closed caf where
a boy in shirt-sleeves is sweeping the floor. Crowds of soldiers, Belgians,
Americans, Canadians, civilians with canes and straw hats and well-dressed
women on their arms, shop-girls in twos and threes laughing with shrill,
merry voices; and everywhere girls of the street, giggling alluringly in
hoarse, dissipated tones, clutching the arms of drunken soldiers, tilting
themselves temptingly in men's way as they walk along. Cigarettes and cigars
make spots of reddish light, and now and then a match lighted makes a man's
face stand out in yellow relief and glints red in the eyes of people round
about.
Drunk with their freedom, with the jangle of voices, with the rustle of
trees in the faint light, with the scents of women's hair and cheap
perfumes, Howe and Randolph stroll along slowly, down one side to the
shadowy columns of the Madeleine, where a few flower-women still offer
roses, scenting the darkness, then back again past the Opra towards the
Porte St. Martin, lingering to look in the offered faces of women, to listen
to snatches of talk, to chatter laughingly with girls who squeeze their arms
with impatience.
"I'm goin' to find the prettiest girl in Paris, and then you'll see the
dust fly, Howe, old man."
The hors d'oeuvres came on a circular three-tiered stand; red strips of
herrings and silver anchovies, salads where green peas and bits of carrot
lurked under golden layers of sauce, sliced tomatoes, potato salad
green-specked with parsley, hard-boiled eggs barely visible under thickness
of vermilion-tinged dressing, olives, radishes, discs of sausage of many
different forms and colours, complicated bundles of spiced salt fish, and,
forming the apex, a fat terra-cotta jar of pвtй de foie gras. Howe poured
out pale-coloured Chablis.
"I used to think that down home was the only place they knew how to
live, but oh, boy . . ." said Tom Randolph, breaking a little loaf of bread
that made a merry crackling sound.
"It's worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months."
After the hors d'oeuvres had been taken away, leaving them
Rabelaisianly gay, with a joyous sense of orgy, came sole hidden in a
cream-coloured sauce with mussels in it.
"After the war, Howe, ole man, let's riot all over Europe; I'm getting
a taste for this sort of livin'."
"You can play the fiddle, can't you, Tom?"
"Enough to scrape out Auprиs de ma blonde on a bet."
"Then we'll wander about and you can support me. Or else I'll dress as
a monkey and you can fiddle and I'll gather the pennies."
"By gum, that'd be great sport."
"Look, we must have some red wine with the veal."
"Let's have Mвcon."
"All the same to me as long as there's plenty of it."
Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and its
piles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantastic
world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'ueuvres things had been evolving to
grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips, crow-like forms
of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involved and jumbled in the
melйe of talk and clink and clatter.
The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormy
sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginings that
had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had been saying,
it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells and the whine
of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms, in trenches,
packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowded behind guns,
involved in telephone apparatus, generals at their dinner-tables, colonels
sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet
and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious
pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would untune the sky. It would
be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with laughter at the sudden vision of
the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers, prisoners working on the
roads, deserters being driven towards the trenches would throw down their
guns and their spades and their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving
in artillery waggons or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards
their capitals, where they would laugh the deputies, the senators, the
congressmen, the M.P.'s out of their chairs, laugh the presidents and the
prime ministers, and kaisers and dictators out of their plush-carpeted
offices; the sun would wear a broad grin and would whisper the joke to the
moon, who would giggle and ripple with it all night long. . . . The red hand
of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse
into the small glasses before them.
"That," said Tom Randolph, when he had half finished his liqueur, "is
the girl for me."
"But, Tom, she's with a French officer."
"They're fighting like cats and dogs. You can see that, can't you?"
"Yes," agreed Howe vaguely.
"Pay the bill. I'll meet you at the corner of the boulevard." Tom
Randolph was out of the door. The girl, who had a little of the aspect of a
pierrot, with dark skin and bright lips and gold-yellow hat and dress, and
the sour-looking officer who was with her, were getting up to go.
At the corner of the boulevard Howe heard a woman's voice joining with
Randolph's rich laugh.
"What did I tell you? They split at the door and here we are, Howe. . .
. Mademoiselle Montreil, let me introduce a friend. Look, before it's too
late, we must have a drink."
At the cafй table next to them an Englishman was seated with his head
sunk on his chest.
"Oh, I say, you woke me up."
"Sorry."
"No harm. Jolly good thing."
They invited him over to their table. There was a moist look about his
eyes and a thickness to his voice that denoted alcohol.
"You mustn't mind me. I'm forgetting. . . . I've been doing it for a
week. This is the first leave I've had in eighteen months. You Canadians?"
"No. Ambulance service; Americans."
"New at the game then. You're lucky. . . . Before I left the front I
saw a man tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of a German
prisoner. The prisoner said, 'Thank you.' The grenade blew him to hell! God!
Know anywhere you can get whisky in this bloody town?"
"We'll have to hurry; it's near closing-time."
"Right-o."
They started off, Randolph and the girl talking intimately, their heads
close together, Martin supporting the Englishman.
"I need a bit o' whisky to put me on my pins."
They tumbled into the seats round a table at an American bar.
The Englishman felt in his pocket.
"Oh, I say," he cried, "I've got a ticket to the theatre. It's a box. .
. . We can all get in. Come along; let's hurry."
They walked a long while, blundering through the dark streets, and at
last stopped at a blue-lighted door.
"Here it is; push in."
"But there are two gentlemen and a lady already in the box, meester."
"No matter, there'll be room." The Englishman waved the ticket in the
air.
The little round man with a round red face who was taking the tickets
stuttered in bad English and then dropped into French. Meanwhile, the whole
party had filed in, leaving the Englishman, who kept waving the ticket in
the little man's face.
Two gendarmes, the theatre guards, came up menacingly; the Englishman's
face wreathed itself in smiles; he linked an arm in each of the gendarmes',
and pushed them towards the bar.
"Come drink to the Entente Cordiale. . . . Vive la France!"
In the box were two Australians and a woman who leaned her head on the
chest of one and then the other alternately, laughing so that you could see
the gold caps in her black teeth.
They were annoyed at the intrusion that packed the box insupportably
tight, so that the woman had to sit on the men's laps, but the air soon
cleared in laughter that caused people in the orchestra to stare angrily at
the box full of noisy men in khaki. At last the Englishman came, squeezing
himself in with a finger mysteriously on his lips. He plucked at Martin's
arm, a serious set look coming suddenly over his grey eyes. "It was like
this"--his breath laden with whisky was like a halo round Martin's
head--"the Hun was a nice little chap, couldn't 'a' been more than eighteen;
had a shoulder broken and he thought that my pal was fixing the pillow. He
said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent. . . . Mind you, he said 'Thank
you'; that's what hurt. And the man laughed. God damn him, he laughed when
the poor devil said 'Thank you.' And the grenade blew him to hell."
The stage was a glare of light in Martin's eyes; he felt as he had when
at home he had leaned over and looked straight into the headlight of an auto
drawn up to the side of the road. Screening him from the glare were the
backs of people's heads: Tom Randolph's head and his girl's, side by side,
their cheeks touching, the pointed red chin of one of the Australians and
the frizzy hair of the other woman.
In the entr'acte they all stood at the bar, where it was very hot and
an orchestra was playing and there were many men in khaki in all stages of
drunkenness, being led about by women who threw jokes at each other behind
the men's backs.
"Here's to mud," said one of the Australians. "The war'll end when
everybody is drowned in mud."
The orchestra began playing the Madelon and everyone roared out the
marching song that, worn threadbare as it was, still had a roistering verve
to it that caught people's blood.
People had gone back for the last act. The two Australians, the
Englishman, and the two Americans still stood talking.
"Mind you, I'm not what you'd call susceptible. I'm not soft. I got
over all that long ago." The Englishman was addressing the company in
general. "But the poor beggar said 'Thank you.'"
"What's he saying?" asked a woman, plucking at Martin s arm.
"He's telling about a German atrocity."
"Oh, the dirty Germans! What things they've done!" the woman answered
mechanically.
Somehow, during the entr'acte, the Australians had collected another
woman; and a strange fat woman with lips painted very small, and very large
bulging eyes, had attached herself to Martin. He suffered her because every
time he looked at her she burst out laughing.
The bar was closing. They had a drink of champagne all round that made
the fat woman give little shrieks of delight. They drifted towards the door,
and stood, a formless, irresolute group, in the dark street in front of the
theatre.
Randolph came up to Martin.
"Look. We're goin'. I wonder if I ought to leave my money with you . .
."
"I doubt if I'm a safe person to-night.""
"All right. I'll take it along. Look . . . let's meet for breakfast."
"At the Cafй de la Paix."
"All right. If she is nice I'll bring her."
"She looks charming."
Tom Randolph pressed Martin's hand and was off. There was a sound of a
kiss in the darkness.
"I say, I've got to have something to eat," said the Englishman. "I
didn't have a bit of dinner. I say-- mangai, mangai." He made gestures of
putting things into his mouth in the direction of the fat woman.
The three women put their heads together. One of them knew a place, but
it was a dreadful place. Really, they mustn't think that. . . . She only
knew it because when she was very young a man had taken her there who wanted
to seduce her.
At that everyone laughed and the voices of the women rose shrill.
"All right, don't talk; let's go there," said one of the Australians.
"We'll attend to the seducing."
A thick woman, a tall comb in the back of her high-piled black hair,
and an immovable face with jaw muscled like a prize-fighter's, served them
with cold chicken and ham and champagne in a room with mouldering greenish
wall-paper lighted by a red-shaded lamp.
The Australians ate and sang and made love to their women. The
Englishman went to sleep with his head on the table.
Martin leaned back out of the circle of light, keeping up a desultory
conversation with the woman beside him, listening to the sounds of the men's
voices down corridors, of the front door being opened and slammed again and
again, and of forced, shrill giggles of women.
"Unfortunately, I have an engagement to-night," said Martin to the
woman beside him, whose large spherical breasts heaved as she talked, and
who rolled herself nearer to him invitingly, seeming with her round pop-eyes
and her round cheeks to be made up entirely of small spheres and large soft
ones.
"Oh, but it is too late. You can break it."
"It's at four o'clock."
"Then we have time, ducky."
"It's something really romantic, you see."
"The young are always lucky." She rolled her eyes in sympathetic
admiration.
"This will be the fourth night this week that I have not made a sou . .
. . I'll chuck myself into the river soon."
Martin felt himself softening towards her. He slipped a twenty-franc
note in her hand.
"Oh, you are too good. You are really galant homme, you."
Martin buried his face in his hands, dreaming of the woman he would
like to love to-night. She should be very dark, with red lips and stained
cheeks, like Randolph's girl; she should have small breasts and slender,
dark, dancer's thighs, and in her arms he could forget everything but the
madness and the mystery and the intricate life of Paris about them. He
thought of Montmartre, and Louise in the opera standing at her window
singing the madness of Paris. . . .
One of the Australians had gone away with a little woman in a pink
negligйe. The other Australian and the Englishman were standing unsteadily
near the table, each supported by a sleepy-looking girl. Leaving the fat
woman sadly finishing the remains of the chicken, large tears rolling from
her eyes, they left the house and walked for a long time down dark streets,
three men and two women, the Englishman being supported in the middle,
singing in a desultory fashion.
They stopped under a broken sign of black letters on greyish glass,
within which one feeble electric light bulb made a red glow. The pavement
was wet, and glimmered where it slanted up to the lamp-post at the next
corner.
"Here we are. Come along, Janey," cried the Australian in a brisk
voice.
The door opened and slammed again. Martin and the other girl stood on
the pavement facing each other. The Englishman collapsed on the doorstep,
and began to snore.
"Well, there's only you and me," she said.
"Oh, if you were only a person, instead of being a member of a
profession----" said Martin softly.
"No, dearie. I must go," said Martin.
"As you will. I'll take care of your friend." She yawned.
He kissed her and stumbled down the dark stairs, his nostrils full of
the smell of the rouge on her lips.
He walked a long while with his hat off, breathing deep of the sharp
night air. The streets were black and silent. Intemperate desires prowled
about him like cats in the darkness.
He woke up and stretched himself stiffly, smelling grass and damp
earth. A pearly lavender mist was all about him, through which loomed the
square towers of Notre Dame and the row of kings across the faзade and the
sculpture about the darkness of the doorways. He had lain down on his back
on the little grass plot of the Parvis Notre Dame to look at the stars, and
had fallen asleep.
It must be nearly dawn. Words were droning importunately in his head.
"The poor beggar said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent and the grenade
blew him to hell." He remembered the man he had once helped to pick up in
whose pocket a grenade had exploded. Before that he had not realized that
torn flesh was such a black red, like sausage meat.
"Get up, you can't lie there," cried a gendarme.
"Notre Dame is beautiful in the morning," said Martin, stepping across
the low rail on to the pavement.
"Ah, yes; it is beautiful."
Martin Howe sat on the rail of the bridge and looked. Before him, with
nothing distinct yet to be seen, were two square towers and the tracery
between them and the row of kings on the faзade, and the long series of
flying buttresses of the flank, gleaming through the mist, and, barely
visible, the dark, slender spire soaring above the crossing. So had the
abbey in the forest gleamed tall in the misty moonlight; like mist, only
drab and dense, the dust had risen above the tall apse as the shells tore it
to pieces.
Amid a smell of new-roasted coffee he sat at a table and watched people
pass briskly through the ruddy sunlight. Waiters in shirt-sleeves were
rubbing off the other tables and putting out the chairs. He sat sipping
coffee, feeling languid and nerveless. After a while Tom Randolph, looking
very young and brown with his hat a little on one side, came along. With
him, plainly dressed in blue serge, was the girl. They sat down and she
dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes with her dark lashes.
"Oh, I am so tired."
"Poor child! You must go home and go back to bed."
"But I've got to go to work."
"Poor thing." They kissed each other tenderly and languidly.
The waiter came with coffee and hot milk and little crisp loaves of
bread.
"Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!" said Martin.
"Indeed it is. . . . Good-bye, little girl, if you must go. We'll see
each other again."
"You must call me Yvonne." She pouted a little. "All right, Yvonne." He
got to his feet and pressed her two hands.
"Well, what sort of a time did you have, Howe?"
"Curious. I lost our friends one by one, left two women and slept a
little while on the grass in front of Notre Dame. That was my real love of
the night."
"My girl was charming. . . . Honestly, I'd marry her in a minute." He
laughed a merry laugh.
"Let's take a cab somewhere."
They climbed into a victoria and told the driver to go to the
Madeleine.
"Look, before I do anything else I must go to the hotel."
"Why?"
"Preventives."
"Of course; you'd better go at once."
The cab rattled merrily along the streets where the early sunshine cast
rusty patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantastic chimney-pots
that rose in clusters and hedges from the mansard roofs.
THE lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on the
white wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed and scalloped
and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men passing. Now
and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chin under a helmet, a
head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a pack alone beside which
slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic with its loaf of bread and its
pair of shoes and its pots and pans.
Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train of
artillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by the lamp
into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of the village
street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks' tails from
between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition, huge
waggons hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment that catches
fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the white wall of the
house.
"Put that light out. Name of God, do you want to have them start
chucking shells into here?" comes a voice shrill with anger. The brisk trot
of the officer's horse is lost in the clangour.
The door of the hut slams to and only a thin ray of orange light
penetrates into the blackness of the road, where with jingle of harness and
clatter of iron and tramp of hoofs, gun after gun, caisson after caisson,
waggon after waggon files by. Now and then the passing stops entirely and
matches flare where men light pipes and cigarettes. Coming from the other
direction with throbbing of motors, a convoy of camions, huge black oblongs,
grinds down the other side of the road. Horses rear and there are shouts and
curses and clacking of reins in the darkness.
Far away where the lowering clouds meet the hills beyond the village a
white glare grows and fades again at intervals: star-shells.
"There's a most tremendous concentration of sanitary sections."
"You bet; two American sections and a French one in this village; three
more down the road. Something's up."
"There's goin' to be an attack at St. Mihiel, a Frenchman told me."
"I heard that the Germans were concentrating for an offensive in the
Four de Paris."
"Damned unlikely."
"Anyway, this is the third week we've been in this bloody hold with our
feet in the mud."
"They've got us quartered in a barn with a regular brook flowing
through the middle of it."
"The main thing about this damned war is ennui--just plain boredom."
"Not forgetting the mud."
Three ambulance drivers in slickers were on the front seat of a car.
The rain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the car and
on the puddles that filled the village street. Streaming with water,
blackened walls of ruined houses rose opposite them above a rank growth of
weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slithering through
the rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy of camions went by
and disappeared, truck after truck, in the white streaming rain.
Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing an accordion, letting strange
nostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain.
"Oh, I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away."
The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off their
knees and hummed the song.
The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on the
floor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly,
rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured
puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning
self-pity of the old coon song:
"I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away."
"Oh, God, something's got to happen soon."
Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the section
leader splashed across the road.
"All cars must be ready to leave at six to-night."
"Yay. Where we goin'?"
"Orders haven't come yet. We're to be in readiness to leave at six
to-night. . . ."
"I tell you, fellers, there's goin' to be an attack. This concentration
of sanitary sections means something. You can't tell me . . ."
"They say they have beer," said the aspirant behind Martin in the long
line of men who waited in the hot sun for the copй to open, while the dust
the staff cars and camions raised as they whirred by on the road settled in
a blanket over the village.
"Cold beer?"
"Of course not," said the aspirant, laughing so that all the brilliant
ivory teeth showed behind his red lips. "It'll be detestable. I'm getting it
because it's rare, for sentimental reasons."
Martin laughed, looking in the man's brown face, a face in which all
past expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth and eyes
and in the modelling of the cheeks and temples.
"You don't understand that," said the aspirant again.
"Indeed I do."
Later they sat on the edge of the stone well-head in the courtyard
behind the store, drinking warm beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, and
staring at a tall barn that had crumpled at one end so that it looked, with
its two frightened little square windows, like a cow kneeling down.
"Is it true that the ninety-second's going up to the lines to-night?"
"Yes, we're going up to make a little attack. Probably I'll come back
in your little omnibus."
"I hope you won't."
"I'd be very glad to. A lucky wound! But I'll probably be killed. This
is the first time I've gone up to the front that I didn't expect to be
killed. So it'll probably happen."
Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat at
ease on the stone margin of the well, leaning against the wrought iron
support for the bucket, one knee clasped in his strong, heavily veined
hands. Dead he would be different. Martin's mind could hardly grasp the
connection between this man full of latent energies, full of thoughts and
desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put his arm
round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go for long walks,
with whom he would have liked to sit long into the night drinking and
talking--and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniform half-buried in the
mud of ditches.
"Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to abattoir on a fine
May morning?" asked the aspirant in a scornful, jaunty tone, as if he had
guessed Martin's thoughts.
"I wonder what they think of it."
"It's not that I'm resigned. . . . Don't think that. Resignation is too
easy. That's why the herd can be driven by a boy of six . . . or a prime
minister!"
Martin was sitting with his arms crossed. The fingers of one hand were
squeezing the muscle of his forearm. It gave him pleasure to feel the
smooth, firm modelling of his arm through his sleeve. And how would that
feel when it was dead, when a steel splinter had slithered through it? A
momentary stench of putrefaction filled his nostrils, making his stomach
contract with nausea.
"I'm not resigned either," he shouted in a laugh. "I am going to do
something some day, but first I must see. I want to be initiated in all the
circles of hell."
"I'd play the part of Virgil pretty well," said the aspirant, "but I
suppose Virgil was a staff officer."
"I must go," said Martin. "My name's Martin Howe, S.S.U. 84."
"Oh yes, you are quartered in the square. My name is Merrier. You'll
probably carry me back in your little omnibus."
When Howe got back to where the cars were packed in a row in the
village square, Randolph came up to him and whispered in his ear:
"D.J.'s to-morrow."
"What's that?"
"The attack. It's to-morrow at three in the morning; instructions are
going to be given out to-night."
A detonation behind them was a blow on the head, making their ear-drums
ring. The glass in the headlight of one of the cars tinkled to the ground.
"The 410 behind the church, that was. Pretty near knocks the wind out
of you."
"Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?"
A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he had
been working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away from him.
"It's put off," he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. "D.J.'s not
till day after to-morrow at four twenty. But to-morrow we're going up to
relieve the section that's coming out and take over the posts. They say it's
hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can't smell at all. The
other section's got about five men gassed, and a bunch of them have broken
down. The posts are shelled all the time."
"Great," said Tom Randolph. "We'll see the real thing this time."
There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in a
heap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoed amid
the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypress tree at
the other end of the village street.
"Talk about the real thing!" said Martin.
"Ole 410 evidently woke 'em up some."
It was the fifth time that day that Martin's car had passed the
cross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallen
crucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky where
the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam. The rain
made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped from the cracked
feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure hung out from the
tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of the rain. Martin was
wiping the mud from his hands after changing a wheel. He stared curiously at
the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes that had meant for some country
sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of pain. Suddenly he noticed that where
the crown of thorns had been about the forehead of the Christ someone had
wound barbed wire. He smiled and asked the swaying figure in his mind:
"And You, what do You think of it?"
For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh.
He leaned over to crank the car.
The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops
marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery sunset.
Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat and misery of
troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained and colourless
and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on their necks and their
backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the helmets, tilted to one
side or the other, distorted and wooden like the face of the figure that
dangled from the cross.
Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, came
occasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roads at
the edge of the woods.
Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of the
column.
One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud of
the road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked up at
the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, the sharp
twanging ping of shrapnel bursting.
The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the cross
with his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The cross fell
forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road.
The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at the
bottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spire with
a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, then up the
hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched green and gold in
the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofs covered with
branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doors decorated with
rustic work. At one place a sign announced in letters made of wattled
sticks, Camp des Pommiers.
A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of men
stripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing and splashing
in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, the pong, pong, pong
of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through the rustling trees.
"Looks like a camp meetin' ground in Georgia," said Tom Randolph,
blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on a pole
between them get out of the way.
The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and,
turning into a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at
the turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken
and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped off
halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and of
turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell.
Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right and left with their
great flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from the direction
of the lines.
At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into a
grove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car of their
section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening to occasional shells
whining far overhead. All through the wood was a continuous ping, pong, ping
of batteries, with the crash of a big gun coming now and then like the growl
of a bullfrog among the sing-song of small toads in a pond at night.
Through the trees from which they lay they could see the close-packed
wooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth, and
where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled carts
piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and unloaded and
dragged away again.
Showing alternately dark and light in the sun and shadow of the
woodland road, a cook waggon, short chimney giving out blue smoke, and
cauldrons steaming, clatters ahead of Martin and Randolph; the backs of two
men in heavy blue coats, their helmets showing above the narrow driver's
seat. On either side of the road short yellow flames keep spitting up,
slanting from hidden guns amid a pandemonium of noise.
Up the road a sudden column of black smoke rises among falling trees. A
louder explosion and the cook waggon in front of them vanishes in a new
whirl of thick smoke. Accelerator pressed down, the car plunges along the
rutted road, tips, and a wheel sinks in the new shell-hole. The hind wheels
spin for a moment, spattering gravel about, and just as another roar comes
behind them, bite into the road again and the car goes on, speeding through
the alternate sun and shadow of the woods. Martin remembers the beating legs
of a mule rolling on its back on the side of the road and, steaming in the
fresh morning air, the purple and yellow and red of its ripped belly.
"Did you get the smell of almonds? I sort of like it," says Randolph,
drawing a long breath as the car slowed down again.
The woods at night, fantastic blackness full of noise and yellow
leaping flames from the mouths of guns. Now and then the sulphurous flash of
a shell explosion and the sound of trees falling and shell fragments
swishing through the air. At intervals over a little knoll in the direction
of the trenches, a white star-shell falls slowly, making the trees and the
guns among their tangle of hiding branches cast long green-black shadows,
drowning the wood in a strange glare of desolation.
"Where the devil's the abri?"
Everything drowned in the detonations of three guns, one after the
other, so near as to puff hot air in their faces in the midst of the
in which now and then was the huddled, troubling smell of soldiers. At last
the moon, huge and swollen with gold, set behind the wooded hills, and they
went back to the car, where they rolled up in their blankets and went to
sleep.
Behind the square lantern that rose over the crossing, there was a trap
door in the broken tile roof, from which you could climb to the observation
post in the lantern. Here, half on the roof and half on the platform behind
the trap door, Martin would spend the long summer afternoons when there was
no call for the ambulance, looking at the Gothic windows of the lantern and
the blue sky beyond, where huge soft clouds passed slowly over, darkening
the green of the woods and of the weed-grown fields of the valley with their
moving shadows.
There was almost no activity on that part of the front. A couple of
times a day a few snapping discharges would come from the seventy-fives of
the battery behind the abbey, and the woods would resound like a shaken harp
as the shells passed over to explode on the crest of the hill that blocked
the end of the valley where the Boches were.
Martin would sit and dream of the quiet lives the monks must have
passed in their beautiful abbey so far away in the Forest of the Argonne,
digging and planting in the rich lands of the valley, making flowers bloom
in the garden, of which traces remained in the huge beds of sunflowers and
orange marigolds that bloomed along the walls of the Dormitory. In a room in
the top of the house he had found a few torn remnants of books; there must
have been a library in the old days, rows and rows of musty-smelling volumes
in rich brown calf worn by use to a velvet softness, and in cream-coloured
parchment where the fingermarks of generations showed brown; huge psalters
with notes and chants illuminated in green and ultramarine and gold;
manuscripts out of the Middle Ages with strange script and pictures in pure
vivid colours; lives of saints, thoughts polished by years of quiet
meditation of old divines; old romances of chivalry; tales of blood and
death and love where the crude agony of life was seen through a dawn-like
mist of gentle beauty.
"God! if there were somewhere nowadays where you could flee from all
this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous
reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred . . ." he would say to
himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint
letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in the deep-throated
passionate chanting of the endless offices of the Church.
One afternoon towards evening as he lay on the tiled roof with his
shirt open so that the sun warmed his throat and chest, half asleep in the
beauty of the building and of the woods and the clouds that drifted
overhead, he heard a strain from the organ in the church: a few deep notes
in broken rhythm that filled him with wonder, as if he had suddenly been
transported back to the quiet days of the monks. The rhythm changed in an
instant, and through the squeakiness of shattered pipes came a swirl of
fake-oriental ragtime that resounded like mocking laughter in the old vaults
and arches. He went down into the church and found Tom Randolph playing on
the little organ, pumping desperately with his feet.
"Hello! Impiety I call it; putting your lustful tunes into that pious
old organ."
"I bet the ole monks had a merry time, lecherous ole devils," said Tom,
playing away.
"If there were monasteries nowadays," said Martin, "I think I'd go into
one."
"But there are. I'll end up in one, most like, if they don't put me in
jail first. I reckon every living soul would be a candidate for either one
if it'd get them out of this God-damned war."
There was a shriek overhead that reverberated strangely in the vaults
of the church and made the swallows nesting there fly in and out through the
glassless windows. Tom Randolph stopped on a wild chord.
"Guess they don't like me playin'."
"That one didn't explode though."
"That one did, by gorry," said Randolph, getting up off the floor,
where he had thrown himself automatically. A shower of tiles came rattling
off the roof, and through the noise could be heard the frightened squeaking
of the swallows.
"I am afraid that winged somebody."
"They must have got wind of the ammunition dump in the cellar."
"Hell of a place to put a dressing-station--over an ammunition dump!"
The whitewashed room used as a dressing-station had a smell of blood
stronger than the chloride. A doctor was leaning over a stretcher on which
Martin caught a glimpse of two naked legs with flecks of blood on the white
skin, as he passed through on his way to the car.
"Three stretcher-cases for Les Islettes. Very softly," said the
attendant, handing him the papers.
Jolting over the shell-pitted road, the car wound slowly through
unploughed weed-grown fields. At every jolt came a rasping groan from the
wounded men.
As they came back towards the front posts again, they found all the
batteries along the road firing. The air was a chaos of explosions that
jabbed viciously into their ears, above the reassuring purr of the motor.
Nearly to the abbey a soldier stopped them.
"Put the car behind the trees and get into a dugout. They're shelling
the abbey."
As he spoke a whining shriek grew suddenly loud over their heads. The
soldier threw himself flat in the muddy road. The explosion brought gravel
about their ears and made a curious smell of almonds.
Crowded in the door of the dugout in the hill opposite they watched the
abbey as shell after shell tore through the roof or exploded in the strong
buttresses of the apse. Dust rose high above the roof and filled the air
with an odour of damp tiles and plaster. The woods resounded in a jangling
tremor, with the batteries that started firing one after the other.
"God, I hate them for that!" said Randolph between his teeth.
"What do you want? It's an observation post."
"I know, but damn it!"
There was a series of explosions; a shell fragment whizzed past their
heads.
"It's not safe there. You'd better come in all the way," someone
shouted from within the dugout.
"I want to see; damn it. . . . I'm goin' to stay and see it out, Howe.
That place meant a hell of a lot to me." Randolph blushed as he spoke.
Another bunch of shells crashing so near together they did not hear the
scream. When the cloud of dust blew away, they saw that the lantern had
fallen in on the roof of the apse, leaving only one wall and the tracery of
a window, of which the shattered carving stood out cream-white against the
reddish evening sky.
There was a lull in the firing. A few swallows still wheeled about the
walls, giving shrill little cries.
They saw the flash of a shell against the sky as it exploded in the
part of the tall roof that still remained. The roof crumpled and fell in,
and again dust hid the abbey.
"Oh, I hate this!" said Tom Randolph. "But the question is, what's
happened to our grub? The popote is buried four feet deep in Gothic art. . .
. Damn fool idea, putting a dressing-station over an ammunition dump."
"Is the car hit?" The orderly came up to them.
"Don't think so."
"Good. Four stretcher-cases for 42 at once."
At night in a dugout. Five men playing cards about a lamp-flame that
blows from one side to the other in the gusty wind that puffs every now and
then down the mouth of the dugout and whirls round it like something alive
trying to beat a way out.
Each time the lamp blows the shadows of the five heads writhe upon the
corrugated tin ceiling. In the distance, like kettle-drums beaten for a
dance, a constant reverberation of guns.
Martin Howe, stretched out in the straw of one of the bunks, watches
their faces in the flickering shadows. He wishes he had the patience to play
too. No, perhaps it is better to look on; it would be so silly to be killed
in the middle of one of those grand gestures one makes in slamming the card
down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of all the lives that must, in
these last three years, have ended in that grand gesture. It is too silly.
He seems to see their poor lacerated souls, clutching their greasy dogeared
cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, and there, in tobacco-stinking,
sweat-stinking rooms, like those of the little cafйs behind the lines, sit
in groups of five, shuffling, dealing, taking tricks, always with the same
slam of the cards on the table, pausing now and then to scratch their
louse-eaten flesh.
At this moment, how many men, in all the long Golgotha that stretches
from Belfort to the sea, must be trying to cheat their boredom and their
misery with that grand gesture of slamming the cards down to take a trick,
while in their ears, like tom-toms, pounds the death-dance of the guns.
Martin lies on his back looking up at the curved corrugated ceiling of
the dugout, where the shadows of the five heads writhe in fantastic shapes.
Is it death they are playing, that they are so merry when they take a trick?
THE three planes gleamed like mica in the intense blue of the sky.
Round about the shrapnel burst in little puffs like cotton-wool. A shout
went up from the soldiers who stood in groups in the street of the ruined
town. A whistle split the air, followed by a rending snort that tailed off
into the moaning of a wounded man.
"By damn, they're nervy. They dropped a bomb."
"I should say they did."
"The dirty bastards, to get a fellow who's going on permission. Now if
they beaded you on the way back you wouldn't care."
In the sky an escadrille of French planes had appeared and the three
German specks had vanished, followed by a trail of little puffs of shrapnel.
The indigo dome of the afternoon sky was full of a distant snoring of
motors.
The train screamed outside the station and the permissionaires ran for
the platform, their packed musettes bouncing at their hips.
The dark boulevards, with here and there a blue lamp lighting up a
bench and a few tree-trunks, or a faint glow from inside a closed caf where
a boy in shirt-sleeves is sweeping the floor. Crowds of soldiers, Belgians,
Americans, Canadians, civilians with canes and straw hats and well-dressed
women on their arms, shop-girls in twos and threes laughing with shrill,
merry voices; and everywhere girls of the street, giggling alluringly in
hoarse, dissipated tones, clutching the arms of drunken soldiers, tilting
themselves temptingly in men's way as they walk along. Cigarettes and cigars
make spots of reddish light, and now and then a match lighted makes a man's
face stand out in yellow relief and glints red in the eyes of people round
about.
Drunk with their freedom, with the jangle of voices, with the rustle of
trees in the faint light, with the scents of women's hair and cheap
perfumes, Howe and Randolph stroll along slowly, down one side to the
shadowy columns of the Madeleine, where a few flower-women still offer
roses, scenting the darkness, then back again past the Opra towards the
Porte St. Martin, lingering to look in the offered faces of women, to listen
to snatches of talk, to chatter laughingly with girls who squeeze their arms
with impatience.
"I'm goin' to find the prettiest girl in Paris, and then you'll see the
dust fly, Howe, old man."
The hors d'oeuvres came on a circular three-tiered stand; red strips of
herrings and silver anchovies, salads where green peas and bits of carrot
lurked under golden layers of sauce, sliced tomatoes, potato salad
green-specked with parsley, hard-boiled eggs barely visible under thickness
of vermilion-tinged dressing, olives, radishes, discs of sausage of many
different forms and colours, complicated bundles of spiced salt fish, and,
forming the apex, a fat terra-cotta jar of pвtй de foie gras. Howe poured
out pale-coloured Chablis.
"I used to think that down home was the only place they knew how to
live, but oh, boy . . ." said Tom Randolph, breaking a little loaf of bread
that made a merry crackling sound.
"It's worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months."
After the hors d'oeuvres had been taken away, leaving them
Rabelaisianly gay, with a joyous sense of orgy, came sole hidden in a
cream-coloured sauce with mussels in it.
"After the war, Howe, ole man, let's riot all over Europe; I'm getting
a taste for this sort of livin'."
"You can play the fiddle, can't you, Tom?"
"Enough to scrape out Auprиs de ma blonde on a bet."
"Then we'll wander about and you can support me. Or else I'll dress as
a monkey and you can fiddle and I'll gather the pennies."
"By gum, that'd be great sport."
"Look, we must have some red wine with the veal."
"Let's have Mвcon."
"All the same to me as long as there's plenty of it."
Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and its
piles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantastic
world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'ueuvres things had been evolving to
grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips, crow-like forms
of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involved and jumbled in the
melйe of talk and clink and clatter.
The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormy
sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginings that
had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had been saying,
it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells and the whine
of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms, in trenches,
packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowded behind guns,
involved in telephone apparatus, generals at their dinner-tables, colonels
sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet
and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious
pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would untune the sky. It would
be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with laughter at the sudden vision of
the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers, prisoners working on the
roads, deserters being driven towards the trenches would throw down their
guns and their spades and their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving
in artillery waggons or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards
their capitals, where they would laugh the deputies, the senators, the
congressmen, the M.P.'s out of their chairs, laugh the presidents and the
prime ministers, and kaisers and dictators out of their plush-carpeted
offices; the sun would wear a broad grin and would whisper the joke to the
moon, who would giggle and ripple with it all night long. . . . The red hand
of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse
into the small glasses before them.
"That," said Tom Randolph, when he had half finished his liqueur, "is
the girl for me."
"But, Tom, she's with a French officer."
"They're fighting like cats and dogs. You can see that, can't you?"
"Yes," agreed Howe vaguely.
"Pay the bill. I'll meet you at the corner of the boulevard." Tom
Randolph was out of the door. The girl, who had a little of the aspect of a
pierrot, with dark skin and bright lips and gold-yellow hat and dress, and
the sour-looking officer who was with her, were getting up to go.
At the corner of the boulevard Howe heard a woman's voice joining with
Randolph's rich laugh.
"What did I tell you? They split at the door and here we are, Howe. . .
. Mademoiselle Montreil, let me introduce a friend. Look, before it's too
late, we must have a drink."
At the cafй table next to them an Englishman was seated with his head
sunk on his chest.
"Oh, I say, you woke me up."
"Sorry."
"No harm. Jolly good thing."
They invited him over to their table. There was a moist look about his
eyes and a thickness to his voice that denoted alcohol.
"You mustn't mind me. I'm forgetting. . . . I've been doing it for a
week. This is the first leave I've had in eighteen months. You Canadians?"
"No. Ambulance service; Americans."
"New at the game then. You're lucky. . . . Before I left the front I
saw a man tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of a German
prisoner. The prisoner said, 'Thank you.' The grenade blew him to hell! God!
Know anywhere you can get whisky in this bloody town?"
"We'll have to hurry; it's near closing-time."
"Right-o."
They started off, Randolph and the girl talking intimately, their heads
close together, Martin supporting the Englishman.
"I need a bit o' whisky to put me on my pins."
They tumbled into the seats round a table at an American bar.
The Englishman felt in his pocket.
"Oh, I say," he cried, "I've got a ticket to the theatre. It's a box. .
. . We can all get in. Come along; let's hurry."
They walked a long while, blundering through the dark streets, and at
last stopped at a blue-lighted door.
"Here it is; push in."
"But there are two gentlemen and a lady already in the box, meester."
"No matter, there'll be room." The Englishman waved the ticket in the
air.
The little round man with a round red face who was taking the tickets
stuttered in bad English and then dropped into French. Meanwhile, the whole
party had filed in, leaving the Englishman, who kept waving the ticket in
the little man's face.
Two gendarmes, the theatre guards, came up menacingly; the Englishman's
face wreathed itself in smiles; he linked an arm in each of the gendarmes',
and pushed them towards the bar.
"Come drink to the Entente Cordiale. . . . Vive la France!"
In the box were two Australians and a woman who leaned her head on the
chest of one and then the other alternately, laughing so that you could see
the gold caps in her black teeth.
They were annoyed at the intrusion that packed the box insupportably
tight, so that the woman had to sit on the men's laps, but the air soon
cleared in laughter that caused people in the orchestra to stare angrily at
the box full of noisy men in khaki. At last the Englishman came, squeezing
himself in with a finger mysteriously on his lips. He plucked at Martin's
arm, a serious set look coming suddenly over his grey eyes. "It was like
this"--his breath laden with whisky was like a halo round Martin's
head--"the Hun was a nice little chap, couldn't 'a' been more than eighteen;
had a shoulder broken and he thought that my pal was fixing the pillow. He
said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent. . . . Mind you, he said 'Thank
you'; that's what hurt. And the man laughed. God damn him, he laughed when
the poor devil said 'Thank you.' And the grenade blew him to hell."
The stage was a glare of light in Martin's eyes; he felt as he had when
at home he had leaned over and looked straight into the headlight of an auto
drawn up to the side of the road. Screening him from the glare were the
backs of people's heads: Tom Randolph's head and his girl's, side by side,
their cheeks touching, the pointed red chin of one of the Australians and
the frizzy hair of the other woman.
In the entr'acte they all stood at the bar, where it was very hot and
an orchestra was playing and there were many men in khaki in all stages of
drunkenness, being led about by women who threw jokes at each other behind
the men's backs.
"Here's to mud," said one of the Australians. "The war'll end when
everybody is drowned in mud."
The orchestra began playing the Madelon and everyone roared out the
marching song that, worn threadbare as it was, still had a roistering verve
to it that caught people's blood.
People had gone back for the last act. The two Australians, the
Englishman, and the two Americans still stood talking.
"Mind you, I'm not what you'd call susceptible. I'm not soft. I got
over all that long ago." The Englishman was addressing the company in
general. "But the poor beggar said 'Thank you.'"
"What's he saying?" asked a woman, plucking at Martin s arm.
"He's telling about a German atrocity."
"Oh, the dirty Germans! What things they've done!" the woman answered
mechanically.
Somehow, during the entr'acte, the Australians had collected another
woman; and a strange fat woman with lips painted very small, and very large
bulging eyes, had attached herself to Martin. He suffered her because every
time he looked at her she burst out laughing.
The bar was closing. They had a drink of champagne all round that made
the fat woman give little shrieks of delight. They drifted towards the door,
and stood, a formless, irresolute group, in the dark street in front of the
theatre.
Randolph came up to Martin.
"Look. We're goin'. I wonder if I ought to leave my money with you . .
."
"I doubt if I'm a safe person to-night.""
"All right. I'll take it along. Look . . . let's meet for breakfast."
"At the Cafй de la Paix."
"All right. If she is nice I'll bring her."
"She looks charming."
Tom Randolph pressed Martin's hand and was off. There was a sound of a
kiss in the darkness.
"I say, I've got to have something to eat," said the Englishman. "I
didn't have a bit of dinner. I say-- mangai, mangai." He made gestures of
putting things into his mouth in the direction of the fat woman.
The three women put their heads together. One of them knew a place, but
it was a dreadful place. Really, they mustn't think that. . . . She only
knew it because when she was very young a man had taken her there who wanted
to seduce her.
At that everyone laughed and the voices of the women rose shrill.
"All right, don't talk; let's go there," said one of the Australians.
"We'll attend to the seducing."
A thick woman, a tall comb in the back of her high-piled black hair,
and an immovable face with jaw muscled like a prize-fighter's, served them
with cold chicken and ham and champagne in a room with mouldering greenish
wall-paper lighted by a red-shaded lamp.
The Australians ate and sang and made love to their women. The
Englishman went to sleep with his head on the table.
Martin leaned back out of the circle of light, keeping up a desultory
conversation with the woman beside him, listening to the sounds of the men's
voices down corridors, of the front door being opened and slammed again and
again, and of forced, shrill giggles of women.
"Unfortunately, I have an engagement to-night," said Martin to the
woman beside him, whose large spherical breasts heaved as she talked, and
who rolled herself nearer to him invitingly, seeming with her round pop-eyes
and her round cheeks to be made up entirely of small spheres and large soft
ones.
"Oh, but it is too late. You can break it."
"It's at four o'clock."
"Then we have time, ducky."
"It's something really romantic, you see."
"The young are always lucky." She rolled her eyes in sympathetic
admiration.
"This will be the fourth night this week that I have not made a sou . .
. . I'll chuck myself into the river soon."
Martin felt himself softening towards her. He slipped a twenty-franc
note in her hand.
"Oh, you are too good. You are really galant homme, you."
Martin buried his face in his hands, dreaming of the woman he would
like to love to-night. She should be very dark, with red lips and stained
cheeks, like Randolph's girl; she should have small breasts and slender,
dark, dancer's thighs, and in her arms he could forget everything but the
madness and the mystery and the intricate life of Paris about them. He
thought of Montmartre, and Louise in the opera standing at her window
singing the madness of Paris. . . .
One of the Australians had gone away with a little woman in a pink
negligйe. The other Australian and the Englishman were standing unsteadily
near the table, each supported by a sleepy-looking girl. Leaving the fat
woman sadly finishing the remains of the chicken, large tears rolling from
her eyes, they left the house and walked for a long time down dark streets,
three men and two women, the Englishman being supported in the middle,
singing in a desultory fashion.
They stopped under a broken sign of black letters on greyish glass,
within which one feeble electric light bulb made a red glow. The pavement
was wet, and glimmered where it slanted up to the lamp-post at the next
corner.
"Here we are. Come along, Janey," cried the Australian in a brisk
voice.
The door opened and slammed again. Martin and the other girl stood on
the pavement facing each other. The Englishman collapsed on the doorstep,
and began to snore.
"Well, there's only you and me," she said.
"Oh, if you were only a person, instead of being a member of a
profession----" said Martin softly.
"No, dearie. I must go," said Martin.
"As you will. I'll take care of your friend." She yawned.
He kissed her and stumbled down the dark stairs, his nostrils full of
the smell of the rouge on her lips.
He walked a long while with his hat off, breathing deep of the sharp
night air. The streets were black and silent. Intemperate desires prowled
about him like cats in the darkness.
He woke up and stretched himself stiffly, smelling grass and damp
earth. A pearly lavender mist was all about him, through which loomed the
square towers of Notre Dame and the row of kings across the faзade and the
sculpture about the darkness of the doorways. He had lain down on his back
on the little grass plot of the Parvis Notre Dame to look at the stars, and
had fallen asleep.
It must be nearly dawn. Words were droning importunately in his head.
"The poor beggar said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent and the grenade
blew him to hell." He remembered the man he had once helped to pick up in
whose pocket a grenade had exploded. Before that he had not realized that
torn flesh was such a black red, like sausage meat.
"Get up, you can't lie there," cried a gendarme.
"Notre Dame is beautiful in the morning," said Martin, stepping across
the low rail on to the pavement.
"Ah, yes; it is beautiful."
Martin Howe sat on the rail of the bridge and looked. Before him, with
nothing distinct yet to be seen, were two square towers and the tracery
between them and the row of kings on the faзade, and the long series of
flying buttresses of the flank, gleaming through the mist, and, barely
visible, the dark, slender spire soaring above the crossing. So had the
abbey in the forest gleamed tall in the misty moonlight; like mist, only
drab and dense, the dust had risen above the tall apse as the shells tore it
to pieces.
Amid a smell of new-roasted coffee he sat at a table and watched people
pass briskly through the ruddy sunlight. Waiters in shirt-sleeves were
rubbing off the other tables and putting out the chairs. He sat sipping
coffee, feeling languid and nerveless. After a while Tom Randolph, looking
very young and brown with his hat a little on one side, came along. With
him, plainly dressed in blue serge, was the girl. They sat down and she
dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes with her dark lashes.
"Oh, I am so tired."
"Poor child! You must go home and go back to bed."
"But I've got to go to work."
"Poor thing." They kissed each other tenderly and languidly.
The waiter came with coffee and hot milk and little crisp loaves of
bread.
"Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!" said Martin.
"Indeed it is. . . . Good-bye, little girl, if you must go. We'll see
each other again."
"You must call me Yvonne." She pouted a little. "All right, Yvonne." He
got to his feet and pressed her two hands.
"Well, what sort of a time did you have, Howe?"
"Curious. I lost our friends one by one, left two women and slept a
little while on the grass in front of Notre Dame. That was my real love of
the night."
"My girl was charming. . . . Honestly, I'd marry her in a minute." He
laughed a merry laugh.
"Let's take a cab somewhere."
They climbed into a victoria and told the driver to go to the
Madeleine.
"Look, before I do anything else I must go to the hotel."
"Why?"
"Preventives."
"Of course; you'd better go at once."
The cab rattled merrily along the streets where the early sunshine cast
rusty patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantastic chimney-pots
that rose in clusters and hedges from the mansard roofs.
THE lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on the
white wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed and scalloped
and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men passing. Now
and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chin under a helmet, a
head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a pack alone beside which
slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic with its loaf of bread and its
pair of shoes and its pots and pans.
Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train of
artillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by the lamp
into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of the village
street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks' tails from
between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition, huge
waggons hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment that catches
fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the white wall of the
house.
"Put that light out. Name of God, do you want to have them start
chucking shells into here?" comes a voice shrill with anger. The brisk trot
of the officer's horse is lost in the clangour.
The door of the hut slams to and only a thin ray of orange light
penetrates into the blackness of the road, where with jingle of harness and
clatter of iron and tramp of hoofs, gun after gun, caisson after caisson,
waggon after waggon files by. Now and then the passing stops entirely and
matches flare where men light pipes and cigarettes. Coming from the other
direction with throbbing of motors, a convoy of camions, huge black oblongs,
grinds down the other side of the road. Horses rear and there are shouts and
curses and clacking of reins in the darkness.
Far away where the lowering clouds meet the hills beyond the village a
white glare grows and fades again at intervals: star-shells.
"There's a most tremendous concentration of sanitary sections."
"You bet; two American sections and a French one in this village; three
more down the road. Something's up."
"There's goin' to be an attack at St. Mihiel, a Frenchman told me."
"I heard that the Germans were concentrating for an offensive in the
Four de Paris."
"Damned unlikely."
"Anyway, this is the third week we've been in this bloody hold with our
feet in the mud."
"They've got us quartered in a barn with a regular brook flowing
through the middle of it."
"The main thing about this damned war is ennui--just plain boredom."
"Not forgetting the mud."
Three ambulance drivers in slickers were on the front seat of a car.
The rain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the car and
on the puddles that filled the village street. Streaming with water,
blackened walls of ruined houses rose opposite them above a rank growth of
weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slithering through
the rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy of camions went by
and disappeared, truck after truck, in the white streaming rain.
Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing an accordion, letting strange
nostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain.
"Oh, I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away."
The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off their
knees and hummed the song.
The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on the
floor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly,
rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured
puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning
self-pity of the old coon song:
"I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away."
"Oh, God, something's got to happen soon."
Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the section
leader splashed across the road.
"All cars must be ready to leave at six to-night."
"Yay. Where we goin'?"
"Orders haven't come yet. We're to be in readiness to leave at six
to-night. . . ."
"I tell you, fellers, there's goin' to be an attack. This concentration
of sanitary sections means something. You can't tell me . . ."
"They say they have beer," said the aspirant behind Martin in the long
line of men who waited in the hot sun for the copй to open, while the dust
the staff cars and camions raised as they whirred by on the road settled in
a blanket over the village.
"Cold beer?"
"Of course not," said the aspirant, laughing so that all the brilliant
ivory teeth showed behind his red lips. "It'll be detestable. I'm getting it
because it's rare, for sentimental reasons."
Martin laughed, looking in the man's brown face, a face in which all
past expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth and eyes
and in the modelling of the cheeks and temples.
"You don't understand that," said the aspirant again.
"Indeed I do."
Later they sat on the edge of the stone well-head in the courtyard
behind the store, drinking warm beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, and
staring at a tall barn that had crumpled at one end so that it looked, with
its two frightened little square windows, like a cow kneeling down.
"Is it true that the ninety-second's going up to the lines to-night?"
"Yes, we're going up to make a little attack. Probably I'll come back
in your little omnibus."
"I hope you won't."
"I'd be very glad to. A lucky wound! But I'll probably be killed. This
is the first time I've gone up to the front that I didn't expect to be
killed. So it'll probably happen."
Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat at
ease on the stone margin of the well, leaning against the wrought iron
support for the bucket, one knee clasped in his strong, heavily veined
hands. Dead he would be different. Martin's mind could hardly grasp the
connection between this man full of latent energies, full of thoughts and
desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put his arm
round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go for long walks,
with whom he would have liked to sit long into the night drinking and
talking--and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniform half-buried in the
mud of ditches.
"Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to abattoir on a fine
May morning?" asked the aspirant in a scornful, jaunty tone, as if he had
guessed Martin's thoughts.
"I wonder what they think of it."
"It's not that I'm resigned. . . . Don't think that. Resignation is too
easy. That's why the herd can be driven by a boy of six . . . or a prime
minister!"
Martin was sitting with his arms crossed. The fingers of one hand were
squeezing the muscle of his forearm. It gave him pleasure to feel the
smooth, firm modelling of his arm through his sleeve. And how would that
feel when it was dead, when a steel splinter had slithered through it? A
momentary stench of putrefaction filled his nostrils, making his stomach
contract with nausea.
"I'm not resigned either," he shouted in a laugh. "I am going to do
something some day, but first I must see. I want to be initiated in all the
circles of hell."
"I'd play the part of Virgil pretty well," said the aspirant, "but I
suppose Virgil was a staff officer."
"I must go," said Martin. "My name's Martin Howe, S.S.U. 84."
"Oh yes, you are quartered in the square. My name is Merrier. You'll
probably carry me back in your little omnibus."
When Howe got back to where the cars were packed in a row in the
village square, Randolph came up to him and whispered in his ear:
"D.J.'s to-morrow."
"What's that?"
"The attack. It's to-morrow at three in the morning; instructions are
going to be given out to-night."
A detonation behind them was a blow on the head, making their ear-drums
ring. The glass in the headlight of one of the cars tinkled to the ground.
"The 410 behind the church, that was. Pretty near knocks the wind out
of you."
"Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?"
A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he had
been working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away from him.
"It's put off," he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. "D.J.'s not
till day after to-morrow at four twenty. But to-morrow we're going up to
relieve the section that's coming out and take over the posts. They say it's
hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can't smell at all. The
other section's got about five men gassed, and a bunch of them have broken
down. The posts are shelled all the time."
"Great," said Tom Randolph. "We'll see the real thing this time."
There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in a
heap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoed amid
the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypress tree at
the other end of the village street.
"Talk about the real thing!" said Martin.
"Ole 410 evidently woke 'em up some."
It was the fifth time that day that Martin's car had passed the
cross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallen
crucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky where
the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam. The rain
made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped from the cracked
feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure hung out from the
tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of the rain. Martin was
wiping the mud from his hands after changing a wheel. He stared curiously at
the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes that had meant for some country
sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of pain. Suddenly he noticed that where
the crown of thorns had been about the forehead of the Christ someone had
wound barbed wire. He smiled and asked the swaying figure in his mind:
"And You, what do You think of it?"
For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh.
He leaned over to crank the car.
The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops
marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery sunset.
Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat and misery of
troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained and colourless
and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on their necks and their
backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the helmets, tilted to one
side or the other, distorted and wooden like the face of the figure that
dangled from the cross.
Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, came
occasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roads at
the edge of the woods.
Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of the
column.
One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud of
the road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked up at
the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, the sharp
twanging ping of shrapnel bursting.
The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the cross
with his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The cross fell
forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road.
The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at the
bottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spire with
a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, then up the
hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched green and gold in
the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofs covered with
branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doors decorated with
rustic work. At one place a sign announced in letters made of wattled
sticks, Camp des Pommiers.
A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of men
stripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing and splashing
in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, the pong, pong, pong
of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through the rustling trees.
"Looks like a camp meetin' ground in Georgia," said Tom Randolph,
blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on a pole
between them get out of the way.
The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and,
turning into a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at
the turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken
and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped off
halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and of
turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell.
Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right and left with their
great flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from the direction
of the lines.
At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into a
grove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car of their
section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening to occasional shells
whining far overhead. All through the wood was a continuous ping, pong, ping
of batteries, with the crash of a big gun coming now and then like the growl
of a bullfrog among the sing-song of small toads in a pond at night.
Through the trees from which they lay they could see the close-packed
wooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth, and
where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled carts
piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and unloaded and
dragged away again.
Showing alternately dark and light in the sun and shadow of the
woodland road, a cook waggon, short chimney giving out blue smoke, and
cauldrons steaming, clatters ahead of Martin and Randolph; the backs of two
men in heavy blue coats, their helmets showing above the narrow driver's
seat. On either side of the road short yellow flames keep spitting up,
slanting from hidden guns amid a pandemonium of noise.
Up the road a sudden column of black smoke rises among falling trees. A
louder explosion and the cook waggon in front of them vanishes in a new
whirl of thick smoke. Accelerator pressed down, the car plunges along the
rutted road, tips, and a wheel sinks in the new shell-hole. The hind wheels
spin for a moment, spattering gravel about, and just as another roar comes
behind them, bite into the road again and the car goes on, speeding through
the alternate sun and shadow of the woods. Martin remembers the beating legs
of a mule rolling on its back on the side of the road and, steaming in the
fresh morning air, the purple and yellow and red of its ripped belly.
"Did you get the smell of almonds? I sort of like it," says Randolph,
drawing a long breath as the car slowed down again.
The woods at night, fantastic blackness full of noise and yellow
leaping flames from the mouths of guns. Now and then the sulphurous flash of
a shell explosion and the sound of trees falling and shell fragments
swishing through the air. At intervals over a little knoll in the direction
of the trenches, a white star-shell falls slowly, making the trees and the
guns among their tangle of hiding branches cast long green-black shadows,
drowning the wood in a strange glare of desolation.
"Where the devil's the abri?"
Everything drowned in the detonations of three guns, one after the
other, so near as to puff hot air in their faces in the midst of the