Emmanuel Bourcier

“ Along the platform we fall in line as well as possible in the dark, our knapsacks on our backs, and, over all, the rain.
“Forward.”
We reach a road; a road that feels hard under the feet. A damp chill arises from the invisible earth and the rain glues our clothing to our skins. Our shoes are heavy with mud. We march. Each follows the comrade who stumbles along ahead, and whom one can hardly see. One hears only the rustling of the trees, the confused sound of steps, a brief exclamation, an oath. We go straight ahead where we are led; through the dark toward the unknown. ”

“ All France and all the world had their eyes on Verdun the inviolable; on Verdun surrounded by flames, in the vortex of action; on Verdun, which did not weaken. Without respite, the Teutonic masses were hurled to the assault. Like a sea of mud they poured upon the outposts of the city. They were beaten down by grenades, shells, machine-guns, fire, shot, and powder; and They did not pass!
All about were scenes most thrilling. It would be impossible to recount them all. We must choose only one or two. ”

“ Men have never created a human prayer more sublime than art thou, bombarded. The German shell believed it had power to destroy thee. It has crushed thine arches and broken thy wings. Thou hadst no need of wings to soar. As a spirit of light thou hast floated above the city; now thou rulest over the city the war, and France; as a symbol, thou art resplendent over all the world. Rheims, thou wert the shrine of France; broken, thou art become her emblem. Thou art no longer ours alone. Thy majesty rises unshaken, triumphant, a divine intelligence facing savage cruelty ”

“ Artillery! This which we look down upon is the Front. There, below us, at a considerable distance still, they are fighting. With throbbing hearts, eager to advance, to arrive at the place destined for us, we peer into the cannon-starred curtain of the night.
But the march continues to be slow. One slips on the muddy ground, one skids, one swears. As we go down the hill the stirring sight is blotted out like dying fireworks, and we are once more in a shut-in road, whose embankments add to the blackness and cut off all outlook. ”

“ It is a French town which is the prey of flames, the first one we have seen thus consumed before our eyes, in the horror of darkness; while on the highroad rolls constantly the flood of refugees, carts, wagons, carriages, all sorts of conveyances of town and country, jumbled together with bicycles and pedestrians, the turbulent throng of a province in flight, of a people driven by a horde.
In subtle ways the fort itself has changed character. It breathes war. Sand-bags are placed about the walls, sentinels watch on the ramparts, orders are given and received under the arches. ”

“ Society impels and guides him. He is no longer the soldier of a people, he is the soldier of a principle. He fights for the triumph of ideals that are noble, ideals that are just, ideals that are free. He assists at the ghastly death-throes of an autocracy which can live only through his enslavement. He knows the price of a revolution: some men must die that others may live. He accepts it. He knows not just how great must be his sacrifice. He knows only that he is resigned.
I saw all this among my comrades. ”

“ He is in a sector of great commotion, where ruins pile upon ruins; where the very earth under his feet explodes; where a fresh drive is being pushed; where no minute is without its danger. There is the patrol toward the enemy’s lines, the life underground, the sky shot with airplanes, the shrapnel overhead and the mine under feet. There is the torpedo coming with its ugly growl; there are all the changing forms in which death beckons—the Grim Monster which prowls and shrieks; there is the agony renewed. ”

“ We dug in the earth, as did all the rest; we watched at the parapets with eyes puffed from lack of sleep. Uncouthness grew upon us, and we appeared, at dawn, in the glacial cold, muffled up in pieces of cloth and skins of animals; hairy, hideous, and fearsome.
We were on patrol duty one night. Creeping about, we passed the listening-post and advanced on No Man’s Land. Like savages, we stalked the enemy for hours, trying to surprise some unknown men: soldiers like ourselves, who might be lost between the lines; men anxious like ourselves, and like ourselves afraid of death and suffering. ”

“ The most critical moment was approaching: the dawning of day, that troubled moment when fatigue crushes the shoulders of the most valiant, when the vision confuses distances and blurs objects, when all one’s surroundings take on a strange, uncanny appearance. Dawn, lustreless and gray, the dawn of a day of rain, rising sulkily, drippingly, coming pale and wan to meet men broken by an anxious vigil, is not a pleasing fairy, is not the divine Aurora with fingers of light ”

“ One would have lived in a world of work, with its pains and pleasures, founding a family and rearing his children. One would have lived as lived his father; one would have had a wife like his mother; one would have pursued happiness. But this dream is one of peace. Now, “C’est la Guerre.” The giant struggle passes the control of men, and its unknown end is still far off. One no longer fights merely for his home, his land, his own well-being. ”

“ We laughed like healthy young men without a care, men who have no dread of the morrow, and who know that, whatever may happen, the soup will be boiled and the bread will come from the oven when it is needed. We had not yet become really grave, certainly no one had suffered, when, our task of preparing the fort completed, we went to the embankment and witnessed the ghastly procession of fugitives. That froze the heart of each of us. So many old men, women, and children, thrown out at random, thrown out to the fierce hazard of flight, stripped of all their possessions! ”

“ One followed the communication-trench, took up gun or shovel, as the order might happen to be, and became either soldier or laborer; or, more often, both at once. Everything was done at night. Everything was dismal, dangerous, frightful. There was no real repose, no relaxation. The incessant shell-fire added its horror to our other discomforts and dangers. The shell! that insensate creature of chance, which bursts over the innocent, scatters its fragments over the plain, and in stupid indifference crushes a clod of earth or snuffs out the lives of a hundred [123] human beings. ”

“ Massed near the field of carnage, the bivouacked troops were in readiness. Each company had its rôle, and each was ready. Each knew at what hour to join the dance. They were going to pierce through, they would pass! Comrades exchanged encouragement and last promises. All hoped to survive, and pursue the routed foe in a sweeping victory.
Our regiment, like others, awaited the call. It had no active part in the festivity, but was present. This was for us a poignant grief. In our sector, not a sound. The cannon were as silent as if every living thing had become a mere spectator of the drama. ”

“ Near us our comrades were fighting in a veritable furnace; they were living the apotheosis of supreme minutes, living the glory of combat, amidst an uproar of shells: in suffering of the flesh and in the beauty of sublime Adventure. We envied them. We mounted to the extreme edge of the embankments, to the parapets of the trenches, that we might see farther and follow more closely the movement of the drama; that we might breathe the odor of battle and grasp its splendor. ”

“ One wanders about and knows not what to do. One fellow has some playing-cards and opens a game. We smoke, and dream, and sew, and clean our arms. We await our turn at sentry duty. It rains. We yawn. The sun comes out, one risks his life to pay a visit to his neighbors. The picturesque ceases to be, by reason of familiarity. One sees nothing of that which at first fixed his attention. The deep trench where crazy grasses hang is a road [150] only too well trodden. The mess is stale, the card-game stupid. One is bored to death and utterly worthless. ”

“ In spite of their good-will and stoutness of heart, neither of them was able to endure the strain of military life for any considerable period. A soldier should be a man of robust physique and unfailing morale. He should be able to withstand heat and cold, hunger and thirst, nights without sleep and the dull agony of weariness. He should have a heart of stone in a body of steel. The will alone is not enough to sustain the body when worn by fatigue, when tortured by hunger, when one must march instead of sleep, or fight instead of eat. ”

“ One does not fight all the time. The vigil is constant, but the struggle is not. There is the incessant watching of the field in front, the unrelaxed tension of stalking the enemy; and at the rear the staleness of inaction. ”

“ We fired more rapidly. The gas was dissipating, but the night was becoming thick. Our only light was the blazing city of Rheims and the glow of shells. The pandemonium increased. One could distinguish only his immediate neighbor, lifting his gun, firing, recoiling from the discharge, replacing the spent cartridge with a full one. The pungent taste of burnt powder penetrated the throat. We sweat. We no longer feared. We pulled the trigger; we were fighting, we were defending the soil, the trench, the sector, in a blind rage. They should not take it! They should give up; they should fall back. ”

“ Thus he was saved; but how many remained on the route, easy prey for brutal German soldiers, and how many died, their names unknown! The plains of Thierache and of the Aisne alone know how many fell by the way, victims of exhaustion, during the great retreat, when the foul enemy already scented Paris and believed it within his grasp; superhuman retreat, which spread for the foe the snare of the Marne, that miracle which the passing centuries will hold in remembrance. ”

“ In the French army the Parisian has the reputation of being an excellent soldier; very alert, of great endurance, light-hearted, and agreeable, with a keen sense of humor which sweeps away gloom and dispels melancholy. He is also a bit hot-headed and does not yield readily to discipline. The leaders know the admirable results they can obtain by appealing to the vanity or the sentiment of the Parisian, and that he is capable of almost any effort is freely admitted. They fear, however, his caustic humor, his facile raillery and his eternal joking, which sometimes endanger their prestige. ”

“ And he, who has escaped the jaws of death, who by a miracle has come out of the destruction, who feels with strangeness the new pulses of life, he runs about to see his friends, he shakes the burden from his thought, he amuses himself—and finally is aware that the time has passed like a flash of lightning and he must again depart. ”

“ A railroad-embankment with its rails in place, its telegraph-poles still standing and occasionally a flagman’s house still in good condition, hid us from the enemy. At one bound we glued ourselves to this embankment, flattening our bodies on the ground; for the German shells continued to lash the air, while out on the plain gray puffs marked their explosions. ”

“ We went where we were sent, passing trains of terror-stricken refugees; speeding without stop along the sentinel-guarded way; passing Paris, then Laon, and finally arriving in the middle of the night in a darkened city; a terror-torn city, whose people gathered at the station to receive us as liberators, acclaiming our uniform as if it were the presage of victory, as if it betokened a sure defense, capable of rolling back the threatening enemy and giving deliverance from danger.
Poor people: I see them still in the touching warmth of their welcome. ”

“ Yes, while the destiny of the world hung in the balance, while the most formidable struggle the earth had ever seen was in progress, we were packed into boxes on wheels, we were shunted about and loitered on the rails like so much useless merchandise. ”

“ All the slopes which form the heights of the Meuse and are the ramparts of Gaul, resounded as a monster forge. There Vulcan had set up his furnaces. Such a battle is too great to be recounted. It is the story of Thavannes, whose immense tunnel of approach sheltered a whole battalion at a time. It is the story of the fall of Douaumont; then the siege of indomitable Vaux, dauntless, resisting, panting, quivering like a drum. There the shells fall at the rate of ten per minute. ”

“ Ten times the German hurled his force against the fortifications, and ten times he fell back, baffled. The garrison stood its ground in a furnace of the damned. New men entered by a breach, followed a narrow path, found the postern gate, and leaped in. For every man who came, came a shell. Overhead twenty airplanes circled about, directing the fire, like vultures above the eagle’s nest; while the cannon on the surrounding heights converged their fire. ”