Georges Duhamel

“ Rabot did not answer; but in his usual way he blinked his eyes, like a child who fears a blow.
“Ah, Rabot!” said the lady in green, “what gratitude do we not owe you, who have guarded safely for us our dear France! But, Rabot, you have already gained the great reward. Glory! The joy of battle! The exquisite agony of plunging forward, your bayonet shining in the sun! The pleasure of plunging the iron of vengeance into the bleeding side of the enemy! And then the suffering—divine suffering to be endured for the sake of all; the sacred wound which, [Pg 115] of a hero, makes a god! ”

“ In spite of the sinister life of the battlefield, I was to be in the presence of a form of death new and terrible in its duration. It is hardly possible to live without at every moment visualising what is going to happen at the next; and it was tragic to bear in one’s consciousness a certainty which froze, at birth, every plan and intention. Illness creates, in ordinary life, like conditions; but their misery is tempered by hope, or even by the relief which comes from resignation. ”

“ Fatigue, the blinding light, the booming of the guns, the rumble of the machinery acted as a sort of lucid drug on my brain. I remained fixed where I was, in a veritable whirl of thought. Everything here worked for one’s good ... it was civilisation finding within itself the supreme reply, the corrective to its destructive excesses; nothing less than this complex organism would suffice to reduce by the smallest degree the immense evil creation of the machine age. I thought again of the indecipherable look of the savage, and my emotion was a mixture of pity, anger and loathing.... ”

“ Suddenly I felt that the word was going to be uttered; that it was ripe, fertile, bursting; that it was going to spring out of my head—escape—and alight, in turn, on every mouth that was speaking there.
“You cannot,” said M. Briavoine, “ask Frenchmen to accept without question an authority that has no bounds. I will even admit without any shame that our race is the least disciplined in the world.”
“Authority, like alcohol, is a poison which makes man mad,” said a spectacled young man with sharp looks.
“I thoroughly agree,” cried the doctor. ”

“ We often climbed the hill which looked over the plain of Rheims. Military life seemed, like the sap of the plants, to be getting stiff and cold and withdrawing into the earth. The armies were preparing for their winter sleep. The guns boomed wearily and without vigour. The bareness of the trees revealed the signs of war which during summer were hidden beneath the foliage.
Autumn made me feel more acutely the [Pg 87] fate that was to strike down my friend, and Dauche himself made me realise with a cruel relentlessness the fate of all men. ”

“ It was in the month of October 1915 that I made the acquaintance of Lieutenant Dauche.
I can never recall that time without deep emotion. We had been living, before Sapigneul, through weeks of fire. The Champagne offensive had for long been rumbling on our right, and its farthest eddies seemed to break on our sector, as the waves scattered by a hurricane that spends itself in the open sea. For three days our guns had made reply to those of Pouilleuse, and we had waited, rifles at hand, for an order which never came. ”

“ The whole tribunal looks at them with astonishment, as at pieces of golden ore in a handful of mud.
They pass with a proud, rather forced smile. Again the procession begins of pathetic [Pg 148] ugliness, terrors, despairs, incurable and ravaged fears. The tribunal made one think of a jagged cliff against which persons are dashed like sea-birds blown by a storm.
The doctors show signs of exhaustion. The oldest, who is rather deaf, throws himself doggedly into his work, like a boar into the thicket. The young doctor is obviously suffering and irritated. ”

“ We were walking along the plateau, which stood out before heaven, erect as an altar, piled with millions of creatures ready for the sacrifice.
It had been dry for several days, and we lived under the rule of King Dust. The dust is the price we pay for fine weather: it attacks the fighting pack, intrudes upon its work, its food and its thoughts; it makes your lips filthy, your teeth crunch, and your eyes inflamed. But when it disappears the reign of mud begins, and then we passionately desire to stagnate again in the dust. ”

“ Since that time I have often thought of the incident whenever, as on that night, I have turned, with love and anguish, towards the past and towards the future of these men of France—my brothers who, in such great numbers, have given themselves up to die and are not ashamed to utter the thoughts that lie nearest the heart; whose nobility of soul, and unyielding intelligence and pathetic simplicity, the world appreciates too little. ”

“ What is really amazing, in a large station, is that the organising imperative will which directs the rush of moving things lies hidden behind an apparent state of chaos and entanglement. We began to walk along lines of trucks that never ended. They seemed to have been left there and forgotten [Pg 126] since the beginning of the war—rolling-stock that appeared to have had its day, with stiffened axles and couplings devoured by rust; but suddenly our lamp would light up an open door, and some soldiers were seen in a heap, sleeping on the straw, or there were cattle with stupefied looks. ”

“ We [Pg 118] tore it up abstractedly, like men who are obliged to work their muscles in order to think more freely.
A little grape-vine was growing at our feet and reached, with two graceful efforts, a ridge of earth gleaming with the freshness of wet grass. It was a neat, pure little vine of Champagne, bursting with juice, cared for like a divine and sacred thing. No wild plants; nothing but the stubbly vine-stock and the soil—that rich soil which the rains wash away and which, each season, the peasants carry up again, on their backs, right to the summit of the hills. ”

“ My absurd stretcher-bearers, unable to fall in with each other’s movements, stumbled like broken-kneed, miserable nags, causing the wounded to scream with pain. In a nibbling, haphazard sort of way, they tried to deal with the waiting masses of the injured, and the whole A.C.A. seemed to stamp with impatience. The effect was rather like a human meat factory which has its machinery going at full strength without being fed with oil and materials.
I must really describe the A.C.A. to you. In war slang it means an automatic hospital (“autochir”) —the latest thing in surgical invention. ”

“ Our villages were packed to suffocation. Man had got everywhere, like a plague or a flood.
He had driven the cattle from their shelter and fixed his abode in hutches, stables and cowsheds.
The shell depôts seemed like pottery fields full of earthenware pitchers. Barges floated on the slimy water of the canal. Some carried food and guns: others served as hospital-boats.
From the movements of this heaving mass of beings and the creaking of their machinery, the panting of a giant seemed to issue forth and fill the silence. ”

“ A frivolous young man, short-sighted, with a turned-up nose, added in a tense voice:
“Ought to be done, you know—our honour....”
And they went on gravely chatting and gulped down cupfuls of a hot brew which was poured from a metal jug. From another angle in the tent the scene was very different. The men were lying down: they had grave wounds. Placed side by side on the uneven [Pg 39] ground, they made a mosaic of pain stained with mud and blood, the colours of war; reeking with sweat and corruption, the smells of war; noisy with cries, moans and hiccups which are the sounds and music of war. ”

“ The door of the operating theatre opened at this point, and the waiting-room was flooded with light. A voice cried:
“The next lot! And the belly chap first!”
The black bearers adjusted their straps, and the two talkers were carried off. I followed the stretchers.
Imagine a shining rectangular block set in sheer night like a jewel in coal. The door closed again, and I found myself imprisoned in that light, which was reflected from the spotless canvas of the ceiling. The floor, level and springy, was strewn with red soaked linen which the orderlies picked up quickly with forceps. ”

“ It never struck me—naturally enough—that the doctor was in fact thinking of Dauche.
Several days went by, blessed with all that is warm, young, affectionate in a growing [Pg 73] friendship. The war, among a thousand other miseries, has compelled us to live occasionally in the company of men whom in time of peace we should have carefully avoided. It was, then, with a trembling joy that I recognised in Dauche those qualities which would move my nature to love and affection—a nature which had ever perhaps been unduly difficult and uneasy. ”

“ One never got tired in Revaud’s room. The roar of the war, the rumbling of transport waggons, the spasmodic shocks of the gunfire, all the whistling and gasping sounds of the killing machine beat against the windows with a spent fury, as in the shelter of a creek resound the echoes of a storm raging in the open sea. ”

“ In the evening, when the approach of darkness tended to bring back to the mind the awful things one had experienced and made one withdraw into oneself, he used cheerfully to ask me to have a game of chess, and this game of skill took us on to the threshold of sleep.
The pleasure I had in the company of Dauche led me one day to tell the doctor how much I admired his character.
The doctor, who was ceasing to be young, was tall, rather bent and bald, with a sad, timid, and kind smile on his face half-hidden by a straggling beard.
“Fate,” I said, “is no respecter of victims. ”

“ On a closer view, there is about them something that sets them all into a class apart: a lack of physical vitality, a sickly look about the body, too much flesh or too little, eyes blazing with fever, sometimes an obvious infirmity, more often a wan skin faintly coloured with very poor blood. Never a joyous relaxation of healthy muscles: all of them have the slow, dragging movement of the snail.
Finding themselves herded together an unendurable thought, some have started a conversation to satisfy their pride; others are silent, too proud to talk. ”

“ But it perhaps betrays benevolence on the part of Nature when it deprives man of the consciousness of his misery. Life and death have it in their power to confer these mournful blessings. Once I saw a soldier struck in so many places that the doctors decided he was beyond the resources of their skill. Among other wounds there was a long splinter of steel driven like a dagger through his right wrist. The sight was so cruel and revolting that an attempt was made to remove the steel. A doctor gripped it firmly and tried to loosen it with sharp, short pulls. ”

“ This ignorance of ourselves is extremely precious, and makes us envy that sovereign ignorance of the beasts and plants. It enabled Dauche to live cheerfully on the edge of the abyss. I was there to assume the burden of the tragedy, as if it were alien to the human rightness of things that so much suffering should take place without a conscious victim. ”

“ The officers nodded their heads, without betraying what they thought. The two priests, for the first time, looked at one another. They looked at each other over the coffin, and bowed as if they had only just arrived. Moved by the same impulse, they both affected a curious smile; but their eyes had no share in it. They confronted each other like two members of a family who have a feud of centuries behind them, and who meet in the presence of a man of the world. ”

“ Hasn’t man enough to do with a troublesome leg, or this perpetual need which he cannot control?
Every evening each one prepared to face the long night with little preparations, as if they were about to set out on a journey. Remusot was pricked in the thigh, and at once he was in a dreamland bathed in sweat, in which the fever brought before his eyes things he never would describe to anyone. Mery had a large mug of some decoction or other prepared for him, and he had only to stretch out his arm to get it. Sandrap smoked his last cigarette, and Revaud asked for his cushion. ”

“ You are interested in him, and I must warn you: he is lost. I’m going to add, since you seek his friendship, that at any moment something will happen to him, bringing death rapidly in its train.”
I had only known Dauche for a short time, but I was overwhelmed. Some meaningless words came to my lips. I said something like “How terrible!” But the doctor, with a pale smile, ended by saying:
“Alas! sir, you will do as I and many others have done: you will get used to living in the presence of men who yet share our world, but of whom one knows without a shadow of doubt that they are already dead.” ”

“ All those who go away leave behind them something of the heavy smell of unwashed bodies. Curious thing, they all have a fetid breath; for that day they have eaten too quickly, badly digested their food, smoked and drunk too much. From all these mouths comes the same warm, sour breath which betrays the same emotion—the same breakdown of the machine. ”

“ Sacred human flesh, sacred substance which serves thought, art, love, everything great in life—it is now nothing but a vile, evil-smelling lump of suet which one handles with disgust to find whether it is yet ready for the slaughter. ”

“ In spite of these moods, the affection I had for Dauche continued to grow. It had deepened with my pity, and the certainty that death would shortly claim him contributed not a little to exalt it. I was by nature inclined to be emotional, and I became passionately devoted to him. I experienced all the apprehensions of a woman who tends a sick child, and is filled with despair on the slightest symptoms or movements. ”

“ Their limbs were so strong, and their chests so solid, that they could not believe in death, and as they felt their rich healthy blood dripping from their wounds, they held at bay, with curses and laughter, the weakness of their broken flesh. ”