No Man's Land (34 page)

‘Forward,' the captain says sharply. The party moves; the men look quietly and curiously at the skull as they pass. They go on, among the other whitish knobs like marbles studded at random in the shallow soil.

‘All in the same position, do you notice, sir?' the subaltern says, his voice chattily cheerful; ‘all upright. Queer way to bury chaps: sitting down. Shallow, too.'

‘Ay,' the captain says. The wounded man babbles steadily. The two bearers stop with him, but the others crowd on after the officers, passing the two bearers and the wounded man. ‘Dinna stop to gi's sup water,' one of the bearers says. ‘A'll drink walkin.'They take up the wounded man again and hurry him on while one of them tries to hold the neck of a water bottle to the wounded man's mouth, clattering it against his teeth and spilling the water down the front of his tunic. The captain looks back.

‘What's this?' he says sharply. The men crowd up. Their eyes are wide, sober; he looks about at the quiet, intent faces. ‘What's the matter back there, Sergeant?'

‘Wind-up,' the subaltern says. He looks about at the eroded walls, the whitish knobs thrusting quietly out of the earth. ‘Feel it myself,' he says. He laughs, his laughter a little thin, ceasing. ‘Let's get out of here, sir,' he says. ‘Let's get into the sun again.'

‘You are in the sun here,' the captain says. ‘Ease off there, men. Stop crowding. We'll be out soon. We'll find the road and get past the barrage and make contact again.' He turns and goes on. The party gets into motion again.

Then they all stop as one, in the attitudes of walking, in an utter suspension, and stare at one another. Again the earth moves under their feet. A man screams, high, like a woman or a horse; as the firm earth shifts for a third time beneath them the officers whirl and see beyond the down-plunging man a gaping hole with dry dust still crumbling about the edges before the orifice crumbles again beneath a second man. Then a crack springs like a sword slash beneath them all; the earth breaks under their feet and tilts like jagged squares of pale fudge, framing a black yawn out of which, like a silent explosion, bursts the unmistakable smell of rotted flesh. While they scramble and leap (in silence now; there has been no sound since the first man screamed) from one cake to another, the cakes tilt and slide until the whole floor of the valley rushes slowly under them and plunges them downward into darkness. A grave rumbling rises into the sunlight on a blast of decay and of faint dust which hangs and drifts in the faint air about the black orifice.

The captain feels himself plunging down a sheer and shifting wall of moving earth, of sounds of terror and of struggling in the ink dark. Someone else screams. The scream ceases; he hears the voice of the wounded man coming thin and reiterant out of the plunging bowels of decay: ‘A'm no dead! A'm no dead!' and ceasing abruptly, as if a hand had been laid on his mouth.

Then the moving cliff down which the captain plunges slopes gradually off and shoots him, uninjured, onto a hard floor, where he lies for a time on his back while across his face the lightward- and airwardseeking blast of death and dissolution rushes. He has fetched up against something; it tumbles down upon him lightly, with a muffled clatter as if it had come to pieces.

Then he begins to see the light, the jagged shape of the cavern mouth high overhead, and then the sergeant is bending over him with a pocket torch. ‘McKie?' the captain says. For reply the sergeant turns the flash upon his own face. ‘Where's Mr. McKie?' the captain says.

‘A's gone, sir-r,' the sergeant says in a husky whisper. The captain sits up.

‘How many are left?'

‘Fourteen, sir-r,' the sergeant whispers.

‘Fourteen. Twelve missing. We'll have to dig fast.' He gets to his feet. The faint light from above falls coldly upon the heaped avalanche, upon the thirteen helmets and the white bandage of the wounded man huddled about the foot of the cliff. ‘Where are we?'

For answer the sergeant moves the torch. It streaks laterally into the darkness, along a wall, a tunnel, into yawning blackness, the walls faceted with pale glints of chalk. About the tunnel, sitting or leaning upright against the walls, are skeletons in dark tunics and bagging Zouave trousers, their moldering arms beside them; the captain recognizes them as Senegalese troops of the May fighting of 1915, surprised and killed by gas probably in the attitudes in which they had taken refuge in the chalk caverns. He takes the torch from the sergeant.

‘We'll see if there's anyone else,' he says. ‘Have out the trenching tools.' He flashes the light upon the precipice. It rises into gloom, darkness, then into the faint rumor of daylight overhead. With the sergeant behind him he climbs the shifting heap, the earth sighing beneath him and shaling downward. The injured man begins to wail again, ‘A'm no dead! A'm no dead!' until his voice goes into a high sustained screaming. Someone lays a hand over his mouth. His voice is muffled, then it becomes laughter on a rising note, becomes screaming again, is choked again.

The captain and the sergeant mount as high as they dare, prodding at the earth while the earth shifts beneath them in long hushed sighs. At the foot of the precipice the men huddle, their faces lifted faint, white, and patient into the light. The captain sweeps the torch up and down the cliff. There is nothing, no arm, no hand, in sight. The air is clearing slowly. ‘We'll get on,' the captain says.

‘Ay, sir-r,' the sergeant says.

In both directions the cavern fades into darkness, plumbless and profound, filled with the quiet skeletons sitting and leaning against the walls, their arms beside them.

‘The cave-in threw us forward,' the captain says.

‘Ay, sir-r,' the sergeant whispers.

‘Speak out,'the captain says. ‘It's but a bit of a cave. If men got into it, we can get out.'

‘Ay, sir-r,' the sergeant whispers.

‘If it threw us forward, the entrance will be yonder.'

‘Ay, sir-r,' the sergeant whispers.

The captain flashes the torch ahead. The men rise and huddle quietly behind him, the wounded man among them. He whimpers. The cavern goes on, unrolling its glinted walls out of the darkness; the sitting shapes grin quietly into the light as they pass. The air grows heavier; soon they are trotting, gasping, then the air grows lighter and the torch sweeps up another slope of earth, closing the tunnel. The men halt and huddle. The captain mounts the slope. He snaps off the light and crawls slowly along the crest of the slide, where it joins the ceiling of the cavern, sniffing. The light flashes on again. ‘Two men with trenching tools,' he says.

Two men mount to him. He shows them the fissure through which air seeps in small, steady breaths. They begin to dig, furiously, hurling the dirt back. Presently they are relieved by two others; presently the fissure becomes a tunnel and four men can work at once. The air becomes fresher. They burrow furiously, with whimpering cries like dogs. The wounded man, hearing them perhaps, catching the excitement perhaps, begins to laugh again, meaningless and high. Then the man at the head of the tunnel bursts through. Light rushes in around him like water; he burrows madly; in silhouette they see his wallowing buttocks lunge from sight and a burst of daylight surges in.

The others leave the wounded man and surge up the slope, fighting and snarling at the opening. The sergeant springs after them and beats them away from the opening with a trenching spade, cursing in his hoarse whisper.

‘Let them go, Sergeant,' the captain says. The sergeant desists. He stands aside and watches the men scramble into the tunnel. Then he descends, and he and the captain help the wounded man up the slope. At the mouth of the tunnel the wounded man rebels.

‘A'm no dead! A'm no dead!' he wails, struggling. By cajolery and force they thrust him, still wailing and struggling, into the tunnel, where he becomes docile again and scuttles through.

‘Out with you, Sergeant,' the captain says.

‘After you, sir-r,' the sergeant whispers.

‘Out wi ye, man!' the captain says. The sergeant enters the tunnel. The captain follows. He emerges onto the outer slope of the avalanche which had closed the cave, at the foot of which the fourteen men are kneeling in a group. On his hands and knees like a beast, the captain breathes, his breath making a hoarse sound. ‘Soon it will be summer,' he thinks, dragging the air into his lungs faster than he can empty them to respire again. ‘Soon it will be summer, and the long days.'At the foot of the slope the fourteen men kneel. The one in the center has a Bible in his hand, from which he is intoning monotonously. Above his voice the wounded man's gibberish rises, meaningless and unemphatic and sustained.

William Faulkner
was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Canada in July 1918 but the war ended before he completed his training.
Crevasse
, the story included here, was first published in 1931 in
These
13, Faulkner's first collection of short stories. In 1926, Faulkner had published his first novel,
Soldier's Pay
, a powerful account of a wounded aviator's return home to a small town in Georgia at the end of the war. His writings on the war already show Faulkner's brilliance at setting a scene and capturing a mood through dialogue. One of the great writers of the 20th century, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Winning the prize brought him worldwide recognition and put Yoknapatawpha County, his fictional rendering of Lafayette County where he grew up, on the literary map. Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississipi, in 1962.

FREDERIC MANNING

CUSHY AVEC MADEMOISELLE

from
Her Privates We

B
OURNE NEVER SLEPT MUCH:
as soon as he put out his cigarette and rolled himself up in his blankets, he would sleep like a log for an hour or two perhaps, and then so lightly that the least sound would wake him. It was a legend among the other men, that nobody ever woke, during the night, without finding Bourne sitting up and smoking a cigarette. Company guard didn't bother him in the least. It was a cushy guard, without formality; and he liked the solitude and emptiness of the night. One bathed one's soul in that silence, as in a deep, cold pool. Earth seemed to breathe, even if it were only with his own breathing, giving consciousness a kind of rhythm, which was neither of sound nor of motion, but might become either at any moment. The slagheaps, huge against the luminous sky, might have been watchtowers in Babylon, or pyramids in Egypt; night with its enchantments, changing even this flat and unlovely land into a place haunted by fantastic imaginings. Morning gave again to life, its sordid realities. He got himself some tea at the cooker, yarned to Abbot while he drank it, and was washed and shaved before the rest of his hut were fully awake.

The battalion fell in on the road, at about twenty minutes past nine; and five minutes later the commanding officer and the adjutant rode down the line of men; perhaps less with the object of making a cursory inspection, than for the purpose of advertising the fact, that they had both been awarded the Military Cross for their services on the Somme.

‘Wonder they 'ave the front to put 'em up,' said Martlow, unimpressed.

Major Shadwell and Captain Malet had no distinctions.

‘I don't want no medals meself,' added Martlow, disinterestedly.

Bourne was struck by the adjutant's horsemanship; when the grey he rode trotted, you saw plenty of daylight between his seat and the saddle; and the exaggerated action made it seem as if, instead of the horse carrying the adjutant, the adjutant were really propelling the horse. However, he brought to the business the same serious attention which he gave to less arduous duties at other times. The men were forbidden to drink from their water-bottles on the march until permission were given. They moved off, and, by ten o'clock, were marching through Noeux-les-Mines again; and presently word was passed along that they were going to Bruay. There was no doubt about it this time: Captain Malet had told Sergeant-Major Robinson, and the men swung forward cheerfully, in spite of dust and heat, opening out a bit, so that the air could move freely between them. On the whole their march discipline was pretty good. They arrived at their new billets at about one o'clock.