Paths of Glory (10 page)

“Yes, Pierre. I mean, sir.”

“I'm not fooling now. I mean it. It just makes things worse for me. And it will for you too, if you're not careful. This is my dugout. Report back here.”

Roget bent down, stepped sideways into the wall of the trench and disappeared.

“He looked as if he was bowing to me,” Didier said to himself. “What a louse he is, with his little gold stripe. Why the devil didn't they send the Corsican with us? He's the kind of man you want on patrol.”

Didier went on down the trench until he saw two boxes of rifle ammunition protruding from a niche in the wall. He passed the boxes, stooped suddenly, and also disappeared from the trench. He went down three or four steps, groping, until his hand touched a blanket. The blanket felt damp, slightly oily and heavy. He pulled it aside and adjusted it carefully behind him. There was a dim light, far below him, a smell of charcoal and of men, and the sound of voices. He went down thirty or forty steps more and came into the main gallery of the dugout. It was warm and comfortable there, and it seemed very remote from the war. A double tier of bunks lined one wall. These were occupied mostly by N.C.O.'s. The men were stretched out on the floor. All of them were asleep, except a group of three who were sitting around a candle stuck in a wine bottle, talking. The dugout was not crowded, and most of the men who were there were old-timers. Didier, who always read the signs, put two and two together and noted that the recruits were being used for the working parties, ration details, and other front-line duties. This was as it should be.

“What's new?” said one of the men near the candle.

“Patrol. Where's Lejeune?”

“He's that fog-horn, down the end there.” Turning back to his companions, he went on, “. . . No, by God, they're not as mad as that. Why, we haven't had any rest. I heard we were going in for a day or two while—”

“Well, why have we taken over only half a regimental frontage then? The same one the Tirailleurs did for their attack. We're as thick as fleas around here. And now this patrol . . .”

Didier had found Lejeune and was working over him, trying to wake him up.

“Come on, show a leg. We've got to go on patrol.”

“What?”

“You heard. Patrol.”

“I can't. I'm all in. Get somebody else. Leave me alone.”

“Come on, get up, will you? I can't get anybody else. Captain's orders. You and me and the lieutenant.”

Lejeune began to skirmish for time:

“Who? Paolacci?”

“No. Roget.”

“That bastard!”

“Yes. Come on. We're late now.”

“What time is it?”

“About two-thirty.” Didier, joining in the skirmish, purposely advanced the hour.

“Two-thirty, eh . . .”

“Yes, two-thirty. And if you don't get a move on, we'll get caught by the dawn and have to spend the day out there.” Didier gave Lejeune a slight kick. Because of his impatience, the kick turned out to be less slight than he had intended.

“If that's the way you're going to act about it, you know where you can stick your patrol,” said Lejeune.

“And if that's the way you're going to act about it, you know where I'm going to stick my bayonet. Come on, Paul, get up. I asked the lieutenant specially for you.”

“Oh, you did, did you. Nice of you that was.” Where shakes, commands, and even kicks had failed, flattery was successful and Lejeune responded to the compliment by finally heaving himself to his feet, not, however, without further protests.

Didier went back to the space near the candle and began to make himself ready. This he did with the solemnity and precision of a ritual.

He took off all his equipment, including his gas mask and trench helmet, and stacked them by his rifle in a corner. He took a knitted cap and a polished steel mirror out of his haversack and put them aside on a shelf. He emptied all his pockets, pausing to light his pipe, and put the contents into the haversack. He unwound his puttees all the way down, then scratched his calves for a full minute. He undid his boot-laces and tied them again, carefully knotting them. He put his puttees back on and tied them with a knot, too. He looked around the floor of the dugout until he found what he wanted—a cork. He burnt the cork in the candle and began blacking his face and hands methodically, stopping now and then to look at the results in the steel mirror. When he was through, he impaled the cork on the tip of his bayonet, caught Lejeune's eye and informed him by a gesture that the cork was at his disposal. He looked around once more until he again found what he wanted, this time a revolver holster. He took the revolver out, unwound the cord attached to its butt, then held it up so the revolver could dangle freely and straighten out the cord. He opened the noose in the cord, passed it over his left shoulder and under his right armpit, then pulled the noose in and caught it tight by slipping the revolver back through as if it were a stitching needle. He yanked the gun up and examined it with care. He cracked it open and dumped out the shells, then looked down the barrel. He snapped it shut again, pulled the trigger several times, sighted it on the candle flame and clicked it once or twice more. Satisfied that it was working properly, he reloaded it after having examined the shells. He took some more shells from the pouch near the holster and put them in the left pocket of his jacket. The gun went into his trousers pocket. He put on the knitted cap, looked at himself once more in the mirror, knocked out his pipe, then put the mirror and pipe away in his haversack and closed it.

“If the sergeant wants his gun,” he said to the group near the candle, “tell him I borrowed it. He can have my rifle in the meantime. Here are my things, here. My personal belongings are in the haversack. There's no money, so you needn't start fighting over it as soon as I go. Anyway, I'll be back. Ready, Paul? Come on, then. We'll pick up some bombs at the lieutenant's dugout when we come down again.”

“Say, I thought this was a reconnaissance patrol.”

“So it is, but we're going to take some bombs just the same.”

“Why not some machine guns too.”

“Come on, shake a leg. See you later, you dugout pimps.”

“Good luck!”

“Bring me a spiked helmet!”

“Come and get it yourself.”

“Keep your rump down, Paul, or you'll draw a barrage of heavies.”

“And don't tread on my feet when you come in.”

“Good luck! . . . As I was saying. The doctor says to him, ‘What a beauty! Where d'you get it?' It was a beauty too, I saw it myself. That long. ‘I got it from the cannon,' he says, ‘the 155-mm.' ‘You must be a very passionate young man,' says the doctor. ‘But I wasn't thinking of your dose just then. There's only one way to get that, you know.' ‘Yes, sir,' says the fellow. ‘There was a man in my squad who had it and I must have caught the infection off the gun.' What a fathead! And did the doctor roar! Take it from me, boys, calomel ointment's all right against the syph, but you can't be too careful when it comes to . . .”

 

Lieutenant Roget saw the flame of his candle waver and knew, even before he heard the footsteps, that his gas blanket had been pulled aside and closed again. He put the bottle he had been drinking from under his overcoat on the bunk.

“Well, you took your time about it,” he said.

“It's only ten past two,” said Didier, guessing.

“Anything to report?”

“Yes. Sentries are all warned, down to here. There's some shelling going on up there on the right, also some gas. Number 8 will start sending up flares at four-thirty. But they'll send them up at ten-minute intervals, not five. And not from their post, but fifty metres to the left of it . . .”

“I see. Perhaps they'd rather go to a cinema instead.”

“The sergeant says every five minutes is too much. It's sure to start the artillery going again. Ten minutes is plenty too, he says. It'll give the position of his post away and he figures that after the third or fourth flare there won't be any post left. So he's going to send a man down the trench to shoot the flare off at a distance. All we have to do is to bear to the left of it as we come in.”

“Quite a strategist, that sergeant. What's his name?”

“I don't know.”

“You're a liar, but it won't do him any good. I'll get it later. Did he have any other observations to make?”

“No,” said Didier, privately relishing the malice of his evasion. He had omitted to tell Roget that the sergeant had covered himself by getting permission for the changes from his company commander.

“All right, you two go up and get some bombs. I'll join you directly.”

“We've got the bombs.”

“Where are your gas masks?”

“You don't take gas masks on patrol,” said Didier. “They get in the way, get caught in the wire . . .”

“Well, go ahead anyway. I'll be up in a minute.”

Didier and Lejeune climbed up the dugout steps, passed the gas blanket and stood on the other side of it, waiting.

“He's fortifying himself,” said Didier. “See the bottle under his coat?”

“No, but the place stank like a
bistro
.”

“You can always tell when he's had a few. He gets sarcastic.”

“He might have passed it round, the swine.”

“There isn't enough even in a barrel to give him guts. Listen, Paul, if he gets funny, or starts kicking up a noise . . .”

“I understand.”

Lieutenant Roget felt fine, just about right, he thought. His condition was so nearly perfect that he reasoned he ought to have one more shot of the cognac to go on, and now that those two were out of the way, he could take it. He reached for the bottle under his coat and took a long pull at it, then set it down on the table. He lighted a cigarette and looked at the map again.

“Very simple,” he thought. “Go out up here where the beginning of the wood marks the boundary, crawl over to the German wire, there, then along it for a few hundred metres until we reach this old communication trench, and that will lead us to Post Number 8. In fact, Number 8 is behind a block in that trench, about fifty metres from our front line.”

It was simple, too, on the map. The nice smooth strip of white, which was no-man's-land. The German wire, neatly marked by double rows of x's. The outskirts of the village that straddled the German wire and then, farther on, the thin, winding, blue line which joined the two fronts and represented the unpossessed communication trench. There were no shell-holes marked on the map, no corpses, no stray wire, no obstacles of any kind. There were no symbols for the men who stood behind that wire, nor any signs to indicate that they were armed with rifles, bombs, machine guns, and flares.

“It'll be easy,” said Roget out loud, and belched. He picked up the bottle to put it away, felt that there was still some liquid in it, and held it up to the candle for appraisal.

“For when I come in,” he said, and continued to look at it. By the time he decided to stop looking at it, he found, as he had expected, that his mind had changed.

“Might as well,” he said. His tone had that mixture of apology and joviality which it would have had if some other person were present. He tossed the empty bottle onto a bunk, trod on his cigarette and blew out the candle, then went up the dugout steps, bumping the braziers and boxes there and cursing them. He found Didier and Lejeune sitting on the firing-step.

The three men made their way along the trench, Roget in front, Didier in the rear. The lieutenant was stepping out, and it wasn't long before he had left the other two behind, for they were delayed in each traverse by stopping to warn the sentries that the patrol was going out. Sometimes the sentries were a bit thick and Didier had to waste time explaining what it was all about. He didn't consider it a waste of time at all, but Lejeune did. He was for hurrying on and trying to keep up with the lieutenant. Didier, however, insisted on seeing that the sentries understood.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” he said. “But I'm going to see that these fatheads know we're out. One of the most dangerous parts of a patrol, you know, is trying to get back into your own line. And we might be driven in anywhere.”

Not far from the left boundary they came around the corner of a traverse and found Roget rooted there, his arms raised over his head, furiously cursing the sentry. The sentry's bayonet was brushing the lieutenant's chest.

“Calais! Calais!” said Didier, taking in the situation at a glance.

“All right,” said the sentry. “Come through. Where are all you Senegalese coming from? Here's a fellow all dressed up like an officer and he doesn't know the password. He can talk French, too. Say, send the sergeant up, will you, you'll find him down the line there. I know my orders. I'm no fool, you know . . .”

“As it happens, you are this time,” said Didier. “We're not Senegalese in spite of our faces. Put your bayonet down, this is our lieutenant. We're going out on patrol, and we'll be out a couple of hours. So watch what you're doing, will you. Understand? I said, do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand. But how was I to know? Orders are orders, you know, and the officers make them themselves. A black-faced devil comes around the corner and when I challenge him . . .”

“All right, forget it. You only did right. Remember we're going to be out there. And remember to tell your relief.”

Roget had gone on ahead again. They found him, a few minutes later, in conversation with another officer, and Didier was pleased to hear the officer saying: