Paths of Glory (11 page)

“. . . it wasn't my sentry anyway and it certainly isn't his fault if you forget the password.”

“Here they are,” said Roget. “Didier, you look around for a place to get through the wire.”

“Perhaps the captain knows a place . . .” Didier began.

“Yes, I do. Come along and I'll show you.”

They retraced their steps through two traverses. In the third one they found half a dozen men, three of them standing near a machine gun which was on the parapet.

“There's a lane through the wire here,” said the captain. “That gun is pointing to the opening and straight down the lane.”

“Thanks, Sancy,” said Roget. “Keep your fingers off that coffee grinder till we get out of the way. All right, you two. Come on!”

All three got their revolvers into their hands, unbuttoned the flaps of the pockets which held the bombs, then one by one, with Roget leading, they climbed the parapet and made quickly for the opening in the wire, crouching. They crawled into the lane and followed it as it led them obliquely away from the front line for a few metres. Half-way through the wire, the lane turned at right angles and led them obliquely in the other direction. Just when they thought they should be coming out of it, they found themselves wired in. Roget started to swear.

“Keep quiet,” Didier whispered. “It's only a block in the lane. Follow me. We can crawl through here.” He went off down a slight incline, wriggling under the wire, laboriously detaching the barbs from his uniform when it got caught. As soon as he was clear, he raised himself on his knees and looked around, then made for a nearby shell-hole. Standing in the shell-hole, he examined his surroundings with care, noting the position of the wood behind him and its relationship to his own and the German line. He was looking attentively at the moon when Roget and Lejeune joined him.

“Who are those two?” asked Roget, pointing to two figures already occupying the shell-hole and apparently asleep.

“Can't you smell? They're dead.”

Lejeune went over to them.

“Tirailleurs,” he reported.

“Come on then!” said Roget, getting up and starting to walk off briskly, as he thought, towards the German front. He was feeling very fine indeed, very brave and very clever. The cognac had given him a sense of being disembodied and immune. He wished he had a rifle, for he wanted to lead a bayonet charge, a bayonet charge by moonlight. The idea appealed to him immensely. . . .

“Hey! Not that way!” said Didier. “You'll be back in our wire again in a minute. This is the way over here. Keep the moon on your right. And crawling. We're not in the Champs Elysées.”

“Well, those two are,” said Roget, laughing at his own joke.

“And we'll be joining them soon, if we keep on making all this noise,” Lejeune added, shooting the lieutenant a glance.

Roget oriented himself and moved off over the lip of the shell-hole, Didier and Lejeune falling in behind him so that he made the point, they the wings, of an inverted V. Roget continued to set a fast pace, even when crawling, so fast, in fact, that Didier pulled himself up to him twice and caught him by the ankle. The last time, he drew level with him and whispered in his ear:

“Not so fast. We're getting near their wire. I think that's it over there. Yes, now you can see it. Take it slowly, a few metres at a time, and then stop and listen. They may have a patrol out too. And if they're doing any wiring, they're sure to have a covering party out here somewhere.”

Roget belched.

“And cut that out too. You make a devil of a lot of noise. Watch where you're going, and don't kick tins and things.”

“Who d'you think you're talking to?”

“You. If you can't run a patrol properly, I will. I know my business, and I'm not going to have my head blown off just because you don't.”

“You'll hear more about this later.”

Didier said nothing, and Roget started off again, bearing a little to the right. Didier waited for Lejeune to come up with him. There were several corpses scattered about and they stank.

“What's the matter?” Lejeune whispered.

“Plenty. Roget's drunk and doesn't give a———. We'll be lucky to get out of this without a mess of some kind.”

“How about . . .?”

“No. He may sober up.”

Roget was working along the German wire now, with Lejeune behind him and Didier a couple of metres off on the flank. The Pimple loomed on their left, an enormous-looking bulk, cutting cleanly into the moonlit sky. They felt as if they were crawling on its base; actually they were about three or four hundred metres from it.

Roget belched.

Instantly a flare went off, so close it seemed as if they had fired it themselves. A machine gun started to rattle, and they lay still as death, pressing themselves into the unyielding earth. The flare burst right over them, the machine gun was firing over them too, and they felt huge and naked on a naked plane. They held their breaths and their minds were emptied of all thought.

The flare went out and the machine gun, after two or three more bursts, stopped firing. Didier could hear a little bunch of shells travelling by quietly, high overhead.

The German wire began to bulge and to force them over in the direction of their own line. They crossed a series of shell-holes linked by shallow trenches. The earth seemed quite fresh to Didier, and he wondered if Roget had noticed it. A little farther on, they came to an area thick with French corpses. The smell was nauseating. Roget started belching again, speeding up his pace, going forward heedless of the noise he was making and reckless of the danger he might be running into.

Didier started to close in on him from his flank position and succeeded in catching him by the leg.

“Name of God! Don't do that!” It was almost a shriek.

“Another sound out of you, and I'll kill you,” Didier whispered.

“Well, don't sneak up on me like that then. It's enough to make anybody jump out of his skin. Hurry up and get me away from these bodies. I'm going to be sick.”

“Go ahead and vomit, you swine, and be quiet about it. We're right in front of a strong point here.”

There was a low gurgling sound while Roget gave up his cognac and spread it in a puddle under his nose.

“Come over in this direction,” said Didier.

They drew away from the bulging German wire and moved out towards the centre of no-man's-land. They gathered for a while in a shell-hole to take stock of things and to give Roget a chance to pull himself together. Then they went on again, in V formation, Didier on the lieutenant's left now, Lejeune on his right. Roget's feeling of immunity had flowed out of him soon after the flowing out of his liquor. He now had an imperious need to be done with the patrol and to get back to the safety of his own dugout. His sense of well-being had evaporated, leaving him defenceless and afraid in a hostile world. His nerves came to life again from their alcoholic anæsthesia. They were jumpy and hard to control.

A large mound of what looked like kindling wood appeared in front of them. Roget turned and threw lumps of earth at his companions, the signal to close in. They lay on their stomachs and put their heads together. Roget's breath was sour.

“What d'you make of that?” he asked Didier.

“Ruins of some houses.”

“All right, then, Lejeune, you work around the right of the pile. Didier will come with me on the left. We'll meet on the other side.”

“Not on your life,” said Didier. “Split a patrol? You're crazy!”

“Shut up. Do as you're told, Lejeune.”

“Don't do it, Paul, it's madness.”

Roget turned his wrist slightly and Didier found himself looking into the muzzle of the lieutenant's gun. Lejeune saw the movement too and checked a remark he was on the point of making. He searched for Didier's eyes, the question he wanted to ask him plainly to be seen in his expression. Didier, however, was staring down the barrel of the revolver, his own weapon uselessly pointing away from under his left armpit. Lejeune was baffled. He decided the safest way out of the dilemma would be to obey. He started to crawl off to the right of the mound.

When Roget could no longer hear Lejeune, he dropped the aim of his gun and smiled—an unpleasant smile—then started off towards the left. Didier followed him, straining to make all his senses alert, and silently raging at the lieutenant for making the double blunder of splitting the patrol and leading him into the zone between the ruins and the enemy wire. Roget, too, soon felt that he had made a mistake in getting himself into the corridor, however short it might turn out to be. He stopped to borrow a couple of bombs from Didier and put them in his breast pockets, leaving the flaps unbuttoned, then went on again, taking infinite pains not to disturb the loose debris of the ruined houses. The place was in shadow there, and no matter how careful he was, it was impossible not to make some noise in the mass of litter which was strewn about. The lieutenant's heart was, therefore, constantly in his mouth. Didier wondered what they would find on the other side of the mound. The signs all indicated that there would be some kind of outpost thereabouts. In fact, he was surprised and made increasingly anxious by the fact that they hadn't yet seemed to disturb anything but loose bricks and timbers. Was he being led straight into an ambush? How was it Lejeune hadn't flushed anything? Or had he, and was he now lying with a bayonet through his throat? . . .

They came out of the shadow of the ruins after what had seemed a long journey in both space and time. Actually they had been about fifteen minutes in covering the frontage of three or four houses. They advanced a few metres more until they were clear of the mound. Roget stopped to examine his surroundings....

Didier, lying just back of him, was sweating. Now for the excessively delicate business of gathering Lejeune into the patrol again. The patrol, which had been a defensive unit, was now a doubly dangerous offensive two units. The reunion had to be accomplished under the most agitating circumstances possible. The tension would be terrific for some seconds, the seconds during which Lejeune would be trying to make himself known, known to men whose identity he himself was no longer sure of. “This ought to cure him of splitting his patrols,” Didier said to himself. “Where the devil has Paul gone to? . . .”

There was a sound of boards tumbling, nearby, on the right. Didier raised his head and quietly cocked his revolver. He saw Roget rise to his knees. He saw his arm start to swing . . .

At that moment Didier fired at Roget's head, and missed.

The arm completed its swing. He saw a roundish shape detach itself from the hand and fly upwards, describing the arc of a lob.

There was a detonation, a cry of surprise and pain, then silence.

The silence lasted four seconds, long enough for Didier to hear his name called. Then the air was filled with a deafening roar and lighted by three star shells which burst simultaneously overhead. He saw Roget on his feet, his mouth open, gesticulating. He saw him start to run, still gesticulating wildly, back the way he had come. He watched him disappear behind the mound of ruins and hoped he would be killed. The roar stopped suddenly, then opened up again, the sound wavering as the machine gun was swept from side to side. Didier looked around with the utmost caution and caught the flash of the gun. It was up there in the ruins, within a stone's throw of him. He noted he was in dead ground and he crouched down again, reprieved. Two green flares went up from the top of the mound. Didier wriggled sideways carefully towards the mound and got into a shallow hole. He waited. The machine gun continued to roar. Then it would stop while a new belt was being put in. Then it would roar again. Within five minutes the protective barrage had come down in front of the machine-gun post. Didier lay still, while the ground trembled around him, and watched the barrage. As soon as he had made out just how far away it was falling, he started to crawl towards it in search of Lejeune.

 

“Stand to! Stand to! Up on the step, there! Out of the dugouts! Come up! Come up! To your posts, all of you! Stand to! Stand to. . . .”

Officers and N.C.O.'s, from Switzerland to the sea, were going up and down the front lines, routing out their men and lining them along the firing-steps. The two armies faced each other, tense and alert. Not a man was asleep, not a man was unarmed, not a man had his boots off as the lines waited, staring into space at each other, waiting, staring, waiting....

Duval, standing on the firing-step from which Post Number 8 had sent up the red flares, found himself in a fantastic world. The air flickered with the constant illumination of star shells, as if a celebration of some sort were going on. He heard, behind him, the rat-tat-tat-tat of the brigade machine guns. Farther back, the seventy-fives were banging their doors again. Now and then, from still farther back, came the ponderous sounds of the heavies. The air was full of noises, the weird, shuddering, moaning noises of countless shells in their flight. Nearer to the ground, too near to be comfortable, there was the swish-swish-swish of machine-gun bullets as they made the earth spurt along the parapets and parados. Men ducked, and now and then some were hit.

“Get up there! Up on the firing-steps! Keep your heads low! Stand to! Stand to! Push that machine gun farther up, there!”

The noise increased. It became a din, the din an uproar, a crescendo of sound so deafening that you had to shout in a man's ear to make yourself heard. “The Orchestration of the Western Front.” The phrase again came into Duval's head. “And I've got a front-row seat. It's glorious! Magnificent!” Duval, beside himself with excitement, was yelling at the top of his lungs, shouting with an exuberance which did not reach his own ears even, so deafening was the noise of the bombardment. Shells dropped in the traverses, machine-gun bullets continued to clip the line of the parapet, but Duval went on yelling, intoxicated almost to the point of hysteria by the vibration of the gunfire, oblivious of all danger.