Paths of Glory (14 page)

Charpentier was thoughtful: “Something funny. One man killed. Roget coming in one way, Didier another. Was that a look he gave me upstairs there, or was it my imagination? Getting separated from his officer, that's not like him. And why didn't the barrage cut him off, too, from finishing the patrol? I'll have a look into this when I have more time. After the attack.”

It never seemed to come into a man's mind that, if he wanted to look into a thing, it might be better to do so before an attack.

 

General Assolant and the aide-de-camp followed Colonel Dax along the Tranchée des Zouaves as it wound its way across the face of the low hill, the low hill from the back of which Dax had watched the signal rockets the night before. The trench sloped gently upwards on the face of the hill. Just short of its high point they came to an inconspicuous shelter built into its side. They stooped to enter the shelter, carefully replacing the curtain of empty sand-bags which served as a backdrop. The place they were in was an observation post, and it was already occupied by an observer. The post was built to hold two men comfortably, three uncomfortably, and the observer was therefore ordered to wait outside. So, too, was Saint-Auban, after he had handed a map, some aerial photographs, and a telescope over to Assolant.

The side of the post which faced the German lines was constructed of sand-bags, neatly arranged so as to protect a breast-high horizontal slit which was framed by laths. The slit was just large enough to accommodate the big end of a telescope. Its width was a little short of the width of the post and there was a piece of sand-bag hanging down in front of it, obscuring the view. Prudent observers always dropped this flap when the sudden increase in the light inside the post warned them that the curtain behind them was being opened. This care to prevent a small rectangle of background light from showing up might seem excessive. It was not, however, considered so by the man who had to stay in the post. Having himself spotted German posts now and then by similar revealing glimpses of light or sparkle of lenses, he knew himself to be equally vulnerable in this respect. Moreover, in places where the lack of it might mean swift and painful death, prudence, caution, was never considered excessive.

Dax and Assolant spread their maps and photographs on the boards which served as elbow rests, took off their trench helmets and respirators, and settled themselves for a good look at the view which was revealed to them when they pinned back the flap. At first they looked with naked eyes, then they used the telescopes. For ten or fifteen minutes they said very little except to exchange questions and answers identifying the features of the ground.

What they saw was what they had come to see: the Pimple. In general outline and in size it was rather like an ocean liner just after it had been launched, that is to say, a liner with its superstructures but without the added height that its funnels would give it. It lay enough off the line of a flat broadside to the French front to make it look as if its prow were thrusting at the boundary of the 181st and their neighbours on the left, the 183rd. It was brown and smooth-looking to the naked eye. The telescopes, however, showed that it was not so smooth as it seemed—that it was, in fact, scarred by countless shell-holes and well-laced with entanglements. Whatever shrubbery there might have been on it had long since been replaced by shell-holes, and the darker patches were bushes of wire, not of leaves. Through the naked eye the slope of its flank would have been inviting to a man out for a walk, but through a telescope it was formidable.

“Sinister,” Dax said to himself. “That's what it is. Or is it because I know it's sinister that I think it looks sinister?”

He tried, without much success, to dissociate it from the war, to appraise it as if it were any hill in any landscape, but he could not get it to exist in his mind untainted by its reputation. The morning sunlight lay bright and cheerful upon it, but still it didn't, it couldn't, look cheerful. An almost imperceptible vapour seemed to emanate from and to cling to it. “If the priest could see that,” Dax thought, “he would say it was the ghosts of all the men who have died upon those slopes. It must be the fumes being ventilated from the catacombs. They would be catacombs too, if we ever got foot on the hill. But if it's ghosts, there'll be plenty more by this time tomorrow.”

The Pimple was, to Assolant, just what all other hills were to him, topographical obstacles which might have to be attacked or defended. He saw the jumbled mess of no-man's-land and the brown line of the German wire on its farther side. The slope of the hill looked easy to him, though he was quite aware that it wasn't as easy as it looked. Silently, as he reviewed the various features of the terrain, he ticked off percentages of losses in his mind. He was pleased to find that his arithmetic left a substantial margin of numbers to overrun the crest of the hill and to establish themselves on the ground beyond. His optimism increased and, in proportion, the height and the reputation of the hill diminished. Given enough troops and ammunition, he could take anything. It was all a question of percentages. Men had to be killed, of course, sometimes lots of them. They absorbed bullets and shrapnel and by so doing made it possible for others to get through. Say, five per cent killed by their own barrage (a very generous allowance, that). Ten per cent lost in crossing no-man's-land, and twenty per cent more in getting through the wire. That left sixty-five per cent, and the worst part of the job over, the most exposed part.

His reasoning was faulty and his percentages were pure guesswork, but he failed to notice his fallacies in the exuberance of winning a battle in his head. He even failed to notice them when they themselves provided a hint in the form of an idea, an idea which captivated him so that it displaced all others, blinded him to the very light of which it was itself the source. The idea was simply this: after the attack he would have the burial parties make detailed records on maps of exactly where all the dead had been found. He and his staff would then correlate the information, make a report and a critique of it, and send it on up the hierarchic ladder in the hope that it might eventually reach G.H.Q. and draw attention there to the fact that its author was a man of brains as well as of bayonets. General Assolant instantly became impatient for the attack to begin so that he could the sooner put his idea into practice. He was in no mood to remember that a battle is a thing of flux, and that you cannot measure flux by the debris that it leaves behind. Nor did it occur to him that while an operation might be, strategically, a neatly conceived plan, tactically it tended to become more and more a series of accidents.

“Zero hour will be at seven A.M.,” Assolant said, more as if he were talking to himself. “I picked that time because we can't attack in the middle of the dawn bombardment and I don't want to attack before it. This business will have to be done in daylight so that we can see what we're doing. There's this extra advantage, too. After the dawn bombardment the Boche will think all danger of an attack is over for the day. We'll catch him off his guard.”

“I doubt it, sir,” said Dax. “From my own experience and from what I've been told, he's never off his guard there. He knows the Pimple is as important to us as it is to him. His barrages respond to his signals almost instantly. And they're well-registered.”

“Furthermore,” said Assolant, ignoring Dax's remarks, “since the dawn bombardment seems a well-established custom around here, we can have the artillery cut the wire then.”

“Won't the Boche notice that we're doing it, sir?”

“What of it? He can't repair it till after nightfall, and by that time it won't be his any more.”

“Yes, but he can cover the gaps with machine guns. It'll tell him just the points at which to expect us.”

“Well, the wire has to be cut. Would you rather have it done during the hurricane barrage before the attack? It's only going to be a five-minute one, before starting to creep. This is a surprise attack, you know. He won't be expecting it so soon after the other.”

Dax didn't pretend to know what the Germans might or might not be expecting, but he did know that the problem of cutting the wire was always a perplexing one for him. If you cut the wire in advance, you were bound to warn the enemy at the same time that you were going to attack at those points within the next twenty-four hours. If you waited for the preliminary bombardment to do the job, you ran the risk of its not being done thoroughly, especially if the bombardment was to be, as in this case, a very short one.

“On the whole, sir, I think you're right. Better to have the wire well cut in advance. Then the guns will all be free to attend to the Boche when we go over.”

“I'll have the artillery do it quietly. I'll have them drop occasional shells in the wire, as if they were falling short. They can make a few registering shots this afternoon. An officer can register them from this post. Which makes me think. This would be an excellent place for me to watch the attack from. Saint-Auban!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go down to Colonel Dax's headquarters and call up Couderc. Tell him to arrange to have telephone wires strung to this post straight from my headquarters.” The view of the sloping side of the Pimple had given Assolant another idea, that of directing the attack in person from the observation post. “Wait a minute. Dax, you can fix me up with a line to the seventy-fives back of the hill here, can't you?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Good. Tell Couderc, then, that after the hurricane barrage those two batteries back there, find out which they are, are to come under my personal command. They will carry on with the fire schedule as planned, but they must be ready to shell any targets which I may have for them during the advance.”

Assolant was delighted with the way things were shaping up, with the prospect of being able to select targets himself and to stand there and watch them being blown to pieces. This was going to be war as it should be fought. The terrain was just right for such an exploit, an exploit whose novelty, he now felt assured, would go a long way towards making his coveted promotion in the Legion of Honour a certainty. He went back to his telescope and looked at the Pimple again. When he turned to speak, Dax saw on his face an expression of mingled avidity and affection, the expression of a man who has just been contemplating a cherished trophy.

“I want to go down and inspect your front line.”

“Yes, sir. But I must warn you it's a hot place.”

“I like hot places,” the general said, and it was no more than the truth.

Dax felt tired and gloomy as he conducted Assolant along the trenches leading to the front line. It was quite clear to him, depressingly so, that the hour or more he had spent at his headquarters pointing out the difficulties of the attack and the exhaustion of his troops to the general had been wasted. The discussion, moreover, had ended on a note of unpleasantness, a note which had only served to wound Assolant's vanity and to solidify his stubborn refusal to consider the attack in any way a questionable one. Warming to the argument that his troops were in no condition for the job assigned to them, Dax had been led into an indiscretion which had given instantaneous offence. He had said:

“Furthermore, sir, this is really a corps operation, not a divisional one.”

The reply had been cold, forbidding:

“Please confine yourself to obeying the orders of your superiors, Colonel Dax, not to criticizing them.”

The sight of the Pimple from the observation post and of the ground between had intensified Dax's misgivings. The general's, if he had had any, seemed to have been dissipated by the same sight. “Rarely,” said Dax to himself, “does a soldier see with naked eyes. He is nearly always looking through lenses, lenses which are made of the insignia of his rank.”

The two men reached the front line and turned to their left. Picking their way through the traverses which plainly showed the effects of the dawn bombardment, they often came upon working parties digging out the avalanches of earth which had been tumbled into the trench. This earth was being carefully put into sand-bags and stored in the traverses, as if it were something precious. It was precious, at that, but the reason it was being stored was that soldiers didn't advertise their position to the enemy by gaily tossing spadefuls of earth over the parapet. Here and there, however, where the parapet gaped too dangerously, sand-bags were thrown or pushed gingerly into the openings. That the Germans also had observers, and that they were alert, was proved by the frequent bursts of machine-gun fire which these efforts to patch up the parapet drew.

Dax was not displeased by this intermittent fire. He hoped Assolant would notice how responsive, how well-aimed it was, and when he thought the general might not be noticing, he drew his attention to it. More than once they had to crouch with their backs to the damaged parapet and watch the little storm of dust spurt on the parados, a foot or so above their heads. Notwithstanding this, Assolant had been constantly jumping up on the firing-steps to take quick looks into no-man's-land. To Dax, these quick looks seemed to be getting less and less quick.

“Please, sir,” he said, when he could restrain himself no longer, “that's suicide. You're putting me in an awkward position, for I'm more or less responsible for your safety, you know, and I can't answer for it if you keep that up. You've seen how accurately they sweep our line. We have a periscope a little farther on and I'd feel easier if you'd wait to use that.”

In spite of his love of hot places, Assolant found that Dax's urgings had a welcome sound to his ears, so welcome indeed, that he suddenly realized they might also be considered overdue.

The trench periscope was already set up on its tripod when the two men came around the corner. Dax got to it first, as he had wanted to do, and went to work raising it cautiously over the parapet. He searched with it for a while until he found what he had been expecting to find, then focused it and stepped away, offering it with a gesture to the general.