Paths of Glory (7 page)

Didier, in Number 2 Company, was, perhaps, the only one of the three thousand rank and file who knew or cared where he was. And perhaps he didn't care so much either, for he was as tired and preoccupied with his aching muscles as the rest. To know his whereabouts, however, was an automatic function for a former frontier guard and night prowler, and that function continued to exercise itself in spite of his fatigue. Nor did it do so any the less keenly because it was dark. On the contrary, senses which had been submerged during the day-time but which had not, for that reason, failed to absorb impressions, came to the surface at night and intensified perceptions which, after all, had been deprived of only one of their number—and that one only partially in Didier's case—sight.

His sense of direction was a strong one; so strong, indeed, that it inclined him to be intolerant of those who did not have it and to be contemptuous of their laziness, to which he attributed their deficiency. Didier knew exactly where he was; it was a question of pride for him to know this. He knew the regiment had left the village shortly after nightfall on the same road by which it had entered. He knew he had walked up a hill. He had felt the open fields of the low plateau, and the road curving back through them. He had not been able to discern the outline of the wood into which he had been plunged abruptly, but he knew he was in a wood because he had felt space and sound confined about him. His sixth sense of the out-of-doors told him that these places were the same places he had passed through that morning. The order to break step, which was relayed back down the column as it approached the bridge over the stream, merely confirmed his certainty of his position, and the slight tonal change in the echo of the marching regiment, shortly thereafter, made him aware that he was now walking between walls of brick instead of walls of trees—the walls of the hamlet.

Thus, when he heard the boots of the company ahead of him strike on the cobblestones, resound on them for a space, and then go soft again, he automatically noted the fact that the regiment was cutting straight across the highway, past the Café du Carrefour, and that it was heading towards another sector of that front which it had, in his opinion, only too recently quitted.

“So, that's it,” he said to himself. “Combat order, and this direction. Something doing, all right. The moon ought to be up soon and then I can get some idea of the lay of the land.”

The regiment tramped on in silence. Even the newly joined recruits had had some of their spirits taken out of them by the marching and counter-marching. The others were too weary and dazed by unfinished sleep even to swear. There comes a degree of numbness in fatigue and exasperation which can be expressed only by a sullen silence. Five hours' sleep had been just enough to stiffen all those men's muscles but not enough to begin the work of reviving them. Equipment, boots, clothing had stiffened too and, worst of all, their boots had all been made a size too small by the swelling of their feet which they had hastened to release from them....

The tail of the regiment vanished on the other side of the highway, enlarging at each step the gap between itself and the Café du Carrefour.

“To the trenches, again,” said the old woman as the last hobnails of the column went silent on the continuation of the dirt road beyond the cobblestones—her cobblestones, as she was in the habit of thinking of them. She was sitting by her stove in the carefully shuttered café, sipping her bowl of black coffee. “To the trenches, again.” She did not add “Poor devils!” because no such commiserating thought came into her head. She merely made an oral note of a fact. She had sat there, like that, for the better part of two years, ticking off to herself the mysterious and aimless movements of the armies which fluctuated around her crossroads. At first she had sat at her door and watched them. Then winter had driven her inside, and she had stayed on there, alone and without curiosity. There was, moreover, no need for her to come out any more for, as she soon discovered, she had learnt the significance of sounds and her ears now gave her almost as much news of what went on around the crossroads as her eyes had formerly done. She could, for instance, make a fair estimate of the size of a body of troops by the duration and spacing of its tramp. She knew the difference between the rumble of an artillery train and of a convoy of motor lorries, and she could tell whether the latter were loaded or empty. She could distinguish between the noises of a staff car and an ambulance and, more remarkable still, between a troop of cavalry and patrol of mounted military police. When questioned about it, she explained this last accomplishment by issuing the following ultimatum: “The keeper of a
bistro
must be able to smell police, or go out of business.” Soldiers stopped off there at the Café du Carrefour on purpose to ask that question and to hear the reply. They were never disappointed, unless they happened to be police.

So she sat there, on the high-water mark of the war in those parts, sometimes within the heavy artillery zone, sipping her bowls of black coffee and enumerating to herself the various fragments of the army that beat up and down past her café, enumerating them not from any interest, patriotic or other, in military affairs, for she had none, but as so many good customers lost.

There was a rumble on the road outside which drew nearer as she finished her bowl of coffee. She gave the stove a poke or two, lighted a candle, and blew out the lamp. She moved over to a door and, candle in hand, paused for a moment, listening.

“Rolling kitchens,” she said. Then she went down into her cellar and climbed into bed.

 

Colonel Dax was marching at the head of his regiment with the officer commanding its First Battalion, Major Vignon.

“It always looks like a distant thunderstorm, doesn't it?” the major said. He was referring to the effect of sheet lightning produced by the flares along the front and the reverberating overtone of gunfire.

“Not so distant, at that,” the colonel answered in a voice that did not encourage any further small talk. The major took the hint and relapsed into silence. But why, he asked himself, had he been invited to walk with his chief? Was it merely for the purpose of keeping step with him?

“It's too bad,” the colonel was thinking, “that you can't ask a man to walk with you without his jumping to the conclusion that you want him to talk to you too. Why can't I say to a man, ‘Look here, I'm getting into a blue funk, as I always do at this point, and I really need your companionship. But it must be your silent companionship. I just want your bulk, your flesh near me, within touching distance. It takes the edge off my funk and helps a lot.' But Vignon wouldn't understand at all. He'd think I'm mad. He just hasn't the faculty for knowing what I'm going through now. If he suspected the crisis I'm getting near, he'd consider it his duty, probably, to pull his pistol and put a bullet through my head. As a matter of fact that's exactly why I need his presence so badly at these times. He hasn't any nerves.”

He was right, too. Neither Vignon nor anybody else suspected for a moment that Dax, colonel of the 181st Regiment of the line, of the crack Assolant Division, next on the list for a general's stars and a promotion in the Legion of Honour, four times cited for bravery in Army Orders—no one suspected for a moment, so well did Dax conceal the fact, that he was in a state of fear which was rapidly turning into panic.

This fear of his was, so far as he knew, an idiosyncrasy, one which grew with each step forward he was now taking, one which became more acute every time he had to perform the duty of leading his regiment into the trenches. Once the men were in the trenches, the crisis would evaporate. He quite realized that his fears were unreasonable, even groundless, to a certain extent, but that did not make it any easier for him to master his rising terror. All he could think of was the compact mass of living, human, vulnerable flesh, strung out for two kilometres or so behind him. All he could think of was that in another half hour that whole two kilometres of compact, living, human, vulnerable flesh would be well within range of the German guns. The thought appalled him; it also prevented the saliva from forming in his mouth.

“Flesh, bodies, nerves, legs, testicles, brains, arms, intestines, eyes . . .” He could feel the mass of it, the weight of it, pushing forward, piling up on his defenceless shoulders, overwhelming him with an hallucination of fantastic butchery. A point of something formed in his stomach, then began to spread and rise slowly. It reached a level near his diaphragm where it became stationary and seemed to embed itself. He could not dislodge it or budge it up or down, but he recognized it for what it was: the nausea induced by intense fear.

“Three thousand men. My men. To run the gauntlet of open, registered roads with three thousand men. All neatly packeted for the slaughter. It's too much for one man to bear. I can't give the order to space out now or they'd know I'm in a funk. They're quick to sense it when an officer has the wind up. At any moment . . . This strain is intolerable. What an awful racket they make. Where the devil are those guides going to meet us? I'd look like a fool arriving with the regiment in single file, all spaced out. Think of it, I can't order the fire-zone intervals yet because it wouldn't look right. What a relief it would be though . . . Keep up appearances, no matter how many lives it costs. What torture this is, and that fool Vignon strolling along as if he's on a boulevard. Good old Vignon! Why can't I have some of his . . . Three thousand men, two kilometres of massed flesh. What a target! What's that light over there? . . .”

His imagination suddenly side-slipped, then righted itself in front of another mirage. He saw, way over there across the lines, German gunners, grotesquely helmeted figures, moving in quiet efficiency around their guns. He saw them ramming shells and charges home and closing the breeches, reading gauges, twirling wheels. He saw the great cannon, mouths still smoking from the previous salvo, rising, slow and erectile, until their muzzles were pointing at just the right spot in the sky. He saw the gun crews step down and away and put their hands to their ears, all except one man to each gun who was clutching a lanyard. He saw the officer raise a whistle to his lips. He saw all of them bow their heads a little and turn half away. He saw the lanyards go suddenly taut, looking as if they had jerked the guns backwards, so instantaneous was the explosion and recoil.

“Flesh, bodies, nerves, legs . . .” Things were getting all mixed up in his mind. It seemed to be filled with flesh, cloyed with the sweetish smell of flesh that is torn open and over which blood is pouring. It was his flesh, their flesh, lying about still alive, but dying, dying so slowly, dying so fast . . .

“Marching, marching, marching. Slowly, as in a dream. Slow march, funeral march . . .

“The naked road. The hard-surfaced road. The ditch too shallow to shelter even a rabbit from the whizzing, centrifugal metal . . .

“The neat, fatally compact mass on the fatally neat road, so neatly marked on the map . . .

“The neat German captain in his compact dugout. His fatally neat figures, the fatally neat co-ordinates of the naked road . . .

“The lanyards going suddenly taut, looking as if they had jerked the huge guns backwards . . .

“The rush of terrifying sound . . .

“Two kilometres of compact, living, human, vulnerable flesh behind him. Three thousand men paralyzed in their tracks . . .

“The blinding flashes of the detonations . . .

“Whizzing, centrifugal metal . . .

“Shambles . . .

“And then smoke, billowing, acrid smoke, settling slowly . . .”

The hallucinations reeled in his head, then fell to pieces as words broke in and shattered them.

“Why, it's the moon coming up. I thought it was a searchlight at first. I'd forgotten about the moon . . . Watch out for that shell-hole!”

“Ah! Thanks, old man, thanks.” Even to Vignon, who was not usually given to noticing such things, his chief's tone of intense gratitude and relief seemed all out of proportion to the commonplace service of warning him not to step into a hole—so much so, indeed, that he could not help giving his companion a side glance. Dax, feeling the glance rather than seeing it, decided he'd better pull himself together and create a diversion of some sort.

“Pass the order back to put out pipes and cigarettes, will you, major? Also gas respirators at the alert.” His voice sounded quite normal again, he was pleased to note; he was pleased to note, too, that Vignon seemed reassured by its customary tone of decisiveness.

“Silly,” Dax thought, “but the mere issuing of a command always inspires confidence. It doesn't matter whether it is a necessary command, or even a correct one.” Then, a little later, an afterthought came to him: “It inspires self-confidence even in the man who issues it.”

The regiment tramped on. The moonlight made marching easier, not only because it showed up the irregularities of the road, but also because it brought shapes into being, gave the men something to look at. The exercise itself, too, had begun to make muscles, boots, and straps more limber. The equipment was no longer such a dead refractory weight. It was moving, now that it was alive with some suppleness of its own again, to the movement of bodies, arms, and legs. The rhythm of men on the march was gathering uniformity once more.

The order to stop smoking and to adjust their gas masks was a message the men understood well enough. Their understanding of the message was reflected in an almost imperceptible change in the rhythm of their marching. It was not so much that they quickened their pace (which they didn't), as that they tightened it—tightened it, perhaps, in response to an inner visceral contraction which swept, like the order, back over the advancing column. Waves of expectancy, of a kind of nervous expectancy, seemed to fluctuate over those pale, moonlit faces, and the men had a tendency to step on the heels of those ahead of them.