This endured for more than an hour, this insane uproar of shrieking voices, crashing cannon, cracking rifles; while Rheims, in flames threw to the wind her streamers of light.
We had no accurate idea of the battle as a whole. Each man acted for himself, for the little corner of ground in range of his rifle, for the piece of trench which he was holding. At one side, the Boches jumped into the trench, cut the throats of the nearest men, then fell, themselves stabbed by bayonets. At another point they penetrated the barbed-wire entanglements, remained caught there, struggling to free themselves, and were cut to pieces by our fire. Farther on, our shells crushed them. We were scarcely conscious of it. We elbowed our neighbors, we exchanged encouragement, we shrieked when we would speak. We were so intense, so full of fury, that many were frothing when commanded to desist. The underofficers exhausted themselves in crying halt, and had to shake each man to awaken him, to bring him to himself, to make him understand. We felt exasperated.
However, the cannonade was decreasing in violence. The gun-fire ceased, reviving only at intervals. The stretcher-bearers ran up, took away the wounded, picked up the tortured gas victims, whose lungs creaked like the bellows of a forge. The battle was over. The Boches were repulsed. In spite of their gas, in spite of the surprise, in spite of their cannon, they left on the field before us almost a battalion: sprawling corpses, dismembered like broken puppets; dead men who gaped at the stars; wounded who soon were dead. Our losses were considerable, theirs were much greater. Twenty of their number remained with us as prisoners. Haggard and stunned, they were led to the rear for the interrogatory.
“Well, how has it been?” I asked Berthet, as I gripped his hand. “It was superb!” he responded. There was a hole in his coat. “Not touched?” “No, a ball just missed taking me off.” He said it with a calm which I admired. He concealed from me the fact that he had breathed the abominable vapors.
After all, it was only a local action on our line. It was not, in the generally accepted sense, a battle. All of us have seen much greater since then. However, on account of the gas, this first engagement is vividly present in our memory, a recollection never to be effaced. It was an encounter so strange! That foul vapor which enveloped the earth, which ate its way into the fibre of the clothing we wore, corroded and withered the leaves on the trees, and changed the aspect of God’s sane creation into a distorted image of hell, will remain forever one of the deepest infamies of the Germans. After contact with this poisoned cloud, nothing retained its original appearance. The arms were red without being rusty, the color of uniforms was changed. There were very few of our men suffering from gun or bayonet wounds, but whole mounds of those who died in convulsions: poor, twisted dead, who agonized in dying; so disfigured their own mothers could not have recognized them. Some of them were wringing their hands, others were swallowing stones, others seemed to be rammed into the earth like stakes. This was not war; it was worse. This was not the rain of bullets which pierce the flesh, or break a skull in passing. This was not the brutal shell, which bursts to fragments, scatters in a thousand directions and mows down a group of men as gayly as a child knocks down a house of cards. This was another matter. It was the very air turned accomplice of the enemy; blinded eyes, frothing mouth, rotted lungs, a breast on fire; every effort exerted redoubling the torture; the rescuer struck down above the man he attempted to save; the officer suffering like his men; the telephone-operator seized in his shelter, the courier arrested in his course, all alike smothered and struggling with death. This was a breath from the depths of hell, this diabolic invention, which that monster, the German Junker, forced men to choose: weapon of meanness and treachery, which sets at naught the valor of both defender and assailant!
VII
RHEIMS
WHEN the life fantastic becomes the life ordinary, when one is at the centre of prodigious events which unroll more rapidly than the picture on the screen, and appear in ever-new guise, the astonishing thing becomes a natural thing; the unheard-of becomes the expected. A distortion of sensation is produced; the brain registers only that which surpasses the climax of what has already been experienced; as on mountain heights, peaks which have been surmounted appear low, and the climber feels that only those are high which are still above him.
Thus it became the ordinary thing for Berthet and me, as for our companions, to live in the extraordinary and the supernatural. We felt quite at home in it, and moved at our ease in a situation which, for him at least, would have been untenable a few short months before. We had become soldiers like the others, eating, when we could, a meagre and coarse ration; sleeping when it was possible; in constant danger of death, but avoiding it apparently by instinct. We lived with no more care than the beasts of the field; with beards long, hands dirty. We dug in the earth, as did all the rest; we watched at the parapets with eyes puffed from lack of sleep. Uncouthness grew upon us, and we appeared, at dawn, in the glacial cold, muffled up in pieces of cloth and skins of animals; hairy, hideous, and fearsome.
We were on patrol duty one night. Creeping about, we passed the listening-post and advanced on No Man’s Land. Like savages, we stalked the enemy for hours, trying to surprise some unknown men: soldiers like ourselves, who might be lost between the lines; men anxious like ourselves, and like ourselves afraid of death and suffering. Then we returned, annoyed to come back without having bagged a foe; regretful that we had not been able to spill some man’s blood. However——