He had driven the cattle from their shelter and fixed his abode in hutches, stables and cowsheds.
The shell depôts seemed like pottery fields full of earthenware pitchers. Barges floated on the slimy water of the canal. Some carried food and guns: others served as hospital-boats.
From the movements of this heaving mass of beings and the creaking of their machinery, the panting of a giant seemed to issue forth and fill the silence. The whole scene suggested a sinister fair, a festival of war, a gathering of Bohemian clans and dancers of evil repute.
The nearer you got to Bray the more congested the country appeared to be. The motor-riding population held tyrannic sway over the roads, forcing the lowlier horse-wagons to drive across the fields. Little trollies running on rails clanked along pompously, showing great independence, hugging the ground with their small wheels, and their back loaded with millions of cartridges: in amongst the boxes some fellows were squatting, half asleep, proclaiming to the world in general the pleasure of being seated on something which does all the walking for you.
When I got above Chipilly, I beheld an extraordinary scene. An immense plain undulated there, covered with so many men, things and beasts, that over vast stretches the ground was no longer visible. Beyond the ruined tower which looks upon Etinehem lay land of a reddish-brown colour. I saw later that this colour was due to a great mass of horses closely pressed against each other. Every day they were brought to the muddy trough of the Somme to slake their thirst. The tracks were turned into sloughs, and the air was filled with an overpowering smell of sweat and manure.
Then, towards the left, stood a veritable town of unbleached tents, whose top coverings were marked with large red crosses. Farther on, the ground sank down, only to curve up again suddenly towards the battlefield quivering on the horizon in a black fog. From different points a burst of discharging shells sent up white clouds, side by side, in quick succession, like rows of trees on the roadside. In the open sky more than thirty balloons formed a ring, giving one the impression of spectators interested in a brawl.
The Adjutant, pointing out the tents, said to me, “That’s Hill 80. You will see more wounded passing there than there are hairs on your head, and more blood flowing than the water in the canal. All those who are hit between Combles and Bouchavesnes are brought to Hill 80.”
I nodded, and we relapsed again into silence and reflection. The day gave out in the unclean air of the marshes. The English were firing their big cannon not far from us, and their roar crashed along the alignment like an enraged horse dashing blindly away. The horizon was so thick with guns that you could hear a continuous gurgle as of a huge cauldron in the tormenting grip of a furnace.
The Adjutant turned again to me. “Three of your brothers have been killed,” he said. “In one sense you are out of the business. You won’t be very badly off as a stretcher-bearer. In another it is unfortunate, but a good thing for you. It’s hard work, stretcher-bearing, but it’s better than the line. Don’t you think so?”
I said nothing. I thought of that devastated little valley where I had spent the first few weeks of the summer in front of the Plémont hill—the deadly hours I spent looking at the ruins of Lassigny between the torn and jagged poplars, and the apple-trees blighted with the horror on the edge of the chaotic road, and the repulsive shell-holes full of green slime and swarming with life, and the mute face of the Château de Plessier, and the commanding hill which a cosmic upheaval alone had made capable of giving rise to grim forebodings. There during long nights I had breathed the fetid air of the corpse-laden fields. In the most despairing loneliness I had been in turn terrified of death and longing for it. And then some one came along one day to tell me that “You can go back behind the lines. Your third brother has been killed.” And many of the men looked at me, seeming to think with the Adjutant, “Your third brother is dead. In a sense you are lucky.”