For my part, I shall never forget the green and grudging light of the dawn, the desolating look of the lamps and the faces, the asphyxiating smell of men attacked by corruption, the cold shiver of the morning, like the last frozen breath of night in the congealed foliage of large trees.
My work as a stretcher-bearer was over. I could return to carpentry. I made heavy planks of green wood and thought of all sorts of things, as the mind does when robbed of sleep and overwhelmed with bitterness.
Towards eight o’clock in the morning the sun was hailed by a race of flies as it was emerging painfully from the mist; and these animals began to abandon themselves to their vast daily orgy.
All those who were on the Somme in 1916 will never forget the flies. The chaos of the battlefield, its wealth in carrion, the abnormal accumulation of animals, of men, of food that had gone bad—all these were factors in determining that year a gigantic swarm of flies. They seemed to have gathered there from all parts of the globe to attend a solemn function. Every possible kind of fly was there, and the human world, victim of its own hatreds, remained defenceless against this horrible invasion. During a whole summer they were the absolute monarchs and queens, and we did not dispute the food with them.
I have seen, on Ridge 80, wounds swarming with larvæ—sights which, since the battle of the Marne, we had been able to forget. I have seen flies dashing themselves on the blood and the pus of wounds and feeding themselves with such drunken frenzy that, before they could be induced to leave their feasting and fly away, they had to be seized with pincers or with one’s fingers. The army suffered cruelly from them, and it is amazing that, in the end, victory was not theirs.
Nothing had a more lugubrious and stripped appearance than the plateau on which stood the city of tents. Every morning heavy traction engines went up the Etinehem hill and brought water to the camp. Several casks placed in amongst the trees were filled with water of rather a sweet taste, and this provision was to suffice, for a whole day, to slake the thirst of the men and clean away the impurities and emissions of disease.
Except on the horizon line, not a bush was to be seen. Nowhere a tuft of fresh grass. Nothing but an immense stretch of dust or mud, according as the face of the sky was calm or stormy. To relieve this desolate scene with a little colour, someone had had the happy idea of cultivating a little garden between the tents. And the wounded, on being lowered from the cars, were astonished to see, in the midst of the ghastliness of military activity, the pale smile of a geranium, or juniper trees uprooted from the stony ridges of the valley and replanted hastily in the style of French gardens.
I cannot, without being strangely moved, recall the tent in which about twelve soldiers were dying of gaseous gangrene. Around this deathly spot ran a thin little border of flowers, and an assiduous fellow was calmly trying to bring into bloom crimson bell-flowers.
Sometimes the earth, torrid with the month of August, seemed to reel with the satiating deluge of a storm. At such moments the tents used to crackle furiously and seemed, like great livid birds, to cling to the earth in order better to resist the blast of the south wind.