Covered with mud and glory

by Georges Lafond

We went along, boot to boot, slowly, for the roads were slippery. Kiki wanted to dance about, for the keen air made him lively. But Zèbre’s sedateness dismayed him, and Kiki wisely ranged alongside and regulated the pace by his.

The lieutenant talked but little—a few detached words, chopped phrases, about the company, an observation on the weather, a reflection on the horses.

The road was almost deserted save for a few Territorials, muffled in their sheepskins, who dragged along their heavy wooden shoes which were made even higher by a thick sole of snow. From time to time a company wagon, driven like an express train, grazed us with its wheels and splashed us with mud.

Then, abruptly, without having had to climb the slightest hill, we saw Morcourt, as one sees suddenly from the top of a cliff the sea at his feet, in the midst of the thousand windings of the Somme, of the canal and the turf-pits. Morcourt is a village scarcely as large as Proyart, and like it hidden in a gully sheltered from the winds on all sides, and also like it, hidden under the snow.

A blacksmith had set up his forge in the open air against the walls of a tottering tile-kiln. All around the snow had melted in great black puddles where the waiting horses had pawed the ground. The smoke from his fire rose red-tinted and dark in the heavy air which seemed to muffle the ring of the hammers on the anvil.

We come to a stop before a house nearly in ruins, whose tottering remains are a constant menace. A corporal rushes out—nimble, short and thick-set, a small Basque cap binding his sunburned forehead—and then some men come from the neighboring stables.

The houses in the country which were invaded for a short time and in which troops have had their cantonments for long weary months all look alike. Their doors and windows are gone, but these are replaced by tent canvas.

The drivers of the echelon and the war train in the machine-gun companies are nearly always sailors, the older classes of the Territorials, who after many changes have been assigned to the Colonial regiments. No one knows why, but it is probably because the bureaucratic, stay-at-home mental worker finds some relationship between the Colonials and the sea. And so they make these men, accustomed to the management of ships, infantrymen, or drivers, or even cavalrymen. But with the unfailing readiness and the ingenuity of their kind they make up so much for all that, that far from appearing unready and badly placed, one would say that they were veterans already broken to all the tricks of the trade.

Their long ship voyages and the necessities of critical hours have taught them to replace with the means at hand most things in material existence. From an old preserve box and a branch of a tree, squared and split with a hatchet, they make a strong and convenient table. With a scantling and a bit of wire lattice taken from a fence, they make an elastic mattress which, covered with straw and canvas, becomes a very comfortable bed.