Covered with mud and glory

by Georges Lafond

One must have lived in these remains of villages, which persist in standing, near the lines to have an exact idea of what they are. In these villages furious combats have taken place in the streets, from house to house, and for two years they have been occupied and overpopulated—a hamlet of one hundred and fifty inhabitants often serves as a cantonment for ten thousand men—by men of all arms of the service, from all regions, of all colors.

It is not ruin in all its tragic horror and majesty. It is worse.

It is something which appears to want to live, but which a latent leprosy eats away. Often there are traces of shells, the splatter of bullets, the marks of fire; the roofs may have fallen in from the recent shelling, but even yet the general effect is that the houses on the streets are still standing.

The fronts of these houses, made of straw and mud, with only a large door swinging on its hinges, are whole. Of course the mud has often been scratched in long, leprous wounds, and the straw tumbles out leaving the bare skeleton of worm-eaten wood; and, besides, the windows are without the glass, which has been broken to bits by the explosion of shells, and which is replaced by bits of paper or by calendars. But the real ruin is inside.

Here is the work of the carelessness and negligence of the wandering multitudes who pass that way, who arrive at evening, tired, muddy, wet, who fall asleep on damp straw, cut to pieces and crawling with vermin, and who go on the next day, or three days later, leaving as a mark of their passing a greater stench and a greater dilapidation.

The ruin is inside. It is not the beautiful ending of destruction by fire, but the slow death by cancer which eats away, by gangrene which mounts from the cattle sheds to the stable, from the stable to the barn, and from the barn to the hearth. And at last a day comes when the front alone is standing on the ruin of the annihilated house, and then men who are passing by, seeing that it is tottering and dangerous, cut it down with blows of the axe and chop the wood into bits for their little needs.

And so these houses die: houses which under their humble appearance had great souls palpitating with life, where lives were born and passed their years; where joys and griefs exclaimed and wept, where the peasant, the son of the soil, drew from this soil, the generatrix of strong races, the re-vivifying harvests which he stored away in the barn which to-day is dead.

Whole villages and great villages agonize in this way through months of wearing away, and their end is no less terrible, no less majestic, no less pitiful than of those villages with glorious names which the wrath of shells beats into dust.

Cantonment 77 is made up of those houses which waste away. Between the fragile walls, notched by an empty barn and a fallen shed, opens a courtyard. Filth spreads out in a vast pool on which float among the refuse a pile of garbage, boxes, the waste of cooking and greasy papers.

In the corner of a recess open to every wind, on piles of bricks held together by iron bars pulled from the window sills, the cook has set his pots and bowls in line. His fire of wood so green that the sap oozes out licks the already blackened walls with its long flames.