All that offers even a precarious shelter—a roof—is occupied by the men who crowd in there on old, filthy straw, and on the meager rations of fresh straw, often too fresh. And as the tiles and thatch let the rain filter through, they stretch above them strips of tent canvas.
Oh, blessed canvas! To what uses is it not put! It serves as a roof against bad weather, the rain and snow; a protection against dampness, mud and vermin; planted on two stakes, stretched to a door casing, it protects the fires for cooking from draughts; in the more comfortable cantonments in the rear, where the straw is clean and abundant, where the men are at last able to take off their shoes, and their muddy leggings and their trousers heavy with dampness, it serves as the bed clothes; and, finally, at the last hour it is in the tent canvas that they collect the bodies with their torn and shattered limbs. It serves as shroud and coffin. And, faithful to its rôle, it is the last shelter.
The men began to arrive by groups almost in order, at any rate as much so as the littered ground in the courtyard would permit. They assembled by sections in a half circle around the pool of filth. It was certainly a picturesque sight when, at the command “Attention,” these men mounted a faultless guard around this fetid pool, where, among papers, tossed about and dirty, and box covers, there floated, bloated and fetid, all kinds of carrion, the rats of the last hecatomb.
Near the doorway on the largest and cleanest part of the courtyard the eight machine guns were drawn up in line.
Eight machine guns, the armament of the company.
Eight guns, so small, so fine, and such bits of workmanship, that one would think to see them that they were a child’s playthings.
The machine guns appeared very coquettish and pretty as they rested on their bluish-gray tripod, with their steel barrels well burnished even to the mouth of their muzzles. They hardly appeared at all threatening with the polished leather of the breech, where the bronzed fist of the gun layer stood out in graceful designs, and the attenuated round and svelte circles of the radiator.
Remains of Villages near the Lines [See page 36]
And the machine gun is a coquette, too. Under its appearance of delicacy and grace it conceals a terrible power of domination and strength. Yet it hurls pitiless death without noise, with a rapidity as furtive as a shout of laughter, with a tac-tac which is scarcely perceptible and which is no more menacing than the familiar tac-tac of the sewing-machine or the typewriter.