“Along the whole front, hundreds of miles long, from the North Sea to Switzerland, the faithful soldiers are posted in the trenches.
“In Flanders the water reaches to their knees. The pumps are working, but without much success. In spite of cement and joists and props, the trenches fall in every day, and the sandbags have to be renewed with infinite trouble every minute. When they leave the trenches the soldiers march through water for miles. In Champagne they are white with chalk, in the Argonne and the Vosges they are coated with mud up to their forage-caps. There, too, the pumps are working to get the mastery over the water.
“It pours with rain, it snows, the wind blows. When our soldiers go to their quarters to rest, many of them support themselves with sticks; for the water and the cold have stiffened their legs. No army of ancient days could have shown such energy as this. Even Napoleon would never have dared to ask of his armies, though they were used to hardship, such prodigious efforts. At the present time the willingness of the men is tenfold. The soldier marches in blood up to his ankles, the blood of the enemy, and the blood of the comrade he loved; but his brow is crowned with laurels.
“The soldier stands there, in the mud and the water, among the wet sandbags pierced with bullets, in the narrow labyrinths of the trenches, behind crumbling walls and among shattered tree-trunks. And that is seen from the seashore where the waves break on the beach to the Swiss frontier where the mountains rise. A hundred thousand men, at this moment, are there, every ten paces, searching the horizon. Behind the sandbags machine-guns are on the watch day and night. In these damp shelters their comrades are sleeping curled up, but ready to dash out and risk their lives at the sentinel’s first alarm, as they have done for seventeen months. Water oozes from the walls. They are silent; their eyes are looking for the Fatherland. They are lying down in their dirty overcoats, they are asleep or thinking of nothing. When the sentinel calls them, they start. They eat their soup while the water trickles down between the sacks, and they are wet through with rain.
“Rusting iron covered with mud, shell-holes filled with slimy water, scattered bundles of clothes, half buried in the earth, dead bodies which have lain there for weeks, and which it has been impossible to bury, and just over there, thirty or forty or a hundred yards away, the enemy.... That is all that the soldiers see, that is their horizon, that is their world. Hundreds of thousands of vigorous men are perishing there, though their destiny was to perpetuate the human race. Death has done good business this year. Already the rats are coming from the destroyed villages and hunting about in the ground. Near Souchez, a prisoner tells me, they are arriving in formidable swarms. The crows are croaking greedily. But there is no fear and no giving way. No soldier who is at the front, right at this point, has not the right to tremble. The war is pitiless. For, by God, it is not demanding too much to ask people who are in safety to look death in the face! A dead man is a dead man, and at this moment there are much more horrible things than death. Many French and English, whose nerves have given way, have jumped on the sandbags and asked death to set them free.
“And death is everywhere. It is everywhere, the whole length of the front, from the sea to the snow-mountains. Bullets whistle, mines and hand-grenades fly about, shells fired a long distance off plough into the ground with terrific explosions, a bit of trench trembles and flies into the air. Death takes officer and man without distinction. It is in the destroyed villages where the soldier is trying to rest, in the forests, in the thickets, and in the shelters where the cannons thunder, above in the air, below under the earth, everywhere.
“Honour to the brave men who fall in these days.
“Death, which stalks across Belgium, France, Alsace, has its special quarters, its craters which are always boiling over, to burst out every now and then and vomit blood and fire. The Yser canal, Souchez and Vimy, Berry-au-Bac, Tahure, the hills of Champagne, the Argonne, the heights of Vauquois, which have swallowed up thousands and thousands of men, Bois le Prêtre and Hartmannsweilerkopf—all these places and others still are the craters which boil without ceasing. All of a sudden the air shrieks and shells arrive in swarms. Like heavy hammers in a smithy for hours at a time they hammer violently on the trenches and reduce everything to fire and blood.
French Attack from Cemetery of Rehainviller near Lunéville.
From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue Duguay-Trouin, Paris.