Light

by Henri Barbusse

Through the heavy distant noise of our tramping, through the funereal consolation of our drowsiness, we heard the adjutant's ringing voice, violently reprimanding this or the other. "Where have you seen, swine, that there can be patriotism without hatred? Do you think one can love his own country if he doesn't hate the others?"

When some one spoke banteringly of militarism—for no one, except Termite, who didn't count, took the word seriously—Marcassin growled despairingly, "French militarism and Prussian militarism, they're not the same thing, for one's French and the other's Prussian!"

But we felt that all these wrangles only shocked and wearied him. He was instantly and gloomily silent.

We were halted to mount guard in a part we had never seen before, and for that reason it seemed worse than the others to us at first. We had to scatter and run up and down the shelterless trench all night, to avoid the plunging files of shells. That night was but one great crash and we were strewn in the middle of it among black puddles, upon a ghostly background of earth. We moved on again in the morning, bemused, and the color of night. In front of the column we still heard the cry "Forward!" Then we redoubled the violence of our effort, we extorted some little haste from out us; and the soaked and frozen company went on under cathedrals of cloud which collapsed in flames, victims of a fate whose name they had no time to seek, a fate which only let its force be felt, like God.

During the day, and much farther on, they cried "Halt!" and the smothered sound of the march was silent. From the trench in which we collapsed under our packs, while another lot went away, we could see as far as a railway embankment. The far end of the loophole-pipe enframed tumbledown dwellings and cabins, ruined gardens where the grass and the flowers were interred, enclosures masked by palings, fragments of masonry to which eloquent remains of posters even still clung—a corner full of artificial details, of human things, of illusions. The railway bank was near, and in the network of wire stretched between it and us many bodies were fast-caught as flies.

The elements had gradually dissolved those bodies and time had worn them out. With their dislocated gestures and point-like heads they were but lightly hooked to the wire. For whole hours our eyes were fixed on this country all obstructed by a machinery of wires and full of men who were not on the ground. One, swinging in the wind, stood out more sharply than the others, pierced like a sieve a hundred times through and through, and a void in the place of his heart. Another specter, quite near, had doubtless long since disintegrated, while held up by his clothes. At the time when the shadow of night began to seize us in its greatness a wind arose, a wind which shook the desiccated creature, and he emptied himself of a mass of mold and dust. One saw the sky's whirlwind, dark and disheveled, in the place where the man had been; the soldier was carried away by the wind and buried in the sky.

Towards the end of the afternoon the piercing whistle of the bullets was redoubled. We were riddled and battered by the noise. The wariness with which we watched the landscape that was watching us seemed to exasperate Marcassin. He pondered an idea; then came to a sudden decision and cried triumphantly, "Look!"

He climbed to the parapet, stood there upright, shook his fist at space with the blind and simple gesture of the apostle who is offering his example and his heart, and shouted, "Death to the Boches!"

Then he came down, quivering with the faith of his self-gift.

"Better not do that again," growled the soldiers who were lined up in the trench, gorgonized by the extraordinary sight of a living man standing, for no reason, on a front line parapet in broad daylight, stupefied by the rashness they admired although it outstripped them.