“Good luck!” says the colonel to me, as he escorts me out over the threshold. “I am going to rest for a few hours.”
It is two o’clock in the morning.
The worst part of the journey is still to come; fifteen to eighteen hundred yards over a tableland, which by day is here and there vaguely guarded from sight by copses—what copses!—but for the greater part of the time is quite devoid of cover. By moonlight our outlines will scarcely stand out above the road over the ridge; the return journey, if we set out again after sunrise, will be a little more complicated.
We walk in Indian file, the guide, Captain P—— of the Brigade Staff, who wished to accompany me, and myself. The shells fall like hail. The earth which they have churned up has crumbled to such an extent that it looks like a mass of cinders. Fifteen to eighteen hundred yards is much farther than one thinks. One has time to make a rapid mental survey of one’s whole career.
Again it is mountaineering memories that surge up in my brain. This time it is the journey through a gorge, the Neuweisthor, between the valley of Fée and that of Zermatt in the Valais Alps. We had taken an unfamiliar path; we had to follow a ridge, which on either side looked out over a precipice; on the right, we could make out a very uninviting crevasse; on the left, right at the bottom, the little Italian village of Macugagna appeared at such a sheer drop beneath us that we had the feeling that, if we were to stumble, we should certainly roll down to it, two or three thousand feet below. The ridge was so narrow that we could not place one foot alongside of the other, and we did not know where to pitch our ice-axes. To make matters worse, while the guide was a level-headed man, the porter who brought up the rear of our roped party had fuddled himself with drink before starting. We were at the mercy of a false step on the part of this tippler. But his professional honour had passed into his legs. The ridge ends in a sort of stone tower where one may gain a really firm foothold and breathe freely. There, on turning round, I saw my man, streaming with sweat and his eyes starting out of his head; he had worked all the alcohol out of his system and had fully recovered his faculties as guide.
The track that we are now pursuing is not so hard to follow, but in other ways it is beset with terrors. Every moment we have to walk across bodies flung across it. At every ten or twelve yards, soon at every five or six paces, we are compelled to stride over a corpse, or even bunches of corpses, some slashed and torn, others in a running posture as if they had been overtaken while in full activity. The light of the moon softens the horror of their wounds without altogether veiling it. Many of them belong to the scouts who ensure connections, carry orders, show routes to be followed. In this war, where men vie with one another in every kind of heroism, we must pay a special tribute to those soldiers who, while their comrades dig themselves in as best they can under the hurricane of fire, run about in the open in order to make up for signalling difficulties or for the breaking of telephone wires. Thanks to these men, efforts are co-ordinated and an understanding is maintained at all points of the front, so that the chain of unity holds together. If one falls, there is at once another to take his place. The remainder are always ready; they even offer their services before their turn comes. Prepared to go upon the most perilous errands, they form a mobile guard round their chief; they are the projecting rays of his brain, which, through them, directs men’s wills from afar and draws up or corrects the plans of an operation. Those who have fallen there, or at any rate some of them, seem to have assumed in death the attitude of those antique youths who handed on to each other the sacred torch in the race. Is it the moon that helps me to see these broken statues? Shall I once more find such marble visions by daylight? The crude light of day does not do justice to the beauty of death.
The soldier who acts as our guide marches at a good rate. He gives the signal to stop when a shell falls too close to us, or when the cadence of the explosions points to a systematic curtain fire. He does not pick out the places for halting, and makes us come to a standstill suddenly with corpses under our very noses, lucky indeed if our faces are not splashed with fragments of flesh crushed once more by that ghastly pestle.
But why does he stop at this moment? Just now the tempo seems to be slackening. Surely we ought to take advantage of this respite. Ah, there he is, stripping a dead soldier! He half-raises him and takes off one by one the straps which the man wears in banderole. In this way he unfastens four or five water-bottles, each holding four pints. These he unscrews and sniffs at in turn, not without anxiety on account of the shells which might interrupt him at his task. His face lights up: the water is drinkable. The man whom he has stripped so methodically carried a supply of water for replenishment, and water on this dried-up tableland is as precious as in the desert. The place from which it is drawn is at the foot of the hillside: you are not sure of getting there or of coming back. At the fort, so many lips are thirsty for fresh water!
The guide, with his water-bottle straps round his waist, hastily resumes his journey, drawing us after him as a roebuck draws a pack of hounds.
At this pace we pass a caravan of porters loaded with a consignment of grenades. They are marching as fast as their burden allows them, under the rain of steel. The only means of transport here is the human back. Poor little men, whose heart is still the greatest of all military forces! “It is a scientific war,” people have declared. “Victory lies with munitions. It is the munitions that crush and destroy everything.” Well, when the artillery thinks to have destroyed everything, the human will still offers a wall of flesh as a resistance: men have endured everything—fire, hunger, cold, and thirst—and still they rise out of the shattered soil. No war will be found to have given such examples of the superiority of man to the machine.