The Dark Forest

by Hugh Walpole

He could only wonder now at his easy ready belief that happiness would last for him. Had happiness ever lasted? As a man began so he ended. Life laughed at him and would always laugh. Nevertheless, he had that journey—five days of perfect unalloyed delight. Nobody could rob him of that. She had said to him that even at the beginning of the journey she had known that she did not love him—she had known but he had not, and even though he had cheated himself with the glittering bubble of an illusion the splendour had been there....

Meanwhile behind his despair there was something else stirring. He has told me that upon that afternoon he was only very dimly, very very faintly aware of it, aware of it only fiercely to deny it. He knew, however stoutly he might refuse to acknowledge it, that the events of the last weeks had bred in him some curiosity, some excitement that he could not analyse. He would like to have thought that his life began and ended only in Marie Ivanovna, but the Battle of S—— had, as it were in spite of himself, left something more.

He found that he recalled the details of that battle as though his taking part in it had bound him to something. Even it was suggested to him that there was something now that he must do outside his love for Marie Ivanovna, something that had perhaps no connexion with her at all. In the very heart of his misery he was conscious that a little pulse was beating that was strange to him, foreign to him; it was as though he were warned that he had embarked upon some voyage that must be carried through to the very end. He was, in truth, less completely overwhelmed by his catastrophe than he knew.

As they now advanced and entered upon the first outworks of the Carpathians the day clouded. They stumbled down into a little narrow brown valley and drove there by the side of an ugly naked stream, wandering sluggishly through mud and weeds. Over them the woods, grey and sullen, had completely closed. The sun, a round glazed disk sharply defined but without colour, was like a dirty plate in the sky. Up again into the woods, then over rough cart tracks, they came finally to a standstill amongst thick brushwood and dripping undergrowth.

They could hear, very far away, the noise of cannon. The sanitars were inclined to grumble. "Nice sort of business, looking for dead men here, your Honour.... We must leave the carts here and go on foot. What's it wet for? It hasn't been raining."

Why was it wet, indeed? A heavy brooding inertia, Trenchard has told me, seemed to seize them all. "They were not pleasant trees, you know," I remember his afterwards telling me, "all dirty and tangled, and we all looked dirty too. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. But that afternoon I simply didn't care about anything, nothing mattered." I don't think that the sanitars at that time respected Trenchard very greatly. He wasn't, in any case, a man of authority and his broken stammering Russian wouldn't help him. Then there is nothing stranger than the fashion in which the Russian language will (if you are a timid foreigner), of a sudden wilfully desert you. Be bold with it and it may, somewhat haughtily, perhaps, consent to your use of it ... be frightened of it and it will despise you for ever. Upon that afternoon it deserted Trenchard; even his own language seemed to have left him. His brain was cold and damp like the woods around him.

They passed through the thickets and came, to their great surprise, upon a trench occupied by soldiers. This surprised them because they had heard that the Austrians were many versts distant. The soldiers also seemed to wonder. They explained their mission to a young officer who seemed at first as though he would ask them something, then checked himself, gave them permission to pass through and watched them with grave gaze. After they had crossed the barbed wire the woods suddenly closed about them as though a door had been softly shut behind them. The ground now squelched beneath their feet, the sky between the trees was like damp blotting-paper, and the smell that had been only faintly in the air before was now heavy around them, blown in thick gusts as the wind moved through the trees. Shrapnel now could be distinctly heard at no great distance, with its hiss, its snap of sound, and sometimes rifle-shots like the crack of a ball on a cricket bat broke through the thickets. They separated, spreading like beaters in a long line: "Soon," Trenchard told me, "I was quite alone. I could hear sometimes the breaking of a twig or a stumbling footfall but I might have been alone at the end of the world. It was obvious that the regimental sanitars had been there before us because there were many new roughly made graves. There were letters too and post cards lying about all heavy with wet and dirt. I picked up some of these—letters from lovers and sisters and brothers. One letter I remember in a large baby-hand from a boy to his father telling him about his lessons and his drill, 'because he would soon be a soldier.' One letter, too, from a girl to her lover saying that she had had a dream and knew now that her 'dear Franz, whom she loved with all her soul, would return to her!... I am quite confident now that we shall be happy here again very soon....' In such a place, those words."

As he walked alone there he felt, as I had felt before the battle of S——, that he had already been there. He knew those trees, that smell, that heavy overhanging sky. Then he remembered, as I had remembered, his dream. But whereas that dream had been to me only a reflected story, with him it had lasted throughout his life. He knew every step of that first advance into the forest, the look back to the long dim white house with shadowy figures still about it, the avenue with many trees, the horses and dogs down the first grey path, then the sudden loneliness, the quiet broken only by the dripping of the trees.

Always that had caught him by the throat with terror, and now to-day he was caught once again. He was watched: he fancied that he could see the eyes behind the thicket and hear the rustling movement of somebody. To-day he could hear nothing. If at last his dream was to be fashioned into reality let it be so. Did the creature wish to destroy him, let it be so. He had no strength, no hope, no desire....

"It was there," he told me, "when I scarcely knew what was real and what was not, that I saw that for which I was searching. I noticed first the dark grey-blue of the trousers, then the white skull. There was a horrible stench in the air. I called and the sanitars answered me. Then I looked at it. I had never seen a dead man before. This man had been dead for about a fortnight, I suppose. Its grey-blue trousers and thick boots were in excellent condition and a tin spoon and some papers were showing out of the top of one boot. Its face was a grinning skull and little black animals like ants were climbing in and out of the mouth and the eye-sockets. Its jacket was in good condition, its arms were flung out beyond its head. I felt sick and the whole place was so damp and smelt so badly that it must have been horribly unhealthy. The sanitars began to dig a grave. Those who were not working smoked cigarettes, and they all stood in a group watching the body with a solemn and serious interest. One of them made a little wooden cross out of some twigs. There was a letter just beside the body which they brought me. It began: 'Darling Heinrich,—Your last letter was so cheerful that I have quite recovered from my depression. It may not be so long now before ...' and so on, like the other letters that I had read. It grinned at us there with a devilish sarcasm, but its trousers and boots were pitiful and human. The men finished the grave and then, with their feet, turned it over. As it rolled a flood of bright yellow insects swarmed out of its jacket, and a grey liquid trickled out of the skull. The last I saw of it was the gleam of the tin spoon above its boot...."