"No!"
How does he manage not to hear it? I am more certain than ever now that I am not mistaken. That sort of crackling, distant perhaps, but nevertheless continuously audible, is the battle towards which we are marching, and which is being waged away over there beyond the hilltop. Let us hasten! It is imperative we should fling ourselves immediately and without hesitation into the midst of that fight, face boldly the bullets streaming and striking. Hurry we must, for wounded men are coming down towards us, followed by others in an endless file, and it is as if merely by showing themselves with their wounds and their blood and their appearance of complete exhaustion, with their anguished faces—it is as if they said and repeated again and again to my men:
"See, there is a battle raging! See what it has done for us; just look upon us returning. And there are hundreds and hundreds more who cannot follow us; who have fallen as we did, who have striven to rise, but could not, and who are lying about everywhere in the woods, dying. There are hundreds and hundreds of others who fell dead where they stood, struck in the head, in the heart, in the stomach, who have rolled over on to the moss, whose still warm bodies you will find lying about everywhere in the woods. You can see them for yourselves if you go there. But if you do go, the bullets will kill you also, as they killed them; or they will wound you, as they have wounded us. Do not go on!"
And the living flesh, shrinking instinctively from death, recoils.
"Porchon, watch the men!"
I have carefully lowered my voice and he, replying to me, does the same.
"Things look bad: I am afraid we may have trouble in a bit."
In one backward glance he has seen the faces of the men, anxious, lined with dread, distorted by nervous grimaces, every man in the grip of a tempest of fear, wide-eyed and feverish.
Still, without faltering, they march behind us. Each step forward they take brings them nearer that corner of the earth where death reigns to-day, yet still they march onwards. Each one with his living flesh is about to enter an inferno; yet the terror-stricken body will act as it should, will perform all the actions of a man fighting a battle. The eyes will aim wind judge; the finger on the trigger will not fail. And so they will go on for as long as may be necessary, despite the bullets flying about them, whistling and singing without pause, often striking with a queer dead noise which makes one turn one's head quickly, and which seems to say: "Here! Look!" They look and see a comrade fall, and say to themselves: "In a little while perhaps it will be my turn; in an hour or a minute or even in this passing second, it will be my turn." And then every particle of their flesh will shrink and know fear. They will be afraid—that is as certain as it is inevitable; but being afraid, they will remain at their posts. And they will fight, compelling their bodies to obedience, because they know that that is what they should do, and because—well! because they are men.
By fours, through the wood and up the slope. I cannot overcome the forebodings aroused by the nervousness of my men. I have complete confidence in them and in myself; but, that confidence notwithstanding, something warns me instinctively of the presence of a new element, of a danger I cannot define even to myself, of—can it be panic? What an age we are in going up! My pulses are beating violently; the blood is rushing to my brain.