The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.
“Courage, mon vieux!”
The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud. Sharp stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the high, long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette. Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells cut through the air above us like scythes. The caldron in this pit of war was being stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us, covered by a bloody blanket like the other one. From slimy sand-bags and wet ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. A boot with some pulp inside protruded from a mud—bank where I stood, and there was a human head, without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of a shell—hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year before, when swarms of boys, of the '16 class, boys of eighteen, the flower of French youth, rushed forward from the crossroads at La Targette, a few hundred yards away, to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They captured them, and it cost them seven thousand in killed and wounded—at least three thousand dead. They fought like young demons through the flaming streets. They fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire. Machine—guns cut them down as though they were ripe corn under the sickle. But these French boys broke the Prussian Guard that day.
Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below earth at the Labyrinth—sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the Labyrinth, until in February of '16 they went away after greeting our khaki men who came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.
XIV
It was then, in that February of '15, that the city of Arras passed for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in the surging tide of traffic that poured through to victory that cost as much sometimes as defeat.
When I first went into Arras during its occupation by the French I remembered a day, fifteen months before, near the town of St.-Pol in Artois, where I was caught up in one of those tides of fugitives which in those early days of war used to roll back in a state of terror before the German invasion. “Where do they come from?” I asked, watching this long procession of gigs and farmers' carts and tramping women and children. The answer told me everything. “They are bombarding Arras, m'sieur.”
Since then “They” had never ceased to bombard Arras. From many points of view, as I had come through the countryside at night, I had seen the flashes of shells over that city and had thought of the agony inside. Four days before I went in first it was bombarded with one hundred and fifty seventeen-inch shells, each one of which would destroy a cathedral. It was with a sense of being near to death—not a pleasant feeling, you understand—that I went into Arras for the first time and saw what had happened to it.
I was very near to the Germans. No more than ten yards away, when I stood peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the suburb of Blangy—it was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a piano in the parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of sand-bags—and no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy's lines when I paced up and down the great railway station of Arras, where no trains ever traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been encamped outside the city, and for all that time had tried to batter a way into and through it. An endless battle had surged up against its walls, but in spite of all their desperate attacks no German soldier had set foot inside the city except as a prisoner of war. Many thousands of young Frenchmen had given their blood to save it.