Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (best books to read for students .txt) 📖

we don’t move. Once more we look at each other, and then we sprang at them. I grabbed the skirt of a coat and she a belt—all wet enough to wring out.

“‘Never! We won’t let you go—it can’t be done.’

“‘But—’

“‘But me no buts,’ I reply, while she locks the door.”

“Then what?” asked Lamuse.

“Then? Nothing at all,” replied Eudore. “We just stayed like that, very discreetly—all the night—sitting, propped up in the corners, yawning—like the watchers over a dead man. We made a bit of talk at first. From time to time some one said, ‘Is it still raining?’ and went and had a look, and said, ‘It’s still raining’—we could hear it, by the way. A big chap who had a mustache like a Bulgarian fought against sleeping like a wild man. Sometimes one or two among the crowd slept, but there was always one to yawn and keep an eye open for politeness, who stretched himself or half got up so that he could settle more comfortably.

“Mariette and me, we never slept. We looked at each other, but we looked at the others as well, and they looked at us, and there you are.

“Morning came and cleaned the window. I got up to go and look outside. The rain was hardly less. In the room I could see dark forms that began to stir and breathe hard. Mariette’s eyes were red with looking at me all night. Between her and me a soldier was filling his pipe and shivering.

“Some one beats a tattoo on the window, and I half open it. A silhouette with a streaming hat appears, as though carried and driven there by the terrible force of the blast that came with it, and asks—

“‘Hey, in the cafe there! Is there any coffee to be had?’

“‘Coming, sir, coming,’ cried Mariette.

“She gets up from her chair, a little benumbed. Without a word she looks at her self in our bit of a mirror, touches her hair lightly, and says quite simply, the good lass—

“‘I am going to make coffee for everybody.’

“When that was drunk off, we had all of us to go. Besides, customers turned up every minute.

“‘Hey, la p’tite mere,’ they cried, shoving their noses in at the half-open window, ‘let’s have a coffee—or three—or four’—‘and two more again,’ says another voice.

“We go up to Mariette to say good-by. They knew they had played gooseberry that night most damnably, but I could see plainly that they didn’t know if it would be the thing to say something about it or just let it drop altogether.

“Then the Bulgarian made up his mind: ‘We’ve made a hell of a mess of it for you, eh, ma p’tite dame?’

“He said that to show he’d been well brought up, the old sport.

“Mariette thanks him and offers him her hand—‘That’s nothing at all, sir. I hope you’ll enjoy your leave.’

“And me, I held her tight in my arms and kissed her as long as I could—half a minute—discontented—my God, there was reason to be—but glad that Mariette had not driven the boys out like dogs, and I felt sure she liked me too for not doing it.

“‘But that isn’t all,’ said one of the leave men, lifting the skirt of his cape and fumbling in his coat pocket; ‘that’s not all. What do we owe you for the coffees?’

“‘Nothing, for you stayed the night with me; you are my guests.’

“‘Oh, madame, we can’t have that!’

“And how they set to to make protests and compliments in front of each other! Old man, you can say what you like—we may be only poor devils, but it was astonishing, that little palaver of good manners.

“‘Come along! Let’s be hopping it, eh?’

“They go out one by one. I stay till the last. Just then another passer-by begins to knock on the window—another who was dying for a mouthful of coffee. Mariette by the open door leaned forward and cried, ‘One second!’

“Then she put into my arms a parcel that she had ready. ‘I had bought a knuckle of ham—it was for supper—for us—for us two—and a liter of good wine. But, ma foi! when I saw there were five of you, I didn’t want to divide it out so much, and I want still less now. There’s the ham, the bread, and the wine. I give them to you so that you can enjoy them by yourself, my boy. As for them, we have given them enough,’ she says.

“Poor Mariette,” sighs Eudore. “Fifteen months since I’d seen her. And when shall I see her again? Ever?—It was jolly, that idea of hers. She crammed all that stuff into my bag—”

He half opens his brown canvas pouch.

“Look, here they are! The ham here, and the bread, and there’s the booze. Well, seeing it’s there, you don’t know what we’re going to do with it? We’re going to share it out between us, eh, old pals?”

9

The Anger of Volpatte

WHEN Volpatte arrived from his sick-leave, after two months’ absence, we surrounded him. But he was sullen and silent, and tried to get away.

“Well, what about it? Volpatte, have you nothing to tell us?”

“Tell us all about the hospital and the sick-leave, old cock, from the day when you set off in your bandages, with your snout in parenthesis! You must have seen something of the official shops. Speak then, nome de Dieu!”

“I don’t want to say anything at all about it,” said Volpatte.

“What’s that? What are you talking about?”

“I’m fed up—that’s what I am! The people back there, I’m sick of them—they make me spew, and you can tell ‘em so!”

“What have they done to you?”

“A lot of sods, they are!” says Volpatte.

There he was, with his head as of yore, his ears “stuck on again” and his Mongolian cheekbones—stubbornly set in the middle of the puzzled circle that besieged him; amid we felt that the mouth fast closed on ominous silence meant high pressure of seething exasperation in the depth of him.

Some words overflowed from him at last. He turned round—facing towards the rear and the bases—and shook his fist at infinite space. “There are too many of them,” he said between his teeth, “there are too many!” He seemed to be threatening and repelling a rising sea of phantoms.

A little later, we questioned him again, knowing well that his anger could not thus be retained within, and that the savage silence would explode at the first chance.

It was in a deep communication trench, away back, where we had come together for a meal after a morning spent in digging. Torrential rain was falling. We were muddled and drenched and hustled by the flood, and we ate standing in single file, without shelter, under the dissolving sky. Only by feats of skill could we protect the bread and bully from the spouts that flowed from every point in space; and while we ate we put our hands and faces as much as possible under our cowls. The rain rattled and bounced and streamed on our limp woven armor, and worked with open brutality or sly secrecy into ourselves and our food. Our feet were sinking farther and farther, taking deep root in the stream that flowed along the clayey bottom of the trench. Some faces were laughing, though their mustaches dripped. Others grimaced at the spongy bread and flabby meat, or at the missiles which attacked their skin from all sides at every defect in their heavy and miry armor-plate.

Barque, who was hugging his mess-tin to his heart, bawled at Volpatte: “Well then, a lot of sods, you say, that you’ve seen down there where you’ve been?”

“For instance?” cried Blaire, while a redoubled squall shook and scattered his words; “what have you seen in the way of sods?”

“There are—” Volpatte began, “and then—there are too many of them, nom de Dieu! There are—”

He tried to say what was the matter with him, but could only repeat, “There are too many of them!” oppressed and panting. He swallowed a pulpy mouthful of bread as if there went with it the disordered and suffocating mass of his memories.

“Is it the shirkers you want to talk about?”

“By God!” He had thrown the rest of his beef over the parapet, and this cry, this gasp, escaped violently from his mouth as if from a valve.

“Don’t worry about the soft-job brigade, old cross-patch,” advised Barque, banteringly, but not without some bitterness. “What good does it do?”

Concealed and huddled up under the fragile and unsteady roof of his oiled hood, while the water poured down its shining slopes, and holding his empty mess-tin out for the rain to clean it, Volpatte snarled, “I’m not daft—not a bit of it—and I know very well there’ve got to be these individuals at the rear. Let them have their dead-heads for all I care—but there’s too many of them, and they’re all alike, and all rotters, voila!”

Relieved by this affirmation, which shed a little light on the gloomy farrago of fury he was loosing among us, Volpatte began to speak in fragments across the relentless sheets of rain—

“At the very first village they sent me to, I saw duds, and duds galore, and they began to get on my nerves. All sorts of departments and sub-departments and managements and centers and offices and committees—you’re no sooner there than you meet swarms of fools, swam-ms of different services that are only different in name-enough to turn your brain. I tell you, the man that invented the names of all those committees, he was wrong in his head.

“So could I help but be sick of it? Ah, mon vieux,” said our comrade, musing, “all those individuals fiddle-faddling and making believe down there, all spruced up with their fine caps and officers’ coats and shameful boots, that gulp dainties and can put a dram of best brandy down their gullets whenever they want, and wash themselves oftener twice than once, and go to church, and never stop smoking, and pack themselves up in feathers at night to read the newspaper—and then they say afterwards, ‘I’ve been in the war!’”

One point above all had got hold of Volpatte and emerged from his confused and impassioned vision: “All those soldiers, they haven’t to run away with their table-tools and get a bite any old way—they’ve got to be at their ease—they’d rather go and sit themselves down with some tart in the district, at a special reserved table, and guzzle vegetables, and the fine lady puts their crockery out all square for them on the dining-table, and their pots of jam and every other blasted thing to eat; in short, the advantages of riches and peace in that doubly-damned hell they call the Rear!”

Volpatte’s neighbor shook his head under the torrents that fell from heaven and said,” So much the better for them.”

“I’m not crazy—” Volpatte began again.

“P’raps, but you’re not fair.”

Volpatte felt himself insulted by the word. He started, and raised his head furiously, and the rain, that was waiting for the chance, took him plump in the face. “Not fair—me? Not fair—to those dung-hills?”

“Exactly, monsieur,” the neighbor replied; “I tell you that you play hell with them and yet you’d jolly well like to be in the rotters’ place.”

“Very likely—but what does that prove, rump-face? To begin with, we, we’ve been in danger, and it ought to be our turn for the other. But they’re always the same, I tell you; and then there’s young men there, strong as bulls and poised like wrestlers, and then—there are too many