"You come from the country?"

"I was labourer on a farm. You have to live with the beasts, and you get to be like "em. But it is the truth I tell you now, Sir, that men do treat each other worse than the beasts. "Be kind to the animals."

That was on a notice a joker stuck up in our trench.... But what isn"t good enough for them is good enough for us. All right; I"m not kicking. Things are like that. We have to take it as it comes. But you could see that the little Sergeant had never been up against it before; the rain and the mud, and the meanness; the dirt worst of all, everything that you touch, your food, your skin, full of vermin.... He came close to crying, I could see, once or twice, when he was new to it. I wouldn"t let on that I noticed, for the boy was proud, didn"t want any help, but I would jolly him, try to cheer him up, lend him a hand sometimes; he was glad to get it. You see you have to get together. But before long he could stick it out as well as anybody; then it was his turn to help me. I never heard him squeal, and we had gay times together--must have a joke now and then, no matter what happens. It keeps off bad luck."

Clerambault sat and listened with a heavy heart.

"Was he happier towards the last?" he asked.

"Yes, Sir, I think he was what you call resigned, just like we all were. I don"t know how it is, but you all seem to start out with the same foot in the morning. We are all different, but somehow, after a while it seems as if we were growing alike. It"s better, too, that way. You don"t mind things so much all in a bunch.... It"s only when you get leave, and after you come back--it"s bad, nothing goes right any more. You ought to have seen the little Sergeant that last time."

Clerambault felt a pang as he said quickly:

"When he came back?"

"He was very low. I don"t know as I ever saw him so bad before."

An agonised expression came over Clerambault"s face, and at his gesture, the wounded man who had been looking at the ceiling while he talked, turned his eyes and understood, for he added at once:

"He pulled himself together again, after that."

"Tell me what he said to you, tell me everything," said Clerambault again taking his hand.

The sick man hesitated and answered.

"I don"t think I just remember what he said." Then he shut his eyes, and lay still, while Clerambault bent over him and tried to see what was before those eyes under their closed lids.

An icy moonless night. From the bottom of the hollow _boyau_ one could see the cold sky and the fixed stars. Bullets rattled on the hard ground. Maxime and his friend sat huddled up in the trench, smoking with their chins on their knees. The lad had come back that day from Paris. He was depressed, would not answer questions, shut himself up in a sulky silence. The other had left him all the afternoon to bear his trouble alone. Now here in the darkness he felt that the moment had come, and sat a little closer, for he knew that the boy would speak of his own accord. A bullet over their heads glanced off, knocking down a lump of frozen turf.

"Hullo, old gravedigger," said the other, "don"t get too fresh."

"Might as well make an end of it now," said Maxime. "That"s what they all seem to want."

"Give the boche your skin for a present? I"ll say you"re generous!"

"It"s not only the boches; they all have a hand in it."

"Who, all?"

"All of them back there where I come from, in Paris, friends and relations; the people on the other side of the grave, the live ones.--As for us, we are as good as dead."

In the long silence that followed they could hear the scream of a sh.e.l.l across the sky. Maxime"s comrade blew out a mouthful of smoke.

"Well, youngster," he said, "it didn"t go right, back there this time, did it?--I guessed as much!"

"I don"t know why."

"When one is hurt, and the other isn"t, they haven"t much to say to one another."

"Oh, they suffer too."

"Not the same. You can"t make a man know what a toothache is unless he feels it. Can"t be done. Go to them all snuggled up in their beds, and make them understand how it is out here!... It"s nothing new to me. I didn"t have to wait for the war. Always have lived like this. But do you believe when I was working in the soil, sweating all the fat off my bones, that any of them bothered their heads about me? I don"t mean that there"s any harm in them, nor much good, either, but like anybody else, they don"t see how it is. To understand a thing properly you"ve got to take hold of it yourself, take the work, and the hurt. If not, and that"s what it is, you know--might as well make up your mind--no use trying to explain. That"s the way things are, and we can"t do anything about it."

"Life would not be worth living, if it were as bad as that."

"Why not, by gosh? I"ve stuck it out all this time, and you"re just as good as me, better, because you"ve got more brains and can learn.

That"s the way to get on, the harder it is the more it teaches you.

And then when you"re together, like us here, and things are rocky, it"s not a pleasure, exactly, but it ain"t all pain. The worst is to be off by yourself; and you"re not lonesome, are you, boy?" Maxime looked him in the face, as he answered:

"I was back there, but I don"t feel it here with you."

The man who lay on the bed said nothing of what had been pa.s.sing before his closed eyes. He turned them tranquilly on the father, whose agonised look seemed to implore him to speak. And then, with an awkward kindness, he tried to explain that if the boy was down-hearted it was probably because he had just left home, but _they_ had cheered him up as well as they could; they knew how he felt. He had never known what it was to have a father himself, but when he was a kid he used to think what luck it would be to have one.... "So I thought I might try. I spoke to him, Sir, like you would yourself,... and he soon quieted down. He said, all the same, there was one thing we got out of this blooming war; that there were lots of poor devils in the world who don"t know each other, but are all made alike. Sometimes we call "em our brothers, in sermons and places like that, but no one takes much stock in it. If you want to know it"s true, you have to slave together like us--He kissed me then, Sir."

Clerambault rose, and bending over the bandaged face, kissed the wounded man"s rough cheek.

"Tell me something that I can do for you," he said.

"You are very good, Sir, but there"s not much you can do now. I am so used up. No legs, and a broken arm. I"m no good,--what could I work at? Besides, it"s not sure yet that I shall pull through. We"ll have to leave it at that. If I go out, good-bye. If not, can"t do anything but wait. There are plenty of trains."

As Clerambault admired his patience, he repeated his refrain: "I"ve got the habit. There"s no merit in being patient when there"s nothing else to do.... A little more or less, what does it matter?... It"s like life, this war is."

Clerambault saw that in his egotism he had asked the man nothing about himself. He did not even know his name.

"My name? It"s a good fit for me,--Courtois Aime is what they call me--Aime, that"s the Christian name, fine for an unlucky fellow like me, and Courtois on the top of it. Queer enough, isn"t it?... I never had a family, came out of an Orphan Asylum; my foster-father, a farmer down in Champagne, offered to bring me up; and you can bet he did it!

I had all the training I wanted; but anyhow it learned me what I had to expect. I"ve had all that was coming to me!"

Thereupon he told in a few brief dry phrases, without emotion, of the series of bad luck which had made up his life. Marriage with a girl as poor as himself--"hunger wedding thirst," as they say, sickness and death, the struggle with nature,--it would not be so bad if men would only help.... _h.o.m.o, homini ... h.o.m.o_.... All the social injustice weighs on the under dog. As he listened Clerambault could not keep down his indignation, but Aime Courtois took it as a matter of course; that"s the way it always has been, and always will be; some are born to suffer, others not. You can"t have mountains without valleys. The war seemed perfectly idiotic to him, but he would not have lifted a finger to prevent it. He had in his way the fatalist pa.s.sivity of the people, which hides itself, on Gallic soil, behind a veil of ironic carelessness. The "no use in getting in a sweat about it," of the trenches. Then there is also that false pride of the French, who fear nothing so much as ridicule, and would risk death twenty times over for something they know to be absurd, rather than be laughed at for an act of unusual common-sense. "You might as well try to stop the lightning as talk against war." When it hails there is nothing to do but to cover over your cold-frames if you can, and when it"s over go round and see how much is left of your crop. And they will keep on doing this until the next hailstorm, the next war, to the end of time.

"No use getting in a sweat." ... It would never occur to them that Man can change Man.

This stupid heroic resignation irritated Clerambault profoundly.

The upper cla.s.ses are charmed with it, no doubt, for they owe their existence to it,--but it makes a Danad"s sieve of the human race, and its age-long effort, since all its courage, its virtues, and its labours, are spent in learning how to die.... But when he looked at the fragment of a man before him, his heart was pierced with an infinite pity. What could this wretched man do, symbol as he was, of the mutilated, sacrificed people? For so many centuries he has bled and suffered under our eyes, while we, his more fortunate brothers, have only encouraged him to persevere, throwing him some careless word of praise from a distance, which cost us nothing. What help have we ever given him? Nothing at all in action, and little enough in words.

We owe to his sacrifices the leisure to think; but all the fruit of our thought we have kept for ourselves; we have not given him a taste of it. We are afraid of the light, of impudent opinion and the rulers of the hour who call to us saying: "Put it out! You who have the Light, hide it, if you wish to be pardoned...." Oh, let us be cowards no more. For who will speak, if we do not? The others are gagged and must die without a word.

A wave of pain pa.s.sed over the features of the wounded man. With eyes fixed on the ceiling, his big mouth twisted, his teeth obstinately clenched, he could say no more.--Clerambault went away, his mind was made up. The silence of this soldier on his bed of agony had brought him to a decision. He would speak.

PART THREE

Clerambault came back from the hospital, shut himself into his room, and began to write. His wife tried to come in, to discover what he was doing; it seemed as if the good woman had a suspicion, an intuition, rare with her, which gave her a sort of obscure fear of what her husband might be about to do, but he succeeded in keeping her away until he had finished. Ordinarily not a line of his was spared to his family; it was a pleasure to his simple-hearted, affectionate vanity, and a duty towards their love also, which none of them would have neglected. This time, however, he did neglect it, for reasons which he would not admit to himself, for though he was far from imagining the consequences of his act, he was afraid of their objections, he did not feel sure enough to expose himself to them, and so preferred to confront them with the accomplished fact.

His first word was a cry of self-accusation: