20

Under Fire

Rudely awakened in the dark, I open my eyes:  “What?  What’s up?”

“Your turn on guard—­it’s two o’clock in the morning,” says Corporal Bertrand at the opening into the hole where I am prostrate on the floor.  I hear him without seeing him.

“I’m coming,” I growl, and shake myself, and yawn in the little sepulchral shelter.  I stretch my arms, and my hands touch the soft and cold clay.  Then I cleave the heavy odor that fills the dug-out and crawl out in the middle of the dense gloom between the collapsed bodies of the sleepers.  After several stumbles and entanglements among accouterments, knapsacks and limbs stretched out in all directions, I put my hand on my rifle and find myself upright in the open air, half awake and dubiously balanced, assailed by the black and bitter breeze.

Shivering, I follow the corporal; he plunges in between the dark embankments whose lower ends press strangely and closely on our march.  He stops; the place is here.  I make out a heavy mass half-way up the ghostly wail which comes loose and descends from it with a whinnying yawn, and I hoist myself into the niche which it had occupied.

The moon is hidden by mist, but a very weak and uncertain light overspreads the scene, and one’s sight gropes its way.  Then a wide strip of darkness, hovering and gliding up aloft, puts it out.  Even after touching the breastwork and the loophole in front of my face I can hardly make them out, and my inquiring hand discovers, among an ordered deposit of things, a mass of grenade handles.

“Keep your eye skinned, old chap,” says Bertrand in a low voice.  “Don’t forget that our listening-post is in front there on the left.  Allons, so long.”  His steps die away, followed by those of the sleepy sentry whom I am relieving.

Rifle-shots crackle all round.  Abruptly a bullet smacks the earth of the wall against which I am leaning.  I peer through the loophole.  Our line runs along the top of the ravine, and the land slopes downward in front of me, plunging into an abyss of darkness where one can see nothing.  One’s sight ends always by picking out the regular lines of the stakes of our wire entanglements, planted on the shore of the waves of night, and here and there the circular funnel-like wounds of shells, little, larger, or enormous, and some of the nearest occupied by mysterious lumber.  The wind blows in my face, and nothing else is stirring save the vast moisture that drain from it.  It is cold enough to set one shivering in perpetual motion.  I look upwards, this way and that; everything is borne down by dreadful gloom.  I might be derelict and alone in the middle of a world destroyed by a cataclysm.