Gabriel Chevallier - Fear

They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thing, this being, screamed in a corner like a maniac. The revulsion that turned our stomachs told us that it would an act of generosity, a fraternal act, to finish him off.

The German artillery has cut the road; we can hear the dull thud of the shells. We cannot be evacuated. Outside, more and more new batches of wounded men wait in the rain for us to die so they can come in. The nurses are overwhelmed. They go from one berth to another, checking the death-rattles. Once these subside into faint murmurs, indicating that the moribund is on the threshold of oblivion, the man is taken outside, where he can die just as well, and his place is filled by another wounded man who still has a chance of life. No doubt the choices are not always right, but the nurses are doing their best, and in war everything is a lottery. This is how our sub-lieutenant makes his exit.

All those who are removed are destined to become corpses, battlefield debris that no longer evokes pity in anyone. The dead get in the way of the living, wear them out. They are forgotten completely during periods of high activity, until their smell becomes insistent. The gravediggers really find them too much, and moan about all the extra work that is costing them sleep. Anything dead is irrelevant. To feel sympathy would weaken us.

An overworked, preoccupied doctor, with no medicine to offer, moves through the rows. With rough words, he brings whatever comfort he can, displaying his badges of rank to the more credulous to convince them they’ll survive. His weariness is obvious, and you can smell the alcohol he uses to keep himself going. His face is streaked by so many splashes of blood that his smile, which he wants to be strong and kind, looks as cruel as an executioner’s.

Most of the wounded bear the number of my regiment but I haven’t been in it long enough to recognise them, and many of them are unrecognisable. From snatches of conversation I gather that the assault from the parapet had been murderous. It had cost the lives of more than a hundred and fifty men. After an initial advance we had been forced to retire to the positions we had started from. The Germans, less exhausted than we were, and well dug in to positions on the ridge, had then launched a vigorous counter-attack, profiting from the fact that our flanks were unprotected. I was curious to know the result of this action in which I had taken part in such an odd way. I also wanted to know what had become of my friends from class 15 and the men from my squad. We were such a disparate bunch in that squad, had so little in common, and quarrelled so often, but we were nonetheless a little family and I would have been distressed if harm had come to any one of them, especially to our young corporal. But I’m in a bad position, down at ground level, and can only see the wounded lying by the wall. They are too far away, too absorbed in their own suffering, for me to question them. And my wish to know more is less strong than my desire to avoid any effort.

And how am I?

I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I am suffering less than some of those around me and I have a whole berth to myself. I am ashamed but at the same time, while neither proud nor happy, I am satisfied with my fate. Despite everything egoism overwhelms the pity that I feel because I am not completely distracted by pain like all these unfortunates with terrible wounds. I am caught between two emotions: the discomfort of parading my good fortune in front of those who are suffering, and the somewhat insolent superiority of those whom destiny has favoured. My own body, turned towards hope, towards life, turns away from these other, smashed bodies; the animal in me, which wants to stay whole, tells me: ‘Rejoice, you are saved!’ But my mind keeps its solidarity with the poor men of the trenches, of whom I was one; it loves and pities them. We are united by the risks we have run together, the fear that has shaken us all. I am not yet detached from them and their cries find their echo in me. Is it just the sight of all these mutilations that could have been mine that moves me? Isn’t our pity really a contemplation of ourselves, via others? I do not know. What should excuse me in their eyes is that we were all exposed to the same shells and bullets, and that what hit them could have hit me. Yet, lying still beneath my blanket, eyes closed, I hide the injustice of my good fortune.

I also have my own reasons for concern. If I lie flat on my back the wound in my chest suffocates me. If I try to turn over it feels as if daggers are being thrust into me. It may be that the hand which weighs so heavily at the end of my arm will never regain its flexibility… If I wasn’t thinking of my comrades who are still out there in some ditch, up to their ankles in water, surrounded by corpses, their lives on the line at every moment, then no doubt I would be thinking that I have suffered a terrible misfortune. If something like this had happened to me outside of war I would surely have fainted away in shock. Whereas here I marched for three hours to find a first-aid post. The fact is that my fate has not been decided and I will only be reassured when the threat of amputation is lifted.

As evening falls, the cries and moans redouble, and delirium grips us. It is swelteringly hot, and the air is stifling, heavy with the sickly sweet smell of blood, of filthy dressings, and excrement. I am getting weaker, my head is spinning, and the cellar seems to be suffocating me, crushing down on my chest…

Fever claims me, makes me shudder, brings hallucinations. A parapet rises up before me, illuminated with flashes of light, a funeral pyre of flaming blue and grey men with the faces of grimacing corpses, with gumless jaws, like the death mask from Neuville-Saint-Vaast. They throw grenades at each other’s heads which crown them with explosions. The smoke clears and they fight on desperately, half-decapitated and dripping with blood. One has an eye hanging out. So as not to waste time he sticks his tongue out and swallows it down. Another, a big German, has the top of his head open; a flap of skin like a hinge holds his scalp which swings like a lid. When he runs out of ammunition he sticks his hand into his head and pulls out his brains which he throws into the face of a Frenchman, covering it with a foul porridge. The Frenchman wipes this off in fury and then opens his coat. From inside he unrolls his intestines and makes them into a noose. This he throws, like a lasso, round the German’s neck and then, pushing his foot against his enemy’s chest, leaning back with his whole weight, he strangles him with his guts. The German’s tongue comes out. The Frenchman cuts it off with his knife and then attaches it to his coat with a safety pin, like a medal. Then comes a woman suckling her baby. She removes the infant from her breast and places him on the top of the parapet where he starts to fry. The woman moves off sadly, moaning to herself: ‘Oh, dear God, how has it come to this?’ Then some officers’ batmen arrive. On to a tin plate they place the baby, now grilled à point like a suckling pig, and fill buckets up with blood, then take all this to the field marshal, who is drinking an aperitif off in the distance while observing the battlefield through binoculars and yawning, because he’s hungry. The parapet crumbles away and there are no victims or victors, because there’s nothing left but corpses.

Now here I am at the front line, in a little machine-gun post. All of a sudden a black butterfly, streaked with red, flutters up above the barbed wire. I have been ordered to kill this butterfly. Finger on the trigger, I look for it through the machine-gun sight. Then I realise something terrible: the butterfly is my heart. Panic-stricken I call the sergeant and explain. ‘It’s an order! Shoot it or you’ll be shot!’ So I shut my eyes and fire off belt after belt to kill my heart… and the butterfly is still fluttering… The general arrives, in a fury: ‘Where do you find these bloody useless conscripts? I’ll get it myself with the first shot!’ From a holster made of human skin he pulls out a golden revolver. He takes aim and kills my heart… I am crying… I will crawl out tonight and go and look for the poor little black butterfly…