Gabriel Chevallier - Fear

Once you leave the central area of the cave and turn right there is a long sloping passage leading to the surface. I am breathing cooler air now but it is acrid, and the explosions are becoming sharper. I can distinguish the slow glug-glug of the 210s, which have a very long range, and the way some speed up when they fall into the ravine. Short bursts of machine-gun fire. A faint crackling sound that must come from grenades. Trench mortars battering away, exploding slowly like mines in a quarry…

A sudden shaft of light, which seems to come from an air vent, illuminates the shelter and shows the entrance, the end of the tunnel, fifteen metres away. Then there is a strange kind of moonlight, a flare going off. This sight makes me freeze in the shadows and I begin to question myself like a patient hesitating at the door to the dentist’s surgery. I think I feel a bit better. Yes, I definitely feel better, it was a good idea to walk… But the spasms start up again. I go a bit further on and in the darkness I bump into the two lookouts, who have come inside to shelter.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the latrines.’

‘You ain’t exactly picked the best of moments to drop your trousers! Just listen to it out there. It’s still hammering down.’

‘Yes… you could be right.’

I squat down on a box. Being so close to all the flares and flashes is giving me more strength to resist. The lookouts continue:

‘You can be sure the Boche have picked out the spot from aerial photos. They’re chucking it down at us, the bastards! But anyway it’s daft to let lads go outside, since you can’t see a bloody thing. Everything’s going up, you don’t even know where the front lines are any more.’

The incoming shells are more distinct now, longer gaps between them. I’m going to try my luck.

‘Get yourself ready,’ they say. ‘Better be quick!’

I’m out, trousers undone, bent over. I find the plank and let myself go, eyes shut. All my faculties are concentrated in my ears on which I depend to warn of any danger, decipher the sounds.

Vouououou… I rush back to the entrance, holding my trousers up with my hand. The mortar shell bursts very close by, its storm whistles over me, shrapnel slams into the ground.

‘Not hit?’ shout the anxious lookouts.

‘No,’ I say, coming inside.

‘You can bet that would have stopped you in mid-flow! Pity you can’t even take a shit in peace round here!’

I have to go again… I wait for a bit. Silence and darkness are returning to the night. The din of gunfire is no longer constant, the pauses are longer. Now’s the time. My second visit lasts longer, and no shell disturbs me.

I make it back to the shelter and rest for a while with the lookouts, worn out and preparing myself for another attack of this treacherous colic. My body is empty and weak and the morning chill makes me shiver. My suffering has been pointless and ridiculous. My companions are complaining:

‘How much longer are they going to leave us here?’

For long enough, I fear. That is, for a few more days. But the days last forever in this sector of condemned men, whom only luck can pardon.

The artillery’s fury continues to intensify. Day and night we have no peace of mind. Day and night the shells, like a host of madmen with pickaxes, are smashing their way through to us, digging ever deeper. Day and night the projectiles doggedly rain down on this scrap of land that we have to defend. We know that an attack is in preparation, that there must be a denouement to these days of wrath. We know that the general staffs of two nations have begun a struggle over these plateaus in which their vanity and military reputations are at stake, that the result of this will raise one up and bring disgrace to the other, that this bitter, relentless battle which brings only despair to the soldiers who are fighting it is an ambitious calculation on the part of a few German generals who measure on the map every day how many centimetres still lie between them and the objective they brag of attaining, that they are vexed at the obstacles and delays we put in their way and blame these on the lack of courage of their own troops. We know that it will take deaths and more deaths on both sides for the one who launched the battle to be frightened by their losses and stop their campaign. But we also know that it takes an awful lot of victims to frighten a general, and the one stubbornly opposing us is nowhere near giving up yet.

The great offensives on the Western Front, which have all come to a standstill, make available a vast quantity of weaponry which is making local actions extremely bloody. Since Verdun, artillery barrages have become standard. The most minor assault is preceded by a bombardment aimed at flattening the enemy defences, and decimating and terrifying the garrisons. When firing is well aimed, those men who escape only do so because it is impossible to hit every single bit of land with shells. Those who are spared start to lose their reason.

Nothing I know has such a devastating effect on the morale of men in the depths of a shelter. The price they pay for their safety is nerves shaken and shattered to a terrible extent. I know of nothing more demoralising than this stealthy pounding, which hunts you down underground, which buries you in a stinking tunnel which may become your tomb. Going back to the surface requires an effort so great that you cannot force yourself to do it unless you overcome your terror at the start. You have to struggle with fear as soon as you have the first symptoms otherwise it will possess you and then you are lost, dragged into a breakdown that your imagination precipitates with its own, terrifying inventions. Your nerve centres, once they’ve been shattered, send out the wrong messages; even your instinctual self-preservation can be undermined by their absurd decisions. The greatest horror, aggravating the breakdown, is that fear still leaves men with the capacity to judge themselves. So you see yourself in the depths of ignominy and cannot regain your self-esteem, cannot justify yourself in your own eyes.

That is where I am…

I have fallen to the bottom of the abyss of my self, to the bottom of those dungeons where the soul’s greatest secrets lie hidden, and it is a vile cesspit, a place of viscous darkness. Here is what I have been without knowing it, what I am: a fellow who is afraid, with an insurmountable fear, a cringing fear, that is crushing him… It would take brute force to drive me out of there. But I think I would rather die here than climb up those steps… I am so afraid that I have lost my attachment to life. And I disgust myself. I depended on my self-esteem to keep me going and I’ve lost it. How could I still display any confidence, knowing what I know about myself, how could I ever put myself forward, ever shine, after what I’ve discovered? I could fool others perhaps, but I would know I was lying, and this sham sickens me. I think of how I pitied Charlet in the hospital. I have fallen just as low as him.

I have stopped eating, my stomach is knotted and everything disgusts me. I drink nothing but coffee, and I smoke. In this perpetual night I no longer know one day from the next. I just sit in front of my little table, leaning over papers; I write, I draw, and take my turn as lookout for part of each night. Men I would rather not see pass by and sometimes bump into me; the wounded cry out in the corner where they have been left temporarily. I concentrate on pointless tasks. But I only hear the shells. The whole of the Chemin des Dames is shaking, and inside I am shaking with it.

I believe that if I had sufficient willpower to go out and go through a bombardment, it would free me from my obsession, like a highly dangerous vaccine can temporarily immunise those who can tolerate it. But I do not have that willpower and if I did I would not be so prostrate. And even then I’d have to revive it day after day.