AT THE WORLD’S END

“We’re going to Alsace,” said the well-informed.  “To the Somme,” said the better-informed, louder.

We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies.  At long intervals the train would begin to move on again.  It has left an impression with me that it was chiefly motionless.

We got out, one afternoon, under a sky crowded with masses of darkness, in a station recently bombarded and smashed, and its roof left like a fish-bone.  It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foul whiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in the rain.

“’Pears we’re in the Aisne country,” they said.

A downpour was in progress.  Shivering, we busied ourselves with unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see.  Each looked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man.  On each side of the road were deserts without limits, flat and flabby, with trees like posts, and rusty fields patched with green mud.

“Shoulder packs, and forward!” Adjutant Marcassin ordered.

Where were we going?  No one knew.  We crossed the rest of the village.  The Germans had occupied it during the August retreat.  It was destroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itself with fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself.  The rain had ceased in melancholy.  Up aloft in the clearings of the sky, clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the detonations reached us, far and fine.  Along the sodden road we met Red Cross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not see inside them.  In the first stages we were interested in everything, and asked questions, like foreigners.  A man who had been wounded and was rejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, and invariably added, “That’s nothing; you’ll see in a bit.”  Then the march made men retire into themselves.

My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociously full; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled and then wounded my back at each step.  The pain quickly became acute, unbearable.  I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at the end of the fifty minutes’ march.  But I did all the same, because I had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and because I could thus always do one step more.  I knew later that this is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.