Wooden Crosses

Wooden Crosses
By Roland Dorgeles

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS
I.--BROTHERS IN ARMS
II.--IN THE SWEAT OF THY BROW
III.--THE RED PENNON
IV.--GOOD DAYS
V.--VIGIL
VI.--THE MILL WITH NO SAILS
VII.--IN THE CAF? DE LA MARINE
VIII.--MOUNT CALVARY
IX.--MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE
X.--OUR LADY OF THE RAG-PICKERS
XI.--VICTORY
XII.--IN THE GARDEN OF THE DEAD
XIII.--THE HOUSE WITH THE WHITE BOUQUET
XIV.--LOVE'S OWN WORDS
XV.--EN REVENANT DE MONTMARTRE
XVI.--THE HERO'S RETURN
XVII.--AND NOW IT IS OVER

Wooden Crosses
CHAPTER I
BROTHERS IN ARMS
ALTHOUGH flowers were already scarce at this season of the year, none the less there had been found enough to bedeck all the rifles in the company, and, as rich in blossoms as a cemetery, the battalion, drums and fifes at its head, had poured helter-skelter across the town between two mute hedgerows of wide-eyed onlookers.
With songs and tears and laughing and drunkards' quarrellings and heart-rending good-byes they had gone on board their train. All night they had rolled along, had eaten their sardines and emptied their water-bottles by the wretched glimmer of a single candle; then, tired of their loud talk, they had gone to sleep, heaped up one against another, heads on shoulders, their legs intermingled with one another.
Dawn had awakened them. Hanging out their carriage doors, they scanned the villages, from which the early morning smoke was rising, for traces of the recent fighting. Man hailed man from carriage to carriage.
"Talk about a war; not as much as a spire smashed up!"
Then the houses opened their eyes, the roadways came to life, and finding voice once more to shout facetious love-makings, they flung their withered flowers at the women who were on the platform at every station, waiting the unlikely return of their vanished sailormen. At every halt they eased themselves and filled the water-bottles. And at length, about ten o'clock, they detrained at Dormans, stupefied and bruised.
A pause of an hour for soup, and they went off by the road--no drums and fifes, no flowers, no waving handkerchiefs--and reached the village where our regiment was resting, close up behind the lines.
There it was just like a great fair; their weary flock was broken up into little groups--one to a company--and the quartermasters rapidly marked off for each a section or squad, which they must hunt up from farm to farm, like shelterless tramps, reading on every door the big white numbers marked in chalk.
Br?val, the corporal, who was coming out from the grocer's shop, found the three that were for us as they were dragging along in the street, crushed under their overladen packs, in which brand-new camp utensils shone with an insolent brilliancy.
"Third company, fifth squad? I'm the corporal. Come on; we're billeted down at the end of the dear old town."
When they came into the courtyard it was Fouillard, the cook, who gave the warning.
"I say, lads, there's the new chums coming."
And flinging down in front of the blackened ashlar of his rustic fireplace the armful of paper he had just fetched up out of the cellar, he examined the new comrades.
"You've not let yourself be cheated," he said solemnly to Br?val. "They're as fine as new pins."
All of us had got up and were ringing round the three bewildered soldiers with a curious group. They stared at us and we stared at them, without a word spoken. They were arriving from behind, arriving from the towns. Yesterday they had still been walking along real streets seeing women, trains, shops; yesterday they were still living the lives of men. And we took stock of them wonderingly, enviously, as though they had been travellers disembarking from strange legendary lands.
"And so, you lads, they're not bothering themselves too much back there?"
"And dear old Panama," asked Vairon, "what are they up to there?"
They on their side eyed us hard, as though they had fallen among savages. Everything must have astonished them in this first meeting, our baked faces, our widely incongruous get-up; Papa Hamel's imitation otter-skin cap; the filthy, once white neckerchief Fouillard wore knotted about his neck; Vairon's trousers, stiff and shining with grease; the cape Lagny wore, the liaison orderly, who had stitched an astrachan collar on to a zouave's hood; some in a "rag-picker's" round jacket, some in artillery tunics--each and everyone accoutred according to his own fashion; fat Bouffioux, who wore his identification disc in his k?pi, as Louis XI. wore his medals; a machine gunner with his metal shoulder-pieces and his iron gauntlet that made him look like a man-at-arms from Cr?cy; little B?lin with his head thrust up to the ears in an old dragoon's cap; and Broucke, "the lad from oop north," who had cut puttees for himself out of green rep curtains.
Sulphart alone had remained aloof out of dignity, perched upon a cask, where he was peeling potatoes with the serious, concentrated air he always assumed