Wooden Crosses | Page 5

sympathetic only shrugged his shoulders.
"That's not so certain," said he.
"If you had struck Charleroi like me," said Lagny to him, Lagny with his shrivelled old woman's face, "you wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get back to the front."
"And all the same you weren't in the retreat, you weren't," interrupted Vairon. "I take my oath that was no rest-camp."
"Aye, that was the stiffest of all, that was," agreed Lemoine.
"And the Marne?" asked Demachy.
"The Marne, that was nothing at all," said Sulphart decidedly. "It was during the retreat that we went through it most. That was where you learnt to know a man."
They were all the same. The retreat, that was the strategic operation they were proudest of, the one action they boasted immoderately of having shared in; it was the starting-point and foundation of all their yarns: the retreat, the terrible forced march from Charleroi to Montmirail, without halts, without food, without objective; the regiments all mixed up together, zouaves and infantry, chasseurs and engineers; wounded men, bewildered and staggering, pallid stragglers that the gendarmes bowled over; the kits and equipments flung into the ditches; one-day battles, always desperate, sometimes victorious; Guise, where the German drew back; sleep deep as a stone snatched on the bank or on the road, in spite of the waggons that thundered by, crushing the sleepers' feet; grocer's shops looted, the poultry-yards they emptied, the machine gunners without mules, dragoons without horses, blacks without chiefs; the mildewed bread that men snatched from one another; the roads blocked with covered carts and bullock-waggons, with women and children all in tears; the native troops dragging goats after them, the villages shooting up in flames, the bridges that were blown up, the comrades that must needs be abandoned all bloody and foundered; and all the time, harassing the tragic column, the Boche cannon that barked without stopping. The retreat.... In their mouths it took on all the air and semblance of victory.
"I take my oath that when you read on the milestones, 'Paris, 60 kilomtres,' it gave you a funny feeling."
"Especially the lads of Panama," said long Vairon.
"And then after that," wound up Sulphart carelessly, like the commonplace epilogue of a thrilling story, "after that came the Marne."
"Do you remember the little melons at Tilloy?... Nice lot we managed to stuff in!"
"Aye, and the buckets of wine when we came into Gueux."
"I won't forget, for my part, the sausages at Montmirail.... You couldn't move but the big shells were on your tracks.... Ah! the swine!"
Demachy had resumed his grave look, and was eyeing these men with envy.
"I should have liked well to be there," said he, "to be in a victory."
"Sure it was a victory," conceded Sulphart, who was turning his wreath round and round in his fingers like a cap. "If you had been there you'd have been bowled over like the others, and nothing more. Ask the lads what they got at Escardes.... Only you people shouldn't talk without knowing.... All the blighters that wrote their muck about it in the papers, they'd have done better to keep their mouths shut. I was there myself--yes, and I know how it all happened. Well, we went more than fifteen days without touching our pay, from the end of August. Then after the last hot time, they paid us the lot in one go: they bunged fifteen sous at every man jack of us. That's the mere truth. And so if you see any blighters that talk to you about the Marne, you've only got to tell them one thing: that the Marne was a show that brought in fifteen sous to the lads that pulled it off...."
. . .
Night falls speedily in November. With darkness came the cold, and over there in the trenches rifle-fire had waked up at the hour of the owl's awakening. We had eaten our meal in the stable, crouched and squatting on the straw, some perched up on the mangers with their legs dangling.
The old hands were telling complicated and brutal stories with the appropriate "and so thens" and "you remember nows," essential to the due ordering of a tale. But the newcomers, whose legs they were trying to pull, whom they meant to amaze, were no longer listening: they were half asleep, with wandering eyes and drooping chins.
"Time to go to bed, lads," said Br?val, unlacing his boots. "These boys have spent last night in the train."
Everybody went to his place with the docility of horses that knew their corner. Lemoine hesitated to trample on the fine carpet of fresh straw.
"That's not bad.... wheat that hasn't been thrashed...."
Carefully, as he did everything, little B?lin made his bed ready. First he spread out his strip of tent canvas; then by way of a pillow, he thrust his satchel under the