Mes amis, dans la vie Faut faire des économies Les journaux vous l'ont dit. C'est aussi mon avis. This intellectual refrain must have given him extreme pleasure, for he began it again and again without any interruption.
"Well," I said, "judging from the looks of things, you aren't often disturbed here?"
At this the drummer cast me a searching look, cold, disdainful and commiserating, as much as to say to me,
"One can see that you've just come!"
As for the quartermaster, he replied to everything in the repertoire of the Eldorado. Without stopping his juggling, he shouted at me in his amazing voice:
Moi! je m'en fous, Je reste tranquil'ment Dans mon trou!... He was going on when the infernal noise of some aerial trolley tore through space.
"Attention!" he cried, without moving from his mattress. "There's the Metro!"
Almost at the same moment, a great shell, a "310" at least, burst in the court of the house opposite, demolished the roof, and crushed a dozen horses.
The adjutant was just crossing the street and he stopped at the door to estimate the damage.
"They missed the steeple again," he said, with a disdainful shrug for the Boche artillery.
And Morin, the drummer, by way of commentary, without interrupting his reading:
"Close the door. If they send any more shells, that will make a draft."
CHAPTER III
THE ECHELON
Table of Contents From Proyart to Morcourt is five miles by a crossroad which in its many curves and windings cuts across trenches, communication trenches and barbed wire.
The snow had stopped, but it still covered the ground, the trees and the farms with its regular white covering. The communication trenches showed black on this vast screen.
The crows circled in innumerable flights and sought in vain for the carrion which had been so abundant for months and which, to-day, was buried.
We went along, boot to boot, slowly, for the roads were slippery. Kiki wanted to dance about, for the keen air made him lively. But Zèbre's sedateness dismayed him, and Kiki wisely ranged alongside and regulated the pace by his.
The lieutenant talked but little-a few detached words, chopped phrases, about the company, an observation on the weather, a reflection on the horses.
The road was almost deserted save for a few Territorials, muffled in their sheepskins, who dragged along their heavy wooden shoes which were made even higher by a thick sole of snow. From time to time a company wagon, driven like an express train, grazed us with its wheels and splashed us with mud.
Then, abruptly, without having had to climb the slightest hill, we saw Morcourt, as one sees suddenly from the top of a cliff the sea at his feet, in the midst of the thousand windings of the Somme, of the canal and the turf-pits. Morcourt is a village scarcely as large as Proyart, and like it hidden in a gully sheltered from the winds on all sides, and also like it, hidden under the snow.
A blacksmith had set up his forge in the open air against the walls of a tottering tile-kiln. All around the snow had melted in great black puddles where the waiting horses had pawed the ground. The smoke from his fire rose red-tinted and dark in the heavy air which seemed to muffle the ring of the hammers on the anvil.
We come to a stop before a house nearly in ruins, whose tottering remains are a constant menace. A corporal rushes out-nimble, short and thick-set, a small Basque cap binding his sunburned forehead-and then some men come from the neighboring stables.
The houses in the country which were invaded for a short time and in which troops have had their cantonments for long weary months all look alike. Their doors and windows are gone, but these are replaced by tent canvas.
The drivers of the echelon and the war train in the machine-gun companies are nearly always sailors, the older classes of the Territorials, who after many changes have been assigned to the Colonial regiments. No one knows why, but it is probably because the bureaucratic, stay-at-home mental worker finds some relationship between the Colonials and the sea. And so they make these men, accustomed to the management of ships, infantrymen, or drivers, or even cavalrymen. But with the unfailing readiness and the ingenuity of their kind they make up so much for all that, that far from appearing unready and badly placed, one would say that they were veterans already broken to all the tricks of the trade.
Their long ship voyages and the necessities of critical hours have taught them to replace with the means at hand most things in material existence. From an old preserve box and a branch of a tree, squared and split with a hatchet, they make a strong and convenient table. With a scantling and a bit of wire lattice taken from a fence, they make an elastic mattress which, covered with straw and canvas, becomes a very comfortable bed.
The sailor is carpenter: the hatchet in his hand takes the place of the most ingenious tools of the joiner; painter: he has painted and refitted his boat from its tarry keel to the scroll work of the bulwarks and the figures and the beloved words they put on the stern; mender: he mends his sails and nets artistically; cook: during the long days at sea on his frail craft with its limited accommodations, he makes the most savory dishes from the fruits of his fishing and a few simple spices. His qualities and his knowledge are numerous and wide: astronomer and healer, and, as well, singer of beautiful songs which cradle his thought at the will of the rhythms, as the sea rocks his boat at the will of the waves.
But in this multiplicity of talents he lacks that of a driver, and what is more, a driver of a machine gun. That is a job which combines the heavy and the mountain artillery. A machine-gun driver should be able to drive in the saddle the leading team of horses and put the heavy caisson of ammunition through the most difficult evolutions. Again, he should be able to drive on foot the mule loaded with his pack-saddle and through the most impossible and sometimes the most dangerous paths.
We had scarcely begun to swallow a cup of thick, smoking, regulation coffee in a room of the cantonment, furnished with special skill, when Sub-Lieutenant Delpos-smart, carefree, smiling, a cap on the back of his head and a song on his lips-arrived.
Dedouche's description seemed to me to be exact. He was indeed a very young man, very quick, very blond and very gay. He was already an officer when others of his age had scarcely left college; he was already a hero counting in his active service a thousand feats of prowess when his rather sceptical contemporaries were content to read about them in books. Open merriment shone in his eyes. He had gained his promotion in the field far from the stifling atmosphere of study halls. Yesterday he was still a sergeant in Madagascar, Senegal, and Morocco; to-day he is an officer who has fought since the beginning of the Great War; to-morrow he will be a trainer of men. He knows them all; many are his old bedfellows or companions of the column. His remarks are keen and unrhetorical and they please the men. They love him and fear him; they are free with him and respect him. They know that he understands his trade perfectly and that they can deceive him in nothing.
Our introduction was short and unceremonious. A man brought on the table a bottle of very sweet Moselle wine, which is christened at the front "Champagne." It was one of those wines which make up for their qualities by such pompous appellations and well-intentioned labels as "Champagne de la Victory," "Champagne de la Revenge," "of the Allies," "of the Poilu," "of Glory." They are all equally bad, but they make a loud noise when the cork is drawn and most of the wine flows away in sparkling foam.
We drained our cups to the common health, and to the success and certain glory of the company.
Then the lieutenant, who has memories of the drama, said in a voice which recalled the tones of the already classic Carbon de Casteljaloux, his neighbor,
"Since my company has, I believe, reached its full number, shall we not show it to the logis, if you please?"
Under the rays of an anemic sun which had waited until the hour of sunset before it deigned to appear, we made a brief visit to the echelon.
First the roll; five corporal muleteers or drivers: Raynal, the owner of a vineyard in Gironde; Liniers, a salesman of wines and spirits and a great elector in the Twelfth Arrondissement; Glanais, Bonecase, Glorieu, carpenter, vine-grower, and farmer-and none of them had ever managed a horse in his life.
And the men-one in fifty is a cavalryman-but that one is perfect. He was trained at the cavalry school at Saumur; trained horses and bred them, so they at once turned him over to the echelon, where he had to lead a mule by the bridle. That, of course, was a reproach to his old trade, so in default of any other satisfaction it taught him the philosophy of resignation and peaceful blessedness.
The cavalry!
"Oh, the cavalry, that's been posing five minutes," said Sub-Lieutenant Delpos-he was extremely fond of that expression.
There were horses and mules varying in age from five to seventeen. They were all sensible, settled down, their legs somewhat worn out, and more accustomed to the hearse than to a caisson, and more familiar with the song of the worker than with the roar of cannon. They were all gentle, only...
