The next day reinforcements arrived from our dep?t. There were forty men for the company, one of whom was an N.C.O. called Langlois—seven men for the section. The poor wretches were very much depressed. They had been detrained at Bar-le-Duc, and sent off to find us, in charge of a subaltern. They had been wandering about for three days, with little or no food. They were worn out when they joined us. Their feet were bleeding, and in their eyes was the reflection of horrible visions. Oh, those fields of corpses! And the smell! Several of them were sick once more at the mere recollection of it. Or again, in other places—those bodies buried in haste—the arms and feet sticking out of the ground! And then, on the second evening they had suddenly found themselves in the firing line. Bullets whizzed past their ears—Zzp, Zzp—and shells surrounded them. Several of their men had already been killed.
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It must be added that these men left F—— five days before under a gloomy impression. News had just got through of our regiment of regulars who since the very beginning had been fighting a few miles away from us, though we had never come across them. And what news it was! Leaving Longuyon on the morning of the 21st, engaged that evening at Ethes, and thrown back on Tellencourt, they had been, so to speak, volatilised, during those two days. Their losses had been enormous. One battalion had been wiped out and another was missing—the only hope was that the whole of it might have been taken prisoners—the third had been saved by the self-possession of a company commander.
When one thought of the recruiting, to a great extent local—The regulars! All the young harvest! The flower of the country! A great many of our poilus had a younger brother, sometimes two or three, among these troops which were said to be exterminated. They were to be seen with anxious eyes, and quivering nostrils, hazarding some name or other, in an agony of suspense. Details were generally lacking, but a trenchant reply would sometimes come:
"Killed, killed!"
"Killed?"
"Exactly."
What a blow it was. Some of them staggered, but most of them bowed their heads and said nothing. Then seized with compassion, I would go up to them.
"Poor old chap!" I soothed them with a vague hope—how many of the missing would turn up again?
What I was more anxious about than anything else was, as may be imagined, the general situation. What was happening? I feverishly questioned Langlois.
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He was a school-master too, but from Paris. Playoust's set had immediately tried to get hold of him, but he made it quite clear that he intended to remain neutral, on good terms with us. He had an interesting head. He was sunburnt, and had intensely blue eyes, a big nose with a narrow bridge, and a determined chin. Besides that, he was slim and muscular, and had a graceful carriage. There was a look of a musketeer or condottiere about him—a look which was deceptive for that matter, as I soon realised. He was a good sort, but nothing beyond that. His intelligence was limited.
During his weeks at the dep?t everything seemed to have rolled off him, like water off a duck's back, without making the faintest impression. He was eager for news, no doubt, but he was far from attaching to it the tragic and capital importance which clothed the least occurrence in this hour of our history.
It was disappointing and exasperating to me. I would have given a lot to meet Fortin and have a talk with him. We had just heard that he had become a humble private again, and was with the reinforcement detachment.
However, I set about extracting all the news from Langlois, bit by bit, and finished by attaining my end.
To begin with, the period of optimism had continued. The enemy had been intercepted on the Meuse, and at Liège, Namur, and Dinant. Our offensive was developing at Mulhouse and towards Morhange. That had gone on until Friday, the 21st. That day's communiqué still gave a favourable picture of the situation. There were two shadows on it, however: the day was described as having been "less fortunate" in Lorraine, and the occupation of Brussels. The next[Pg 382] day, there was nothing very new. A huge battle was going on. The guns were talking.
Complete silence for two days. On the third—it was Tuesday—the communiqué announced, in terms very flattering to our troops, that the attack had had no decisive results and that we had fallen back on our covering positions. The casualties were heavy on both sides. One paper claimed to see a second Valmy in the engagement.
But since then things had been going from bad to worse! To how great an extent? I pressed Langlois, a............