Ils ne passeront pas

One thing the twentieth century taught us was that man could be inhuman to his fellow man on a scale previously unimagined. It’s not the only lesson we take from those hundred crowded years, but it’s one of the big ones. Set alongside what the French and Germans really were doing to one another at Verdun in 1916, St. John the Divine’s vision of the Apocalypse all of a sudden isn’t so much of a much.


As the sun rose from the direction of Germany, Sergeant Pierre Barrès rolled out from under his filthy, lousy blanket. Hishorizon bleu uniform was equally lousy, which he loathed, and equally filthy, which he minded not at all, for it made him a harder target for theBoche .

He yawned, rubbed his eyes, scratched his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. When had he last shaved? Two days before? Three? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t much matter.

Under the blanket next to his in the muddy trench, his loader, Corporal Jacques Fonsagrive, was also stirring.“Bonjour, mon vieux,” Barrès said. “Another lovely morning,n’est-ce pas?

Fonsagrive gave his opinion in one word:“Merde.” He always woke up surly—and stayed that way till he fell asleep again.

“Any morning I wake up and I am still breathing is a lovely morning,” Barrès said. He pulled his water bottle off his belt and shook it. Half full, he judged: maybe a liter in there. He pulled out the cork and drank.Pinard ran down his throat. The rough red wine got his heart beating better than coffee had ever dreamt of doing.

“Well, then, odds are there won’t be many more lovely mornings left in the world,” Fonsagrive said. “Fucking miracle we’ve had this many.” He scratched himself, then stuck aGitane between his lips. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He coughed. “Christ on His cross, that’s worse than the chlorine theBoche shoots at us. What’s for breakfast?”

“Ham and eggs and champagne would be nice, especially if an eighteen-year-old blonde with big jugs brought it to me,” Barrès answered. Fonsagrive swore at him. Unperturbed, he went on, “What I’ve got issinge . How about you?”

Singehere, too, and damn all else,” Fonsagrive said. “I was hoping you had something better.”

“Don’t I wish,” Barrès said fervently. The company field kitchen—like about half the company field kitchens in the French Army—was unserviceable. Some capitalist well back of the line had made a profit. If the troops who tried to use the worthless stoves went hungry . . . well,c’est la guerre.

Glumly, the two men opened tins ofsinge and stared down at the greasy, stringy beef. “Goddamn monkey meat,” Fonsagrive said. He started shoveling it into his face as fast as he could, as if he wanted to fuel his boiler while enduring as little of the taste as he could. Barrès followed suit. Even washed down with more swigs ofpinard , the stuff was vile.

He flung the empty tin out of the trench, almost as if it were a grenade. It didn’t clank when it came down, which probably meant it landed on a corpse. There were more corpses around than anything else, he often thought. The stench was all-pervasive, unbelievable, inescapable—a testament to what all flesh inevitably became. He wanted to delay the inevitable as long as he could.

And how likely was that? He spat. He knew the answer too well. “Verdun,” he muttered under his breath. “World’s largest open-air cemetery.”

Jacques Fonsagrive grunted. “Visitors always welcome,” he said, taking up where Barrès had left off. “Come on in yourself and see how you’d make out as a stiff.” He sounded like an advertising circular filled with a particular sort of repellent good humor.

“Heh,” Barrès said—more acknowledgment that the words were supposed to be funny than an actual laugh.

Cautiously, he reached up and plucked the cork from the muzzle of the Hotchkiss machine gun he and his partner served, then pulled away the oily rag that covered the machine gun’s cocking handle. He and Fonsagrive could get soaked and maintain their efficiency. The machine gun was more temperamental—and, in the grand scheme of things, more important to the French Army.

Even more cautiously, he peered over the edge of the parapet. Ahead and over to the north lay what had been the Bois des Fosses. It was a wood no more, but a collection of matchsticks, toothpicks, and bits of kindling. Like gray ants in the distance, Germans moved there now.

Sharp cracks behind him announced that the crews of a battery of 75s were awake, too. Shells screamed overhead. They slammed down in the middle of the wood, scattering the gray ants and sifting the remains of the timber one more step down toward sawdust.

“Nice to see the artillery hitting the other side for a change,” Fonsagrive remarked. Like any infantryman who’d ever been under fire from his own guns, he had an ingrained disdain for cannons and the men who served them.

Barrès said, “Those 75s are too close to bring their shells down on our heads.”

“Merde,”Fonsagrive said again. “With those bastards, you never say they’re too close to do anything.”

The sun rose higher. The day was going to be fine and mild, even warm. Barrès faced the prospect with something less than joy. Heat would make the stench worse. And it would bring out the flies, too. Already they were stirring, bluebottles and greenbottles and horseflies not too finicky to feast on human flesh as well.

Thunder in the east made Barrès turn his head in that direction. Dominating the terrain there, Fort Douaumont was one of the keys to Verdun—and a key now in the hands of theBoche . Barrès neither knew nor cared how the fort had been lost. That it had been lost, though, mattered very much, for with its loss the Germans held the high ground along this whole stretch of front.

French artillery was doing its best to make sure theBoche did not rest easy on the heights. A gray haze continually hung about Fort Douaumont. Black shellbursts from a battery of 155s punctuated the haze. Below and around the fort, nothing at all grew. The ground was bare and brown and cratered, like astronomical photographs of the moon.

More thunder boomed, this closer. German 77s and 105s were replying to the French guns harassing theBoche in the Bois des Fosses. The French field pieces defiantly barked back.

Some of the German shells fell short, a few falling only a couple of hundred meters beyond the trench in which Barrès stood. He did not deign to look back at them, but remarked, “Back when the war was new, misses that close would have put my wind up.”

“Back when the war was new, you were stupid,” Fonsagrive answered. “And if you’d got any smarter since, you wouldn’t be here.”

That held too much truth to be comfortable. Sighing, Barrès said, “When the battalion has taken seventy-five percent casualties, they’ll pull us out of the line. That’s the rule.”

“When the battalion has taken seventy-five percent casualties, odds are three to one you’ll be one of them,” his loader said. Fonsagrive punctuated the words with a perfect Gallic shrug. “Odds are three to one I’ll be another.”

Barrès nodded. No one had shot him yet, though not for lack of effort. He didn’t know why not. His belief in luck had grown tenuous—had, to be honest, disappeared—from seeing so many comrades wounded and slain around him. He had no reason to believe he was in any way different from them. Yes, he’d lasted a little longer, but what did that mean? Not much.

He said, “The one good thing about fighting is that then you don’t think about all the things that can happen to you. You just fight, and that’s all. It’s before and after that you think.”

“There is no good thing about fighting.” Fonsagrive spoke with authority a general might have envied. “There are some that are bad, and some that are worse. If I kill theBoche , it is bad. If theBoche kills me, that, I assure you, is worse. And so I kill theBoche .”

For theBoche , of course, the pans of that scale were reversed. The German trenches lay only a couple of hundred meters away. They had been French trenches till the field-gray tide lapped over them. The field-gray tide had briefly lapped over the trench in which Barrès and Fonsagrive stood, too, but a French counterattack had cleared it again. Some of the rotting corpses and chunks of corpses between the lines wore field-gray, othershorizon bleu . In death, they all smelled the same.

Behind their rusting barbed wire, the Germans were awake now, too. Here and there along the trench, riflemen started shooting up the slope toward the French position.Poilus returned the fire. Their rhythm was slightly slower than that of theBoche ; they had to reload rounds one by one into the tubular magazines of their Lebels, where the Germans just slapped fresh five-round boxes onto the Mausers they used.

Sighing, Barrès said, “There are quiet sections of the front, where for days at a time the two sides hardly shoot at each other.”

“Not at Verdun,” Fonsagrive said. “No, not at Verdun.”

“Tu a raison, malheureusement,”Barrès said. A moment later, he added, not unkindly,“Cochon.”

And Fonsagrive was indeed right, however unfortunate that might have been. In front of Verdun, France and Germany were locked in an embrace with death—aTotentanz , a German word the French had come to understand full well. The town itself, the white walls and red-tiled roofs four or five kilometers back of the line, had almost ceased to matter. In the bit more than a month since the Germans swarmed out of their trenches on 21 February, the battle had taken on a life of its own. It was about itself, not about the town at all: about which side would have to admit the other was the stronger. And it was about how many lives forcing such an admission would cost.

As if to underscore that point, a German Maxim gun snarled to life. TheBoche was a good combat engineer; a concrete emplacement protected the machine gun from anything short of a direct hit from artillery. Sandbags protected Barrès’ Hotchkiss. He envied his counterparts in field-gray their snug nest.

But, regardless of his envy, he had a job to do. “If they are feeling frisky, we had better pay them back in kind,” he said to Jacques Fonsagrive.

The loader already had one of the Hotchkiss gun’s thirty-round metal strips of ammunition in his hands. He inserted it in the left side of the weapon. Barrès used the cocking handle to chamber the first round, then squeezed the trigger and traversed the machine gun to spray bullets along the German trenches like a man watering grass with a hose.

As soon as the strip had gone all the way through the gun, Fonsagrive fed in another one. Barrès chambered the first round manually; the Hotchkiss gun, again, did the rest. It didn’t have quite the rate of fire of the German Maxim with its long, long belts of ammunition, but it was more than adequate for all ordinary purposes of slaughter, as a good many of the German dead could have attested.

Barrès had no idea whether any individual bullet he fired hit any individualBoche . He didn’t much care. If he fired enough bullets, some of them would pierce German flesh, just as, if he played roulette long enough, the ball would sometimes land on zero, missing both red and black.

Unfortunately, the same applied to that Maxim down the slope. Apoilu perhaps fifty meters from Barrès let out an unearthly shriek and fell writhing to the bottom of the trench, clutching at his shoulder.

Fonsagrive spat. “In most factories, it is an accident when someone is hurt—an accident that causes work to stop. What we make in this factory is death, and when someone is hurt it is but a death imperfectly manufactured. I hope theBoche who fired that round gets a reprimand for falling down on the job.”

One more casualty,Barrès thought as a couple of men helped the wounded soldier up a zigzagging communications trench toward a medical station.One more casualty that is neither Jacques nor I. One casualty closer to the three-quarters who have to be shot or blown up before they take this battalion out of the line. That was a revoltingly cold-blooded way to look at a man’s agony and probably mutilation. He knew as much. Being able to help it was something else again.

He did his best to return the disfavor to theBoche . Methodical as any factory worker, Fonsagrive fed strip after strip of bullets into the Hotchkiss gun. Barrès knew from long experience just how hard to tap the weapon to make the muzzle swing four or five centimeters on its arc of death. Had the Germans come out of their trench, they would not have lived to reach his.

Presently, the donut-shaped iron radiating fins at the base of the barrel began to glow a dull red. Over in the trench theBoche held, the mirror image of his own, the water in the cooling jacket surrounding the Maxim gun’s barrel would be boiling. The Germans could brew coffee or tea with the hot water. All Barrès could do was remember not to touch those iron fins.

After a while, the German machine gun fell silent, though rifles kept on barking. Barrès turned to Fonsagrive and asked, “Have we got any of that newspaper left?”

“I think so,” the loader answered. His words seemed to come from far away; Barrès’ hearing took a while to return to even a semblance of its former self after a spell of firing. Fonsagrive rummaged. “No newspaper, but we’ve got this.” He held out a copy ofL’Illustration .

“It will do,” Barrès said. Taking the magazine, he scrambled up out of the trench and into a shell hole right behind it. A couple of bullets whipped past him, but neither came very near; he’d had much closer calls. He unbuttoned his fly to piss, then yanked down his pants and squatted in a spot that wasn’t noticeably more noisome than any other. In some stretches of the line, trenches had latrine areas soldiers were supposed to use. The trenches around Verdun had been shelled and countershelled, taken and retaken, so many times, they were hard to tell from the shell holes in front of and behind them.

As Barrès did his business, he glanced at an article about the fighting in which he was engaged. He needed only a couple of sentences to be sure the writer had never come within a hundred kilometers of Verdun or, very likely, any other part of the front.Confident hope rings a carillon of bells in our hearts, the fellow declared.

“I know what hope would ring a carillon of bells in my heart,salaud, ” Barrès muttered: “the hope of trading places with you.”

Slowly and deliberately, he tore that page from the copy ofL’Illustration and used it for the purpose for which he had requested the magazines of Fonsagrive. Then he used another page, too; like a lot of the men on both sides here, he had a touch of dysentery. A lot of men had more than a touch.

He set his pants to rights and then, clutching the magazine, dove back into the trench. He drew more fire this time, as he’d known he would. “TheBoche would sooner assassinate a man answering a call of nature than do battle when both sides have weapons at hand,” he said.

“So would I,” Fonsagrive replied. “The pigdogs”—he liked the feel of the GermanSchweinhund —“are just as dead that way, and they can’t shoot back at me.”

Barrès thought it over. “It could be that you have reason,” he said at last.

“And it could be that all the world has gone mad, and that reason is as dead as all the other corpses in front of us in no-man’s-land,” Fonsagrive said. “That, I think, is more likely. If there were a God, these would be the last days.”

“I was, once, a good Catholic,” Barrès said. “I went to Mass. I took communion. I confessed my sins.” He scratched his head. Something popped wetly under his fingernail. “I wonder where the man who did those things has gone. The man I am now . . . all that man wants to do is to kill theBoche and to keep theBoche from killing him.”

“All I used to want to do was get drunk and fuck,” Fonsagrive said. “I still want to do those things. Like you, I also want to keep theBoche from killing me, especially when I have my pants down around my ankles. What do you say that you feed our friends down there another couple of strips, to show them you were not taken up to heaven while answering nature’s call?”

“And why not?” Barrès peered over at the German trenches. He was very careful not to lift his head above the parapet in the same spot twice in a row.Boche snipers knew their business. The Germans would not have been where they were, would not have been doing what they were doing, had their soldiers not known their business.

His eyes slid past motion out in no-man’s-land, then snapped sharply back. Any motion out there was dangerous. But this was not aBoche , sneaking from shell hole to shell hole to lob bombs into the French trench. It was a couple of rats, fat and sleek and sassy and almost the size of cats, on promenade from one favorite dining spot in field-gray orhorizon bleu to the next. Rats thrived at Verdun—and why not? Where else did men feed them so extravagantly?

Barrès was tempted to knock them kicking with a burst from the Hotchkiss. In the end, he didn’t. There would only be more tomorrow, eating of their obscene meat. And these were as likely to go down and torment the Germans as they were to come up and molest his comrades and him.

Then Barrès spotted motionin the trenches of theBoche . A man so incompetent as to give away his position to a machine gunner did not deserve to live. Barrès squeezed the Hotchkiss’ trigger. The German crumpled. “I got one,” Barrès told his loader. “I saw him fall.”

“One who won’t get us,” Fonsagrive replied.

The Germans promptly replied, too. Their riflemen picked up their pace of fire. The Maxim gun came back to life, flame spurting from its muzzle as if from the mouth of a dragon. And, a few minutes later, theBoche artillery began delivering presents to the French trenches. Barrès scuttled into the little cave he had scraped out of the front wall of the trench. The Germans—and, he understood, the English, too—forbade their soldiers from digging such private shelters. If a shell landed squarely on one, it would entomb the soldier huddling there. But a man in his own little cave enjoyed far better protection from splinters than one simply cowering at the bottom of the trench.

Some of the rounds—77s, 105s, and 150s—exploded with a peculiar muffled burst. Even beforepoilus started banging on empty shell casings—carillons of dread, not hope—Barrès yanked his gas helmet out of its case and pulled it down over his head. He got a quick whiff of chlorine, enough to make his throat scratchy and bring tears to his eyes, before he could secure the helmet.

He took several anxious breaths after that, fearing the pain would get worse. But he’d protected himself fast enough; it eased to a bearable discomfort. He stared out at the world through round windows, filthy as the portholes of a cabin in steerage. Wearing the helmet, he had to move more slowly and carefully, for he wasn’t getting enough air to do anything else. A man who exerted himself too strenuously in a gas helmet was liable to burst his heart.

But when theBoche used gas, he was liable to send assault troops as soon as the barrage ended. And so, regardless of the high-explosive shells, still coming down with the ones carrying chlorine, Barrès got out of his shelter and took his place at the Hotchkiss gun again. Better the risk of a shell fragment piercing him than the certainty of a bayonet or a bullet if theBoche got into his trench.

He spied no special stirring in the German trenches. Jacques Fonsagrive peered over the parapet with him. “Nothing,” Barrès said. “Nothing at all, not this time.”

“Not quite.” When Fonsagrive spoke, his voice, heard through two thicknesses of varnished cloth, sounded as if it came from the bottom of the sea. The laugh that followed seemed even worse, almost demonic. “Look at the vermin.”

Out between the lines, several rats kicked and frothed as chlorine seared their lungs. They were enough like men to sneak about. They were enough like men to steal. They were enough like men to prey on the dying and the dead. But they were not quite enough like men to invent such ingenious ways of murdering one another, or to come up with defenses against that deadly ingenuity.

“I don’t miss them a bit,” Barrès said.

“Nor I,” the loader agreed. “As when you shot that German earlier today, I merely think,There are a couple who will not gnaw my bones.

“Even so,” Barrès said. The gas shells were still raining down. “I hope we do not have to wear these cursed helmets too much longer.”

“Ah, to hell with a mealy-mouthed hope like that,” Fonsagrive said. “What I hope is that the wind will shift and blow the gas back on the pigdogs”—yes, he was enamored of that word—“who sent it to us. They deserve it. They are welcome to it. Hope for something worth having.”

“That is a better hope,” Barrès said after due reflection. “It is also a hope that could come true without much difficulty.” The German trenches lay downhill from the one in which he stood, and chlorine was heavier than air. Even a little breeze would give theBoche a taste of his own medicine.

“Do you want to feed them a few strips?” Fonsagrive asked. “Let them know they have not put paid to us?”

“I had in my mind that thought,” Barrès said, “but then I thought again, and I decided I would rather not. If they know they have not gassed us, they are likely to drop more ordinary shells on our heads, are they not?”

Behind the gas helmet, Fonsagrive’s expression was as hard to read as the unchanging countenance of a praying mantis. After a little while, though, he nodded. “That is a good notion. We can give them a nasty surprise if they come at us, and by then their men will be too close for them to shell us.”

“I wish they would give it up soon,” Barrès said. “I would like another swig ofpinard . Even a tin of monkey meat might not taste bad right now.”

“My poor fellow!” Fonsagrive exclaimed. “You must have inhaled more of the gas than you think, for your wits have left you altogether.”

“It could be,” Barrès admitted. “Yes, it could be. Did I truly say I wanted to eatsinge ? No one in his right mind—no one who is not starving, at any rate—would be so foolish.”

“I wonder if we will be starving before too long,” Fonsagrive said. “Thecuistots will have a hellish time bringing supplies to the line through this.”

“That is a duty for which I would not care,” Barrès said—no small statement, coming as it did from a machine gunner at the front. Thecuistots walked, or more often crawled, to the front festooned with loaves of bread as if with bandoliers, and with bottles ofpinard . They paid the butcher’s bill no less than anyone else—more than many—and had not even the luxury of shooting back.

And, if the bread arrived covered with mud and loathsome slime, if some of the wine bottles got to the front broken . . . why, then the weary, hungry, thirsty, filthypoilus cursed thecuistots , of course. And if the bread and wine did not arrive at all, thepoilus still cursed thecuistots , though in that case the bearers were more often than not in no condition to take note of curses.

“Bread and wine,” Barrès muttered. “The communion of the damned.” He’d had that thought before, as no doubt many Catholics at the front had done, but it struck him with particular force today.

“What is it you say?” Fonsagrive asked. The gas helmet muffled voices and hearing both. Barrès repeated himself, louder this time. Fonsagrive gestured contemptuously. “You and your God,mon vieux. How important you think you are—how important you think we are—to merit damnation. I tell you again: if there is a God, which I doubt, as what man of sense could not, then we are not damned. We are merely forgotten, or beneath His notice.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Barrès said. Through the gas helmet, Fonsagrive’s chuckle sounded like the grunting of a boar. Barrès cocked his head to one side, listening not to the loader but to the German bombardment. “It is easing off.” He might have been speaking of the rain. Indeed, he had so spoken of the rain many times; in the trenches, rain could be almost as great a nuisance as gas, and lasted far longer.

After another hour or so, Jacques Fonsagrive cautiously lifted his gas helmet from his head. He did not immediately clap it back on. Neither did he topple to the ground clutching at his throat with froth on his lips. He had done that once for a joke while Barrès was taking off his own helmet, and had laughed himself sick when his partner on the machine gun pulled it back down in a spasm of panic. Barrès had not known he could curse so inventively.

Now he pulled off the gas helmet with a sigh of relief. The air still stank, but the air around Verdun always stank. If anything, the chlorine that remained added an antiseptic tang to the ever-present reek of decay. Behind him, the sun was sinking toward the battered horizon. “Another day at the shop,” he remarked.

“But of course,” Fonsagrive said. “Now we go home to our pipes and slippers.” They both laughed. They might even sleep a little tonight, as they had the night before, if theBoche proved to be in a forgiving mood. On the other hand, they might stay awake three, four, five days in a row—if they stayed alive through the end of that time. Barrès had done it before.

Fonsagrive did light a pipe, a stubby little one filled with tobacco that smelled as if it were half dried horse dung. All French tobacco smelled that way these days. For lack of anything better—the only reason a man with a tongue in his head would do such a thing—he and Barrès opened tins ofsinge and supped as they had breakfasted. Even in the twilight, the preserved beef was unnaturally red.

“Poor old monkey,” Barrès said. “A pity he got no last rites before he died.” He took another bite and chewed meditatively. “He tastes so bad. . . . Maybe he was a suicide, and they found his body two or three days later and stuffed it in a tin then. That would account for the flavor, to be sure, and for his getting no rites. Yes,” he went on, pleased with his own conceit, “that would account for a great many things.”

“Would it account for your being an idiot?” Jacques Fonsagrive enquired. Barrès chuckled to himself.He is jealous, Barrès thought.Usually, such foolishness falls from his lips, and I am the one who has to endure it. But then Fonsagrive continued, “We are all suicides here, and none of us shall receive the last rites. It is true, is it not? Of course it is true. We are suicides, and theBoche , he is a suicide, and the whole cursed world, it is a suicide, too, throwing itself onto the fire as a moth will hurl itself into the flame of a gas lamp.”

Pierre Barrès dug into the tin ofsinge and ate without another word till it was empty. It was not that he disagreed with his loader. On the contrary: he felt exactly as did Fonsagrive. But some things, no matter how true they were—indeed, because of how true they were—were better left unsaid.

Fonsagrive seemed to sense the same thing, for when he spoke again, after flinging his own empty tin out of the trench, what he said was, “Perhaps the two of us will succeed in botching our own suicides. We have botched so many things since thistragédie bouffe began, what is one more?”

“Maybe we will,” Barrès said, glad for any excuse not to contemplate what was far more likely to happen to him.

And then, from down the trench, voices were raised in simultaneous greeting and anger. That could mean only one thing. “Thecuistots have got here at last,” Fonsagrive said, spelling out that one thing, “and the bread is even filthier than usual. Either that, or they have no wine at all.”

“Fuck you and fuck all your mothers, too, the ugly old bawds,” acuistot was saying furiously in a voice that broke every fourth word: he couldn’t have been above seventeen. “I suppose you stand up and wave when theBoche drops shells onyour heads. If you think my job is so easy, come do it.”

“If you think fighting up here while you’re starving is so easy,you come do it,” one of thepoilus retorted. But his voice held less outrage than those of the front-line troops had before; thecuistot ’s answering fury had quelled theirs, as counterbattery fire reduced the damage gun crews could do. None of the soldiers cared for the notion of becoming acuistot himself: no, not even a little.

Eventually, Barrès and Fonsagrive got bread and wine for themselves. Barrès’ share of the wine did not quite fill his water bottle, and he had to use his belt knife to cut away several muddy, filthy spots from the chunk of bread. Even after he’d done that, it still stank of corruption and death. Or perhaps it was only his imagination, for the whole battlefield stank of corruption and death.

Fonsagrive gave the bread such praise as he could: “Lord knows it’s better thansinge .” He drank some of thepinard thecuistot had brought forward. “And this is better than horse piss, but not much.”

With his belly full, Barrès was inclined to take a somewhat more charitable view of the world. “Let it be as it is, Jacques,” he said. “All the grousing in the world won’t make it any better.”

“To hell with the world,” the loader replied. “If I grouse,I feel better.” His eyes glittered in the gathering darkness.

Barrès decided not to push it any further. What the devil was the use? What the devil, for that matter, was the use of anything up here at the front line? Survival was the most he could hope for, and his odds even of that weren’t good. “Let me have a cigarette,mon vieux, will you?” he said. “Either that or some tobacco for my pipe. I’m just about all out.”

“Here.” Fonsagrive handed him a leather pouch. “Help yourself.” Tobacco got to the front even less reliably thanpinard and bread. A few days before, he’d been the one who was low, and Barrès had kept him smoking.

A brimstone reek, as of a fumigation or an exorcism, rose from the match Barrès struck. He got his pipe going and sucked smoke into his mouth. It was vile smoke, but less vile than everything else around him. He leaned back against the wall of the trench, savoring the pipe. TheBoche must have been at his supper, too, for there was silence in the trenches about the space of half an hour.

He looked up. The stars were coming out, as if all the world beneath them were at peace. He always marveled at that. The stars did not care. Maybe it was just as well.

From high above, cold and thin in the distance, came the sound—Barrès dug a finger in his ear, for his mind at first would not credit what he heard—of a brazen trumpet blowing a long blast. “That is not a call of ours,” he said, repose dropping from him like a hastily donned cloak. “That is surely some thing of theBoche .”

“Bugger theBoche ,” Fonsagrive said, but he, too, scrambled to his feet. Barrès set his finger on the trigger of the Hotchkiss gun. If the Germans wanted to pay a call on his stretch of trench by night, as they had been known to do, he would give them a warm reception. Fonsagrive went on, “I think they mean to bombard us from above: that horn must surely be coming from anavion .”

“So it must.” Barrès shrugged and sighed. “If only our ownavions were worth something more than an arse-wipe article fromL’Illustration .”

“If only, if only, if only,” the loader mocked him. “If only you did not say ‘If only’ so much. TheBoche has more artillery, he has more men, and he has moreavions as well. Such is life. We shall go on killing him anyway, until we are killed ourselves.”

Down in the German trenches a couple of hundred meters away, men were shouting and stirring, as the French soldiers were to either side of Barrès’ machine gun. Barrès thought he saw movement, and started firing. The German Maxim gun answered instantly, and riflemen on both sides also opened up. Muzzle flashes stabbed the night.

Then the aerial bombardment Fonsagrive had feared began. It was like no bombing raid Barrès had ever known: hail and fire rained out of the sky together. “Mother of God!” Barrès shouted, diving for shelter. “TheBoche has learned how to take his cursed flamethrowers up intoavions .”

“So he has,” Fonsagrive answered. “What he has not learned to do, the stinking pigdog, is to aim his flying fire. Listen to them howl down the slope, roasted in their own ovens!” He chuckled in high good humor.

“Might as well be our artillery,” Barrès said, laughing, too. The Germanswere howling when hail smote or fire burned, and the bombardment seemed to be falling on them and the French almost impartially. Barrès cocked his head to one side. “Truly their pilots are great cowards, for they are flying so high, one cannot even hear the sound of their engines.”

“As you say, might as well be our own artillery.” Fonsagrive got to his feet. “And this bombardment is not so much of a much, either. Shells or bombs would do far worse than these drippy wisps of fire.” A hailstone clattered off his helmet.

Barrès did not think theBoche could come out of his trenches and attack, not when he was being bombarded, too. Nonetheless, the Frenchman peered toward the enemy’s line. The rain of fire had started blazes in the wrecked and battered woods, although, thanks to the hail, they weren’t spreading very fast.

Fonsagrive stuck up his head, too. He shrugged. “One part in three of the forest on fire, more or less,” he said. “I had not thought the Germans to be such a slovenly people. If they have this weapon that burns, they would do better to bring it all down onour heads, not scatter it about as a running man with dysentery scatters turds.” He sounded rather like a critic explaining why a dramatist had ended up with a play worse than it might have been.

After a while, the rain of hail and fire eased, both ending at about the same time. Never once had Barrès heard the buzz of anavion ’s motor. The woods and such dry grass as remained on the ground burned fitfully. They would, Barrès judged, burn themselves out before long: so many of those trees had already burned, not much was left on which flames could support themselves.

He said, “With any luck at all, the next time theBoche trots out his fire, he will use it against the English farther north.”

“It could be,” Fonsagrive said. “He honored them with poison gas before he gave us our first taste of it, but now he shares it with them and us alike. He is a generous fellow, theBoche , is he not?”

“To a fault,” Barrès said. “I wonder when he will do us another favor of this sort. Not soon, I hope.”

In that hope he was disappointed, as he discovered within minutes. He had been disappointed a great many times since the war began, and was hardly surprised to have it happen again. As if proud of their ingenuity, the Germans heralded the new onslaught with another of those trumpetlike blasts that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

“Look up in the sky!” Fonsagrive exclaimed. “One of theiravions must have walked into a shell, for it is burning, burning.”

“That is a very huge bastard of anavion , to be sure,” Barrès replied. “I wonder—I wonder most exceedingly—how such a machine could even so much as hope to get off the ground. Look at it, Jacques. Does it not seem like a great mountain burning with fire?”

“So it does,” Fonsagrive said. “And may all the Germans inside it burn with fire, too. There it goes, by God! It will crash in the river.”

Crash in the Meuse it did, behind the French lines and to the west of the trench in which Barrès and Fonsagrive huddled. The ground shook under Barrès’ boots. “Good!” he said savagely. “All the bombs and all the fire thesalauds still had with them have gone up. Now there can be no doubt they are dead.”

“They are dead, yes, and probably one fish in three in the Meuse with them,” Fonsagrive said. “That was a formidable explosion.”

“A pity theavion did not crash into the trenches theBoche holds,” Barrès said. “It would have been sweet, having him hoist by his own petard.”

“So it would,” Fonsagrive said. “It would also be sweet if, having made a nuisance of himself in the first part of the evening, theBoche would roll up in his covers and go to sleep for the rest of the night. As you said, another favor like the falling fire we do not need.”

But the respite the two Frenchmen got did not last long. For the third time that evening, the horn sounded not behind the German line but, as best Barrès could tell, above it. “Whatis theBoche playing at?” he demanded in a cross voice. “When he does strange things, I grow nervous, for then I do not know what he is likely to try next.”

Even as he spoke, a great searing white light sprang into being above him. “Parachute flare!” The cry rose from up and down the line. Barrès ducked down below the lip of the parapet. In that pitiless glare, the Germans would have had an easy time picking him off.

He waited for the Maxim gun in the trench down the slope to take advantage of the flare and start pottingpoilus less cautious than he. But the enemy’s machine gun stayed quiet, as did his own Hotchkiss. He wondered why. When he said so aloud, Fonsagrive answered, “Could it be that no one told theBoche machine gunners the flare was going up? Could it be they think it is ours, and wait for us to shoot at them?”

“It could be, I suppose,” Barrès said dubiously, “but it sounds like something our own officers are more likely to do than those of the Germans.” He had a healthy, indeed almost a fearful, respect for the men who wore field-gray and coal-scuttle helmets, and for their commanders. They had come too close to killing him too many times for him to feel anything but respect for them.

Slowly, slowly, the parachute flare sank. It was an extraordinarily fine one. It scarcely flickered or dimmed as it came down, staying so bright, Barrès could not even make out the ’chute supporting it in the air.

It lit in a muddy puddle—a water-filled shell hole, no doubt—off to the right, in the direction of Fort Douaumont. Even after it sank into the puddle, its light still shone for a moment. TheBoche remained in his trenches. “Whatever he was supposed to do, he has buggered it up,” Fonsagrive said.

“So it would seem,” Barrès agreed. “Who would have thought it of him?”

From that muddy puddle, and perhaps from all the other sodden shell holes nearby, of which there were a great many, rose a bitter odor penetrating even through the horrid stench of the battlefield of Verdun. “What the devil is that?” Fonsagrive said. “Some new German gas?” He grabbed for his gas helmet.

But Barrès held up a hand. “No, that’s not a gas,” he said. “Don’t you recognize it? That’s the smell of wormwood.”

“Wormwood?” The loader frowned. “The stuff that goes into absinthe?”

“The very same,” Barrès replied.

Fonsagrive snorted. “And what do you know of wormwood, of absinthe, eh,mon vieux ? I suppose you are going to tell me you were one of those Paris dandies who knocked back the stuff by the beaker before they made it against the law because it drove some of those dandies mad?” As Barrès’ eyes readjusted to the night, he saw Fonsagrive gesture airily, as he guessed a Parisian dandy might do. Whatever effect the gesture might have had from a Paris dandy, it altogether failed of its purpose when coming from a filthy, unshaven corporal.

“Oh, yes, I used to guzzle absinthe by the tumblerful,” Barrès said.

His loader snorted again, louder and more rudely this time. “The truth, if you please. Do you know what the truth is?”

“Better than Pontius Pilate. Better than you, too,” Barrès retorted. But then he sighed. “Oh, very well. The truth. Back when the war was new, my company commander used to drink the stuff. Every day, at noon and in the evening, he would pour some absinthe into the bottom of a glass, hold a perforated spoon filled with sugar above it, and drip a little water through the sugar and into the absinthe. Then he’d drink it down. I don’t know where he got the stuff, but he had plenty.”

“What sort of officer was he?” Fonsagrive asked, interest in his voice. “Did the absinthe make him crazier than those who don’t drink it?”

“Not so you’d notice,” Barrès answered. “He was just a soldier, like any other. He’s dead now, I heard.”

“As who is not, these days?” Fonsagrive said. “It’s almost a fucking dishonor to stay alive, if you know what I mean.”

“Only too well,mon ami —only too well.” Sadly, Barrès shook his head. After he’d done it, he wished he hadn’t. “Those cursed fumes of wormwood are giving me a hangover, and I didn’t even get to enjoy the drunk.”

“Life is full of tragedies,” Fonsagrive said. “Shall I weep for you?”

“If you would be so kind,” Barrès answered. His loader rolled his eyes. Both men laughed. After a little while, Fonsagrive began to complain that his head hurt, too. “Ah,quel dommage, ” Barrès said, his voice full of lachrymose, even treacly, sympathy. “How I grieve that you suffer!”

“How I grieve that you lay it on with a trowel,” Fonsagrive remarked. The two soldiers laughed again.

Barrès said, “TheBoche has been trying all sorts of strange and curious things tonight. I wonder whether he is finished, or whether he will show us something else new and interesting.”

That made Jacques Fonsagrive stop laughing. But then, after some thought, the loader said, “TheBoche has shown us strange and curious things tonight,oui, but I cannot see that he has hurt us very badly with them. His fire did him as much harm as it did us, and if he somehow turned water into absinthe—well, so what? Jesus Christ turned water into wine, and look what happened toHim .”

“If a priest heard you say that, he would swell up and turn purple, like a man stung by many hornets,” Barrès said. “But, since it is my ears you assail . . .” As Fonsagrive had earlier in the day, he shrugged a fine French shrug.

A fourth trumpet blast sounded, above and beyond the battlefield. Barrès tensed, but not so much as he had done when that strange horn call first sounded. These German attacks were strange and curious, true, but, as his loader had said, they were less dangerous than most of the things the Germans had done before.

For some time, he wondered if this trumpet blast were merely sound and fury, signifying nothing. But then Jacques Fonsagrive asked, “Where has the moon gone?” By his tone, he suggested that Barrès was hiding it in one of the pockets of his uniform tunic.

Looking east, Barrès saw that the waning crescent moon which had crawled up above the German-held land in that direction—without his noticing, the hour had got well past midnight—was now vanished. He spied no cloud behind which it could have disappeared . . . and, for that matter, the stars in that part of the sky also seemed to have gone.

“Absinthe fumes,” he said again. “What else could it be? They poach your wits like the eggs in eggs Benedict.”

“Hmm.” Fonsagrive pondered the phrase as if he’d seen it in some new essay from Anatole France. “Not bad,” he said at last. “Soon the sun will be up. If you see strange things in the light of day, you will know your wits are not poached, but as addled as the eggs a Picard peasant sells you for fresh.”

A good many of the infantrymen in the trench with them were Picard peasants. If they heard, if they thought the comment a slander on their habits, they gave no sign.Probably laughing up their sleeves, Barrès thought.

And the sun gave no sign of coming up. When a waning crescent moon rises, the sun cannot be far behind. So a lifetime of experience had taught Barrès. But, even though the sun did not rise and did not rise, he refused to let it fret him. After all, among all the other stenches, the stench of wormwood remained strong in the air. “A few minutes seem like an hour,” Barrès remarked after some time had passed.

“True: time marches on hands and knees,” Fonsagrive said, adding, “It could be that we should put on our gas helmets, to clear these fumes from our heads. The sun should have risen long ago.”

“To the devil with that,” Barrès said. He waved out across no-man’s-land. “TheBoche is in the same state we are. TheBoche must be in the same state we are, or he would have come over here and done us a mischief.” He leaned against the wall of the trench and closed his eyes. “I am going to sleep for a bit, while I have the chance.”

“Not the worst idea in the world,” Fonsagrive agreed, and he stretched out, too. They knew they could be up and firing in a couple of seconds if the Germans had been rendered less nearly insensible than seemed to be the case.

When Barrès opened his eyes, he was prepared to swear on a stack of Bibles two meters high that he had dozed only a few minutes. But the sun, that suddenly treacherous beast, stood high in the sky, having somehow traveled a third part of its journey across the heavens while he lay snoring.

Ever so cautiously, he sniffed. Yes, the odor of absinthe lingered. If it had thrown him into such a stupor, maybe he should have thrust the gas helmet over his head in the darkness. But, while it might save his life, he hated it, just as he hated donning a rubber that might save him from disease.

Fonsagrive woke up a couple of minutes later. “What’s going on?” he demanded, pointing toward the sun. “Where’d that little bugger sneak out from while we weren’t looking?”

“Damned if I know,” Barrès answered. “But there he is, and we just have to make the best of it.”

They weren’t the only ones who’d taken advantage of what still felt like unnaturally extended darkness. All up and down the line,poilus who’d just awakened were exclaiming in wonder at how the sun had come out of nowhere. Barrès spoke no German past“Hände hoch!” —which he mispronounced abominably—but he knew surprise when he heard it. By the noises theBoche was making down in his trenches, he was as surprised as his French foes.

Before Barrès had a chance to marvel at that, the aerial trumpet sounded again: the fifth time overall, the first in daylight. Fonsagrive made a disgusted noise, then said, “Ahh, I thought we were done with that weird crap.”

Then, together, he and Barrès exclaimed not in disgust but in fright. A shell—it had to be a shell, though it glowed like a star even in broad daylight—was falling from the sky, seemingly straight toward them. Barrès had seen plenty of German 420s and flying mines: half the terror of those things was that youcould see them as they fell. The same held true here. This was no parachute flare, like the one that had somehow brought with it the reek of absinthe. This one plunged to earth unimaginably faster than any stooping hawk.

Barrès barely had time to dive into his cave before the starlike shell burst in no-man’s-land. By the way the ground shook beneath him, it had landed not far in front of his Hotchkiss gun. Dirt and gobbets of decayed man’s-flesh rained down on the trench, as they did after any near miss from a big shell. He gritted his teeth, bracing himself for the storm of steel sure to follow that first shot.

But the storm of steel did not come. When it didn’t come, Barrès scrambled to his feet and seized his machine gun’s trigger instead of sheltering in the hole he’d scraped for himself in the front wall of the trench. Maybe something had gone wrong with theBoche ’s artillery signals, and footsoldiers in field-gray were about to swarm out of their trenches and up the slope toward him.

He saw no swarming footsoldiers, for which he heartily thanked God. He did see the enormous hole the shell had dug, about halfway between his line and the forwardmost German positions. From that hole, a great smoke rose: perhaps the star shell had been of armor-piercing make, and had penetrated deep enough into the soft earth to ignite a stock of cooking oil or motor oil merely buried by all the other thousands of rounds that had slammed into the slope. The smoke spread quickly, all but blotting out the light of the sun that had so mysteriously reappeared in the sky.

Something stirred, there at the edge of the hole. Barrès’ finger tightened on the trigger of the Hotchkiss gun. But then, frantically, he jerked his hands away from the weapon, snatched the gas helmet off his belt, and stuffed it down over his head. “Holy Virgin Mary Mother of God,” he gasped, almost as if the phrase were but a single word. “The absinthe fumes were ever so much worse than I thought.”

Beside him, Fonsagrive was also putting on his gas helmet with desperate haste. “Tell me what you see,” the loader begged.

“I will not,” Barrès said firmly. “In no way will I do that. You would think I was mad. I would think I am mad, did I put into words what my fuddled brain makes of what my eyes see.”

Locusts the size of horses? Locusts the size of horses with the tails of scorpions and the faces of men? Locusts the size of horses with iron breastplates, with wings that rumbled as they shook them out? Locusts with women’s hair streaming out from under golden crowns, with the fierce teeth of lions huge in their jaws?

Though Barrès breathed clean air now, the absinthe fumes had already fuddled him, and the hallucinations—for such they had to be—did not resume their proper form, which could be nothing but men in field-gray with coal-scuttle helmets on their heads.

“I do not care what they look like to me,” he declared as the impossible things began to advance on the trench. He was lying. He knew he was lying, but saying the words helped him control his fear, even if he could not banish it. And what he said next was surely true: “If I can see them at all, I can kill them.”

He squeezed the machine gun’s trigger and sent a strip of ammunition into the Germans who did not to his mind look like Germans. Mechanical as if powered by steam, Jacques Fonsagrive fed the Hotchkiss another thirty-round strip, and another, and another. All along the trench,poilus, some wearing gas helmets, some not, emptied their rifles at the advancing enemy as fast as they could.

The slaughter was gruesome. TheBoche had to be throwing in raw recruits, for they knew nothing—less than nothing—about taking cover. Barrès had heard that the Germans were trying out armor like that which knights of old had worn. Maybe the breastplates he thought he saw on the giant locusts were in fact breastplates on Germans. If they were, they weren’t proof against machine-gun bullets.

And then Barrès laughed out loud, a huge, delighted laugh. Some—perhaps even half—the Germans in no-man’s-land, unable to stand up against the withering French fire, started back toward their own line. And the Germans in that line, as fuddled from wormwood fumes as Barrès was himself, opened fire on their comrades as if they were Frenchmen. The Maxim and Mausers worked an execution as ghastly as the Hotchkiss and Lebels.

A few got into the trenches on either side. None lasted long, not against bullets and bayonets and grenades. Then one more rose out of the pit. Maybe the fumes were fading from Barrès’ head, for this one looked like a man. Butwhat man he looked like kept changing from moment to moment. Now he had lank, dark hair, a small mustache, and wore what looked something like a German uniform, save with a red armband bearing some kind of symbol on his left arm. Then again, he might have been a short, pockmarked fellow with iron-gray hair and a large mustache, wearing a suit halfway between military and civilian cut, with a gold star hanging from his left breast pocket. Or—

Barrès waited to see no more. He fired at the man who shifted shape. So did the German Maxim gunner. They both started shooting at essentially the same instant. They both scored hits, too, a great many hits. The man—a German officer?—went down and stayed down. He didn’t look now like one man, now like another, not any longer. He just looked dead.

“Is that the end of it?” Barrès asked.

“Am I God, that I should know such things?” Fonsagrive returned. “I will tell you what I think, though. What I think is, it will never be over for us, not until we are killed. In the meanwhile, we are obliged to make ourselves as difficult for theBoche as we can.”

Since Barrès thought the same thing, he did not argue with his loader. Down the trench, someone was screaming, “It burns! Aii, it burns! The sting, the horrible sting!” Barrès wondered what the absinthe fumes had made that poorpoilu imagine he was fighting.

And then, clearly audible even through the varnished cloth of his gas helmet, Barrès heard that trumpet sound for a sixth time.“Merde alors!” he exclaimed angrily. “Has theBoche not yet realized that, whatever his wormwood-filled gas shell may have done to us, it has done likewise to his own men?”

“If our generals are fools, why should theBoche ’s generals not be fools as well?” Fonsagrive said.

Whatever the wormwood-filled gas shell had done to Barrès, its effects had not left him. Nor, as he’d thought, had they diminished. Rushing hard toward him came a host of cavalry straight from the imagination of a madman. The horses wore breastplates of fire and brimstone; their heads looked like those of lions. Instead of tails, snakes grew from the end of their spines, snakes with great poisonous fangs. The lion heads breathed out flames and smoke. Some of the riders had wings.

“Gas!” Fonsagrive shouted. “Horsemen with poison gas!” Barrès nodded. His gas helmet kept him safe. And he had before him a target of which machine gunners could commonly but dream. He fired and fired and fired, till the cooling fins on the Hotchkiss gun glowed red. Fonsagrive fed him strip after strip of ammunition.

“TheBoche is mad, to attack us with cavalry,” Barrès said. “But however mad he is, they shall not pass!”

That he, too, was mad, to see the GermanUhlans as he did, went without saying. But a man who had spent so long breathing absinthe fumes could hardly be expected to remain in his right mind. And anyone on the front lines at Verdun was apt to be mad anyhow. He was sane enough to keep the machine gun pointed in the right direction, and that was the only thing that really mattered.

Some of the improbable-looking cavalry charged back toward the German lines, as had some of the footsoldiers who’d looked to him like giant locusts. The Germans shot them down as cheerfully as Barrès did. He laughed. They were making his work easier for him.

He did not think any of the horsemen got into either set of trenches. Both the Empire and the Central Powers kept cavalry divisions behind their lines, awaiting breakthroughs that never came. Cavalry, in any case, melted under machine-gun fire like frost melting under hot sunshine. To anyone who’d spent time in the trenches, that was obvious. Generals on both sides, though, had a way of staying back at nice, comfortable headquarters. What was obvious to the soldiers who did the fighting and dying must not have seemed so plain ten or twenty kilometers behind the line.

At last, Barrès stopped shooting. “Have we got a jam?” Fonsagrive asked anxiously.

“Not at all,” Barrès replied. “The gun performs splendidly. But I see nothing more alive in front of me. Why, then, should I waste cartridges I shall need to try to beat back the next German attack?”

Rain mixed with sleet—Verdun surely had the most abominable climate in all of France, and yesterday’s warmth was forgotten—began pelting down. A great clap of thunder sounded, and another, and another, until there were seven in all. Jacques Fonsagrive laughed. “Do you know,mon ami, ” he said, “that I used to be frightened of thunder, and would hide under my bed during a storm?”

“Artillery fire will cure one of that,n’est-ce pas? ” Barrès said. “I would like to hide under my bed when theBoche shells us. I would like to have a bed under which to hide when theBoche shells us.”

“An iron bed, by choice,” Fonsagrive said. “But yes, after artillery, how is one to lose one’s nerve over thunder?” He shook his fist at the sky. “If there is a God up there, which, as I have said, I do not believe, how could He do worse to us than what the Germans and our own officers have visited upon us here? Such a thing would not be possible.”

Barrès scratched himself. “It could be that you are right. But it could be that you are wrong, too. After all, when theBoche shelled us with poison gas yesterday, he did kill a great many rats, as we both noted.”

“I beg your pardon.” Fonsagrive’s nod was full of exquisite, understated irony. “If God is as all-powerful as most fools say, no doubt He could give us rats and poison gas at the very same time. Or He might simply give the rats gas helmets, which would save Him a miracle.”

“Very good. Oh, very good indeed.” Barrès clapped his hands. “I wish we had a chaplain here, to listen to these brilliant blasphemies.”

“Chaplains are no fools,” Fonsagrive said. “Nothing requires that they come to the front line, and so they do not. If nothing required me to come to the front line, I would not either, I assure you.”

“Nor I,” Pierre Barrès answered. He shrugged. “But the nations are angry. It is the time of the dead. And so we are here: the dead, but not quite yet.” The ground shook under his feet. “Is that an earthquake?”

“What a fool you are,” Fonsagrive said. “That’s someone’s ammunition dump going up. I hope very much it is an ammunition dump of theBoche going up.” He cocked his head to one side, to hear from which direction the roar of the explosion would come.

So did Barrès. He heard no explosion, though, only the endless patter of the rain. And then, through the rain, high and thin, came a seventh trumpet blast. He glanced over to Jacques Fonsagrive. The loader nodded: he had heard it, too. They both braced themselves for whatever the Germans might throw at them next.

“We are not dead yet,” Barrès repeated. “We have heard six of these horn calls, and endured them. What is one more?”

“Perhaps one too many,” Fonsagrive said. “But then again, perhaps not, also.”

The ground shook again. There were lightnings and thunderings. The sleet turned to hail. After shell fragments, hail was at worst a minor nuisance. But, little by little, the foul weather eased. The sun came out once more—not by stealth, as it had before, but simply because the wind blew away the clouds.

Barrès and Fonsagrive both nodded. “It is done,” they said together.

They looked at each other. Somehow, it should not have been their voices saying those words, but Another’s. They both shrugged. Who had time to think of Another, here in the man-made hell of Verdun? And, as Jacques Fonsagrive had said, what even from the last of days could be worse than that which soldiers endured here?

Barrès took off his gas helmet. A last few raindrops fell, though the sky seemed clear. They tasted of salt, almost as if they were tears.

A buzzing in the air swiftly swelled to a mechanical roar. With a grunt of fright, Barrès threw himself into the hole he’d scraped in the trench. Bullets from the machine guns of several low-flyingavions decked with black crosses chewed up the French entrenchments. Men screamed as they were wounded.

As soon as theavions had passed, Barrès emerged and sent what ammunition was left in his machine gun after them. He did not think he scored any hits. A man on the ground with a Hotchkiss gun knocked down anavion only by luck. He knew it. He accepted it. But if a man on the ground did not bet, how could he hope to win?

Maybe his puny act of defiance angered the Germans. Whatever the reason, their artillery opened up on the position his regiment occupied. A man on the ground with a Hotchkiss gun could do nothing whatever against artillery. Barrès knew that, too. He had trouble accepting it. That was one of the reasons he hated gunners so much.

Slow as usual, the French artillery eventually got around to responding to theBoche bombardment. That tardiness was another reason why Barrès hated gunners, even gunners inhorizon bleu . Also as usual, all too many of the French shells fell short and landed on the same trenches the Germans were pounding. That gave Barrès—and every otherpoilu —a most excellent reason for hating his own gunners.

By the time the two rival sets of artillerymen (so Barrès supposed they were, even if they sometimes seemed joined in a malign alliance against the French infantry) had finished plowing up the trenches and the ground between them, no one could have told from what manner of creature the chunks of flesh out there had come. Germans? Very likely. Horses? Very likely. Giant locusts with scorpion stings? No one could not have proved otherwise.

Little by little, the shelling slowed. Barrès came out of his hole, wondering if theBoche intended rushing up the slope at him. But the men in field-gray seemed content for the time being to stay where they were. He took out a tin ofsinge , opened it, and stared resignedly at the red, red meat inside.

Jacques Fonsagrive was opening some tinned beef, too. “I wonder if thecuistots will be able to get more bread up here any time soon,” he said.

“Whether they do or not, we’ll get by,” Barrès answered. “We still have monkey meat and we still havepinard . We can go on a while longer.”

“You have reason,mon vieux, ” Fonsagrive said. “And the fighting’s been a little quieter the last couple of days, eh?”

“Yes, I think so.” Barrès nodded, then shrugged. “Who knows? I would not care to bet on it, but we might even live. You have any more tobacco?” Fonsagrive passed him aGitane . He lit it and took a long drag. “Ahh. Thanks. That’s good, by God.”