Paul and Victor Margueritte: At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

====

Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

“It is a triumph for which we have had to pay, and which will cost us dear.”

Du Breuil thought of the death-rattle of the wounded, the pallor of the dead. The terrible vision, with the fields strewn with corpses, again rose up.

***

There was a report, and almost immediately a black point, a shell, whistled in a straight line, increasing in size as it came. Brutus, frightened, sprang forward, and the shell burst in the midst of the group of officers. A moment of bewilderment followed, during which, in a red flash, the wind from the wings of Death struck his temples, and the horrible picture appeared before him of a head clean cut from the body, three bodies which were falling, and on the ground, in a pool of blood near the folding stool, still upright, the Colonel, – as white as a sheet, his stomach and legs shattered.

Here were companies lying on the ground to allow the storm of bullets to pass, the officers flat upon their stomachs joking, encouraging the men with a merry word; there, deserted fields strewn with arms, knapsacks, shakos; a few wounded soldiers, some dead ones marking out the passage of a troop. At a bound, Brutus grazed a very young Second Lieutenant, who was stretched upon his back. His twitching right hand convulsively clenched the hilt of his sword. One of his legs was missing. Where was it? The poor fellow was still alive. That look!…Ah, the batteries!…There they were spread out, facing a wood.

He fired his revolver, he dashed forward like a madman, uttering shrill, murderous cries. Then he comprehended to the full the horror of it all. At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust. He vowed indefinite hatred towards these frenzied brutes – Germans as well as Frenchmen. Murderers! Murderers! All inspired in him boundless repulsion.

“Isn’t it curious to think that we are surrounded by an invisible force, by a network of death, the meshes of which we can only break by tearing ourselves and letting fresh blood? Do you know the number of our last losses? – 12,273 men. Our wounded? More than 15,000, the Marshal was saying just now.”

In the ambulances and hospitals, already full in the town, crowded the three thousand five hundred men who had been wounded in the last fight. Public buildings, like private houses, gave forth the perpetual odor of death. Everywhere were beds, stretchers, straw, and upon these sick-beds of misery poor, motionless, or gesticulating forms, hollow and yellow faces, acute, savage, and stupefied eyes. Death-rattles arose near wounded in a state of coma, the forerunner of the great sleep; the piercing screams of those who were under the knife issued from the walls; putrid expirations made one think of flesh eaten up by gangrene.