Gabriel Chevallier: His screams were terrible, enough to shame God

====

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

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
Fear
Translated by Malcolm Imrie

In war all instincts are given free rein, with nothing to impede or stop them, except for death’s arbitrary intervention.

The mouth was fixed in the last screams of a terrible death agony, with a rictus of the lips baring the teeth, a mouth wide open, spitting out the soul like a clot of blood. I wish I could have kept this mask that death had fashioned, on which its fatal genius had achieved a synthesis of war, so that a cast could be made and given to women and zealots.

We were a troop of ghosts and old men, and all we could do was keep crying out for a breather. For always the whistles would summon us back up on our feet, set in motion our onerous role as beasts of burden, until it no longer felt like a march with a destination but a journey to the end of a night that spread across the earth into infinity.

There was not a single meter of conquered ground that wasn’t paved with a corpse, not a hectare that had not cost a battalion.

Cadaverous and caked in mud, they had lost most of their kit and looked like fugitives; there was a glint of madness in their eyes, the madness that comes from proximity to death. They staggered away in groaning groups, holding each other up. We could not take our eyes off the white patches of field dressings, with blood seeping through. Blood still dripped from them, marking their trail. Next came the silent stretchers, from which hung white, contorted hands. Four medical orderlies transported on their shoulders one unfortunate whose arm and had been torn apart, exposing the frayed muscles. His screams were terrible, rising up to the impassive heavens, enough to shame God.