All Roads Lead to Calvary

J >> Jerome K. Jerome >> All Roads Lead to Calvary


Joan had gone out in September, and for a while the weather was pleasant.
The men, wrapped up in their great-coats, would sleep for preference
under the great sycamore trees. Through open doorways she would catch
glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a
flickering candle. From the darkness there would steal the sound of
flute or zither, of voices singing. Occasionally it would be some
strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and
plaintive. But early in October the rains commenced and the stream
became a roaring torrent, and a clammy mist lay like a white river
between the wooded hills.

Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war.
Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank
up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which
you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you
slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little
donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up
and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and
be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud;
lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the
straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud,
motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back
in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through
the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy
men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of
mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with
a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever
through the endless mud.

Men sitting by the roadside in the mud, gnawing at unsavoury food; men
squatting by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding
feet in the muddy water, replacing the muddy rags about their wounds.

A world without colour. No other colour to be seen beneath the sky but
mud. The very buttons on the men's coats painted to make them look like
mud.

Mud and dirt! Dirty faces, dirty hands, dirty clothes, dirty food, dirty
beds; dirty interiors, from which there was never time to wash the mud;
dirty linen hanging up to dry, beneath which dirty children played, while
dirty women scolded. Filth and desolation all around. Shattered
farmsteads half buried in the mud; shattered gardens trampled into mud. A
weary land of foulness, breeding foulness; tangled wire the only harvest
of the fields; mile after mile of gaping holes, filled with muddy water;
stinking carcases of dead horses; birds of prey clinging to broken
fences, flapping their great wings.

A land where man died, and vermin increased and multiplied. Vermin on
your body, vermin in your head, vermin in your food, vermin waiting for
you in your bed; vermin the only thing that throve, the only thing that
looked at you with bright eyes; vermin the only thing to which the joy of
life had still been left.

Joan had found a liking gradually growing up in her for the quick-moving,
curt-tongued doctor. She had dismissed him at first as a mere butcher:
his brutal haste, his indifference apparently to the suffering he was
causing, his great, strong, hairy hands, with their squat fingers, his
cold grey eyes. But she learnt as time went by, that his callousness was
a thing that he put on at the same time that he tied his white apron
round his waist, and rolled up his sleeves.

She was resting, after a morning of grim work, on a bench outside the
hospital, struggling with clenched, quivering hands against a craving to
fling herself upon the ground and sob. And he had found her there; and
had sat down beside her.

"So you wanted to see it with your own eyes," he said. He laid his hand
upon her shoulder, and she had some difficulty in not catching hold of
him and clinging to him. She was feeling absurdly womanish just at that
moment.

"Yes," she answered. "And I'm glad that I did it," she added, defiantly.

"So am I," he said. "Tell your children what you have seen. Tell other
women."

"It's you women that make war," he continued. "Oh, I don't mean that you
do it on purpose, but it's in your blood. It comes from the days when to
live it was needful to kill. When a man who was swift and strong to kill
was the only thing that could save a woman and her brood. Every other
man that crept towards them through the grass was an enemy, and her only
hope was that her man might kill him, while she watched and waited. And
later came the tribe; and instead of the one man creeping through the
grass, the everlasting warfare was against all other tribes. So you
loved only the men ever ready and willing to fight, lest you and your
children should be carried into slavery: then it was the only way. You
brought up your boys to be fighters. You told them stories of their
gallant sires. You sang to them the songs of battle: the glory of
killing and of conquering. You have never unlearnt the lesson. Man has
learnt comradeship--would have travelled further but for you. But woman
is still primitive. She would still have her man the hater and the
killer. To the woman the world has never changed."

"Tell the other women," he said. "Open their eyes. Tell them of their
sons that you have seen dead and dying in the foolish quarrel for which
there was no need. Tell them of the foulness, of the cruelty, of the
senselessness of it all. Set the women against War. That is the only
way to end it."

It was a morning or two later that, knocking at the door of her loft, he
asked her if she would care to come with him to the trenches. He had
brought an outfit for her which he handed to her with a grin. She had
followed Folk's advice and had cut her hair; and when she appeared before
him for inspection in trousers and overcoat, the collar turned up about
her neck, and reaching to her helmet, he had laughingly pronounced the
experiment safe.

A motor carried them to where the road ended, and from there, a little
one-horse ambulance took them on to almost the last trees of the forest.
There was no life to be seen anywhere. During the last mile, they had
passed through a continuous double line of graves; here and there a group
of tiny crosses keeping one another company; others standing singly,
looking strangely lonesome amid the torn-up earth and shattered trees.
But even these had ceased. Death itself seemed to have been frightened
away from this terror-haunted desert.

Looking down, she could see thin wreaths of smoke, rising from the
ground. From underneath her feet there came a low, faint, ceaseless
murmur.

"Quick," said the doctor. He pushed her in front of him, and she almost
fell down a flight of mud-covered steps that led into the earth. She
found herself in a long, low gallery, lighted by a dim oil lamp,
suspended from the blackened roof. A shelf ran along one side of it,
covered with straw. Three men lay there. The straw was soaked with
their blood. They had been brought in the night before by the stretcher-
bearers. A young surgeon was rearranging their splints and bandages, and
redressing their wounds. They would lie there for another hour or so,
and then start for their twenty kilometre drive over shell-ridden roads
to one or another of the great hospitals at the base. While she was
there, two more cases were brought in. The doctor gave but a glance at
the first one and then made a sign; and the bearers passed on with him to
the further end of the gallery. He seemed to understand, for he gave a
low, despairing cry and the tears sprang to his eyes. He was but a boy.
The other had a foot torn off. One of the orderlies gave him two round
pieces of wood to hold in his hands while the young surgeon cut away the
hanging flesh and bound up the stump.

The doctor had been whispering to one of the bearers. He had the face of
an old man, but his shoulders were broad and he looked sturdy. He
nodded, and beckoned Joan to follow him up the slippery steps.

"It is breakfast time," he explained, as they emerged into the air. "We
leave each other alone for half an hour--even the snipers. But we must
be careful." She followed in his footsteps, stooping so low that her
hands could have touched the ground. They had to be sure that they did
not step off the narrow track marked with white stones, lest they should
be drowned in the mud. They passed the head of a dead horse. It looked
as if it had been cut off and laid there; the body was below it in the
mud.

They spoke in whispers, and Joan at first had made an effort to disguise
her voice. But her conductor had smiled. "They shall be called the
brothers and the sisters of the Lord," he had said. "Mademoiselle is
brave for her Brothers' sake." He was a priest. There were many priests
among the stretcher-bearers.

Crouching close to the ground, behind the spreading roots of a giant oak,
she raised her eyes. Before her lay a sea of smooth, soft mud nearly a
mile wide. From the centre rose a solitary tree, from which all had been
shot away but two bare branches like outstretched arms above the silence.
Beyond, the hills rose again. There was something unearthly in the
silence that seemed to brood above that sea of mud. The old priest told
her of the living men, French and German, who had stood there day and
night sunk in it up to their waists, screaming hour after hour, and
waving their arms, sinking into it lower and lower, none able to help
them: until at last only their screaming heads were left, and after a
time these, too, would disappear: and the silence come again.

She saw the ditches, like long graves dug for the living, where the
weary, listless men stood knee-deep in mud, hoping for wounds that would
relieve them from the ghastly monotony of their existence; the holes of
muddy water where the dead things lay, to which they crept out in the
night to wash a little of the filth from their clammy bodies and their
stinking clothes; the holes dug out of the mud in which they ate and
slept and lived year after year: till brain and heart and soul seemed to
have died out of them, and they remembered with an effort that they once
were men.

* * * * *

After a time, the care of the convalescents passed almost entirely into
Joan's hands, Madame Lelanne being told off to assist her. By dint of
much persistence she had succeeded in getting the leaky roof repaired,
and in place of the smoky stove that had long been her despair she had
one night procured a fine calorifere by the simple process of stealing
it. Madame Lelanne had heard about it from the gossips. It had been
brought to a lonely house at the end of the village by a major of
engineers. He had returned to the trenches the day before, and the place
for the time being was empty. The thieves were never discovered. The
sentry was positive that no one had passed him but two women, one of them
carrying a baby. Madame Lelanne had dressed it up in a child's cloak and
hood, and had carried it in her arms. As it must have weighed nearly a
couple of hundred-weight suspicion had not attached to them.

Space did not allow of any separation; broken Frenchmen and broken
Germans would often lie side by side. Joan would wonder, with a grim
smile to herself, what the patriotic Press of the different countries
would have thought had they been there to have overheard the
conversations. Neither France nor Germany appeared to be the enemy, but
a thing called "They," a mysterious power that worked its will upon them
both from a place they always spoke of as "Back there." One day the talk
fell on courage. A young French soldier was holding forth when Joan
entered the hut.

"It makes me laugh," he was saying, "all this newspaper talk. Every
nation, properly led, fights bravely. It is the male instinct. Women go
into hysterics about it, because it has not been given them. I have the
Croix de Guerre with all three leaves, and I haven't half the courage of
my dog, who weighs twelve kilos, and would face a regiment by himself.
Why, a game cock has got more than the best of us. It's the man who
doesn't think, who can't think, who has the most courage--who imagines
nothing, but just goes forward with his head down, like a bull. There
is, of course, a real courage. When you are by yourself, and have to do
something in cold blood. But the courage required for rushing forward,
shouting and yelling with a lot of other fellows--why, it would take a
hundred times more pluck to turn back."

"They know that," chimed in the man lying next to him; "or they would not
drug us. Why, when we stormed La Haye I knew nothing until an
ugly-looking German spat a pint of blood into my face and woke me up."

A middle-aged sergeant, who had a wound in the stomach and was sitting up
in his bed, looked across. "There was a line of Germans came upon us,"
he said, "at Bras. I thought I must be suffering from a nightmare when I
saw them. They had thrown away their rifles and had all joined hands.
They came dancing towards us just like a row of ballet girls. They were
shrieking and laughing, and they never attempted to do anything. We just
waited until they were close up and then shot them down. It was like
killing a lot of kids who had come to have a game with us. The one I
potted got his arms round me before he coughed himself out, calling me
his 'liebe Elsa,' and wanting to kiss me. Lord! You can guess how the
Boche ink-slingers spread themselves over that business: 'Sonderbar!
Colossal! Unvergessliche Helden.' Poor devils!"

"They'll give us ginger before it is over," said another. He had had
both his lips torn away, and appeared to be always laughing. "Stuff it
into us as if we were horses at a fair. That will make us run forward,
right enough."

"Oh, come," struck in a youngster who was lying perfectly flat, face
downwards on his bed: it was the position in which he could breathe
easiest. He raised his head a couple of inches and twisted it round so
as to get his mouth free. "It isn't as bad as all that. Why, the Thirty-
third swarmed into Fort Malmaison of their own accord, though 'twas like
jumping into a boiling furnace, and held it for three days against pretty
nearly a division. There weren't a dozen of them left when we relieved
them. They had no ammunition left. They'd just been filling up the gaps
with their bodies. And they wouldn't go back even then. We had to drag
them away. 'They shan't pass,' 'They shan't pass!'--that's all they kept
saying." His voice had sunk to a thin whisper.

A young officer was lying in a corner behind a screen. He leant forward
and pushed it aside.

"Oh, give the devil his due, you fellows," he said. "War isn't a pretty
game, but it does make for courage. We all know that. And things even
finer than mere fighting pluck. There was a man in my company, a Jacques
Decrusy. He was just a stupid peasant lad. We were crowded into one end
of the trench, about a score of us. The rest of it had fallen in, and we
couldn't move. And a bomb dropped into the middle of us; and the same
instant that it touched the ground Decrusy threw himself flat down upon
it and took the whole of it into his body. There was nothing left of him
but scraps. But the rest of us got off. Nobody had drugged him to do
that. There isn't one of us who was in that trench that will not be a
better man to the end of his days, remembering how Jacques Decrusy gave
his life for ours."

"I'll grant you all that, sir," answered the young soldier who had first
spoken. He had long, delicate hands and eager, restless eyes. "War does
bring out heroism. So does pestilence and famine. Read Defoe's account
of the Plague of London. How men and women left their safe homes, to
serve in the pest-houses, knowing that sooner or later they were doomed.
Read of the mothers in India who die of slow starvation, never allowing a
morsel of food to pass their lips so that they may save up their own
small daily portion to add it to their children's. Why don't we pray to
God not to withhold from us His precious medicine of pestilence and
famine? So is shipwreck a fine school for courage. Look at the chance
it gives the captain to set a fine example. And the engineers who stick
to their post with the water pouring in upon them. We don't reconcile
ourselves to shipwrecks as a necessary school for sailors. We do our
best to lessen them. So did persecution bring out heroism. It made
saints and martyrs. Why have we done away with it? If this game of
killing and being killed is the fine school for virtue it is made out to
be, then all our efforts towards law and order have been a mistake. We
never ought to have emerged from the jungle."

He took a note-book from under his pillow and commenced to scribble.

An old-looking man spoke. He lay with his arms folded across his breast,
addressing apparently the smoky rafters. He was a Russian, a teacher of
languages in Paris at the outbreak of the war, and had joined the French
Army.

"It is not only courage," he said, "that War brings out. It brings out
vile things too. Oh, I'm not thinking merely of the Boches. That's the
cant of every nation: that all the heroism is on one side and all the
brutality on the other. Take men from anywhere and some of them will be
devils. War gives them their opportunity, brings out the beast. Can you
wonder at it? You teach a man to plunge a bayonet into the writhing
flesh of a fellow human being, and twist it round and round and jamb it
further in, while the blood is spurting from him like a fountain. What
are you making of him but a beast? A man's got to be a beast before he
can bring himself to do it. I have seen things done by our own men in
cold blood, the horror of which will haunt my memory until I die. But of
course, we hush it up when it happens to be our own people."

He ceased speaking. No one seemed inclined to break the silence.

They remained confused in her memory, these talks among the wounded men
in the low, dimly lighted hut that had become her world. At times it was
but two men speaking to one another in whispers, at others every creaking
bed would be drawn into the argument.

One topic that never lost its interest was: Who made wars? Who hounded
the people into them, and kept them there, tearing at one another's
throats? They never settled it.

"God knows I didn't want it, speaking personally," said a German prisoner
one day, with a laugh. "I had been working at a printing business
sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me,
and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell
the machinery to keep them all from starving."

"But couldn't you have done anything to stop it?" demanded a Frenchman,
lying next to him. "All your millions of Socialists, what were they up
to? What went wrong with the Internationale, the Universal Brotherhood
of Labour, and all that Tra-la-la?"

The German laughed again. "Oh, they know their business," he answered.
"You have your glass of beer and go to bed, and when you wake up in the
morning you find that war has been declared; and you keep your mouth
shut--unless you want to be shot for a traitor. Not that it would have
made much difference," he added. "I admit that. The ground had been too
well prepared. England was envious of our trade. King Edward had been
plotting our destruction. Our papers were full of translations from
yours, talking about '_La Revanche_!' We were told that you had been
lending money to Russia to enable her to build railways, and that when
they were complete France and Russia would fall upon us suddenly. 'The
Fatherland in danger!' It may be lies or it may not; what is one to do?
What would you have done--even if you could have done anything?"

"He's right," said a dreamy-eyed looking man, laying down the book he had
been reading. "We should have done just the same. 'My country, right or
wrong.' After all, it is an ideal."

A dark, black-bearded man raised himself painfully upon his elbow. He
was a tailor in the Rue Parnesse, and prided himself on a decided
resemblance to Victor Hugo.

"It's a noble ideal," he said. "_La Patrie_! The great Mother. Right
or wrong, who shall dare to harm her? Yes, if it was she who rose up in
her majesty and called to us." He laughed. "What does it mean in
reality: Germania, Italia, La France, Britannia? Half a score of pompous
old muddlers with their fat wives egging them on: sons of the fools
before them; talkers who have wormed themselves into power by making
frothy speeches and fine promises. My Country!" he laughed again. "Look
at them. Can't you see their swelling paunches and their flabby faces?
Half a score of ambitious politicians, gouty old financiers, bald-headed
old toffs, with their waxed moustaches and false teeth. That's what we
mean when we talk about 'My Country': a pack of selfish, soulless, muddle-
headed old men. And whether they're right or whether they're wrong, our
duty is to fight at their bidding--to bleed for them, to die for them,
that they may grow more sleek and prosperous." He sank back on his
pillow with another laugh.

Sometimes they agreed it was the newspapers that made war--that fanned
every trivial difference into a vital question of national honour--that,
whenever there was any fear of peace, re-stoked the fires of hatred with
their never-failing stories of atrocities. At other times they decided
it was the capitalists, the traders, scenting profit for themselves. Some
held it was the politicians, dreaming of going down to history as
Richelieus or as Bismarcks. A popular theory was that cause for war was
always discovered by the ruling classes whenever there seemed danger that
the workers were getting out of hand. In war, you put the common people
back in their place, revived in them the habits of submission and
obedience. Napoleon the Little, it was argued, had started the war of
1870 with that idea. Russia had welcomed the present war as an answer to
the Revolution that was threatening Czardom. Others contended it was the
great munition industries, aided by the military party, the officers
impatient for opportunities of advancement, the strategists eager to put
their theories to the test. A few of the more philosophical shrugged
their shoulders. It was the thing itself that sooner or later was bound
to go off of its own accord. Half every country's energy, half every
country's time and money was spent in piling up explosives. In every
country envy and hatred of every other country was preached as a
religion. They called it patriotism. Sooner or later the spark fell.

A wizened little man had been listening to it all one day. He had a
curiously rat-like face, with round, red, twinkling eyes, and a long,
pointed nose that twitched as he talked.

"I'll tell you who makes all the wars," he said. "It's you and me, my
dears: we make the wars. We love them. That's why we open our mouths
and swallow all the twaddle that the papers give us; and cheer the fine,
black-coated gentlemen when they tell us it's our sacred duty to kill
Germans, or Italians, or Russians, or anybody else. We are just crazy to
kill something: it doesn't matter what. If it's to be Germans, we shout
'_A Berlin_!'; and if it's to be Russians we cheer for Liberty. I was in
Paris at the time of the Fashoda trouble. How we hissed the English in
the cafes! And how they glared back at us! They were just as eager to
kill us. Who makes a dog fight? Why, the dog. Anybody can do it. Who
could make us fight each other, if we didn't want to? Not all the king's
horses and all the King's men. No, my dears, it's we make the wars. You
and me, my dears."

There came a day in early spring. All night long the guns had never
ceased. It sounded like the tireless barking of ten thousand giant dogs.
Behind the hills, the whole horizon, like a fiery circle, was ringed with
flashing light. Shapeless forms, bent beneath burdens, passed in endless
procession through the village. Masses of rushing men swept like shadowy
phantoms through the fitfully-illumined darkness. Beneath that
everlasting barking, Joan would hear, now the piercing wail of a child;
now a clap of thunder that for the moment would drown all other sounds,
followed by a faint, low, rumbling crash, like the shooting of coals into
a cellar. The wounded on their beds lay with wide-open, terrified eyes,
moving feverishly from side to side.

At dawn the order came that the hospital was to be evacuated. The
ambulances were already waiting in the street. Joan flew up the ladder
to her loft, the other side of the yard. Madame Lelanne was already
there. She had thrown a few things into a bundle, and her foot was again
upon the ladder, when it seemed to her that someone struck her, hurling
her back upon the floor, and the house the other side of the yard rose up
into the air, and then fell quite slowly, and a cloud of dust hid it from
her sight.