The Horrible
The warm night was closing in. The women had remained in the drawing room while the men sat smoking on the garden chairs in front of the door, round a table laden with cups and liqueur-glasses.
Their lighted cigars shone like eyes in the growing darkness. They had been discussing a frightful accident that had happened the previous evening, when two men and three women had been drowned in the river before the eyes of the guests.
General de G⸺ remarked: “Yes, these things do affect one but they are not horrible.
“The hackneyed word ‘horrible’ carries much more meaning than the word ‘terrible’ does. A frightful accident like this distresses, upsets, and alarms one, but it does not horrify. In order to experience horror, something more is needed than mental emotion, something more than witnessing a frightful death; there must be either a shuddering sense of mystery, or a feeling of abnormal, unnatural terror. A man who dies even in the most dramatic circumstances does not inspire horror; a battlefield is not horrible; blood is not horrible; the vilest crimes are rarely horrible.
“Listen, I will give you two instances which have made me realise the meaning of horror.
“During the war of 1870 we were retreating towards Pont-Audemer after having passed through Rouen. The army consisted of about twenty thousand men; twenty thousand men in retreat, disbanded, demoralised, exhausted, were going to re-form at Havre.
“The ground was covered with snow, and night was falling. No one had had any food since the evening before; the Prussians were not far away, and the men had to retire quickly.
“The ghastly Norman country, speckled with the shadows of the trees round the farms, lay still, under a black heavy threatening sky.
“Nothing could be heard in the wan twilight but the sound, muddled, confused, and yet over-loud, of the troops on the march, an endless tramping mingled with the faint clink of their mess-tins or their swords. The men, bent, round-shouldered, dirty, many of them in rags, dragged themselves along, toiled through the snow with long exhausted strides, their hands sticking to the steel on the butt ends of their muskets, for it was freezing hard. I frequently saw a poor devil marching barefooted, so painful were his boots, leaving bloodstained footprints at every step. After a while he would sit down for a few minutes, but he never rose again. Every man who sat down was a dead man.
“How many of these poor exhausted soldiers we left behind expected to start again as soon as they had rested their stiffened legs! But the moment they stopped, their sluggish blood ceased to circulate in their frozen veins, and an irresistible numbness chilled them to the marrow, chained them to the ground, closed their eyes, and in one second paralysed the overwrought human machine. They gradually sank down, their heads on their knees, not falling over altogether, for their backs and their limbs become as hard and rigid as a piece of wood: it was impossible either to bend the bodies or place them upright.
“The rest of us, more robust, kept on going, chilled to the bone, going forward by mere inertia, through the night, the snow, the cold deathlike country, crushed by grief, defeat, and despair, but, above all, in the grip of the appalling sense of abandonment, the end of all things, death—nothing left.
“I saw two gendarmes holding the arms of a strange-looking little man, old, beardless, quite amazing in appearance. They were searching for an officer, believing that they had caught a spy.
“The word ‘spy’ spread rapidly through the crowd of stragglers, who gathered around the prisoner. A voice shouted: ‘He must be shot.’ And through the group of soldiers falling over with fatigue and only able to stand upright by leaning on their guns, there suddenly passed that wave of infuriated and bestial anger which drives a mob to bloodshed.
“I tried to speak, because I was in command of a battalion at the time, but the authority of officers was no longer recognised and they would even have shot me.
“One of the gendarmes said: ‘He has been following us for three days. He asks everybody for information about the artillery.’
“I tried to question the man: ‘What are you doing? What do you want? Why are you following the army?’ He muttered a few words in unintelligible dialect.
“He was indeed a strange being, with narrow shoulders and a sullen look: he was so ill at ease in my presence that I had no further doubt as to his being a spy. He seemed very old and feeble, and kept looking at me furtively, in a humble, stupid, sly way.
“The men around us shouted: ‘To the wall! To the wall!’
“I said to the gendarmes: ‘You will be responsible for the prisoner?’
“I was still speaking when the surging crowd knocked me off my feet and I saw in a flash the man seized by the angry soldiers, thrown down, beaten, dragged along the road and flung against a tree. Half dead, he fell in the snow.
“They shot him immediately. The soldiers fired at him, reloaded their guns, and fired again with the rage of brutes. They fought with each other for their turn to shoot, and, still firing, they filed past the corpse as you file past a coffin to sprinkle it with holy water.
“Then suddenly the cry arose: ‘The Prussians! The Prussians!’ And from every side I heard the tremendous uproar of the panic-stricken army in full flight.
“The panic due to the firing at the vagabond had maddened the executioners themselves, who, not understanding that they were responsible for the terror they felt, fled and disappeared into the darkness.
“I was left alone with the body and the two gendarmes whose duty compelled them to stay with me.
“They lifted up the battered mass of bruised and bleeding flesh. ‘He must be searched,’ I said, handing them a box of candle-matches which I had in my pocket. One of the gendarmes held the light for the other. I stood between the two.
“The gendarme who was examining the body declared:
“ ‘Clothed in a blue workman’s blouse, a white shirt, trousers, and a pair of shoes.’
“The first match went out, and a second was lighted. The man, turning out the pockets, continued: ‘A horn-handled knife, check handkerchief, snuffbox, piece of string, and piece of bread.’
“The second match went out, a third was lighted. After having carefully felt the corpse, the gendarme said: ‘That’s all.’
“I said: ‘Strip him. We may find something next his skin,’ and to enable the two gendarmes to work together, I held the match for them. By its fugitive light I saw them gradually strip the body and expose to view the bleeding mass of flesh, still warm in death.
“Suddenly one of them stammered: ‘Damn it all, Major; it’s a woman!’
“I cannot describe my strange, poignant feeling of anguish. I could not believe it, and knelt down in the snow beside the shapeless pulp to see for myself: it was a woman!
“The two gendarmes, speechless and demoralised, waited for me to express an opinion on the matter. But I didn’t know what to think, I had no idea what could have happened. Then the brigadier drawled out: ‘Perhaps she had come to look for her son in the artillery, because she had not heard from him.’
“And the other replied:
“ ‘That may well be so.’
“And I who had seen so many terrible things began to shed tears. And beside the dead woman, in the icy cold night, in the middle of the dark plain, in the presence of this mystery, this unknown victim, I knew exactly what the word ‘horror’ meant.
“I had the same feeling last year when interrogating one of the survivors of the Flatters Mission, an Algerian sharpshooter. You know most of the details of that appalling drama, but there is still another of which you are probably ignorant.
“The colonel was going to the Sudan through the desert, crossing the immense territory of the Touaregs, who in that ocean of sand which stretches from the Atlantic to Egypt, and from the Sudan to Algeria, are pirates of a sort comparable to those who formerly plundered the high seas.
“The guides conducting the column belonged to the tribe of Shaamba from Wargla.
“Well, one day they pitched their camp in the middle of the desert, and the Arabs declared that as the spring was a little farther on they would go with all the camels to fetch water.
“One man only warned the colonel that he had been betrayed. Flatters refused to believe him and accompanied the convoy with his engineers, doctors, and most of the officers. They were massacred by the spring, and all the camels were captured.
“The captain of the Arabian Department of Wargla who had stayed behind in the camp took command of the survivors, Spahis and sharpshooters, and began to retreat, abandoning all supplies and provisions, because there were no camels.
“So they started off through the shadeless, boundless solitude, beneath the fierce sun that scorched them from early morning till night.
“One tribe surrendered, bringing dates as a peace-offering; these dates were poisoned, and nearly all the Frenchmen perished, the only remaining officer being of the number.
“Only a few Spahis were left with their quartermaster, Pobéguin, besides the native sharpshooters of the Shaamba tribe, with two camels, but these disappeared one night with two Arabs.
“Then the survivors realised that they would be obliged to eat each other, and as soon as the flight of the two Arabs with the two camels was discovered, they separated and proceeded to march one by one through the soft sand, under the fierce blaze of the sun, out of gunshot range of each other.
“They kept on like this all day and when they reached a spring each one in turn went up to drink as soon as his nearest neighbour had reached the distance decided upon. So they kept on the whole day, raising in their track across that level, burnt-up expanse those little columns of dust which in the distance show the track of travellers in the desert.
“But, one morning, one of the men swerved round and approached his neighbour, and the other stopped to look.
“The man whom the famished soldier was approaching made no attempt to run away, but lay flat on the ground and aimed at him. When he thought he was within gunshot he fired, but did not hit the other, who still advanced and, firing in his turn, shot his comrade dead.
“The others rushed up from every direction for their share of the dead body; he who had been the slaughterer cut it up and distributed the pieces.
“Then the irreconcilable allies spaced themselves as before, until the next murder should bring them together again.
“For two days they lived upon their share of human flesh; then, as hunger seized them again, he who had killed the first man killed a second. Again he cut up the corpse like a butcher, and offered portions to his companions, only keeping his own share. And so this retreat of cannibals continued.
“The only surviving Frenchman, Pobéguin, was killed at a well-side the very night before help arrived.
“Do you understand now what I mean by the ‘horrible’?”
This is the story that was told by General de G⸺ the other night.