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At night, the countryside that surrounds them is unnaturally quiet. Bahorel listens, still – there's little else to do during the watch, unless he wants to light a cigarette and be shot for his trouble – but it's a futile exercise. The land's voices have been silenced by the fire and fury and inexorable march of machinery that destroys every inch of territory they retake, mulches fields into mud and turns trees that might've outlived them all into firewood and shrapnel.
The land is dead, as barren as the sandy tracks along the sea shore where there ought to be crops and lines of tilled earth. The cattle that once grazed in the fields have all been shot by now. It's their land that they're fighting through, but there's so little of what Bahorel knows left in it that it's unrecognisable. Even the silty quarry tunnels beneath Paris felt more alive than this place. The last time he walked the wide, orderly boulevards above they had been all but deserted; it's growing harder and harder to remember what came before.
There's a cough behind him, quiet, suppressed, yet loud in air that's otherwise colourless. It even smells dead, or Bahorel's lost his sense for it; he hasn't smelt anything but stale sweat, mud, shit and gunpowder in weeks now. He turns his head, taking his eyes off the inky, grey-green darkness he had been staring into to glance at his watchmate.
Prouvaire, the small, pale, thin man he's been paired with tonight, has been staring at the opposing stretch of featureless horizon for the past hour, and seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Now he's glancing over his shoulder at Bahorel, and chewing his bottom lip as he considers whether to speak.
"Best have out with it," Bahorel advises; his words form a fine wet mist in the air that settles on his whiskers and eyelashes. "I don't bite, unless the situation calls for it."
The pale man colours at that, or appears to; it's difficult to tell in the moonlight, but the cast of his white features does seem to alter slightly.
The act of speaking does alleviate a little of the oppressive weight that's been bearing down on Bahorel, without him being entirely aware of it. He's never been one for peace and quiet; he had too many siblings to ever experience it in his youth, and it's not a habit he means to acquire – not when there's cafés and Opera houses and ballrooms full of conversation he could be partaking in. Would the charming guinguette near the barrière de Belleville where he'd met that woman with the melodious laugh still be there when he got home? If he got home –
"Would you mind awfully if I sat down for a little while?" the pale man asks; he has a thin, frail voice that trembles as he speaks, but he doesn't shrink beneath Bahorel's enquiring gaze as some do.
"If you like," Bahorel answers, and shifts where he's standing so he can alternate the direction he's looking in, to cover both their posts for a while. Moving brings an unwelcome reminder of how stiff his limbs have become in the chill – he stamps his feet, and rubs his hands together to get his blood moving again, but all it achieves is to make his feet sink further into the wet mud. He hasn't felt his toes in weeks.
Prouvaire smiles a small, stiff smile, steps inelegantly down from the lip of the trench, takes his steel helmet off and rubs at the back of his neck with the arm that has his rifle slung over it.
He has a woollen balaclava covering his ears and most of his chin, but it's slipped back at the forehead, revealing a widow's peak and short, limp, dark hair. He has a thin, drooping moustache, a long, serious face, and a spattering of mud on his left cheek. It's a look that puts Bahorel in mind of the images of dour-faced mediaeval saints on their cracked wooden altars, gold haloes flaking and lines spider-webbing their hollow cheeks. The man's bright, soulful eyes only add to the effect: they shine faintly in the moonlight, making him appear sombre and empathetic, as though permanently on the verge of weeping.
His coat is the same horizon blue as Bahorel's own; in daylight it's the colour of mist-shrouded mountains against a crisp, cloudy sky, but at night it's simply a lighter grey than the mud that surrounds them. Everything about the man is as grey as the rest of Bahorel's world has been steadily becoming as the war drags on, months becoming years with no seasons to mark their passing as the land decays around him. Hot and muddy or cold and muddy – those are the two states of being he's accustomed to now.
Prouvaire seats himself on an exposed plank near the base of the trench, placing his helmet and his rifle beside him. The clasps that fix his gun to its strap click softly as he removes it from his body. There's no dugout here in which to conceal a fire, but there is a small, hooded lamp, dim enough that its light won't spill out and reveal their position. Prouvaire takes it in his hands, warming them on its rusted metal sides. Bahorel returns his attention to the darkness he's supposed to be watching, but he does glance intermittently down at the man at his feet, itching for anything else to occupy his thoughts with.
After a while, Prouvaire sets the lamp beside him and pulls a small notebook out of an inside pocket of his coat. He directs the thin, filmy beam of light at it, and Bahorel watches with brief interest as he produces a pencil from the same pocket, and begins to write.
It's not unusual for men to keep a diary here, though there's little enough to write about most days. It passes the time, and gives some form to the otherwise indistinguishable days and nights. Perhaps he's writing a letter to his family, or to his sweetheart - he seems the type to have a woman waiting for him back home, quiet and unassuming and ordinary.
Except the lines he forms with his words don't have the shape of a love letter to them; they have the shape of poetry. Bahorel can't read the words from where he stands, but the length of the lines and the breaks between them suggest metre and stanzas and rhythm.
"What are you writing about?" he asks, staring in the vague direction of the enemy lines as he does so; they've been dark and quiet all night, and for several nights now – perhaps they've abandoned their trenches for a better position, or given up the whole miserable job and gone home to their mothers; perhaps they're simply biding their time, waiting for the right moment to push their own line forward. He might be looking his German counterpart straight in the eye, for all he can tell. He has some choice words for him to relay to the Kaiser, if they do find themselves face to face. He's got some choice words for Poincaré too, and a few gestures.
"Moonlight," Prouvaire replies after a pause, as though Bahorel's words had far to travel before they broke his concentration. Bahorel glances at him as he pauses in his writing, lifting his pale face to the sky once more. "And starlight, and how beautiful the heavens are, even when everything below them seems desolate." His quiet, wispy voice solidifies as he speaks, deepening into something with more resonance to it. "Some of their names go back as far as the second century; to think we're gazing at the same stars as men made myths of over two thousand years ago –" He hesitated then, as though his own self-consciousness had finally caught up with him. Bahorel had no desire to return to the silence of before.
"Go on," he prompted, watching his companion with renewed interest; he liked men that were passionate about something, even if it was for a subject he couldn't claim an answering interest in.
"I've a friend back home of a scientific mind; he told me once that some of the most distant stars are already dead, and what we perceive is the light they cast a billion lifetimes ago, yet it has so far to travel that it's only just reached us. It's like ripples across the surface of an infinite pond, and who knows what lies beyond – I don't believe anything is truly dead if its echoes can still move people." He gestures with the tip of his pencil at some point high in the middle of the sky. "That bright star there forms part of the constellation Andromeda, a maiden chained to a rock to appease the god of the sea; beside her is Perseus, her rescuer – it's thought to be the forebear of all princess and the dragon-slayer legends. I think it's fitting that the stars should hold our stories for us, even if there's no one left to tell them."
His eyes glitter as he speaks with the reflected light of the stars above, as though in calling them by name he's inviting them into himself. Bahorel quells the sneaking suspicion that his companion hasn't been looking at the stretch of horizon he's supposed to be watching at all. He knows the story well enough, but monsters rising out of the sea to devour women feels fanciful in a way it didn't as a child – he's seen real monsters now, and they're machines concocted by men to turn battlefields into charnel houses.
Despite the cynicism that's been setting roots in his heart since the war began, he feels himself taken aback by the fondness with which the man speaks of the stars. He's always considered theirs to be a cold light – colourless, and these long nights of watching nothing but darkness have only strengthened its association with death in his mind. It's what he imagines the light of the underworld would look like – fire might be terrible, but at least being scorched by it would provide brief warmth. His own personal hell isn't pain and endless torment at the end of the devil's pitchfork; it's the absence of sensation, a void empty of life and laughter with no end in sight.
He's been watching the man beside him as he watches the stars in turn, but now Bahorel lifts his own gaze to the sky, and is surprised by what he sees there. Above a bleak horizon there's a heavy, thick curtain of cloud, but above that – his helmet slips as he cranes his neck to look, and he holds it in place with the hand that isn't clutching the body of his rifle, as he tilts his head back as far as he's able to without unbalancing himself.
He's lived in Paris so long that he's grown used to the heavens being obscured by the smoky haze of the city and the electric noise of its streetlamps. Looking at them now is like looking backwards in time, to a youth spent in a little stone farmhouse on the edge of an ancient village.
He knows the constellations as well as he knows the dirt tracks and country lanes, though he doesn't know all their proper names. Above are the same bright points he used to fix his way by, when he and his brothers had gone wandering in the fields or playing in the streams, and lost track of the hour. They used to traipse home through fields that shone with the tall green shoots of wheat, rippling like water in the light of the pale silver moon. They used to catch leeches in the ink-black pond on the edge of his parents farm some nights, to sell to the decrepit old doctor in the village that still swore by them.
Beneath this tapestry of memory it's easier to recall what used to lie beneath. He pictures ancient trees shaking their branches at the breeze; feels the fear of the dormouse as the owl's talons close around it; hears crickets humming as they cling to the long grass.
"What's that one?" He points to a particularly bright white star, low in the sky to the east, hundreds of millions of kilometres beyond enemy lines.
He hears Prouvaire moving behind him; the man steps up to the lip of the trench beside him, his helmet and rifle back in place. "Jupiter, I think."
"You're very knowledgeable about this," Bahorel states, still staring at the sky. "What did you do, before?"
"I read history at the Sorbonne, and wrote mediocre poetry in my spare time," Prouvaire's tone is warm, if a little bashful.
"Sounds delightful." He means it.
"What did you do?"
"Law - at least on paper. I wanted to write plays."
"You should –" Prouvaire's tone brightens with sudden, glittering enthusiasm, "– I daresay we'll all need a little theatre when this is over, to remind us what it means to be human."
"I suppose it'll fill the time."
"I expect front row seats on opening night."
Bahorel tears himself away from the sky at last, and finds Prouvaire smiling at him. It's a warm smile, the kind that makes its bearer's eyes crease at the corners. It brightens the solemn set of the man's features into something softer, and more inviting. Bahorel returns the smile, until the man's cheeks start to colour again, and he lowers his eyes.
"I should go back to my post."
Prouvaire goes, and Bahorel in turn resumes his sentries' stance, but they aren't quiet for very long after that. The rest of their night shift is spent conversing, pointing at stars and relaying their stories in warm, animated tones.
When the next pair of men come to relieve them, they find them both beaming.