“When did they go past?” the sergent yells. “You must have seen them!”
The man shakes his head, waves his hands. He says he didn’t see anyone, that he went out this morning with his goats and his son. Have pity, he says, and other things in his language, in his choked voice. The boy asks the sergent to leave them in peace, but a kick sends him sprawling onto his side and he immediately gets back on his knees, swaying slightly and keeping his head lowered, his lips moving although nothing can be heard of the prayer—or curse—that he is uttering.
“Look!” Castel tells the old man. “Look at this, you scum!”
He takes out his pistol, releases the safety and presses the barrel to the boy’s temple.
Giovanni grabs Daniel’s sleeve.
“Talk, or I’ll blow his head off! Talk, you son of a bitch! It’ll be one less rebel anyway, cos they’ll come here to take your little bastard!”
The old man says again that he doesn’t know anything, hasn’t seen anything, that he only came here to feed and water his herd, please, please, leave us alone. The boy trembles and shakes and moans, his eyes crazed with terror.
Giovanni is on his feet. His fist tightens around the cocking lever of his rifle.
“Don’t say anything. Don’t move,” Daniel whispers. “Leave them. They’ll calm down.”
“They’re not going to kill that man—they can’t!” Giovanni chokes.
The sergent makes a sign to a soldier. The man primes his submachine gun and aims a burst of gunfire at the herd of goats. He does it gladly. Maybe half the magazine is used. The goats leap in all directions or collapse to the ground or limp away then roll down the slope, bleating like children, like old women, and to hear them, you’d think it was a group of people being massacred. Two drag their bodies around with their front legs, and three are lying on their sides, their bodies jerking. The others try to climb the sides of the grassy crater, but the men are kicking them back down, shouting and laughing, then the crippled goats crawl along the ground, braying, and the soldiers laugh even louder. Lieutenant Vrignon, who turned around when he heard the gunfire, watches without understanding. He hangs up his telephone, picks up his sub-machine gun and runs towards the sergent and the two Arabs, who are now holding their heads and crying, and his feet get stuck in ruts and he stumbles sometimes against large tufts of thick grass.
He squats next to the two men and forces them to look at him by lifting up their chins with the barrel of his gun, and he too barks into their faces and hits them with the back of his hand while Castel holds them by the hair.
The interrogation lasts another five minutes. Castel and two soldiers strip the boy naked and force him to stand up, hands on his head, and the two soldiers tease his penis with the points of their daggers, telling him even a bitch in heat wouldn’t want that soft piece of meat. They throw the old man by his hair at his goats and the soldier who did that rubs his hands, grimacing and whining with disgust because a lock of hair is stuck between his fingers, white and bushy and dry as tow, stuck there with sweat.
A few men laugh. Others pretend to look away.
Then the lieutenant whistles as if calling a dog and the men turn to look at him and respond to his signal by reforming the column on the path.
The two shepherds are sitting down, their faces in their hands. The boy has hastily dressed again, shivering as he pulls his old rags tight around him. The remaining goats have come back and are nibbling or sniffing or pushing at them with their muzzles, while bleating.
Daniel comes down from the spur where they had gone to keep a lookout, and behind him he hears Giovanni whispering insults and threats at the officers, the army, this whole fucking war.
“And we let them do it . . . Jesus, can you believe it? They could have killed those two men and what would we have said?”
Daniel does not reply. He doesn’t know what to say. He concentrates on putting his rifle back in its slipcover, then lights a cigarette and offers one to Giovanni.
“I don’t know what we could do. Maybe nothing. Because this is a war and we don’t have any freedom left. We’re not even ourselves anymore.”
“Of course we are! Shit, what do you think? Look around! We’re just the same as before, with the same ideas, the same reactions, aren’t we?”
Daniel meets his eyes: huge, shining and very dark. He would like to be able to think like Giovanni. He’d like to be able to think, full stop.
“I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know anything anymore.”
His friend tosses away his cigarette, loads up his bag, gets tangled up in the straps of his rifle. He looks as though he is about to throw everything to the ground, but Daniel helps him lift up his kit. Around them, the men are blowing and sighing as they hoist up their loads. None of them watches the old man and his son picking up the contents of their bags. A bit of bread, some dates, a few crumbs of cheese. In the transparent air, under a sky of a deep, dense blue, the light picks out each detail like the point of a scalpel. Perhaps no-one can look at that without pain.
They start walking again and the heat silences them and exhaustion rises through their legs, making their footsteps heavy and slow. The path climbs gently, incessantly, subjecting them inch by insidious inch to its rule.
A few hours later, they have a break in the shade of a copse of live oaks and eat their corned beef from the tin, and slices of saucisson with rubbery bread. They drink sparingly from their flasks of water and click their tongues, perhaps to rid their mouths of the briny or metallic taste. The sergent is the only one who remains on his feet, the sling of his sub-machine gun across his chest, the weapon behind his back. He says sitting down makes you weak, and he goes from group to group asking everyone if they are alright, advising them to save their water because there’s none around in this country of sand and dust; it’s like a precious metal, hidden in the depths of the earth. Not like in Indo, he adds, where two days in the humidity made you mouldy like an old bit of bread and where you could fill your flask just by holding it to the end of a giant leaf for five minutes.
Men offer him slices of saucisson and squares of chocolate and he refuses scornfully, content to pick and swallow handfuls of nuts and grains from his pocket. It’s said that no-one has ever seen him eat anything more substantial than that during any march or patrol. That he’s never thirsty; that a single gulp of water is enough for him, where a grunt will down his entire flask; that he runs smoothly on very little because all he carries around with him is the bare minimum: muscles and nerves, basic weaponry, plus a grenade that he keeps on him so that, if the fells ever get him, he will blow himself up—him and the idiot who walks over in triumph, thinking he’s caught a prisoner. It’s also said that he brings in bottles of gin by military courier and that he cuts it with lemonade to give it some flavor and that he gets drunk alone in his hovel, a former pigsty whose first human occupants, in ’56, cleaned it with a flame-thrower before whitewashing it. Those who have been inside talk about a canvas bed, a table and chair, a washbowl perched on a three-legged stool in front of a mirror and a single wooden shelf. Weapons hung on hooks on the wall. And nothing else. Oh . . . yes. Photos of Chinks with those fucking gently sloping hats. And landscapes with yet more Chinks or Gooks, who can tell, slaving away, bent double over the waters of a paddy field.
That is what they say about Sergent Castel. Behind his back, and at quite a distance.
No-one really hears the clicks that echo above them. Castel drops to the ground, the lieutenant yells, “Down! Down!” and Daniel sees Declerck, thrown forward as if kicked, fall head first in the dust then twist his torso, holding his throat to stop the blood from pissing everywhere, but it pours between his writhing fingers, and the giant of the north struggles, groaning, kicking out and rolling over, as if trying to fight off an invisible enemy. Giovanni crawls over to him and uses his dirty scarf to compress his ripped throat, telling him it’ll be alri
ght, don’t worry, we just need to press down on this to make it stop.
Above them, there is a buzzing and the leaves of the trees are torn off and rain down on the men like confetti. The trees wail as their branches are eaten away. Daniel looks around him at the men pinned to the ground, on the verge of burying themselves like insects in the sand in order to avoid the bullets that seek them out but ricochet from rocks or land in the soil, creating little clouds of dust. Giovanni is still lying next to Declerck, one hand pressed to his neck, the blood-soaked scarf in his hand, but the wounded man no longer moves, lying on his back with his eyes and mouth wide open, his fingers tensed and buried in the earth.
The gunfire ceases suddenly. Heads are lifted. Vrignon, the lieutenant, adjusts his hat and goes over to Castel. The two of them gather up the men, tacking quickly, backs bent, between the abandoned bags and guns. A few look away from the sight of Declerck’s corpse, while others can’t stop staring at it. Stupefied. All that blood. They’ve probably never seen so much. A piglet can be bled, squealing, into a bucket, but a man’s blood pours out like red water from a burst pipe, spreading over the dry earth, already absorbed into it, now nothing more than a dark stain. They are pale, jaws slack or tensed, faces shining with a sweat that has not been caused only by the heat.
The lieutenant crouches down, and those who were still standing imitate him, gripping their weapons with sweat-slick fingers. He stares at them without a word, meeting every gaze, wide-eyed or defeated. He is probably waiting for his breathing to slow before he can speak.
Castel is lying on his belly in the undergrowth, looking through binoculars at the side of the hill.
“They’ve got a machine gun,” says the lieutenant. “They’re containing us here, waiting for us to leave; that’s why they’re aiming high and shooting in short bursts. It’s possible they’ve got another position a bit further on so they can catch us from both sides. Evidently they don’t have a mortar, otherwise we’d all be dead, and we’re not going to wait till one arrives, if it happens to be on its way. Alright, so we’ve lost one. They got him by pure chance. It could have been any of us, O.K.? I don’t want to lose anyone else. What I want is for us to get out of here without any injuries. And we’re not going to let those sons of bitches get away with it—we’re going to kill a few of them, so at least Declerck won’t have died for nothing. Understood? So stop crawling around like cockroaches and start acting like soldiers again.”
The men mutter and nod, slowly getting up. Giovanni puts his blood-covered hands in the dust and wipes them on his trousers. Daniel meets his vacant gaze that then looks away, eyes lost in the deathly pallor of his face.
The sergent gets to his feet. They all stare at him in terror, instinctively cringing.
“Lieutenant, let me reconnoitre. We should be able to find that machine gun. I think I know where they were shooting from.”
Vrignon looks up at him, glances around at the men sitting in the shade and shakes his head. Aggrieved or resigned.
“O.K. I’ll call the battalion to let them know.”
“Two men with me to see where they are,” says Castel. “You can cover us from here. Short bursts—save the ammunition. We don’t know how long we’ll have to stay here. Pauly and Normand. Delbos, you take your Garand. Those guys up there are not made of cardboard—you need a bull’s-eye. Got it? Leave your bags. Just take your gun and some grenades. Come on, let’s get moving!”
When he hears his name, Daniel shivers and stands up at the same time as the other two, slowly, then removes the rifle from its slipcover and takes three magazines. As soon as he leaves the shade, the sun beats down on his shoulders, trying to force him to the ground. Daniel follows Castel, who climbs up through the thicket of trees, emerging from their cover to throw himself behind a rock. The four of them find themselves on their knees and the covering fire starts up. The hillside shakes, with clouds of dust, shards of rock, fragments of branches and leaves sent flying by the impact of the bullets.
They start climbing again on all fours, hidden by the thick, dry underbrush that rustles as they move through it and scratches at their faces and arms. Daniel is just behind Castel, who goes quickly, but he finds himself sliding over the stones as they roll beneath his shoes, as if he was running on a carpet of marbles. He’s short of breath and the burning he can feel in his legs seems to be radiating from his very bones, cooking his muscles from inside. He can hear the two others, Pauly and Normand, panting behind him. They too skid and slip, and swear in whispers.
The gunshots come more sporadically. The platoon’s machine gun must have been placed in a good position, because they can hear it more loudly now. Above them, the fells fire at random but they seem invisible. Nothing moves apart from the scraps of foliage torn from the trees by bullets and the puffs of dust raised by their impact. It looks as if the hill itself is answering back to the shots. A volley of bullets hisses past over their heads and Daniel hears Pauly yell and fall heavily and groan, “I’m hit! Shit, boys, they got me, those fuckers!,” so he goes back and crouches next to the wounded man while Normand fires his sub-machine gun in every direction, staring at the bead, as if the fellaghas might appear from anywhere to finish them off.
“Where does it hurt? Fuck, I can’t see anything!”
Pauly pants and moans. His eyes roll back in terror.
“My back,” he manages to say. “At the top.”
Daniel pulls him towards him so he can turn him onto his side, and that is when he sees the slash in the battledress jacket and beneath that the bloodstained undershirt and beneath that a smear of blood, like a sort of burn. He touches the skin around it, feeling only the bulge of a rib.
“It’s nothing. Just a scratch. It’s bleeding a bit, but that’s all.”
“Bollocks to that! I get hit by a bullet and you give me that shit!”
Daniel feels himself pushed aside and falls on his ass. Castel is already leaning over Pauly.
“Show me. What have you got?”
He makes him lie face down and examines the wound.
“This is nothing, you prick. Another centimeter and it would have hit your spine, but you’ve got nothing worse than a cracked rib, so stop fucking whining. Stay here and don’t move. We’ll pick you up on our way back. And shut your mouth, you understand? Normand, take his magazines and let’s go. Their machine gun’s over there, in that thicket. We’re going to take it out.”
He leaves, with Daniel and Normand following. Bent double, noses to the ground, sucking up dust. The sergent lies down behind a mound of earth. He passes Daniel his binoculars.
“Look over there. That pointed tree higher up. Below that. You see the barrel sticking out? The leaves move sometimes too. Wait until they fire again.”
Not two hundred meters away. Dense undergrowth below live oaks and junipers. Daniel can see nothing but the leaves shining brightly in the sun, motionless. Nothing moves or even shivers.
“You don’t see anything?”
The sergent is whispering into his ear. Daniel props himself up on his elbows, holds his breath. He sees the smoke before he hears the crackle of gunfire.
Now he can make out a few centimeters of the barrel and part of the tripod. He wonders how he didn’t notice it earlier. He doesn’t have enough saliva to speak: his dry mouth, lined with dust, emits only a sort of choking noise. He thinks about his two flasks of water, waiting for him down below, in the shade. Looking for the shooter, he notices the slightest tremble in the rough, stiff foliage that rarely moves in the breeze. His forearms tremble. His back and his shoulders are burning, and the collar of his jacket scratches the back of his neck, which is covered in sweat. He searches the depths of the thicket for a lighter mark, a bit of skin, a circle of light sliding over a face.
Suddenly he distinguishes the shape of a face, unmoving, above the firing axis of the machine gun.
Rifle. Adjust the scop
e. He’s lost his target: his field of vision is trembling too much.
“Here. Take a drink, and afterwards blow his head off.”
He does not remember ever having swallowed anything better than this lukewarm, dirty water. He manages to say thanks and returns to a firing position, moves slightly to the side, finds a better support.
The man is still there, in the shadow of the undergrowth, immobile at his machine gun. He can see him better now. Face leaning forward, eyes lowered perhaps, as if he’s praying. He is surprised by the power of this image. This profile framed by an emerald and black blur, sparkling in the sunlight. Depth and contrast.
Daniel centers him in the eyepiece, lifts it a little to compensate for the fall of the trajectory and holds his breath again. For ten or fifteen seconds he can feel nothing but a drop of sweat tickling his skin as it runs from his temple down to his cheek. And in the scope he sees the man lying flat and with his other eye the dark green thicket where he lies shining in the blazing sun.
Deafened by the detonation. His shoulder absorbs the shock. In the scope he can no longer see anything, then he finds the mouth of the machine gun again, searches for the figure of the gunner.
Castel scans the bushes with his binoculars.
“I saw something move. You got him.”
He picks up the walkie-talkie and speaks to the lieutenant.
“We got him. Move now before they replace him. I’m going to check it out.”
Daniel continues staring at the undergrowth. He cannot take his eyes off the place where he saw that immobile face. Perhaps he was already dead, he thinks, and at the same time he half expects him to reappear. The sergent tugs at his sleeve.
“Come on, let’s go. Stay three meters below me.” Then, to Normand, he orders: “You—find some shelter for Pauly.”
After the War Page 24
