by Pete Ayrton
Through my questions, I lead the nurses into traps of logic, and ensnare them in syllogisms that completely undermine their principles. They struggle like flies in a spider’s web, but refuse to surrender to the mathematical rigour of reason. They are led by the sentiments that a long passage of generations, ruled by dogma, has incorporated into the very substance of their being – sentiments that they have got from a line of women, housewives and mothers, who were alive in their early years and then crushed by domestic drudgery, worn out by the daily round, who crossed themselves with holy water to exorcise any thoughts they might have.
They are surprised to learn that duty, as they understand it, can be opposed to other duties, that there are seditious ideas vaster and more elevated than theirs, and which could be more beneficial to humanity.
Nonetheless, Mademoiselle Bergniol declared:
‘No son of mine will be brought up to think like you.’
‘I know that, mademoiselle. You could bear flaming torches as well as babies, but you’ll only give your son the guttering candle that you were given; its wax is dripping and burning your fingers. It is candles like that which have set the world ablaze instead of illuminating it. Blind men’s candles, and you can be sure that tomorrow they’ll relight the braziers that will consume the sons of your loins. And their pain will be nothing but ash, and at the moment their sacrifice is consummated, they will know this and will curse you. With your principles, if the occasion presents itself, then you in turn will be inhuman mothers.’
‘Do you deny that there are heroes, then, Dartemont?’
‘The action of a hero is a paroxysm and we don’t know what causes it. At the height of fear, you can see men becoming brave; it is a terrifying kind of bravery because you know that it’s hopeless. Pure heroes are as rare as geniuses. And if in order to get one hero you have to blow ten thousand men to pieces, then we can do without heroes. You should remember that you would probably be unable to carry out the mission you give us. You can only be sure of how calmly you’ll face death when you’re facing it.’
When Mademoiselle Bergniol has gone, Nègre, who was following our conversation, shared his opinion:
‘The delicate little dears! What they need is a hero in their beds, a real live hero with a bloody face, to make them squeal with pleasure!’
‘They don’t know…’
‘They don’t know anything, I agree. When all’s said and done, women – and I’ve known plenty of them – are females, stupid and cruel. Behind all their airs and graces, they are just wombs. What will they have done during the war? They’ll have egged on men to go and get their heads blown off. And the men who will have disembowelled lots of the enemy will receive their reward: the love of a charming, right-thinking young woman. What sweet little bitches!’
While he’s talking I am watching the women going about their duties. Mademoiselle Bergniol is energetic in a methodical way, busying herself with studied cheerfulness: she seems transformed by the sense of duty that she upholds. Mademoiselle Heuze is a big girl, homely and rather awkward, but the shape of her large mouth gives her a kindly appearance. Mademoiselle Reignier is full of goodwill, clumsy, a bit daft, and already too fat; in a few years she’ll make ‘a good, plump mother’ without a trace of ill-nature. With Madame Bard, her nonchalance and the way she swings her strong hips suggests desire; with the rather sultry gaze of a woman lacking a husband, her eyes linger on our bodies, a little covetously, perhaps. I avoid the attentions of grey-haired Madame Sabord, a fussy woman with dry fingers whose touch is unpleasant. Mademoiselles Barthe and Doré, one blonde the other brunette, both with bruised eyes, are almost inseparable, wrapping their arms round each other’s waists, whispering confidences which make them burst into shrill laughter, like giggles, in a way men find irritating. There is something a bit too voluptuous in their sisterly embraces. Mademoiselle Odet offers everyone her sad smile, her veiled words and the ardour of her feverish eyes. She is too pale, too thin; her frail shoulders already bent beneath the weight of life at its start. You can see she will not have the strength to bear this life for long. We are grateful to her for sharing this short future with all of us, for caring for us when she needs someone to care for her, and the least we can do is to give a smile of encouragement in return for her smile, so full of self-denial.
I know nothing of them apart from these impressions and that’s enough for me. I don’t try to understand what brought them here. I am simply thankful that they are here, gliding gracefully around the ward, filling it with flowers and their various charms. I’m thankful, too, that they have lost that little edge of bourgeois arrogance they had at the start, when they spoke to us as if they were addressing their staff. I even allow myself the forbidden pleasure of catching them unawares with the ghost of a blush on their cheeks which they hide by turning away, or of suddenly looking deep into their eyes and finding the trace of some illicit emotional agitation which makes their hearts beat differently. But I stop myself on the threshold of this disquiet, like a gentleman at the door of a boudoir.
And above all I am delighted that we have become such good friends, that these young ladies (it’s the young ones who display the most curiosity) spare me an hour of their time every day. The clamour of war is silenced by the murmur of their voices. Their words may not always be true, may be empty, but they are kind and gentle, and this pulls me back into life outside the battle zone – though it strikes me every now and then that my return here is unlikely to be permanent.
*
Every now and then the door of the ward silently opens, and a dark shadow appears beside one of the beds, mumbling unctuous words over the occupant. It’s the hospital chaplain, the former head of the Saint-Gilbert school.
Now, I respect all faiths (and occasionally envy them) but I am always surprised at the furtive approach of some of these people, at their unconvincing smiles. If they are truly performing a holy and noble ministry then why do they behave like touts, and give the impression that they are soliciting your soul with a ‘psst!’ from the end of some dark alleyway. This particular chaplain is of the type that seem to impose themselves on you by calculating your faults. Under their embarrassing gaze I suddenly feel like a monster of depravity, and I’m always waiting for them to say: ‘Come, my son, and confide in me all your filthy little sins…’ Father Ravel took a particular interest in me in the beginning, and I suppose that the nurses, knowing my religious background, must have told him about me. In the period just after I arrived he would visit me every day and asked me to come and see him as soon as I could walk. I put this off as long as I could.
But he managed to drag a promise out of me, in a way that I find unfair. On the evening after my operation, seeing me weak and no more capable of resistance than a dying man, he persisted at great length and, still lost in the fog of chloroform, I said yes. Afterwards he kept reminding me of this promise and repeating: ‘I am waiting for you’, in a reproving tone that made it seem like I was the one acting in bad faith.
He did this so much that last week I eventually followed him out of the ward. He took me to his room and sat himself down in the chair beside the prie-dieu, where penitents kneel before Christ. But I’ve known that old trick with the furniture for a long time. So instead of kneeling on the prie-dieu, I sat on it. Once he had recovered from his astonishment, he questioned me, rather clumsily.
‘So, my dear son, what do you have to tell me?’
‘I don’t have anything to tell you, sir.’
I realised that I should not expect any sophisticated conversation from him and that the only reason he’d brought me there was to catch me off guard and steal my sins. For him, every soul must be healed by absolution, rather in the way that some doctors use purges for every illness. I let him go on. He reminded me of my Christian childhood, and asked:
‘Do you not want to come back to God? Do you not have sins to repent?’
‘I don’t have sins any more. The greatest sin, in the eyes of the C
hurch and the eyes of men, is to kill your brother. And today the Church is ordering me to kill my brothers.’
‘They are the enemies of our nation.’
‘They are nonetheless the children of the same God. And God, the father, presides over the fratricidal struggle of his own children, and the victories on both sides. He’s just as happy whichever army sings the Te Deum. And you, one of the just, you pray to him to ruin and annihilate other just men. How do you expect me to make sense of that?’
‘Evil comes from men, not from God.’
‘So God is powerless?’
‘His plans are beyond our comprehension.’
‘We have that saying in the army, too: “Don’t try to understand.” It’s the logic of a corporal.’
‘I implore you, my child, for it is written: “Pride is the beginning of all sin: He that holdeth it, shall be filled with maledictions, and it shall ruin him in the end.”’
‘Yes, I know: “Beati pauperes spiritu”. It’s a form of blasphemy, since He created us in his image and likeness!’
He got up and showed me the door. We did not exchange another word. Instead of the affliction at the sight of this lost sheep that should have been in his eyes, all I could see was a glint of hatred, the fury of a man who had been defeated and whose pride (yes, he too!) was wounded. I wondered how this fury could relate to the divine…
Still, I would have liked it if this priest had given me a few words of hope, indicated a possibility of belief, explained things to me. Alas, God’s poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid.
If the Son of God exists, it is at the moment when he bares his heart, while so many hearts are bleeding – that heart so full of love for man. Was it all to no purpose, had his Father sacrificed him pointlessly? The God of infinite mercy cannot be the God of the plains of Artois. The good God, the just God, could not have allowed such bloody carnage to be carried out in His name, could not have wanted such destruction of bodies and minds to further his glory.
God? Come off it, the heavens are empty, as empty as a corpse. There’s nothing in the sky but shells and all the other murderous devices made by men…
This war has killed God, too.
*
The nurses leave the ward between noon and two o’clock, after our lunch. To avoid the embarrassment of relieving ourselves in their presence, we have regulated our bodily functions so that – unless it’s unavoidable – they are only exercised in that period. The only job of the male army nurse who covers for them is to remove the bedpans. Those waiting for him to come look at the ceiling and smoke energetically to dispel the odour. Once the big rush is over and we no longer risk catching cold, we open the windows. Winter sunlight pours into the ward and we let it trickle between our hands, pale with idleness, so that they acquire a faint flush of pink.
Someone had given this male nurse the cruel surname of Caca. I know this name upsets him, know it because I knew André Charlet before the war, at university, where he was one of the star students, bursting with curiosity and ideas. In student reviews he published some brilliant sonnets, which represented life as a vast field of conquests, a heavenly forest full of surprises, into which ventured great explorers who brought back amazing fruit with unfamiliar tastes, women of savage beauty, and a thousand barbaric objects of refined savagery. When the mobilisation began he was one of the first to join up and he was severely wounded the following year.
Now I found him here, broken, drained, and dirty. A few months of war had brought about this metamorphosis, given him this agitated manner, emaciated body and yellow skin. It has left him with the mad terror that you can see behind his eyes. So that he could stay in the hospital he accepted this job and the disgusting duties that go with it. By being Caca, he gets to spend an extra three months in hospital, through some military decision or other allowing medical staff to take on temporary assistants. If he hadn’t done this he would most likely have joined the auxiliaries unless he’d been declared unfit for service altogether. But he doesn’t want to go before a panel except as a last resort for he isn’t convinced that his health has been sufficiently ruined to exempt him from returning to front-line duty. He is alone in doubting it; we believe he is likely to die from tuberculosis, more infallible than shells.
I try to win him round, recalling our adolescent years together, our friends, our happiness, our former ambitions. But I cannot interest him. He smiles weakly and says: ‘It’s all over!’
‘And what about poetry, old pal?’ I reply.
He shrugs his shoulders: ‘Poetry is like glory!’, then leaves because someone is calling him. A moment later he returns with steaming bedpan, turns his head away in utter disgust, and sneers: ‘There you are, poetry!’
Among his memories of the war, this one is truly appalling:
‘It was in the eastern zone, end of August. Our battalion attacks with bayonets. You have no idea how idiotic those first assaults were, what a massacre. What distinguished that period without a doubt was the incompetence of our leaders – and they were sometimes victims themselves. They had been taught that battles were decided by the infantry, and cold steel. They didn’t have the faintest idea about the effects of modern weaponry, of artillery and machine guns, and their big hobby horse was Napoleonic strategy – nothing new since Marengo! We were under attack and instead of establishing solid positions, we were scattered across the plains, unprotected, wearing uniforms straight out of a circus and then ordered to charge at forests, from 500 metres. The Boche picked us off like rabbits and then, once they’d done all the damage they could, they fled when we got close enough for hand-to-hand fighting. Finally on that particular day, having lost half our men, we managed to drive them out. But the bastards had a diabolical idea. There was a strong wind blowing against us and they set fire to the cornfields from which we were chasing them… What I saw there was a vision of hell! Four hundred wounded men, lying still on the ground, suddenly bitten and revived by the flames, four hundred turned into human torches, trying to run on broken limbs, waving their arms and screaming like the damned. Their hair went straight up in flames, like tongues of fire on the head of the Holy Ghost, and the cartridges they had in their belts exploded. We were struck dumb, unable to think of taking cover, as we watched four hundred of our comrades sizzling and twisting and rolling in this inferno, swept by machine- gun fire, unable to reach them. I saw one stand up as the wave of fire approached him and shoot his neighbours to spare them this horrible death. And then several of them, about to be engulfed by the flames, began screaming to us: “Shoot us, pals, shoot us!” and maybe some of us had that terrible courage… And Ypres! The night battles at Ypres. You didn’t know who you were killing, who was killing you. Our colonel had told us: “Treat prisoners well, my children, but don’t take any.” The people we were facing had surely been given the same instructions.’
Gabriel Chevallier was born in Lyon, France, in 1895. He is best known as the author of Clochemerle. Fear is an autobiographical novel about his experiences in the war. It was published in 1930 and withdrawn with the author’s consent in 1939 at the onset of the Second World War. The book was republished in French in the 1950s to critical acclaim and first published in English in 2011. As Chevallier writes in his preface to the 1951 edition:
The great novelty of this book, whose title was intended as a challenge, is that the narrator declared: I am afraid. In all the ‘war books’ I had read, fear was indeed sometimes mentioned, but it was other people’s fear. The authors themselves were always phlegmatic characters who were so busy jotting down their impressions that they calmly greeted incoming shells with a happy smile.
/> The author of the present book believed that it would be dishonest to speak of his comrades’ fear without mentioning his. That is why he decided to admit, indeed to proclaim, his own fear…
After the worldwide success of Clochemerle, Chevallier wrote two sequels, Clochemerle Babylon and Clochemerle les Bains, and in 1948, he published Mascarade, a collection of stories that include ‘Crapouillot’, a darkly funny First World War story of a general who ‘needs deaths’ to make his statistics competitive. He died in Cannes in 1969.
JULES ROMAINS
JERPHANION WRITES TO HIS WIFE
from The Prelude to Verdun
translated by Warre B. Wells
ILOVE YOU, ODETTE DARLING, I love you, my precious wife. You are always in my mind. It is sheer agony for me to be separated from you. I am writing now as though we were talking face to face. I am writing in order to give myself the illusion of your presence.
Even here, in mid-winter, we could be so happy, dear child, you and I together. Through my attic window I can see the spread of sky above the plain. In spite of the season it is very blue, incredibly blue, like the sky in some southern land. Here and there its brightness is framed in bunches of white cloud such as one sees in summer. And the distant view has nothing in it of January. There seems as much green in it as brown and grey. I can see lovely long roofs, great simple masses, and roads, and the grassy verges where they twist and turn. To make it into a background of quiet happiness against which we two could spend long hours loving and sauntering, all that is necessary is to wipe out of the landscape the figures of all these poor fellows in faded blue who move about like so many great heavy ants.
The plain in which this village lies hidden is completely pastoral, with nothing military about it at all. An hour after the last man in blue has vanished, it will look once more exactly like one of Millet’s pictures. Even the village has a curious beauty of its own. It is the one I told you of in my previous letters. To think that we’ve been here a month already! It’s all so good that it’s really rather frightening. I keep on wondering what horrible thing is going to happen next. But I do my best to enjoy the moment. The great thing is just to go on living.
