by Pete Ayrton
This teacher’s name was Princhard. What can the man have dreamt up to save his carotids, lungs and optic nerves? That was the crucial question, the question we men should have asked one another if we’d wanted to be strictly human and rational. Far from it, we staggered along in a world of idealistic absurdities, hemmed in by insane, bellicose platitudes. Like smoke-maddened rats we tried to escape from the burning ship, but we had no general plan, no faith in one another. Dazed by the war, we had developed a different kind of madness: fear. The heads and tails of the war.
In the midst of the general delirium, this Princhard took a certain liking to me, though he distrusted me of course.
In the place and situation we were in, friendship and trust were out of the question. No one revealed any more than he thought useful for his survival, since everything or practically everything was sure to be repeated by some attentive stool pigeon.
From time to time one of us would disappear. That meant the case against him was ready and the court martial would send him to a military tribunal, the penal colonies, the front or, if he was very lucky, the insane asylum in Clamart.
More dubious warriors kept arriving, from every branch of service, some very young, some almost old, some terrified, some ranting and swaggering. Their wives and parents came to see them, and their children too, staring wide-eyed, on Thursdays.
They all wept buckets in the visiting room, especially in the evening. All the helplessness of a world at war wept when the visits were over and the women and children left, dragging their feet in the bleak, gas-lit corridor. A herd of snivelling riff-raff – that’s what they were – disgusting.
To Lola it was still an adventure, coming to see me in that prison, as you might have called it. We two didn’t cry. Where would we have got our tears from?
‘Is it true that you’ve gone mad, Ferdinand?’ she asked me one Thursday.
‘It’s true!’ I admitted.
‘But they’ll treat you here?’
‘There’s no treatment for fear, Lola.’
‘Is it as bad as all that?’
‘It’s worse, Lola. My fear is so bad that if I die a natural death later on, I especially don’t want to be cremated! I want them to leave me in the ground, quietly rotting in the graveyard, ready to come back to life… Maybe… how do we know? But if they burned me to ashes, Lola, don’t you see, it would be over, really over… A skeleton, after all, is still something like a man… It’s more likely to come back to life than ashes… Reduced to ashes, you’re finished!… What do you think?… Naturally the war…’
‘Oh, Ferdinand! Then you’re an absolute coward! You’re as loathsome as a rat…’
‘Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it… I don’t deplore it… I don’t resign myself to it… I don’t weep about it… I just plain reject it and all its fighting men, I don’t want anything to do with them or it. Even if there were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they’d still be wrong and I’d be right. Because I’m the one who knows what I want: I don’t want to die.’
‘But it’s not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…’
‘If that’s the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War?… Did you ever try to find out who any of them were?… No! You see? You never tried. As far as you’re concerned they’re as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement… Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing! For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I’ll say it again! I’ve proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I’ll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten… Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous… Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours… I don’t believe in the future, Lola…’
When she heard me flaunting my shameful state like that, she lost all sympathy for me… Once and for all she put me down as contemptible.
She decided to leave me without further ado. It was too much. When I left her that evening at the hospital gate, she didn’t kiss me.
Evidently the thought that a condemned man might have no vocation for death was too much for her. When I asked her how our fritters were doing, she did not reply.
On my return to the dormitory, I found Princhard at the window with a crowd of soldiers around him. He was trying out a pair of dark glasses in the gaslight. The idea, he explained, had come to him last summer at the seashore, and since it was summer now, he was planning to wear them next day in the park. That park was enormous and exceedingly well policed by squads of vigilant orderlies. The next day Princhard insisted on my going for a walk on the terrace with him to try out his beautiful glasses. A blazing afternoon beat down on him, defended by his opaque lenses. I noticed that his nose was almost transparent at the nostrils and that he was breathing hard.
‘My friend,’ he confided, ‘time is passing and it’s not on my side… My conscience is immune to remorse, I have been relieved, thank God, of those fears… It’s not crimes that count in this world… people stopped counting them long ago… What counts is blunders… And I believe I’ve made one… that’s absolutely irremediable…’
‘Stealing canned goods?’
‘Yes, just imagine, I thought I was being so clever! My idea was to abstract myself from the battle and return, disgraced but still alive, to peace, as one returns, exhausted, to the surface of the sea after a long dive… I almost succeeded… but this war, undoubtedly, has been going on too long… So long that cannon fodder disgusting enough to disgust the Nation is no longer conceivable… She has begun to accept every offering, regardless of where it comes from, every variety of meat… The Nation has become infinitely indulgent in its choice of martyrs! Today there’s no such thing as a soldier unworthy to bear arms and, above all, to die under arms and by arms… They’re going, latest news, to make a hero out of me!… How imperious the homicidal madness must have become if they’re willing to pardon – no, to forget! – the theft of a tin of meat! True, we have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honours and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see – and history, as you know, is my business – everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categorical condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonour and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offence is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community. A poor man’s theft is seen as a malicious attempt at individual redress, you understand?… Where would we be? Note accordingly that in all countries the penalties for petty theft are extremely severe, not only as a means of defending society, but also as a stern admonition to the unfortunate to know their place, stick to their caste, and behave themselves, joyfully resigned to go on dying of hunger and misery down through the centuries for ever and ever… Until today, however, petty thieves enjoyed one advantage in the Republic: they were denied the honour of bearing patriotic arms. But that’s all over now, tomorrow I, a thief, will resume my place in the army… Such are the orders… It has been decided in high places to forgive and forget what they call my “momentary madness”, and this, listen carefully, in consideration of what they call �
��the honour of my family”. What solicitude! I ask you, comrade, is it my family that’s going to serve as a strainer and sorting house for mixed French and German bullets?… It’ll just be me, won’t it? And when I’m dead, is the honour of my family going to bring me back to life?… I can see how it will be with my family when these warlike scenes have passed… as everything passes… I can see my family on fine Sundays… joyfully gambolling on the lawns of a new summer… while three feet under papa, that’s me, dripping with worms and infinitely more disgusting than a kilo of turds on Bastille Day, will be rotting stupendously with all my deluded flesh… To fertilize the fields of the anonymous ploughman – that is the true future of the true soldier! Ah, comrade! This world, I assure you, is only a vast device for kidding the world! You are young. Let these minutes of wisdom be as years to you! Listen well, comrade, and don’t fail to recognize and understand the telltale sign, which glares from all the murderous hypocrisies of our society: “Compassion with the fate, the condition of the poor…” I tell you, little men, life’s mugs, beaten, fleeced to the bone, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they’re going to grind you up into battle sausage… That’s the sign… It’s infallible. It starts with affection. Louis XIV at least, and don’t forget it, didn’t give a hoot in hell about his beloved people. Louis XV ditto. He wiped his arsehole with them. True, we didn’t live well in those days, the poor have never lived well, but the kings didn’t flay them with the obstinacy, the persistence you meet with in today’s tyrants. There’s no rest, I tell you, for the little man, except in the contempt of the great, whose only motive for thinking of the common people is self-interest, when it isn’t sadism… It’s the philosophers, another point to look out for while we’re at it, who first started giving the people ideas… when all they’d known up until then was the catechism! They began, so they proclaimed, to educate the people… Ah! What truths they had to reveal! Beautiful! Brilliant! Unprecedented truths! And the people were dazzled! “That’s it!” they said. “That’s the stuff! Let’s go and die for it!” The people are always dying to die! That’s the way they are! “Long live Diderot!” they yelled. And “Long live Voltaire!” They, at least, were first-class philosophers! And long live Carnot, too, who was so good at organizing victories! And long live everybody! Those guys at least don’t let the beloved people moulder in ignorance and fetishism! They show the people the roads of Freedom! Emancipation! Things went fast after that! First teach everybody to read the papers! That’s the way to salvation! Hurry hurry! No more illiterates! We don’t need them any more! Nothing but citizen-soldiers! Who vote! Who read! And who fight! And who march! And send kisses from the front! In no time the people were good and ripe. The enthusiasm of the liberated has to be good for something, doesn’t it? Danton wasn’t eloquent for the hell of it. With a few phrases, so rousing that we can still hear them today, he had the people mobilized before you could say fiddlesticks! That was when the first battalions of emancipated maniacs marched off! The first voting, flag-waving suckers that Dumouriez led away to get themselves drilled full of holes in Flanders! As for Dumouriez himself, who had come too late to these newfangled idealistic pastimes, he discovered that he was more interested in money and deserted. He was our last mercenary… The gratis soldier was something really new… So new that when Goethe arrived in Valmy, Goethe or not, he was flabbergasted. At the sight of those ragged, impassioned cohorts, who had come of their own free will to get themselves disembowelled by the King of Prussia in defence of a patriotic fiction no one had ever heard of, Goethe realized that he still had much to learn. “This day,” he declaimed grandiloquently as befitted the habits of his genius, “marks the beginning of a new era!” He could say that again! The system proved successful and pretty soon they were mass-producing heroes, and in the end, the system was so well perfected that they cost practically nothing. Everyone was delighted. Bismarck, the two Napoleons, Barrès, Elsa the Horsewoman. The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: “Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!” But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary… Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose by cries of: “Hang the limp turnips! The juiceless lemons! The innocent readers! By the millions, eyes right!” If anybody doesn’t want to fight or murder, stinking pacifists, grab ’em, tear ’em to pieces! Kill them in thirteen juicy ways! For a starter, to teach them how to live, rip their guts out of their bodies, their eyes out of their sockets, and the years out of their filthy slobbering lives! Let whole legions of them perish, turn into smidgens, bleed, smoulder in acid – and all that to make the Nation more beloved, more fair, and more joyful! And if in their midst there are any foul creatures who refuse to understand these sublime truths, they can just go and bury themselves right with the others, no, not quite, their place will be at the far end of the cemetery, under the shameful epitaphs of cowards without an ideal, for those contemptible slugs will have forfeited the glorious right to a small patch of the shadow of the municipal monument erected by the lowest bidder in the central avenue to commemorate the reputable dead, and also the right to hear so much as a distant echo of the Minister’s speech next Sunday, when he comes around to urinate at the Prefecture and sound off over the graves after lunch…’
But from the end of the garden someone was calling Princhard. The head physician had sent his orderly to get him on the double.
‘Coming,’ Princhard cried. He had barely time enough to hand me the draft of the speech he had been trying out on me. A ham if there ever was one.
I never saw Princhard again. He had the same trouble as all intellectuals – he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him. He needed all sorts of gimmicks to steam him up, help him make up his mind.
It’s been a long time since that night when he went away, when I think about it. But I remember it well. Suddenly the houses at the end of our park stood out sharply, as things do before the night takes hold of them. The trees grew larger in the twilight and shot up to the sky to meet the night.
I never made any attempt to get in touch with Princhard, to find out if he had really ‘disappeared’, as they kept saying. But it’s best if he disappeared.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born near Paris in 1894 and died in Meudon in 1961. The virulently anti-Semitic views expressed in his writings in the 1930s and later have always made it difficult to offer a balanced assessment of Céline’s literary genius. The fact remains that Journey to the End of the Night is one of the great novels to feature the First World War. Although less than a quarter of the book takes place in wartime, the disgust, hatred and bile that the narrator Bardamau, Céline’s fictional alter ego, feels for the war colours the whole book. Céline found an appropriate, fragmented style to convey the irrational convulsions of the war. Bardamau is afraid and prepared to admit his fear:
‘Oh, Ferdinand! Then you’re an absolute coward! You’re as loathsome as a rat…’
‘Yes an absolute coward, Lola. I reject the war and everything in it… I don’t deplore it… I don’t resign myself to it… I don’t weep about it… I just plain reject it and all its fighting men…’
Journey to the End of the Night, which covers (French) imperialism in Africa and the horror of the car assembly lines of Detroit as well as the war itself, is truly international in its scope but never loses sight of how it is individuals that the system crushes. The book has an extraordinary ability to go from the personal to the political and back again. Maybe not someone you would want to go out drinking with, but Céline sure can write!
ISAAC BABEL
PAPA MARESCOT’S FAMILY
from On the Field of Honour
translated by Peter Constantine
WE OCCUPY A VILLAGE that we have taken from the enemy. It is a tiny Picardy village, lovely an
d modest. Our company has been bivouacked in the cemetery. Surrounding us are smashed crucifixes and fragments of statues and tombstones wrecked by the sledgehammer of an unknown defiler. Rotting corpses have spilled out of coffins shattered by shells. A picture worthy of you, Michelangelo!
A soldier has no time for mysticism. A field of skulls has been dug up into trenches. War is war. We’re still alive. If it is our lot to increase the population in this chilly little hole, we should at least make these decaying corpses dance a jig to the tune of our machine guns.
A shell had blown off the cover of one of the vaults. This so I could have a shelter, no doubt about it. I made myself comfortable in that hole, que voulez-vous, on loge ou on peut.*
So – it’s a wonderful, bright spring morning. I am lying on corpses, looking at the fresh grass, thinking of Hamlet. He wasn’t that bad a philosopher, the poor prince. Skulls spoke to him in human words. Nowadays, that kind of skill would really come in handy for a lieutenant of the French army.
‘Lieutenant, there’s some civilian here who wants to see you!’ a corporal calls out to me.
What the hell does a civilian want in these nether regions?
A character enters. A shabby, shrivelled little old man. He is wearing his Sunday best. His frock coat is bespattered with mud. A half-empty sack dangles from his cowering shoulders.
There must be a frozen potato in it – every time he moves, something rattles in the sack.
‘Eh bien, what do you want?’
‘My name, you see, is Monsieur Marescot,’ the civilian whispers, and bows. ‘That is why I’ve come…’
‘So?’
‘I would like to bury Madame Marescot and the rest of my family, Monsieur Lieutenant.’
‘What?’
‘My name, you see, is Papa Marescot.’The old man lifts his hat from his gray forehead. ‘Perhaps you have heard of me, Monsieur Lieutenant!’
