Julie was asleep, her mouth half open, her blouse undone. The young woman in the black dress was sitting with her back against the side of the car, and a lock of hair hanging over one cheek. I wondered whether she had stayed like that all night and whether she had been able to sleep. Her eyes met mine. She smiled at me, on account of the bottle of water.
“Where are we?” asked one of my neighbors, waking up.
“I don’t know,” answered the man sitting in the doorway with his legs hanging out. “We’ve just passed a station called Lafrancheville.”
We passed another decked with flowers and deserted like the rest. On the blue-and-white sign I read the name: BOULZICOURT.
The train started rounding a bend, through some fairly flat country; the man with the dangling legs took his pipe out of his mouth to exclaim in comical despair:
“Hell!”
“What is it?”
“The swine have shortened the train!”
“What’s that you say?”
There was a rush toward the door, and, hanging on with both hands, the man protested:
“Stop pushing, you! You’re going to shove me out on the line. You can see for yourselves there are only five carriages in front of us. Well, what have they done with the others? And how am I going to find my wife and kids? Hell! Oh, damn it to hell!”
3
“I KNEW PERFECTLY WELL THAT THE ENGINE couldn’t pull all those carriages. They must have realized that in the end and decided to cut the train in two.”
“The first thing to do was to tell us, wasn’t it? What’s going to happen to the women?”
“Perhaps they’re waiting for us at Rethel. Or at Rheims.”
“Unless they’re going to give them back to us, like soldiers’ wives, when this damned war finishes—if it ever does!”
I tried automatically to distinguish between sincerity and sham in these angry complaints. Wasn’t this above all a sort of game these men were playing with themselves, because there were witnesses?
Personally I wasn’t upset, nor really anxious. I stayed where I was, motionless, a little startled in spite of everything. Suddenly I had the feeling that a pair of eyes were gazing insistently at me.
I was right. The face of the woman in black was turned toward me, paler in the dawn light, and not as clear-cut as the day before. She was trying, with her gaze, to convey a message of sympathy to me, and at the same time I had the impression that she was asking a question.
I interpreted it as:
“How are you standing up to the shock? Are you terribly upset?”
This put me in a quandary. I didn’t dare to show her my lack of concern, which she would have misinterpreted. I accordingly assumed a sad expression, but without overdoing it. She had seen me on the track with my daughter and must have deduced that my wife was with me too. As far as she could see, I had just lost them both, temporarily, but lost them nonetheless.
“Courage!” her brown eyes said to me over the others’ heads.
I responded with the smile of a sick man whom somebody is trying to reassure but who feels no better as a result. I am almost certain that if we had been closer to one another she would have given my hand a furtive squeeze.
In behaving like that, I didn’t intend to deceive her, as one might imagine, but, with all those heads between us, it wasn’t the time to explain how I felt.
Later on, if we happened to be brought together and if she gave me the opportunity, I would tell her the truth, since I wasn’t ashamed of it.
I was no more surprised by what was happening to us than I had been, the day before, on hearing of the invasion of Holland and the Ardennes. On the contrary, my idea that it was a matter between Fate and myself was reinforced. It was becoming more obvious. I had been separated from my family, which was a personal attack and no mistake.
The sky was rapidly brightening, as pure and clear as the day before when, in my garden, I had been feeding the hens without knowing that it was the last time.
I was touched by the memory of my hens, and the mental picture of Nestor, his comb all crimson, struggling fiercely when old Monsieur Reverse tried to grab him.
I imagined the scene between the two low, whitewashed walls, the beating of the wings, the white feathers flying, the vicious pecks, and perhaps Monsieur Matray, if he had been prevented from leaving, climbing onto his crate to look over the wall and give advice as he usually did.
That didn’t prevent me from thinking at the same time about this woman who had just shown sympathy for me when I had done nothing but give her an empty bottle picked up from the track.
While she was doing her hair with her fingers moistened with saliva, I tried to decide to what category she belonged. I couldn’t make up my mind. I told myself that it didn’t really matter and eventually the idea occurred to me of handing her the comb I had in my pocket, while my neighbor whom I was disturbing gave me a meaningful look.
He was mistaken. I wasn’t doing it for that.
We were moving fairly slowly and out in the open country when we began to hear a steady buzz which we didn’t manage to place immediately, and which was just a vibration of the air to begin with.
“There they are!” exclaimed the man with the pipe, his legs still dangling in the air.
For somebody who never felt giddy, he had the best place in the car.
I discovered later on that he was a constructional ironworker.
Bending down, I saw them too, for I wasn’t far from the door. The man was counting:
“Nine … ten … eleven … twelve … there are twelve of them … probably what they call a squadron. If it was the right time of the year and they weren’t making any noise, I’d swear they were storks.…”
I counted eleven of them, high up in the sky. Because of a trick of the light, they appeared white and luminous, and they were flying in a V-shaped formation.
“What’s that fellow up to?”
Pressed against one another, we were looking up at the sky when I felt the woman’s hand on my shoulder where she might easily have put it inadvertently.
The last plane in one leg of the V had just broken away from the others and seemed to be diving toward the ground, so that our first impression was that it was falling. It grew larger at incredible speed, spiraling down, while the others, instead of continuing on their way toward the horizon, started forming a huge circle.
The rest happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to be really frightened. The plane which was doing the nose dive had disappeared from our sight, but we could hear its menacing roar.
It flew over the train, along its whole length, from back to front, so low that we instinctively ducked.
Then it disappeared only to repeat its maneuver, with the difference that this time we heard the rattle of the machine gun above us, and other sounds, like that of wood splintering.
There were shouts, inside our car and elsewhere. The train went a little farther, then, like a wounded animal, stopped after a few jolts.
For a while there was complete silence, the silence of fear, which I was facing for the first time, and I was probably not breathing any more than my companions.
All the same, I went on looking at the scene in the sky, the plane soaring upwards again, its two swastikas clearly visible, the head of the pilot giving us a final glance, and the others, up there, circling around until he took up his position again.
“Swine!”
I don’t know from whose breast the word exploded. It relieved us all and roused us from our immobility.
A little girl was crying. A woman pushed forward, repeating as if she didn’t know what she was saying:
“Let me pass … Let me pass.”
“Are you hurt?”
“My husband …”
“Where is he?”
Everybody looked instinctively for a body stretched out on the floor.
“In the next car.… The one that’s been hit … I heard it …”
Her f
ace drawn, she dropped to the stones beside the lines and started running along, shouting:
“François! … François!”
None of us made a pretty picture and we felt no desire to look at one another. It seemed to me that everything was happening in slow motion, but perhaps that was just an illusion. I also remember something like zones of silence around isolated noises which sounded even louder as a result.
One man, then another, then a third jumped down, and their first instinct was to pass water without taking the trouble to move away, or even, in one case, to face the other way.
Farther off a continuous lament could be heard, a sort of animal howl.
As for Julie, she stood up, her blouse coming out of her crumpled skirt, and said in a drunken voice:
“Well, chum!”
She repeated this two or three times; perhaps she was still repeating it when I got out in my turn and helped the woman in black to jump down onto the ground.
Why was it that particular moment that I asked her:
“What’s your name?”
She didn’t consider the question stupid or out of place, for she answered:
“Anna.”
She didn’t ask me what I was called. I told her all the same:
“My name is Marcel. Marcel Feron.”
I would have liked to pass water like the others. I didn’t dare, because of her, and it hurt me to restrain myself.
There was a meadow below the track, with tall grass, barbed wire, and, a hundred yards away, a white farmhouse where there was nobody to be seen. Some hens, around a pile of manure, had all started cackling together, as excited as if they had been frightened too.
The people in the other car had got out, as flustered and awkward as we were.
In front of one of the carriages there was a more compact, solemn crowd. Some faces were turned away.
“A woman has been wounded over there,” somebody came and told us. “I don’t suppose there’s a doctor among you?”
Why did the question strike me as grotesque? Do doctors travel in cattle cars? Could any of us be taken for a doctor?
At the front of the train, the fireman, his face and hands black, was waving his arms about, and a little later we learned that the engineer had been killed by a bullet in the face.
“They’re coming back! They’re coming back!”
The shout ended in a strangled cry. Everybody copied the first ones who had had the idea of throwing themselves flat on their faces in the meadow, at the foot of the embankment.
I did like the others; so did Anna, who was now following me about like a dog without a master.
The planes up in the sky were forming another circle, a little farther west, and this time we missed nothing of the maneuver. We saw one plane come spiraling down, flatten out just when it seemed bound to crash, skim the ground, soar upward again, and sweep around to cover the same ground once more, this time firing its machine gun.
It was two or three miles away. We couldn’t see the target—a village, perhaps, or a road—which was hidden by a wood of fir trees. And already it was climbing into the sky to join the flock waiting for it up there and follow them northward.
I went, like the others, to look at the dead engineer, part of his body on the footplate, near the open firebox, his head and shoulders hanging over the side. There was no face left, just a black and red mass from which the blood was oozing in big drops onto the gray stones by the track.
He was my first dead man of the war. He was almost my first dead man, apart from my father, who had been laid out by the time I came home.
I felt sick and tried not to show it, because Anna was beside me, and because at that moment she took my arm as naturally as a girl walking along the street with her sweetheart.
I think she was less upset than I was. And yet I myself was less upset than I would have expected. At the sanatorium, where there were a lot of dead people, we were not allowed to see them. The nurses acted in good time, coming to collect a patient from his bed, sometimes in the middle of the night. We knew what that meant.
There was a special room for dying, and another, in the basement, where the body was kept until the relatives claimed it or it was buried in the little local cemetery.
Those deaths were different. There wasn’t the sunshine, the grass, the flowers, the cackling hens, the flies buzzing around our heads.
“We can’t leave him there.”
The men looked at one another. Two of them, both elderly, volunteered to lend the fireman a hand.
I don’t know where they put the engineer. Walking back along the train, I noticed holes in the sides of the cars, long scores which showed the wood as bare as when you fell a tree.
A woman had been wounded, one shoulder, we were told, practically torn off.
It was she whom we could hear groaning as if she were in labor. There were just a few other women around her, old women for the most part, for the men, embarrassed, had moved away in silence.
“It isn’t a pretty sight.”
“What are we going to do? Stay here until they come back to snipe at us?”
I saw an old man sitting on the ground, holding a bloodstained handkerchief to his face. A bottle, hit by a bullet, had shattered in his hand and splinters of glass had scored his cheeks. He didn’t complain. I could see only his eyes, which were expressing nothing but a sort of amazement.
“They’ve found somebody to attend to her.”
“Who?”
“A midwife on the train.”
I caught sight of her, a sour-faced little old woman with a sturdy figure and her hair arranged in a bun on top of her head. She didn’t belong to our car.
Without realizing, we gathered together in groups corresponding to the carriages, and in front of ours the man with the pipe went on protesting halfheartedly. He was one of the few who had not been to see the dead engineer.
“What the hell are we waiting for? Isn’t there a single bastard here who can make that damned engine work?”
I remember somebody climbing up onto the track carrying a dead chicken by the feet, and sitting down to pluck it. I didn’t try to understand. Seeing that nothing was happening as it did in ordinary life, everything was natural.
“The fireman wants a hefty fellow to feed the boiler while he tries to take the engineer’s place. He thinks he can manage. It isn’t as if the traffic was normal.”
Contrary to all expectations, the horse dealer volunteered, without making a song and dance about it. It seemed to amuse him, like those members of an audience who go up onto the stage in response to an appeal by a conjuror.
He took off his jacket, his tie, and his wristwatch, which he handed over to Julie before making for the engine.
The half-plucked chicken was hanging from a bar in the ceiling. Three of our companions, sweating and out of breath, came back with some bales of straw.
“Make room, you fellows!”
The young fellow of fifteen, for his part, had brought an aluminum saucepan and a frying pan from the abandoned farm.
Were others doing the same in my house?
I can remember some amusing exchanges which made us laugh in spite of ourselves.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t run the train down the embankment.”
“What do you think the rails are for, you idiot?”
“Trains can run off the rails, even in peacetime, can’t they? So which of us two is the idiot?”
A group of people went on fussing around the engine for some time, and it came as a surprise to hear it whistle in the end like an ordinary train. We moved off slowly, almost at a walking pace, without any jolting, before gradually picking up speed.
Ten minutes later we passed a road which crossed the line and which was crowded with carts and cattle, with cars here and there trying to get through. Two or three peasants waved to us, more solemn and serious than we were, and it seemed to me that they looked at us enviously.
Later on, we saw a road which ran pa
rallel with the line for some time, with army trucks driving in both directions and spluttering motorcycles weaving in and out.
I imagine, although I didn’t make sure afterward, that it was the road from Aumagne to Rethel. In any case, we were getting near to Rethel, judging by the increasing number of signals and houses, the sort of houses you find around towns.
“Do you come from Belgium?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say to Anna, who was sitting beside me on the trunk.
“From Namur. They suddenly decided, in the middle of the night, to set us free. We’d have had to wait until the morning to get our things, because nobody had the key to the place where they’re locked up. I preferred to run to the station and jump on the first train.”
I didn’t bat an eyelid. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I looked surprised, since she added:
“I was in the women’s prison.”
I didn’t ask what for. It struck me almost as natural. In any case, it was no more extraordinary than for me to be there in a cattle car and my wife and daughter on another train, or to have the driver killed on the footplate and, somewhere else, an old man wounded by a bottle which a machine-gun bullet had shattered in his hand. Everything was natural now.
“Are you from Fumay?”
“Yes.”
“That was your daughter, was it?”
“Yes. My wife is seven and a half months pregnant.”
“You’ll find her at Rethel.”
“Perhaps.”
The others, who had been in the army and were more practical than I was, spread the straw on the floor in readiness for the coming night. It formed a sort of huge communal bed. Some were already lying down on it. The card players kept passing around a bottle of brandy which never left their corner.
We drew into Rethel and there, all of a sudden, for the first time, we became aware that we weren’t ordinary people like the rest, but refugees. I say we, although none of my companions confided in me. All the same I think that in that short space of time we had come to react more or less in the same way.
It was the same sort of weariness, for instance, which could be seen on every face, a weariness very different from that which you feel after a sleepless night or a night’s work.
The Train Page 5
