If only I’d had time, but I didn’t. There was nothing left to steal. How pleasant it would be in a cozy little jailhouse, I said to myself, where the bullets couldn’t get in. Where they never got in! I knew of one that was ready and waiting, all sunny and warm! I saw it in my dreams, the jailhouse of Saint-Germain to be exact, right near the forest. I knew it well, I’d often passed that way. How a man changes! I was a child in those days, and that jail frightened me. Because I didn’t know what men are like. Never again will I believe what they say or what they think. Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.
How much longer would this madness have to go on before these monsters dropped with exhaustion? How long could a convulsion like this last? Months? Years? How many? Maybe till everyone’s dead? All these lunatics? Every last one of them? And seeing events were taking such a desperate turn, I decided to stake everything on one throw, to make one last try, to see if I couldn’t stop the war, just me, all by myself! At least in this one spot where I happened to be.
The colonel was only two steps away from me, pacing. I’d talk to him. Something I’d never done. This was a time for daring. The way things stood, there was practically nothing to lose. “What is it?” he’d ask me, startled, I imagined, at my bold interruption. Then I’d explain the situation as I saw it, and we’d see what he thought. The essential is to talk things over. Two heads are better than one.
I was about to take that decisive step when, at that very moment, who should arrive on the double but a dismounted cavalryman (as we said in those days), exhausted, shaky in the joints, holding his helmet upside-down in one hand like Belisarius,* trembling, all covered with mud, his face even greener than the courier I mentioned before. He stammered and gulped. You’d have thought he was struggling to climb out of a tomb, and it made him sick to his stomach. Could it be that this spook didn’t like bullets any more than I did? That he saw them coming like me?
“What is it?” Disturbed, the colonel stopped him short; the glance he flung at that ghost was of steel.
It made our colonel very angry to see that wretched cavalryman so incorrectly clad and shitting in his pants with fright. The colonel had no use for fear, that was a sure thing. And especially that helmet held in hand like a bowler was really too much in a combat regiment like ours that was just getting into the war. It was as if this dismounted cavalryman had seen the war and taken his hat off in greeting.
Under the colonel’s withering look the wobbly messenger snapped to attention, pressing his little finger to the seam of his trousers as the occasion demanded. And so he stood on the embankment, stiff as a board, swaying, the sweat running down his chin strap; his jaws were trembling so hard that little abortive cries kept coming out of him, like a puppy dreaming. You couldn’t make out whether he wanted to speak to us or whether he was crying.
Our Germans squatting at the end of the road had just changed instruments. Now they were having their fun with a machine gun, sputtering like handfuls of matches, and all around us flew swarms of angry bullets, as hostile as wasps.
The man finally managed to articulate a few words:
“Colonel, sir, Sergeant Barousse has been killed.”
“So what?”
“He was on his way to meet the bread wagon on the Etrapes road, sir.”
“So what?”
“He was blown up by a shell!”
“So what, dammit!”
“That’s what, colonel, sir.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, sir, that’s all, colonel, sir.”
“What about the bread?” the colonel asked.
That was the end of the dialogue, because, I remember distinctly, he barely had time to say “What about the bread?” That was all. After that there was nothing but flame and noise. The kind of noise you wouldn’t have thought possible. Our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were so full of that noise I thought it was all over and I’d turned into noise and flame myself.
After a while the flame went away, the noise stayed in my head, and my arms and legs trembled as if somebody were shaking me from behind. My limbs seemed to be leaving me, but then in the end they stayed on. The smoke stung my eyes for a long time, and the prickly smell of powder and sulfur hung on, strong enough to kill all the fleas and bedbugs in the whole world.
I thought of Sergeant Barousse, who had just gone up in smoke like the man told us. That was good news. Great, I thought to myself. That makes one less stinker in the regiment! He wanted to have me court-martialed for a can of meat. “It’s an ill wind,” I said to myself. In that respect, you can’t deny it, the war seemed to serve a purpose now and then! I knew of three or four more in the regiment, real scum, that I’d have gladly helped to make the acquaintance of a shell, like Barousse.
As for the colonel, I didn’t wish him any hard luck. But he was dead too. At first I didn’t see him. The blast had carried him up the embankment and laid him down on his side, right in the arms of the dismounted cavalryman, the courier, who was finished too. They were embracing each other for the moment and for all eternity, but the cavalryman’s head was gone, all he had was an opening at the top of the neck, with blood in it bubbling and glugging like jam in a kettle. The colonel’s belly was wide open, and he was making a nasty face about it. It must have hurt when it happened. Tough shit for him! If he’d beat it when the shooting started, it wouldn’t have happened.
All that tangled meat was bleeding profusely.
Shells were still bursting to the right and left of the scene.
I’d had enough, I was glad to have such a good pretext for making myself scarce. I even hummed a tune, and reeled like when you’ve been rowing a long way and your legs are wobbly. “Just one shell!” I said to myself. “Amazing how quick just one shell can clean things up. Could you believe it?” I kept saying to myself. “Could you believe it!”
There was nobody left at the end of the road. The Germans were gone. But that little episode had taught me a quick lesson, to keep to the cover of the trees. I was in a hurry to get back to our command post, to see if anyone else in our regiment had been killed on reconnaissance. There must be some good dodges, I said to myself, for getting taken prisoner … Here and there in the fields a few puffs of smoke still clung to the ground. “Maybe they’re all dead,” I thought. “Seeing they refuse to understand anything whatsoever, the best solution would be for them all to get killed instantly … The war would be over, and we’d go home … Maybe we’d march across the Place Clichy in triumph … Just one or two survivors … In my dream. … Strapping good fellows marching behind the general, all the rest would be dead like the colonel … Like Barousse … like Vanaille (another bastard) … etc. They’d shower us with decorations and flowers, we’d march through the Arc de Triomphe. We’d go to a restaurant, they’d serve us free of charge, we’d never pay for anything anymore, never as long as we lived! We’re heroes! we’d say when they brought the bill … Defenders of the Patrie! That would do it! … We’d pay with little French flags! … The lady at the cash desk would refuse to take money from heroes, she’d even give us some, with kisses thrown in, as we filed out. Life would be worth living.”
As I was running, I noticed my arm was bleeding, just a little though, a far from satisfactory wound, a scratch. I’d have to start all over.
It was raining again, the fields of Flanders oozed with dirty water. For a long time I didn’t meet a soul, only the wind and a little later the sun. From time to time, I couldn’t tell from where, a bullet would come flying merrily through the air and sunshine, looking for me, intent on killing me, there in the wilderness. Why? Never again, not if I lived another hundred years, would I go walking in the country. A solemn oath.
Walking along, I remembered the ceremony of the day before. It had taken place in a meadow, at the foot of a hill; the colonel had harangued the regiment in his booming voice: “Go to it, boys,” he had cried. “Go to it, boys,” and “Vive la France!” Whe
n you have no imagination, dying is small beer; when you do have an imagination, dying is too much. That’s my opinion. My understanding has never taken in so many things at once.
The colonel had never had any imagination. That was the source of all his trouble, and of ours even more so. Was I the only man in that regiment with any imagination about death? I preferred my own kind of death, the kind that comes late … in twenty years … thirty … maybe more … to this death they were trying to deal me right away … eating Flanders mud, my whole mouth full of it, fuller than full, split to the ears by a shell fragment. A man’s entitled to an opinion about his own death. But which way, if that was the case, should I go? Straight ahead? My back to the enemy. If the M.P.s were to catch me roaming around I knew my goose was cooked. They’d give me a slapdash trial that same afternoon in some deserted classroom … There were lots of empty classrooms wherever we went. They’d play court-martial with me the way kids play when the teacher isn’t there. The noncoms seated on the platform, me standing in handcuffs in front of the little desks. In the morning they’d shoot me: twelve bullets plus one. So what was the answer?
And I thought of the colonel again, such a brave man with his breastplate and his helmet and his mustache, if they had exhibited him in a music hall, walking as I saw him under the bullets and shellfire, he’d have filled the Alhambra, he’d have outshone Fragson,* and he was a big star at the time I’m telling you about. That’s what I was thinking. My heart was down in the dumps.
After hours and hours of cautious, furtive walking, I finally caught sight of our men near a clump of farmhouses. That was one of our advance posts. It belonged to a squadron that was billeted nearby. Nobody killed, they told me. Every last one of them alive! I was the one with the big news: “The colonel’s dead,” I shouted, as soon as I was near enough. “Plenty more colonels where he came from.” That was the snappy comeback of Corporal Pistil, who was on duty just then, what’s more, he was organizing details.
“All right, you jerk, until they find a replacement for the colonel, you can be picking up meat with Empouille and Kerdoncuff* here, take two sacks each. The distribution point is behind the church … the one you see over there … Don’t let them give you a lot of bones like yesterday, and try and get back before nightfall, you lugs!”
So I hit the road again with the other two.
That pissed me off. “I’ll never tell them anything after this,” I said to myself. I could see it was no use talking to those slobs, a tragedy like what I’d just seen was wasted on such stinkers! It had happened too long ago to capture their interest. And to think that a week earlier they’d have given me four columns and my picture in the papers for the death of a colonel the way I’d seen it. A bunch of halfwits.
The meat for the whole regiment was being distributed in a summery field, shaded by cherry trees and parched by the August sun. On sacks and tent cloths spread out on the grass there were pounds and pounds of guts, chunks of white and yellow fat, disemboweled sheep with their organs every which way, oozing intricate little rivulets into the grass round about, a whole ox, split down the middle, hanging on a tree, and four regimental butchers all hacking away at it, cursing and swearing and pulling off choice morsels. The squadrons were fighting tooth and nail over the innards, especially the kidneys, and all around them swarms of flies such as one sees only on such occasions, as self-important and musical as little birds.
Blood and more blood, everywhere, all over the grass, in sluggish confluent puddles, looking for a congenial slope. A few steps further on, the last pig was being killed. Already four men and a butcher were fighting over certain of the prospective cuts.
“You crook, you! You’re the one that made off with the tenderloin yesterday!”
Leaning against a tree, I had barely time enough to honor that alimentary dispute with two or three glances, before being overcome by an enormous urge to vomit, which I did so hard that I passed out.
They carried me back to the outfit on a stretcher. Naturally they swiped my two oilcloth sacks, the change was too good to miss.
I woke up to one of the corporal’s harangues. The war wasn’t over.
Anything can happen, and I in my turn became a corporal at the end of that same month of August. Many a time I was sent to headquarters with five men for liaison duty under General des Entrayes. He was a little man, he didn’t say much, and at first sight he seemed neither cruel nor heroic. But it was safer to suspend judgment … What he seemed to value most of all was his comfort. In fact he thought of his comfort all the time, and even when we’d been busy retreating for more than a month, he’d chew everybody out in every new stopping place if his orderly hadn’t found him a nice clean bed and a kitchen with all the modern appliances.
This love of comfort gave our chief of staff a lot of trouble. The general’s domestic requirements got on his nerves. Especially since he himself, yellow, gastritic in the extreme, and constipated, wasn’t the least bit interested in food. But he had to eat his soft-boiled eggs at the general’s table all the same, and listen on that occasion to his complaints. Those are the things a soldier has to put up with. But I couldn’t feel sorry for him, because as an officer he was a first-rate swine. Judge for yourself. After a whole day spent dragging ourselves uphill and down glade, through carrots and clover, we’d finally stop so the general could get to sleep somewhere. We’d find him a quiet, sheltered village, where no troops had been billeted yet, or if they had been, they’d have to move on in a hurry, we’d throw them out even if they’d already stacked their rifles, and they’d just have to spend the night in the open.
The village was reserved for the general staff, its horses, its mess, its luggage, and not least for that stinking major. The bastard’s name was Pinçon, Major Pinçon.* I hope they’ve killed him off by now (and not pleasantly). But at the time I’m talking about Pinçon was disgustingly alive. Every evening he’d send for us liaison men and give us a good chewing out, to keep us on our toes and fire us with enthusiasm. Then he’d send us all over the place, after we’d run errands for the general all day. Dismount! Mount! Dismount again! And more of the same, carrying his orders in all directions. They might just as well have drowned us. It would have been more convenient for everybody.
“Dismissed!” he’d yell. “Get back to your regiments! And on the double!”
“Where is the regiment, sir?” we’d ask …
“At Barbigny.”*
“Where’s Barbigny?”
“Over there!”
Over there, where he pointed, there’d be nothing but darkness, same as everywhere else, an enormous darkness that swallowed up the road two steps ahead of us, only a little sliver of road about the size of your tongue was spared by the darkness.
This Barbigny of his was at the end of the world. Try and find it! To find his Barbigny you’d have had to sacrifice at least a whole squadron! A squadron of brave men, what’s more! And I wasn’t brave at all, I couldn’t see any reason to be brave, so obviously I had less desire than anyone else to find his Barbigny, the situation of which, incidentally, was pure guesswork as far as he was concerned. Maybe they thought they could make me go and commit suicide if they yelled loud enough. But either you have it in you or you don’t.
I knew only one thing about that blackness, which was so dense you had the impression that if you stretched out your arm a little way from your shoulder you’d never see it again, but of that one thing I was absolutely certain, namely, that it was full of homicidal impulses.
As soon as night fell, that big-mouth major couldn’t wait to send us to our deaths; it was something that came over him at sundown. We’d try a bit of passive resistance, we’d pretend not to understand, we’d try to take root in that cozy little billet, but when we finally couldn’t see the trees, we had to resign ourselves to going away and dying a little; the general’s dinner was ready.
From then on, it was all a matter of luck. Sometimes we’d find Barbigny and the r
egiment and sometimes we wouldn’t. When we found it, it was mostly by mistake, because the squadron sentries would start shooting at us. So naturally we’d advance and be recognized, and usually spend the night doing all sorts of details, carrying numberless bales of oats and buckets of water, and getting chewed out till our heads reeled, in addition to dropping with sleep.
In the morning, our liaison team, all five of us, would report back to General des Entrayes and get on with the war.
But most of the time we didn’t find the regiment and we’d circle around villages on unknown trails, keeping away from evacuated hamlets and treacherous thickets—as much as possible we avoided those kinds of things because of German patrols. We had to be somewhere though while waiting, somewhere in the darkness. Some things couldn’t be avoided. Ever since then I’ve known how wild rabbits must feel.
Pity comes in funny ways. If we’d told Major Pinçon that he was nothing but a cowardly stinking murderer, we’d only have given him pleasure, the pleasure of having us shot without delay by the M.P. captain, who was always following him around and who lived for nothing else. It wasn’t the Germans that M.P. had it in for.
So for night after idiotic night we crept from ambush to ambush, sustained only by the decreasingly plausible hope of coming out alive, that and no other, and if we did come out alive one thing was sure, that we’d never, absolutely never, forget that we had discovered on earth a man shaped like you and me, but a thousand times more ferocious than the crocodiles and sharks with wide-open jaws that circle just below the surface around the shiploads of garbage and rotten meat that get chucked overboard in the Havana roadstead.
The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for a lifetime.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 2
