I saw the sky and sunlight streaming through the trees; mutilated, black trees, also killed in the fields. I saw that the trees were still black. And then there was also the village school. And I heard children singing “I’ll never forget you.” For you. Alone. At the origin of all this there was now that someone, and that child, my child, and my little brother, and someone else, the English child. The same. Death baptizes as well.
Here, we are far removed from identity. He’s a corpse, a twenty-year-old corpse who will go on to the end of time. That’s all. His name is no longer worth telling: he was a child.
That’s all we need to know.
We can remain here, at this particular point in the life of a twenty-year-old child, the last man to die in the war.
Any death is still Death. Any child of twenty is a child of twenty.
It’s not entirely the death of just anyone. It remains the death of a child.
Anyone’s death is Death in its entirety. Anyone is everyone. And this anyone can take the horrible form of an ongoing childhood. They know these things in villages; the peasants taught them to me with the brutality of an event that became that event, of a child of twenty killed in a war at which he was playing.
Perhaps that is also why he remained intact, the young English corpse; why he remained stuck in that terrible, horrible age, the age of twenty.
I became friendly with the people of the village, especially the old woman who looks after the church.
The dead trees are there, crazy, frozen in their fixed chaos; the wind wants no part of them. They are complete, martyred, black with the dark blood of trees killed by fire.
He became sacred for me—me, the passer-by—he, the young Englishman who died at twenty. Each time I wept for him.
And then I regretted not having known the old English gentleman who came every year to shed tears over the child’s grave, not having talked to him about the child, about his laugh, his eyes, his games.
The dead child was taken in charge by the entire village. And the village adored him. This child of war will forever have flowers on his grave. One thing remains unknown: the exact date when it all stopped.
In Vauville, the memory of the beggar woman’s song comes back to me. That very simple song. The song of the insane, of all the insane, everywhere; those who went insane from indifference. The song of easy death. Of those who died of hunger. The memory of those who died on the road, in the trenches, half devoured by dogs, tigers, birds of prey, giant rats from the marshes.
The hardest thing to endure is the lacerated face, the skin, the sunken eyes. Eyes emptied of sight, with no gaze left. Staring. Looking at nothing.
He is twenty years old. The age, the number of his age stopped at death; what he has become will always be twenty years old. No one knows what that is. No one looked.
I wanted to write about the English child. And I can’t write about him anymore. And yet I’m writing, as you see, I’m writing nonetheless. It’s because I’m writing that I don’t know if it can be written about. I know it isn’t a story. It’s a brutal, isolated fact, without reverberation. The facts suffice. One could relate the facts. And the old man who always cried, who came for eight years, and who, one particular time, did not come back. Ever. Was he, too, taken by death? Without a doubt. And then the story would end for all eternity, like the child’s blood, his eyes, the child’s smile frozen by the discolored mouth of death.
The children in school sing that they had loved him for a long time, that child of twenty, and that they’d never forget him. They sing it every afternoon.
And I weep.
There were nightfalls the same blue as the eyes of those schoolchildren.
There was that color blue in the sky, the blue which was the color of the sea. There were all the trees that had been murdered. And the sky, too. I looked at it. It covered everything with its slowness, its everyday indifference. Unfathomable.
I see places linked together. Except the continuity of the forest: that has disappeared.
Suddenly I no longer wanted to go back. And still I wept.
I saw him everywhere, the dead child. The child who had died from playing at war, from playing at being the wind, at being a twenty-year-old Englishman, handsome and heroic. Who played at being happy.
I still see you: you. The Child himself. Dead like a bird, of eternal death. Death that was long in coming. In the pain of his body ripped apart by airplane steel, he begged God to let him die quickly so that he wouldn’t suffer anymore.
His name was W. J. Cliffe, yes. That’s what is now inscribed on the gray granite.
You have to cross the churchyard and head toward the town school, which stands in the same enclosure. Go toward the cats, those crazy gangs of cats, with their cruel and unbelievable beauty. Those cats called “tortoiseshell,” yellow like flames, red like blood, white and black. Black like the trees forever blackened by the soot of German bombs.
A river runs along the cemetery. And then in the distance are more dead trees, to the other side of where the child is. Burnt trees that shriek against the direction of the wind. It’s a very loud sound, like a strident sweep from the end of the world. It makes you afraid. And then, suddenly, it stops, without your knowing what it was. For no reason, you’d say, for no reason at all. And then the peasants say it was nothing, just the trees that have preserved in their sap the charcoal of their wounds.
The inside of the church is truly admirable. One can recognize everything. The flowers are flowers, the plants, the colors, the altars, the embroideries, the tapestries. It’s admirable. Like a temporarily abandoned room awaiting lovers who haven’t arrived yet because of bad weather.
One would like to get somewhere with that emotion. Write from without, perhaps, by simply describing, perhaps, describing the things there, present. Not invent any others. Invent nothing, no detail. Not invent anything at all. Nothing like anything. Not accompany death. To finally leave it behind and not look in that direction, just for once.
The roads that lead to the village are former paths, and very old. They come from prehistory. They have always been there, it seems; that’s what I’m told. They were the necessary passageways toward the terra incognita of footpaths and springs and seashores, or if one wanted to be safe from wolves.
I had never been devastated by the fact of death to such a point. Utterly captured. Caught. And now, for me, all those surroundings are finished; I don’t go there anymore.
What remains is Vauville, that hopscotch; what remains is deciphering the names on certain tombs.
What remains is the forest, the forest that moves closer to the sea with each passing year. Still black with soot, ready for the coming eternity.
The dead child was also a soldier in the war. And he could just as well have been a French soldier. Or an American.
We are eleven miles from the landing beach.
The villagers knew he was from the north of England. The old English gentleman had told them about the child. The old man wasn’t the child’s father, the child was an orphan; he must have been his teacher, or perhaps a friend of his parents. The man loved that child. Like his own son. Like a lover, too, perhaps, who knows? He was the one who had spoken the child’s name. The name was engraved on the light gray slab. W. J. Cliffe.
There is nothing I can say.
There is nothing I can write.
There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.
I’d like to tell of the ceremony that was created around the death of the young British pilot. I know a few details: the whole village was involved; it constituted an almost revolutionary enterprise. I also know that the tomb was erected without official authorization. That the mayor had no part in it. That Vauville became a kind of funeral celebration centered on the adoration of the child. A celebration free of tears and love songs.
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nbsp; All the villagers know the child’s story. And also the story of the old man’s visits, the old teacher. But they never talk about the war anymore. For them, the war was only that child killed at the age of twenty.
Death had reigned over the village.
The women cried, they couldn’t help it. The young pilot disappears; he dies a real death. If they sang his death, for example, it wouldn’t be the same story. The sublime discretion of those women, who saw to it, I believe (though I can’t be completely sure), that the child was put on the other side of the church, where there were no other graves yet. Where there is still only his grave. Sheltered from the crazy wind. The women took the child’s body, they washed the body, and they put it in that place, in the grave, the one with the pale gray slab.
The women never said anything about that. If I had been there with them, to do it with them, I wouldn’t have been able to write about it; I don’t believe so. I’m saying that this incredibly strong feeling of involvement might not have occurred. It’s the same emotion that still returns today, when I’m alone. Alone, I still cry for the child who became the war’s final casualty.
That inexhaustible fact: the death of a twenty-year-old child killed by German guns on the very day peace was declared.
Twenty years old. I’m saying his age. I’m saying: he was twenty years old. He will be twenty years old for all eternity, before the Eternal. Whether it exists or not, the Eternal will be that child.
When I say twenty years old, it’s horrible. His age is the most horrible thing. The pain I feel for him is a banality. It’s odd, but the idea of God never occurred around the child. That easy word, the word God, the easiest of all—no one spoke it. It was never uttered during the burial of the twenty-year-old child, who had been playing at war in his Meteor above the Norman forest, beautiful as the sea.
Nothing measures up to this fact. There are many facts like this in the universe. Breaches. There, this event was seen. And the fact that the child died from playing at war was seen, too. Everything surrounding the child’s death is clear.
He had been happy, he had been very happy coming out of the forest; he didn’t see any Germans. He was happy to fly, to live, to have decided to kill some German soldiers. Like all children, this child loved to play war. Dead, he was always another child, any twenty-year-old child. And then it stopped with the night, the first night. He became the child of this French village, he, the British pilot.
He signed his own death here, before the people of Vauville who were watching.
This book is not a book.
It’s not a song.
Or a poem. Or thoughts.
But tears, pain, weeping, despair that cannot yet be stopped or reasoned with. Political fury strong like one’s faith in God. Even stronger than that. More dangerous because it is endless.
That child who died in the war is also the secret of each one who found him at the top of that tall tree, crucified on that tree by the carcass of his airplane.
One cannot write about that. Or else one can write about everything. To write about everything, everything at once, is not writing. It’s nothing. To read it is untenable, like reading an advertisement.
Again I hear the singing of the small children from the village school. The singing of the children of Vauville. We should be able to stand it. It’s still difficult for us. I always cried when I heard those children singing. And I still cry.
Already one sees the tomb of the young British pilot less. It remains visible in the surrounding landscape, but already it has moved away from us for all eternity. And its eternity will be lived in that way through the lost child.
The places around the church are what give access to the child’s grave. There, something is still happening. We are now separated from the event by decades, and yet it’s here, the event of his grave is here. Could it be the solitude of a child who died in the war, of gentle caresses on the icy granite of his tombstone? We don’t know.
The village has become the village of that twenty-year-old British child. It is like a kind of purity, an abundance of tears. The extreme care taken over his grave will be eternal. We already know this.
The eternity of the young British child-pilot is there, present; one can kiss the gray stone, touch it, sleep against it, weep.
Like an appeal, that word—eternity comes to one’s lips—will be the common grave of all the other casualties of the region killed in all the wars to come.
This might be the birth of a cult. Replacing God? No, God is replaced every day. One is never short of God.
I don’t know what to call this story.
Everything is there, contained in a few dozen square yards. Everything is there in that jumble of dead bodies, the splendor of the tombs, the opulence that make this place so striking. It’s not numbers: numbers have been scattered elsewhere, in the German fields of northern Germany, in the slaughters of every region of the Atlantic coastline. The child has always remained himself. And alone. Battlefields have always been far away, everywhere in Europe. Here it’s the opposite. Here it’s the child, the king of wartime death.
He’s a king as well: a child as alone in death as a king in the same death.
One could photograph the tomb. The fact of the tomb. Of the name. Of the sunsets. The sooty blackness of the scorched trees. Photograph those twin rivers gone mad that scream every evening, we’ll never know why or at what, like starving bitches; those badly made rivers, God’s failures, ill born, that slam together every night, hurl themselves at each other. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. Madwomen from another world, in a screech of iron, butchery, and convoys, looking for a place to throw themselves, into some sea, into some forest. And the cats, the hordes of cats yowl in terror. There are always cats in cemeteries that lie in wait for who knows what event, indecipherable except to them, the cats. Without owners. Lost.
The dead trees, the fields, the cattle, everything here looks toward the evening sun of Vauville.
The place itself remains absolutely deserted. Empty, yes. Almost empty.
The church caretaker lives right nearby. Every morning after coffee, she goes to look at the grave. A peasant. She wears the same dark blue canvas apron that my mother wore in the Pas-de-Calais, when she was twenty.
I forgot: there is also the new cemetery, less than a mile out of Vauville. It’s a two-bit cemetery. There are sprays of flowers big as trees. Everything is painted white. And no one is there, no one is inside, you’d think that there wasn’t anything. That it isn’t a cemetery. That it is I don’t know what—a golf course, perhaps.
All around Vauville are very old roads from before the Middle Ages. It was on top of them that they built roads for us today. Along the ancient hedges, there are new roads for the living. Robert Gallimard was the one who told me about the existence of that whole network of early Norman roads. The first roads of the men of the coast, the North-men.
No doubt many people have written the history of the roads.
What must be said here is the impossibility of telling about this place, here, and this grave. But even so, one can kiss the gray granite and weep over you. W. J. Cliffe.
We must start backward. I’m not talking about writing. I’m talking about the book once it’s written. Start at the spring and trace it to its aquifer. Start from the grave and follow it to him, the young British pilot.
There are often narratives but very seldom writing.
There is only a poem, perhaps, and even then, to try … what? We no longer know what must be done, not even that.
There is the grandiose banality of the forest, of the poor, of the mad rivers, the dead trees, and those cats, carnivorous as dogs. Those red and black cats.
The innocence of life, yes, it’s true, it is there, like the rounds the schoolchildren sing.
It’s true, there is the innocence of life.
An innocence to cry for. In the distance there is the old war, the one that now lies in shreds when one stands alone in the village, faci
ng the martyred trees burnt to cinders by German fire. The corpses of soot trees, murdered. No. There is no more war. The child has replaced everything of that war. The twenty-year-old child. The entire forest, the entire earth: he replaced it all, along with the future of war. War is locked up in his grave with the bones of the child’s body.
It’s calm now. The main splendor is the idea, the idea of twenty years old, the idea of playing at war, grown resplendent. A crystal.
If there weren’t things like this, writing would never occur. But even if writing is there, always ready to scream, to cry, one does not write it. Emotions of that order, very subtle, very profound, very carnal, and essential, and completely unpredictable, can hatch entire lives in a body. That’s what writing is. It’s the pace of the written word passing through your body. Crossing it. That’s where one starts to talk about those emotions that are hard to say, that are so foreign, and yet that suddenly grab hold of you.
I was at home in this village, here, in Vauville. I came here every day to cry. And then one day I stopped coming.
I write because of the good fortune I have to get mixed up in everything, with everything; the good fortune to be in this battlefield, in this theater devoid of war, in the enlargement of this reflection. And there in the enlargement that slowly, very slowly, gains on the terrain of war, is the ongoing nightmare of the death of that young child of twenty, in the dead body of the English child twenty years of age, dead with the trees of the Norman forest, in the same death, unlimited.
This emotion will continue to spread beyond itself, toward the infinity of the whole world. For centuries. And then one day, all over the world we will understand something like love. Of him. Of the English child who died at twenty for having played at war against the Germans in that monumental forest—so beautiful, they’ll say, so ancient, secular, even lovely, yes, that’s it: lovely is the word.
One should be able to make a certain film. A film of insistence, of flashbacks, new beginnings. And then abandon it. And also film that abandonment. But no one will do it, we already know this. No one will ever do it.
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