18
The Missing Song
“Forward, march!”
The colonel had decided to set the tempo for his troops’ advance with blasts from his two cannons. He had arranged them so that the Italians would think he had twenty or so. Ruse has always been man’s best weapon, and in this battle its use was as much strategic as tactical. Strategy: Leclerc divided his company into two battalions, one cannon covering the advance of each. This way he could attack the Italians on two fronts. Tactics: the cannons, each placed about three thousand meters from the fort at Kufra, delivered at regular intervals and in alternation twenty good shots each day.
To give the impression that there were multiple cannons, Leclerc relied on the echo they produced. He ordered that they be moved a few meters after each shot. This principle had the added bonus of giving them some protection, ensuring that when the Italians returned fire, their shots landed in empty sand. After a certain number of shots, Leclerc would modify the interval. A team of eight tirailleurs, under the supervision of a Zouave—a French infantryman—struggled to make this maneuver possible. Two were charged with loading the cannon, another with firing it off, and the others quickly moved it after each shot.
Because of his well-developed muscles, Hebga was assigned to the cannon unit. So he heard the charge of the infantry far in the distance as he clutched his ax, hands aching for action. War is an act of generosity toward the son of a bitch on the opposite side that you send off to hell as quickly as possible. That’s what Philothée told himself, and for him, hell looked a lot like where he was, now that Bilong was gone. You see, his friend had died in his arms. And for this death, whose last cry hadn’t shaken up the universe, he wanted revenge. In short, that was what dictated his advance toward the enemy, nothing more than that. And certainly not the fascist Italian fort—before the battle, Leclerc had told them that the fort was really France, the City of Lights, occupied Paris, and that they needed to liberate it even if it cost them their lives!
Go on, Philippe François Marie, comte de Hautecloque—for that is your true name, and you were born in the Somme—go on and ask a child from Edéa to die for the liberation of your village. Believe me, Philothée didn’t give a shit about your dear village. What he saw before his eyes was the image he had conjured of that assassin who had killed his friend, and each time a man beside him fell—whether tirailleur, meharist, Zouave, or anyone else—he told himself that Bilong had given him one more chance to take on his assassin, to tell him he was born from a dog’s asshole, and then to drive his bayonet deep into that very asshole. He wanted that perforated man to suffer, to suffer horribly, because what Philothée just couldn’t bear was the thought that that man might die before going through some part of the hell that had left his friend suffering on a cot in the clinic in Faya-Largeau, opening his mouth from time to time to cry out a word he himself couldn’t say without stuttering:
“Ng-Nguet!”
As for Aloga, he longed for a song far different from those cannon blasts that shook the sky. That guy had so many songs in his head; it drove him crazy to spend a whole day hearing nothing but cannon fire, the groans of men as they fell, and the cries of the wounded who lay at his feet, imploring him to finish them off. Oh, how he’d like to give a lesson in Bassa song to those fascists who had dared to make his head spin with that infernal music! There was one song in particular that he missed, one last song, one song among the hundreds archived in the forest’s deep memory, and he knew exactly which one: the song that sings of the hunters, warriors, blacksmiths, and woodcutters. A symphony of the forest that would resonate through the desert. There in the sand he composed this missing song, step by step, word by word, couplet by couplet, verse by verse, harmony by harmony, fascist by fascist: he composed it for Hebga’s ax.
Oh! Aloga will compose his song in his head, and sing it only later that evening when he is back in camp, when the soldiers—fascists and Free French alike—have called a truce for the night, and the woodcutter sitting beside him says that his itching hands were useless all day long. Then he’ll ask Hebga to clap his hands, to clap harder and harder. And Hebga will clap his hands together, as Aloga asks him to. Then he’ll ask Philothée to clap as well, and the stuttering soldier will clap.
And there, between his two comrades who, like him, had lived through another day of combat when they risked being eaten up by the infamous woman of the Saharan sands, Aloga sang his song of the forest, his assiko, like only Jean Bikoko Aladin knew how to sing. Aloga sang, marking out the beat on the ground with his foot, he sang his deathly assiko. Aloga sang, he sang his “Sahariana” while his friends Hebga and Philothée clapped. Soon the other tirailleurs joined in, and together, clapping and stomping, sometimes pounding out the beat with the butt of their rifles on a piece of scrap metal, on a goblet, spoon, canteen, or whatever was handy, answered Aloga’s song. Then Philothée put one foot in front of the other, shimmied his shoulders, his belly, and showed the others who, whether they were from Chad, Gabon, Ubangi, or Congo, all knew something about this sort of forest dance. He showed all the tirailleurs how to dance to this one incomparable song, which wasn’t recorded in the French military archives because, even though it was composed right there in the desert as Italian bullets flew overhead, it was sung in Bassa—in an African language.
19
The Black Force
Whether the opposing soldiers are committed to the cause or not, in war it’s always a fatal mistake not to respect your adversary. What really set Leclerc apart, then, in this Battle of Kufra, was that he respected his adversaries. That’s what too few books underscore. Yet Leclerc knew quite well the land where the fascists lived and breathed, and God knows that among his friends there were many who put themselves at the forefront of French fascism. Hadn’t he been a faithful and often approving reader of that fascist paper L’Action française, even stashing many copies of it away among his things back in Tailly? Oh! Colonel Leclerc had no choice but to respect the fascists, for, after all, it was only due to the vagaries of history that he found himself outside the walls of Kufra while they were inside the fort.
What set him at odds with the Italians was the defeat of France, nothing more, nothing less. He didn’t want to destroy them, but rather to give them an honorable way out, in accord with the laws of military chivalry. Didn’t the commander of the Italian forces know where his sympathies lay? The Italian could have proposed a friendly agreement, a little something that would have satisfied the opposing parties because, he surely would have said, “We’ve known each other forever, right?” Yet let’s leave these suppositions aside, because the Italian commander was an idealist. About twenty years old. He’d only just finished his military service, which had interrupted his study of law, when he’d been sent to the Sahara—and, for a noncommissioned officer, that was a punishment.
Had he said, “Hold on, hold on, Colonel. Don’t you remember that editorial from L’Action praising Mussolini’s seizure of power?” that certainly would have changed things.
“Yes, I read it,” Colonel Leclerc would have replied, the memory of all he read flooding back. At that point, Il Duce had friends only in Spain.
“But what about you in France…?”
“Ah! The present derives from the past!”
But this exchange never took place because, as I’ve said, the commander of the Italian forces was unaware of Leclerc’s fascist sympathies. What’s more, before this battle, he’d never even heard of him. A warning had come over the radio about the soldiers, many of them black, that Leclerc was leading toward his fort. How could that fascist have known that Leclerc’s reputation would come at the expense of his own? For him, the Battle of Kufra was as much ideological as military, whereas for Leclerc it was mostly military.
As the Italian gathered his wits, he suddenly realized the advantages of his position. Two military axioms stood out: first, that whoever fights a solely defensive war is condemned to lose; second, since the French forces were
outside the fort, they would need a truce sooner than the Italians, because they’d have to gather their wounded and their dead scattered over the desert, whereas the Italian wounded and dead were already together there in the fort. The situation wasn’t great on a humanitarian front, as the Italian officer could no longer count on receiving supplies, especially since his air support had been disrupted after the fall of Murzuk. But on the military front, however, the Italian found himself in a favorable situation, even if international law tied his hands. The commander remembered what Il Duce had said about that: “It’s not even worth the paper it’s written on.” Force, that was the only thing that mattered. The Italian commander understood, despite being trained as a lawyer, that he’d pay dearly if he respected international law more than Il Duce did.
That’s why, two weeks after having settled into a routine of pauses, during which the Allied soldiers gathered their wounded and their dead, one evening he gave the order for all his cannoneers to gather in the courtyard of the fort and to shoot at the French forces throughout the night. Never had a Sahelian night been lit more brightly. Bursts of fire cut across the clear sky, long, arcing blasts that ended in explosions; the whistle of each successive launch rang out like the whoosh of a heavenly saber. There was no pause in the Italians’ repeated, systematic shots. From the other side came a confused hum of cries, vehement curses, half-given orders; chaos reigned, death expanded her reach. For an hour, no, two or three—what difference does it make?—the cannonballs pilloried the French positions, sending clouds of sand high into the night. And then there came a break, a long break. Maybe the Italian commander thought he’d managed to breach the enemy line? Whatever it may be, he sent out some of his soldiers who, crying “Avanti!,” threw themselves into the sand dunes, rushing over them like a cloud of evil shadows, like a horde of wild animals.
What happened next in the valley would be recorded in the annals of the world’s wars as a return to hand-to-hand combat. For when they came out of their fort, the Italians believed that the French forces had been forced to retreat, to seek cover together because of the repeated pounding of their cannons. But that was wrong, for in fact Leclerc’s two units came together each evening. That was when the colonel took stock of things and adjusted his tactical plans. So the French forces met the Italians, who no longer had cannons on their side, head-on. And that’s when the Italian forces learned for themselves about the fighting force that is a Bassa woodcutter. Night is a blessing, because under its blanket, the lightest of weapons become invisible, whereas the heaviest explode with the full force of their metal. Hebga jumped over the sand that grabbed at his feet, tore his body from the darkness through the pure force of his muscles, hit left, hit right. Here there was a cry, there the explosion of a skull. He spun around and swung at a shadow glimpsed behind his back: an Italian rushing at him. Why don’t the records of that truly horrific night recount the exploits of that man who came from the depths of Edéa’s forests to inscribe the letters of his name on the desert? Then the Italians would remember the desert spirit that devastated their forces, decimated their army. Then they would remember the faceless spirit that was pure force, a black force: forza nera!
In the thick of his battle, Hebga was making up for the days, nights, and months he had spent crossing steppes and plains, crossing the whole of Cameroon, looking for the Man who had done that. Obviously, this fight would leave him hungering still. For in the depths of the night he couldn’t see whose ribs he was breaking with his ax, and even less those whose faces he destroyed. As he bent down to look at a man he’d just flattened with a kick, a second attacked; he had to dispatch him with just one hand, since he held his ax in the other. Then Hebga fought the two men at once, for the one who’d fallen got back up and rushed at him, cursing in Italian. The woodcutter took one blow to the face, but he gave back many, hitting his adversaries in the belly, on the back and neck. For him, the war was degenerating into an unfair fight. Punches landed on his eyes, fractured his jaw. He wasn’t giving his all to the fight, no, because Hebga wanted to see the face of the Man who had done that. He knocked down one assailant and pinned him to the ground. He wanted to look him in the eyes and spit in his face. He wanted to tell him of the pain he still felt in his belly from the brutal loss of our Sita—you know that story—and then smash his face open with his ax. But the second guy didn’t give him the chance to. One blow to Hebga’s neck, and the man on the ground was able to tear free from his grasp and get back up. As the woodcutter struggled back to his feet, a crack split the air. The man who had hit Hebga from behind was stopped in his tracks, as if struck by lightning; he fell to his knees, then dived face-first into the sand. Hebga turned: there was Captain Massu, still holding his rifle at the ready.
“War no boxing match,” he said, speaking in a clipped French and using a derogatory epithet for the Italians. “Daniels no fun.”
The second assailant raised his hands in the air.
20
War Is Not a Boxing Match
How can I contradict Massu? After all, what is one punch in the context of the Second World War? What is one beating in the context of a clash of rifles, cannons, mortars, bomber aircraft, submarines, and, to end it all, the atomic bomb? What is one uppercut in the context of trenches, concentration camps, and genocides? Ah! If only Hebga, that child of the forest, had known that Bassa savagery was nothing, really nothing, when compared with the kind of savagery that authorized a well-read man, with a good haircut, nice shoes, beard neatly trimmed, and mustache waxed, a civil servant—hence methodical—to write down the name of his compatriot, who was white like him, well read like him, a music lover, and a passionate reader of French poetry, on an alphabetized list that would send that neighbor to the gas chambers! For Hebga, the forced labor, the njokmassi, was truly the most awful thing the whites had brought to Edéa. He had always thanked the spirits that he’d never been caught, shaved, and made to sit in the mud, like so many others he’d seen treated that way. I must say that he had always followed his mother’s advice: “Pay your taxes!” She knew something about this, our Sita did. She was in charge of the market and had seen too often that when the colonial police were called because people hadn’t paid for their stands or their beers, things quickly got much more complicated. What did he know, yes, just what did Hebga know about this Second World War when the staunchest supporters of the Free French general’s theories about the professional military class were found in Nazi Germany? Ah! Did Hebga—who had only signed up for the war because he wanted to avenge his mother’s death—did he even know what those Germans and Frenchmen had been doing to each other for the past hundred, no, two hundred years, all in the name of revenge?
Did he have any idea what men are capable of when they’ve been caught up in a century-old dance of hatred? He who until then had used the pebbles he loaded into his slingshot, his ndomo ndomo, to kill only birds, who had sharpened his machete with dexterity and determination but with innocence, not savagery, in his heart—wasn’t it time he learned how to use a miraculous weapon? Or else how would he understand this hatred, yes, this hatred that suddenly appeared disguised as love? He couldn’t see the Italian on the other side holding a round metal cylinder—so smooth, with a bit of a point at one end—holding it like a woman, giving it a kiss. Strange thing to do, the woodcutter would have thought, although he, too, often held his ax like a lover. But an ax isn’t a shell. On the other side, among the French troops, who would be chosen for this dance with death? Night stretched over the desert, the night sky so clear and smooth it seemed like a holiday. A crescent moon traced a smile—what else could it do after seeing that man kiss a shell? Then the desert was beset by the sounds of chaos, by the apocalypse; the staccato of machine gun fire split the air, rifle blasts exploded all around. Here and there a man wheezed, cried out, and cursed under death’s caress; then his body turned to rubber and fell. Men ran left and right. They peeked out from their shelters in the sand, from behind a dune’s protect
ive cover, just as an Italian gently, silently, placed a shell in the muzzle of his mortar.
Then the Italian plugged his ears. Immediately a dull blast shook the desert, leaving silence in its wake, making the moon jump; while the area around the man with the shell disappeared in an exuberant cloud of sand, a bolt of light took off from the very heart of his hideaway. The light flew higher and higher across the sky, straight as a flaming arrow, straight as a line traced by the geometric spirit of the night. It crossed the sky trying to reach the distant, smiling moon, there in the depths of the heavenly vault, aiming for its heart. As it passed, the friction of the wind created an inimitable whistle, like the sound of scissors on silk. In the distance the light curved, no longer seeking the moon. The line of light came back toward the ground, toward a distant dune, where the panicked Free French troops were hidden. Is there any soldier who doesn’t know the sound of an incoming shell? Who hasn’t seen the line of light traced across the sky? Its false promise to kiss the moon, its dangerous beauty—is there anyone who hasn’t watched its approach? Now the shell landed on the dune, falling right into Aloga’s wide-open mouth, as he stood watching it come, mesmerized by the perfect trajectory of that light through the darkness. The explosion sent the tirailleur flying up to the sky, torn limb from limb, scattered across a giant wave of sand, vaporized in a burst of flesh, liquefied in a bloodbath. His limbs, his appendages flew up: his head shooting to the left, one toe straight ahead, one foot behind, a leg to the front, his left hand to the right, and his trunk—well, it’s best I not say. There was a thud of metal splitting open, of bones shattering, flesh expanding, a gigantic din that created such chaos that the universe itself fell silent … and stayed silent for a long while. A calm so great that it was only the next day that they realized the extent of the destruction, for the false Hilun hadn’t even made a sound.
When the Plums Are Ripe Page 19
