Birth of Our Power (20 page)

I could, of course, demolish his ingenuous faith; and at times I am tempted to do so. But to my careful irony (he can't understand irony, especially the kind that talks without smiling) he answers with the disabled looks of a baffled child caught at fault, suddenly doubting the lessons he has learned. And it is a serious matter to destroy a man's faith without replacing it. And then I have my task, my road to take: Letter of Transit #662–491 already surrounds me, wherever I go, with a pernicious atmosphere.

We were traveling together. It was in a little café in a town in the Midi,
Au rendez-vous des Ferblantiers,
that Faustin Bâton made his first real contact with men at war. We had seen some ill-dressed soldiers entering there, home guards and convalescents come to see off a helmeted
friend—loaded down with heavy haversacks—whose profile to us seemed austere. “Furlough's over,” I remarked. The setting was that of an ugly industrial suburb: rails, a low wall, a wooden shack plastered with torn-up posters: LOAN … VICTORY … We followed the group into the café. “Willya set up a round, Moko? somebody cried out to my companion. (Why “Moko?”) “With great pleasure, gentlemen,” he answered, with a broad, serious smile. Then they stared at him; his voice, almost grave, impressed them. “Be so kind as to come over and have a chair,” said someone else. The tone had lowered. There were six of them: the helmeted man on furlough whose face was not actually austere, but ravaged, drawn, full of perpendicular lines, with a tuft of red whiskers on his chin; the others seemed a motley crew, yet unified—except for one whom I took to be a schoolteacher—by a common expression and way of talking, local people, workers who would some day like to run a little workshop of their own, shopkeepers who had been workers.

“Traveling?” the fat fellow with the face of a cab driver asked us politely. “We're seeing off Lacoste here. He's leaving on the 10:30 for a quiet sector.”

“Perhaps we will meet each other there,” said Faustin politely.

He felt himself to be at a great moment in his life. Six real French soldiers were listening to him. He told them, addressing himself in particular to the man on furlough, that he had come from America to fight. That his ancestors had played a part in the French Revolution. That he forgave Napoleon for the imprisonment and death of Toussaint L'Ouverture. That he was ready to die for Civilization, the liberator of the Black people, the liberator of all men. That he admired more than any others the heroic soldiers of the Marne and of Verdun. Lacoste, the soldier on furlough, seemed to be looking at him from far away with gloomy astonishment. When Faustin had finished, the silence came crashing down around our shoulders with all its weight. The innkeeper's wife—beautiful bare arms—had come over to our table, opposite a smiling Alsatian girl who was holding out a square bottle toward us from a chromos on the wall.

“Well!” said Lacoste at last.

He had had a lot to drink, and was consumed by a boundless sadness. He must have understood that he had to find another answer in response to those strange black eyes full of a kind of anguish which burned in that ugly chimpanzee face across the table.

“Well,” he said, “then you must be right, if that's the way things are. C'mon. Try on my helmet. Let's see if that kind of headgear will look as good on you as it does on me …”

He put his helmet over the kinky hair, loosened and then tightened the chinstrap. He was himself no longer anything but a man prematurely old who hadn't shaved since the previous evening and hadn't slept all night (because his wife had begun to cry at dawn). But Faustin appeared to us under the surprising mask of a true warrior, with a terrible smile and carnivorous teeth. His head looked as if it had been made for the helmet.

“No,” cried Lacoste. “It looks better on you than it does on me. You can keep it, y'know! Ah, son of a bitch, how I'd love to change heads with you, Black Beauty! I'd even be willing to sleep only with a Negress for the rest of my life … C'mon, let's change heads!”

He seized his own head between both hands, as if to tear it off—and suddenly hid his face in his sleeve on the edge of the table.

A hushed conference convened next to me.

“What a brute! He's trying to make an ass of us, I tellya. It's impossible that anybody could still be such a jerk these days. It might've happened three years ago, I don't say no. I c'n understand, the rest of us, we don't have no choice. And then we've been invaded. But that dopey jerk! With his L'Ouverture and Napoleon! He talks like a newspaper. Myself, I feel like pushing in his face!”

The one who was talking must have been a convalescent. All I could see of him was the back of a hand covered with a large, freshly scarred burn. His neighbor, an old home guard, replied:

“Don't try to be funny. One man's as good as another. When they add it up, all they want is the right count of carcasses and broken arms. If one comes over from America, maybe that saves one of us. I don't have any objection to him gettin' killed instead of me. It ain't right that it's always the same ones gettin' killed. There ought t' be more of 'em comin' from all the countries in the world. At least then they'd be able to leave the old classes behind the lines guarding the railroads. Me, I'm in favor of the Black Army.”

He raised his voice:

“Monsieur Bâton, I believe? Monsieur Bâton you're very right. And I hope you'll have the Croix de Guerre before long …”

“… with thirty-six palms,” added someone under his breath.

The schoolteacher observed Faustin with cruel fixity.

“Hey, Francois,” he said to my neighbor, “I think I understand this fellow. Look at that jaw: it explains everything. I once met a volunteer like that in the Argonne, only white, a poacher from the Vosges for whom the whole war was nothing but a nice man hunting party. He'd shoot your Boche down for you with mean delight. He was a coward, like a bedbug at bottom: the soul of a murderer. I told him once: ‘You're not a soldier, you're a gangster.' I wasn't in the least put out when he caught a nice little piece of shrapnel right between the eyes.”

Lacoste raised his head. A kind of bewilderment held him between rage and laughter.

“Gimme back my helmet, Black Beauty,” he said violently, “since we can't exchange heads. I like mine well enough anyway. Com'on, hup; gimme back!”

He practically tore the helmet out of Faustin's helpless hands. He banged his fist on the table, making the glasses jump.

“To hell with it all boys. All together:

C'est à boire, à boire, à boire

C'est à boire qu'il nous faut ô ô—
…”

They sing.

Faustin is silent. A grieved smile draws his features. The expression of a man who has made a mistake he would like to be forgiven for, who would like to lie, and understands that it is useless. His sharp ears have picked up bits and pieces of dialogue which he refuses to understand but which he cannot forget. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Farewell, Faustin.”

“What? But I …”

“No, you're staying. Faustin, my friend, the truth: the Front begins here. Your place is among these soldiers
who have had enough
…”

The words I speak strike home, enlarge the inner wound. He hesitates, bewildered.

“C'mon, Black Beauty,” cries the man on furlough with a sudden snarl in his voice, “all together, I tell you:

Le troisième dans l'escarcelle

Ne trouva qu'un écu faux…

C'est à boire, à boire, à boire
…”

I CONTINUE MY JOURNEY ALONE. THE SOFT GREEN LANDSCAPES SLOWLY DIVIDE
in front of the express—and doubtless, come together again behind the long metallic snake as, its old links flaming, it patiently devours the miles. Beauty of the earth in August. The color of the world is golden …

“Landscapes give me a pain in the ass!”

The faded eyes of an exhausted man yelled this at me when I smiled vaguely at some russet fields, perhaps thinking how alive the earth is. “Pass me the canteen,” he said in a heavy tracked voice.

The trains are full of soldiers. I should like to see this ant swarm around the railroad stations from way up high. A chimerical order reigns there, assigning to each individual precise but incomprehensible routes. Each searches for his life, comes, goes, resists, hesitates, but in the end all these trains unload their human cargo in enormous communal graves …

“Reasons give me a pain in the ass!”

The exhausted man stuffs his pipe with rage under the N
O SMOKING
sign. There is also:

TAISEZ-VOUS, MÉFIEZ-VOUS,

LES OREILLES ENNEMIES VOUS ÉCOUTENT.

(Keep still! Watch out! Enemy ears are listening!)

I am the only civilian in the compartment. I am the right age to be a dead man on active duty; I have the health of a man who has just spent six months living in Catalonia. All these worn faces under their old gray helmets look at me almost as if I were an enemy.

“Enemy? You kidding? You and all the others give me a pain in the ass!”

Their greatcoats are faded and spotted: the horizon-blue of the muds, the rains, the fatigue. Their rucksacks heavy and shapeless. Their
helmets dented. Under their harness the torpid men seem emaciated with hard bones and tanned leather, tenacious souls turned in on their useless anger. A convalescent as fresh as a young girl is leaning in the corner. “What didja have?”—“A bullet in the top of my right lung; two months in the hospital.”—“A cushy job, eh!” That is all that is said about the war for several hours. And this from a vintner, who had got off at the previous station: “As for us in the Vauquois …” At the sound of that name I cocked my ear. But it was only a story about booze, soup, monkey meat and a bastard of a sergeant: “So I says to him …” Nothing in this monotonous story about insignificant things (punctuated with “So I says to him's,”—“So he says to me's,”—“So's,” and “Then's”) came through of the battlefield, where these things had probably really happened, filling a man's life for days and his memory perhaps for years …They talk about furloughs, women, wine, the prices.

“The war? It gives me a pain in the ass!” the exhausted man would say. “I'm fighting in it; that's already quite enough.”

These men are hard and faded like the stones at the bottom of a waterfall, rolled, polished, broken by countless shocks. Their falling increases the strength of the falls that rolls them along. They are nothing. They kill. They are killed. They live. They are dead. Dead in advance, by anticipation. This one here, puffing on his pipe with dark lips, will have his head blown off in four days, accidentally, on his way back from the latrine. Nothing will be found of his cunning smuggler's head, which is at this moment cooking up some “ideas,” some clever, life-saving “system …”

Dead in advance without any anticipation; for so many others, identical to them, are actually dead that each of these has his forgotten double somewhere underground.