Fear (14 page)

One evening four days ago, they brought a new patient into the ward and put him in a bed in a secluded corner. He seemed to be in very low spirits and kept his face turned resolutely to the wall. On his first day in the ward I thought I noticed the nurses displaying a certain degree of surprise when they questioned him. And over the next days they spoke to him in an odd tone in which, knowing them as well as I did, I could discern some cautious pity, along with an indefinable nuance of superiority. He became an object of curiosity and furtive glances for all of us. However, he didn’t complain and ate normally.

A little while ago (I was beginning to take my first steps out of bed) I approached him rather stealthily. He didn’t see me coming and our eyes met when I was right beside him.

‘Nothing too serious, old man?’

He hesitated, then snapped:

‘Me, I’m not a man any more.’

As I didn’t grasp what he was saying he pulled back his blanket:

‘See for yourself!’

Below his stomach I saw the shameful mutilation.

‘Anything would have been better than that!’

‘Are you married?’

‘Two months before the war. A great little kid . . .’

He gave me a photo he took from under his pillow: a pretty brunette with bright eyes and firm bust.

‘Anything would have been better.’

‘So don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You can still give pleasure to your wife.’

‘You think?’

‘For sure.’

I told him what I knew about eunuchs, about the pleasure they could give to women in the harems, explained that there were plenty of cases of having such surgery voluntarily. He seized my sleeve and, as if he wanted me to swear to the truth of what I was saying, demanded:

‘You’re sure of this?’

‘Quite sure. I can find you a book which goes into these questions.’

He looked at the photograph.

‘As for myself, well, perhaps, if I must . . . But you understand, it’s because of her . . .’

He remained silent for a long time, then summed up his thoughts:

‘Women, you know, you need
that
to keep them!’

I have told no one what I learned, not wanting to make it worse for him. There’s no doubt everyone would feel pity for him, but it was precisely pity that would be so dreadful and he will have plenty of time to endure it. For now, the little edge in the nurses’ voices (now I understood what it was) was quite enough. The tone they use with him astonishes me. Among their numbers are several very proper young women, from good families, some of them pious and probably virgins. Yet they are still sensitive to this. Faced with a man who is incomplete, they lose that very discreet air of submission and fear that women have with men. Their lack of respect means ‘there’s no danger in this one’, the worst insult a woman can direct at us. He was right, the poor devil:
that
is essential with them, with all of them. The prudish ones, who are afraid of it, think about it just as much as the sensual ones, who need it.

As soon as she arrives at eight in the morning, the matron comes straight to my bed:

‘Good morning, Dartemont. Sleep well?’ she asks with a warm, sociable smile.

She is just being polite. I’m not in danger and always sleep well.

To Nègre, on my right, she says, cordially:

‘Good morning, Nègre!’ with a weaker smile, just what is left of the one she’s given me.

To Diuré, on my left, now in a much more matronly tone: ‘All right, Diuré?’

Then she hurriedly makes her rounds, addressing people as groups now, not as individuals – ‘Everyone OK over here?’—while distributing haughty little nods of greeting.

The nuances are significant. They show that I have been granted the favour of the matron, who, to us wounded, was the equivalent of the colonel to the soldier. I have done nothing to merit this favour except to be myself, without concessions, accepting all the dangers of such frankness which must sometimes shock these women. It worked; they liked me. It must be said that the nurses find me more charming than many of my comrades. I come from the world of ideas and as I’m not in much pain, and stay lucid, and am not interested in drinking and card games, I can have long conversations with them which allow me to make sense of things – in my own fashion. I proceed to revise their values, which are not the same as mine. Their heads are stuffed with good intentions, which have been garnished with the bric-à-brac of noble sentiments tied up in a pretty bow, of honeyed breasts and make-believe men, as if their mothers had raised them to spend their whole lives sailing on some limpid blue lake with their heads on the shoulder of a faithful companion . . . I make a mess of some of the drawers where they keep their ideas and break a few tasteless vases. But I get the feeling that they don’t really detest what they would call cynicism, paradox or blasphemy. Being women, they like their ideas and opinions to be treated roughly, as, in some cases, their bodies. They experience a certain chaste thrill in listening to me, not so very different from the other kind of thrill, though they do not suspect it. They tell me a little anxiously of the things they admire. When they are at home they prepare questions for me at their leisure, which they note and then spring on me the next day. From my point of view, as long as they look after me, keep in their place and attend to my dressings every morning after washing me and applying iodine, then in the evenings, free from the tyranny of my wounded flesh, I can enjoy regaining my advantage over them, as a man, and one with a powerful intellect. It’s funny to see how a little infantryman – little more than a servant, no doubt, in the eyes of some of their fathers – can give lessons to the daughters of superior officers, as indeed they admit I do, and pleasantly too. What adds piquancy to this little victory is the memory of the utter misery in which I found myself a few weeks ago, of my insignificance at the front, in a squad, behind a parapet, among the endless foothills of the Artois where a man with his personality and his ideas, with his past achievements if he’s old and his future potential if he’s young, is merely an anonymous unit in the vast hordes of serving soldiers, who will be decimated every day then replaced by other men who mean just as little to the leaders . . . A soldier, just another grain of the inexhaustible raw materials of the battlefield, little more than a corpse since he is destined to become one by chance in the great, anonymous massacre . . . And here, in mixed hospital no. 97, is the blessed Dartemont, to whom the matron remarked the other day, in the presence of some of these young ladies: ‘Here we have the intellectual centre of the ward.’

Yesterday the lowliest herdsman, the lowliest navvy, with his thick skin and superior physical endurance, was better at war than me. His hard muscles and broad chest gave the country a safer frontier, in the ten metres of territory under his care. Yesterday, the meanest hoodlum with his stiletto and his hyena’s taste for corpses, was a better assailant, a more dangerous enemy for the blond giant facing him than the unknown soldier Dartemont, taking his turn at drudgery (‘just like one of the lads’, and it was only fair), no good at marching, no good down in the trenches, untrained, scorned by the tough guys for all his useless student intellectual baggage, impressing them only when he gave away his brandy ration and didn’t haggle over food. And here he is today chatting to ten young women who are smiling at him and listening to him, and who, when they discuss their wounded charges among themselves, must – I imagine – be saying: ‘He’s got an interesting mind, that boy!’

The hospital train that took us away from the front came into the station around nine in the morning, after an arduous, bumpy, and feverish three-day journey.

While we were being carried across the tracks and platforms, civilians looked at us with pity, and murmured: ‘Poor children!’ Their pity made me suddenly feel that my wound had a meaning, one revived from antiquity: ‘Your blood has flowed for the country, and you are a hero!’ But I knew just how hesitant and unwilling a hero I was, and that in fact I was a mere victim, or beneficiary, of a blow that had struck home, that I had not raised my arm to avenge it, that no enemy was dead because of anything I had done. I had no exploits to recount to all the zealous mothers and old men gathered on the ramparts to greet the returning warriors after their victorious battles. I was a hero without enemy scalps, taking advantage of the heroism of homicidal heroes. It could be that I felt just a little ashamed . . .

It was when we were brought into a great hall full of nurses in white, some of them young, smiling and fresh-faced, others grey and maternal, that we learned how special we were. Women! To be surrounded by the faces and voices and smiles of women! So we were not going to end up in some sinister military hospital . . .

We were assigned our beds. I was in ward 11, on the third floor, under the supervision of the matron, Miss Nancey. Each ward had its staff and head nurse; the hospital had twelve wards and must have held two or three hundred patients.

It was six days since I was wounded and this was the first time I had left the hard stretcher on which I couldn’t turn round. My new bed felt infinitely soft, and to find myself in a bright, clean place, in white sheets, made me strangely astonished. Now I was certain of my salvation, I could at last let go, relinquish all the strength I’d summoned up to keep myself safe and sound while I was being transported by indifferent stretcher-bearers who had grown deaf to our screams having heard too many screams already, and who could only get the rest and calm which they also needed by abandoning us to our pain, forgetting us, sometimes letting us die. I gave in to the weakness that came so easily and closed my eyes, as a young nurse took charge of me.

I had not washed since we were in the trenches before the attacks of 25 September. Underneath its coating of bandages, my body was covered in filth and dried blood from top to toe, and there were still pallid lice crawling around beneath the gauze, lice which you could burst like fat pimples in one vile squelch with your fingernail. The young woman propped me up on my pillows, put a basin on my bed and wiped my face. I was transformed. From the haggard mask scarred by horror and exhaustion that I had acquired through three weeks of combat emerged my real face, my old one, the face of man destined to live. She considered this new face that she had just cleaned, now pink but still dazed, and asked me:

‘What class are you in?’

‘Class 15.’

‘What were you doing before the war?’

‘Student.’

‘Ah! Two of my brothers were students.’

She washed my right hand (the left was still swathed in dressings), holding it in hers like you do with little children. The water in the basin was black and mucky. It was thick with the mud of Artois, the clay into which we were driven by the whistle of shells and which had plastered us with hard scales.

I thought she had finished with me but she came back, accompanied by a small, brusque woman who told me:

‘We will move you near the windows.’

‘I’m fine here,’ I answered weakly, wanting nothing but sleep.

‘No, you’ll be better there, take my word for it.’

And without further ado she summoned the porters. I glared at her, I found her unpleasant. However, this turned out to be the first of Mademoiselle Nancey’s kind deeds. From then on this was to be my bed, second in the row by the windows looking on to the hospital’s main quadrangle, near the door, which I was soon convinced was a very good position. And I owed it to my social status, of which the young woman had immediately informed the head nurse.

I could sleep.

The next morning.

‘It’s not bad here,’ says Nègre.

‘It’s not bad at all!’

Now that we were rested we could begin to take stock of our surroundings and companions. Before the war, mixed hospital no. 97 had been a religious boarding school called Saint-Gilbert, and ward 11 was in a former dormitory. It was very long room, lit by ten windows on either side, the darkest corner sectioned off, with beds lined up at two-metre intervals. In the middle of the room were dining tables; in the corner, the store cupboards, dispensary, and wash-hand basins. The ward was painted pale yellow, and was spotlessly clean; there were even vases of flowers.

‘All in all,’ continues Nègre, ‘a pleasant place to be in pain.’

‘I’m not in pain. You?’

‘Not a lot.’

We watch the nurses scurrying around busily. (‘The brunette’s not bad.’ ‘The tall one’s OK, too.’). They are getting the measure of this new batch of patients, choosing their favourites. They stop at the foot of each bed and call out to each other, a little too casually:

‘Mademoiselle Jeanne, come and take a look at this one. Doesn’t he look young?’

Unshaven and feverish, the wounded man who has lost the habit of talking to women, if he had ever acquired it, shrinks down under the blankets, blushes, and gives stupid answers to young ladies whose confidence intimidates him.

‘You’d think these lasses were playing with their dollies!’

They are very polite and display considerable willingness to help. But you can still feel a certain distance in their tone, which shows that we are not from their milieu. Caring for us is a patriotic task, a humane gesture which they deign to make but which does not overcome the distance born of different upbringing. They keep the prejudices of their caste and address officers in a different tone. Nègre grumbles:

‘We’re going to look bloody stupid if this carries on! We didn’t put up with shells and bullets in order to get pushed around by a bunch of hoity-toity brats!’

‘You’re right. It’s high time we restored a bit of order.’

A nurse is just passing. I wave her over and, once she is at my bedside, I say:

‘Mademoiselle, I need some notepaper, some cigarettes, and a newspaper. Can you sort that out?’

‘Certainly, monsieur. We get the
Écho de Paris
here.’

‘No doubt you do. But I want
L’Œuvre
, mademoiselle. Shall I give you the money?’

‘And I need some pipe tobacco,’ chips in Nègre, ‘and a ballpoint pen.’