Fear (31 page)

Thus equipped according to our tastes, haversacks at our side, blankets across our chests instead of bandoliers, and canes in hand, our marches are turning into tourism. Those who are interested in the countryside can enjoy discovering panoramic views, picturesque bends in the road, a deep, crystal-clear lake at the foot of a valley, pastures as green as freshly painted railings, bright borders of birches round a park, an old house with rusty wrought iron and broken shutters which retains nobility in its decrepitude like a grand old lady fallen on hard times. Mornings are sweet delight, pale blue mist clearing to unveil wide vistas blushed with luminous pink. All of a sudden, the chime of church bells breaks the silence, while the farmyard cock warms himself in the sun, lord of all he surveys. We share the adventure of new billets in the evening, a village to explore with all it has to offer in the way of grocery shops, bars, wood and straw – and women, if we stay awhile. But women are rare and the countless men who lust after them get in each other’s way. The excess of desires protects their virtue, and the beneficiaries of this are usually men stationed at the rear who have permanent quarters in the village.

We make up a little detachment at the head of the battalion, behind the commandant on horseback who is himself preceded by all the cyclists. The road opens before us, clear and empty. As we pass through towns and villages, we are the first to spot a pretty girl standing on her doorstep. My comrades, almost all from the south, greet her with an exclamation which needs to be heard with the right accent:
Vé, dé viannde!
Which makes it clear that their aspirations are not focused on the soul of this child.[
34
]

Behind us, men from the companies struggle with their loads of packs, light machine guns, and full bandoliers. They need marching songs to forget their fatigue. Drawing its recruits from Nice, Toulon, Marseille, etc., the regiment has kept its local traditions in spite of the incorporation of new elements from all over the country. One song is particularly popular. It celebrates the charms of a certain Thérèsina, a young woman who always extends a warm welcome to working men. Every couplet praises a different part of her superb body. The best bit, kept till last, is more or less the same as that which gourmets appreciate in chickens. More men join in, voices swell, and the song ends on this apotheosis:

Bella c . . . nassa
,

Quà Thérèsina
,

Bella c . . . nassa
,

Bella c . . . nassa
,

Per fare l’amoré.

Thérèsina, mia bella
,

Per fare l’amoré.

Thérèsina, mia bella
,

Per fa-ré l’a-mo-ré!
[
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]

This evocation of the charming Thérèsina, half-Niçoise, half-Italian, has helped us up many a steep hill and over many a difficult stretch, as if possession of this military Venus must be the reward for our efforts.

Soldiers from the south are very demonstrative. During breaks, while we are all sitting around outside our billets, they shout out from group to group, and amiably insult each other in their colourful patois.

‘Oh! Barrachini, commen ti va, lou miô amiqué?’

‘Ta mare la pétan! Qué fas aqui?’

‘Lou capitani ma couyonna fan dé pute!’

‘Vaï, vaï, brave, bayou-mi ouna cigaréta!’

‘Qué bâo pitchine qué fas!’
[
36
]

At the front, where there is the risk of the Germans listening in to our telephone communications, this patois is used as a code. I remember once hearing our adjutant announce a bombardment of our sector thus:

‘Lou Proussiane nous mondata bi bomba!’

I do not understand everything. But I love this sonorous tongue, which evokes sunny lands with all their optimism and nonchalance, and lends a particular pungency to their tales. Sometimes when we’re sharing a hut I have the impression of finding myself mixed in with an exotic tribe. These people experience the north as an exile. They say: ‘We’ve come to fight for others. It isn’t our country that’s being attacked.’ To them, their country is the shores of the Mediterranean, and they have no worries about their frontiers. They are astonished that people can fight tooth and nail over cold regions, blanketed in snow and fog for six months of the year.

Yet they perform their enforced role as soldiers just like everyone else – only with a bit more noise and cursing. They are easy people to get on with.

The battered division has gone to recuperate on quiet roads and in peaceful villages. Survivors of the Chemin des Dames have brought back a series of anecdotes which they embellish and gradually transform into feats of arms. Now that they are no longer in immediate danger, the simplest men forget how they shook with fear, forget their despair, and display a naïve pride. Poor men who paled in terror under the shells, and will do so again at the next engagement, make themselves into a legend worthy of Homer, without seeing that their vanity, which has nothing to feed on apart from the war, will become part of the same traditions of heroism and chivalrous combat that they usually scorn. If you were to ask them ‘Were you afraid?’ many would deny it. At the rear they start talking again of courage, dupes of this tawdry illusion. They like to impress civilians with tales of the horrors they have witnessed, exaggerating their own sangfroid. They bask in the joy of having survived the massacres, blot out the others that are being prepared, and the fact that their lives that they managed to save last time round will soon be threatened again. They live in the present, they eat and they drink. ‘No need to worry!’ they say, and in that they are mistaken.

Rewards and medals have been distributed, with the usual injustice. Men like lieutenants Larcher and Marennes, for example, who held the battalion together, have received hardly any recognition. When a battalion performs well, its leader is the first to get medals, and if he does not indicate those among his subordinates who showed merit, the higher ranks ignore them. In fact Commandant Tranquard abandoned us at our first break, without so much as a by your leave, and without bothering to put the affairs of his unit in order – ‘like a yellow-belly’ as people said. The men at the front fight amidst chaos; there are no witnesses, no umpires to record their successes. They alone can judge where honour is due. This makes most proud proclamations ridiculous and most honours a disgrace. We know of all the usurped reputations which nevertheless carry weight at the rear. Medals are a mockery when some share out the honours and everyone else shares the risks. And as for stripes, they quickly became absurd distinctions; we tore them off long ago. Their only value is for those passing their time in the military zone at the rear who want to impress people when they’re on leave. For us, the front means the trenches.

We have been walking in the Vosges, revisiting the solemn, majestic forests and the silent mountain passes. We have got as far the Col de la Schlucht, opposite Munster. At the foot of the high peak of the Hohneck, its summit still covered with snow that had survived the summer, we were billeted in isolated encampments. In this valley of boredom we were only troubled by our own anti-aircraft batteries, whose shells fell back on us. Some victors of the last battles were thus stupidly wounded.

After Pétain’s offensive, we returned to the Chemin des Dames, captured at last, to the area around Vauxaillon, to the left of the Moulin de Laffaux. Because of our advance, this sector was still disorganised. Paths led to the battalion command post, set up in a little house on a hillside and the runners had their shelter in some ruins.

Along with Frondet, I slept in a narrow passage which we shared with an unexploded shell from a 150 which had come through the wall. A main road led on to the front lines. Down on the plain we found a village hidden by trees, and German positions were scattered around the rich, unspoilt countryside.

We only got shelled at mealtimes in the field kitchens, and spent our leisure exploring the old enemy positions, which had been knocked to pieces by a bombardment lasting several days. On the Mont des Singes we found a number of German corpses, purple and swollen, in an advanced state of decomposition. Grimacing and terrifying, these hideous cadavers had been left to the worms which were coming out of their noses and mouths like some gruel that they vomited as they were dying. They awaited burial, eye sockets already picked clean, hands blackened and shrunken, clenched on the ground. In spite of the smell, the most hardened and greedy soldiers searched them again, but in vain. These unfortunates had already been robbed once by their conquerors, as revealed by their open jackets and turned-out pockets; all the trophies were long gone. Hatred played no part in this pillaging of their remains, merely the desire for booty, traditional in war, to the point of being its true motive, which could only find satisfaction on dead bodies, on quite rare occasions.

At least the corpses proved that the enemy was also taking serious losses, something we did not often have the means to verify. Then we alerted the sanitary brigade to their presence, and stopped going to see these rotting conquerors with empty pockets.

Now we are in another sector, and it looks like this time we will be here for a while.

On our right is the little village of Coucy, crowned by a medieval castle with round towers. On our right is the English army which is holding the Barisis sector. The reserve battalion occupies a huge limestone cave network, a ‘
creute
’ – with entrances on the opposite slope beneath a plateau. Below us lie a valley, fields, a forest, and in the background, a canal. We take it in turns at the front line, between two sectors that have not been devastated and are covered with wild flowers.

The soldiers have returned to their monotonous duties: keeping watch and digging trenches. Men are increasingly dispersed, are expected to work to their limits. The hours of guard duty are extended. While some regiments only go up to the trenches to attack and do not stay there, ours hardly ever leaves them, except when it is moved. Our losses are generally less, but the work is exhausting. After two weeks at the front line, the battalions are moved back to the reserve positions, as close as they get to rest. At night, detachments are sent off in fatigue parties but in the daytime men remain in the cave with little to do and pass their time playing cards, engraving shell cases, sleeping, sewing or writing.

The days pass, indistinguishable in their tedium. Shells always find a few victims. There is nothing interesting in the communiqués and it is clear the war has no reason to stop.

In the morning the ground is hard, a thin film of ice covers the puddles and long-fallen leaves crackle underfoot. Winter has come and we have to prepare to spend it as well as possible. ‘One more winter!’ cry the men in despair. They draw up a balance sheet of four years of war. They have seen many of their comrades perish and have narrowly escaped death themselves several times, and yet the Allies have still not managed to carry out a major offensive which has shaken the enemy line or liberated a significant portion of territory. The battles of 1915 have won nothing but local advantages, paid for too dearly and without strategic importance. At Verdun we were on the defensive, the Somme was inconclusive, and last April’s offensive was a crime that the whole army has condemned. We followed our brothers’ rebellion at a distance and our hearts were with them: the mutinies were a human protest. Too much has been asked of us, our sacrifices have been wasted and abused. We know very well that it is the docility of the masses that permits so many horrors, our own docility . . . We are kept ignorant of battle plans, but we see the battles themselves, and we can judge.

No end seems in sight. Every day men fall. Every day we have less trust in our own luck. There are still some old hands in the platoons who have been there from the start, hardly leaving the front. Some of them believe themselves immune, invulnerable, but they are rare. The majority, on the contrary, estimate that the luck which has saved them will eventually turn. The more times a man has a lucky escape, the more he has the feeling his turn is coming. When he thinks back at the dangers he has undergone, he is caught by a retrospective terror, like someone who pales after having narrowly avoided a serious accident. We all have a fund of luck (we like to believe), and if you draw on it for too long there will be nothing left. Of course there is no law to this and everything comes down to probabilities. But faced with the injustice of fatality, we hang on to our lucky star, take refuge in absurd optimism, and we must forget that it is absurd or we will suffer. We have seen plenty of evidence of the fact that there is no predestination, but it’s the only notion we have to keep us going.

Here everything is planned for killing. The ground is ready to receive us, the bullets are ready to hit us, the spots where the shells will explode are fixed in time and space, just like the paths of our destiny which will inevitably lead us to them. And yet we want to stay alive and we use all our mental strength to silence the voice of reason. We are well aware that death does not immortalise a human being in the memories of the living, it simply cancels him out.

The rose-pink morning light, the silence of dusk, the warmth of midday, all these are traps. Happiness is a ruse, preparing us for an ambush. A man feels a sudden sense of physical well-being and raises his head above the parapet: a bullet kills him. A bombardment goes on for hours but there are only a few victims, while a single shell fired for want of anything better to do lands in the middle of a platoon and wipes it out. A soldier comes back from the long nightmare of Verdun and on an exercise a grenade detonates in his hand, tearing off his arm, ripping open his chest.