Fear (39 page)

‘My boy, all the institutions lead to war. It’s the crown of the whole social order, we’ve learnt that. And since it’s the powerful who decide to go to war, and the minorities who do the fighting . . .’

‘We’ll tell them . . .’

‘Oh, you’re too much . . . Enough. I’m off to see if the Prussians are ready to go home yet.’

I share a bright and comfortable little shelter with Nègre, with a good stove. We are in a camp tucked away among the pines on a mountain slope. While my friend is off on his rounds, I’m sweeping up and chopping wood. In the evenings we prepare reports on the day on a drawing table and compare our maps of the sector with aerial photos sent by the division.

We spend our free time in animated debates, which usually leave me confused given Nègre’s passion for argument and his tendency to push logic to the limit. But our debates make no difference to our friendship. That’s the main thing.

We can feel that the end of the war is near.

Our telegraphists have been intercepting radio messages. We now know that an armistice is under discussion and that the Germans have asked for peace terms from GCHQ. It is nearly over.

At around six o’clock one morning, an artillery spotter wakes us up.

‘That’s it. The armistice takes effect at eleven o’clock.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Armistice at eleven o’clock. Official.’

Nègre sits up and looks at his watch.

‘Another five hours of war!’

He puts on his helmet and takes his cane.

‘Where are you off to?’ I ask.

‘I’m going down to Saint-Amarin. I’m deserting. I’m going to get myself under cover and I advise you to spend the next five hours at the bottom of the deepest trench you can find and not go out. Return to the womb of our mother earth and wait for delivery. We are as yet but embryos on the threshold of the greatest birth ever seen. In five hours we will be born.’

‘But what are we risking?’

‘Everything! We’ve never risked so much, we risk catching the last shell. We’re still at the mercy of an artilleryman in a bad mood, a barbarian fanatic, a mad nationalist. You don’t by chance believe that the war has killed all the halfwits? They belong to a race that will never die out. I’m sure there was a halfwit in Noah’s Ark and he was the most prolific male on God’s blessed raft! Keep your head down, I tell you . . . Cheerio! We’ll see each other again in peacetime.’

He hurries off, vanishing into the morning mist.

‘At the end of the day, he’s right,’ said the spotter.

‘Then stay here with me. There’s not much danger here.’

He lay down on Nègre’s bunk. No sounds of war disturbed the morning. We lit cigarettes, and we waited.

Eleven o’clock.

Total silence. Total astonishment.

And then a murmur rose up from the valley, answered by another from the front. A great outburst of shouting, echoing through the naves of the forest. It seemed that the whole earth was exhaling one long sigh. And that an enormous weight was falling from our shoulders. We cast off the hair shirts of anguish that mortify our chests: we are finally saved.

It is a moment that brings us back to 1914. Life rises up again like the dawn. The future opens before us like a magnificent avenue. But it is an avenue bordered by tombs and cypresses. A bitter taste mars our joy, and our youth has greatly aged.

The only goal offered to us through all these years of war was the horizon, crowned with explosions. But we knew we could never reach that goal. Gorged on the living and the dead, the soft earth seemed accursed. Young men, from the land of Balzac and the land of Goethe, whether they were taken from universities, workshops or the fields, were provided with daggers, revolvers and bayonets, and were pitched against each other, to butcher and maim in the name of an ideal which we were promised would be used wisely and well by those at the rear.

At twenty we were on the bleak battlefields of modern warfare, a factory for the mass production of corpses, where all that is asked of the combatant is that he is a unit of the immense and obscure number who do their duty and take the shells and the bullets, a single unit in the multitude that they destroyed, patiently and pointlessly, at a rate of one ton of steel per pound of young flesh.

Through all these years, when they had broken our spirits, and though we no longer had any conviction to drive us on, they sought to make us into heroes. But we saw only too well that hero meant victim. Through all these years, they demanded from us, hour after hour, the total acquiescence that no moral strength could allow us to repeat continually. Certainly many had consented to die, once or ten times over, resolutely, to have done with it all. But every time that we kept our lives, having made a gift of them, we were pursued even harder than before.

Through all these years, they forced us to gaze on the rotting, dismembered corpses of those who had been our brothers, and we could not stop ourselves thinking that these were the images of what we would be the next day. Through all these years, while we were young, healthy, and full of hopes that tortured us by their tenacity, they kept us in a kind of final agony, like a death watch for our youth. Because for us, the ones still alive today, the survivors, the moment that precedes pain and death, more terrible than pain and death, has already lasted for years . . .

And peace comes suddenly – like a burst of gunfire. Like a stroke of good fortune for a poor, exhausted man. Peace: a bed, meals, quiet nights, plans that we have still not had the time to form . . . Peace: this silence that has fallen over the lines, and fills the sky, and spreads across the whole earth, the great silence of a funeral . . . I think of the others, those in Artois, and the Vosges, and the Aisne, and Champagne, of our age, whose names we have already forgotten . . .

‘It feels really funny, doesn’t it?’ says a soldier passing by.

Our new colonel has just been told that the Germans are abandoning their lines and coming to meet us. He answers: ‘Give the order that they must not be allowed to approach. Open fire if necessary!’ He seems furious. A secretary explains: ‘He was waiting to get his general’s stars.’ He must find our joy deeply offensive.

Then we decide that we too should go down to Saint-Amarin to celebrate the armistice. We will return this evening. We doubt that the intelligence section has any more intelligence to receive or to give. Since eleven o’clock we are no longer soldiers but civilians held against our will.

We stroll down the paths joking merrily.

Vououou . . . We throw ourselves to the ground, up against the tree trunks. But instead of an explosion, we hear a roar of laughter.

‘Bloody fool!’

The man who had imitated the whistle of a shell answers:

‘You’re not used to peace yet!’

It is true. We are not used to not being afraid.

Down in Saint-Amarin, everyone is drinking, shouting and singing. Women are smiling, and getting cheers and kisses.

I know the café where we will find Nègre, and we head straight for it. He is indeed there, and it’s evident that he’s already slightly drunk. He climbs up on the table, knocking over glasses and bottles, and, to welcome us, points to the crowd of soldiers with a grand gesture:

‘And on the 1,561st day of the fight-to-the-end era, they rose from the dead, covered in lice and glory!’

‘Bravo, Nègre!’

‘Soldiers, I congratulate you, you have attained your objective: Escape.’

‘Long live Escape!’

Nègre comes down from the table, warmly embraces us, finds us seats at his table and calls the landlord:

‘Hey there, good Alsatian, wine for these thirsty victors!’

I shout above all the noise:

‘Nègre, what does Poculotte think of the events?’

‘A good question! You know I saw him? At eleven o’clock on the dot I announced myself at his residence. I’ve waited five years for that moment. “Is there something you want, sergeant?” he says, arrogant as ever. But I soon sorted him out: “My dear general, I have come to inform you that as of now we are dispensing with your services and leaving it to Providence to take care of filling the cemeteries. We further inform you that during the rest of our lives we would never like to hear any more of you or your estimable colleagues. We wish to be left in fucking peace. Peace! General, you are dismissed!”’

Six months later our regiment is marching through the suburbs of Saarbrücken, where the
poilus
have been wreaking romantic havoc. They have naturally been exploiting their success with the last of their energy.

On the low balcony of a little house, a pregnant woman, whose appearance and complexion reveal her nationality, gives us a rather daft smile, points to her belly, and, with amicable shamelessness, calls out:

‘
Bedit Franzose!
’

‘Don’t you think,’ says a soldier, ‘that they’ve been feeding us a lot of nonsense with all that stuff about “race hatred”?’

NOTES

1
Author’s note: I have discussed this in another book:
Le Petit Général.

2
Author’s note: ‘The courage, the recklessness, call it what you will, is the flash, the instant of sublimation; then flick! The old darkness again . . .’ William Faulkner, ‘All the Dead Pilots’, 1931.

3
The ‘raging little Borgia’ was Joseph Caillaux, former prime minister and more recently minister of finance, a Radical and pacifist. During his brief spell as prime minister he had averted war with Germany during the Agadir Crisis of 1911. His wife, Henriette, had shot dead the editor of
Le Figaro
, Gaston Calmette, after he had accused Joseph Caillaux of partiality in office, and had threatened to publish some potentially scandalous correspondence between Caillaux and his wife (who had at the time been his mistress). The trial of Madame Caillaux was the most sensational in France for many years, and ended with her acquittal thanks to the oratory of her lawyer, Labori. ‘Caillot’ – pronounced the same as Caillaux – ‘de sang’ is French for blood clot.

4
The buildings of Les Invalides in Paris include a retirement home for war veterans.

5
François Achille Bazaine was commander-in-chief of the French army during the Franco-Prussian War. He surrendered the city of Metz and a force of 180,000 men to the Prussians in October 1870.

6
Pseudonym of Emmanuel Poiré, a popular political cartoonist.

7
Charles Martel, ‘Charles the Hammer’ (688–741 AD), Charlemagne’s grandfather, most famous for leading the victory of Christian Frankish and Burgundian armies against the Muslim forces of the Umayyad Caliphate at the battle of Poitiers (or Tours) in 732.

8
Louis IX.

9
In fact he is supposed to have said ‘Paris is well worth a Mass’.

10
Differences between French and British army ranks can be confusing. Here, it is worth noting that an adjutant (
adjudant
) is a sub-officer, immediately above a sergeant, and has some of the same duties as a
lieutenant
(same spelling and similar role to the British one). A
commandant
is an officer one rank above captain, thus almost but not quite the equivalent of a British major. A French
major
, however, is a staff warrant officer, above an adjutant and below a lieutenant. And to make matters more complicated still, at least for luckless translators, a
major
was also the term used for an army doctor, at least until the late 1920s.

11
In fact Cicero wrote ‘Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’, ‘How long will you abuse our patience, Catiline?’

12
He is referring to an infamous quote from General Joffre, who, when asked in October 1918 by leading politicians what his strategy was, replied ‘I’ll just keep nibbling at them for the time being.’

13
The German offensive that began the war had initially been very successful and by September Paris was in danger. During the Battle of the Marne between 5 and 12 September, a French counter-offensive drove the Germans back to lines where the armies remained for much of the rest of the war. On 7 September the French 6th Army was helped by the dispatch to the front of 10,000 reserves from Paris, of whom some 6,000 came in Paris taxi cabs sent by General Gallieri, the city’s military governor. The taxis – whose drivers apparently received 27% of the actual fare for the journey – became a symbol of national unity, though in fact their military role was relatively insignificant.

14
Bat d’Af was the usual name for the Bataillons d’infanterie légère d’Afrique, also known as ‘Joyeux’, who mainly served in the French colonies of north Africa. Many of the men in the Bat d’Af had previously served relatively short prison terms, usually for crimes of violence or immorality. Discipline in the Bat d’Af was especially tough.

15
Author’s note: This is the effect of foreshortening. A pilot flying over the battlefield would obviously not have seen a blue plain but a plain dotted with blue. In the same way, the earlier expression ‘kingdom of the dead’ may seem excessive to those who judge coldly at a distance. What must be understood is the state of mind of a young man who, after a night of danger and exhaustion, suddenly finds himself facing hundreds of corpses – thousands, even, if you take account of those too far away for him to see. This young man is there as a participant . . . A man who watches a bombardment from a distance might find the sight curious, even amusing. But take him a kilometre closer, where he can look down on what is happening, and his judgement will be strangely different. One should thus not be surprised if emotions bring a few distortions, but remind oneself that no exaggeration, no invention, could ever surpass the horror of the reality.

16
This is a precise description (author’s note).

17
These were used as revetments to retain the soil at the sides of trenches.

18
The 75mm field gun was the main artillery piece used by the French, effective in open country but not much good against trenches.

19
A devout Catholic organisation for young women.