No Man's Land (61 page)

I never made any attempt to get in touch with Princhard, to find out if he had really ‘disappeared', as they kept saying. But it's best if he disappeared.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
was born near Paris in 1894 and died in Meudon in 1961. The virulently anti-Semitic views expressed in his writings in the 1930s and later have always made it difficult to offer a balanced assessment of Céline's literary genius. The fact remains that
Journey to the End of the Night
is one of the great novels to feature the First World War. Although less than a quarter of the book takes place in wartime, the disgust, hatred and bile that the narrator Bardamau, Céline's fictional alter ego, feels for the war colours the whole book. Céline found an appropriate, fragmented style to convey the irrational convulsions of the war. Bardamau is afraid and prepared to admit his fear:

Journey to the End of the Night
, which covers (French) imperialism in Africa and the horror of the car assembly lines of Detroit as well as the war itself, is truly international in its scope but never loses sight of how it is individuals that the system crushes. The book has an extraordinary ability to go from the personal to the political and back again. Maybe not someone you would want to go out drinking with, but Céline sure can write!

ISAAC BABEL

PAPA MARESCOT'S FAMILY

from
On the Field of Honour

translated by Peter Constantine

W
E OCCUPY A VILLAGE
that we have taken from the enemy. It is a tiny Picardy village, lovely and modest. Our company has been bivouacked in the cemetery. Surrounding us are smashed crucifixes and fragments of statues and tombstones wrecked by the sledgehammer of an unknown defiler. Rotting corpses have spilled out of coffins shattered by shells. A picture worthy of you, Michelangelo!

A soldier has no time for mysticism. A field of skulls has been dug up into trenches. War is war. We're still alive. If it is our lot to increase the population in this chilly little hole, we should at least make these decaying corpses dance a jig to the tune of our machine guns.

A shell had blown off the cover of one of the vaults. This so I could have a shelter, no doubt about it. I made myself comfortable in that hole,
que voulez-vous, on loge ou on peut
.
^*

So – it's a wonderful, bright spring morning. I am lying on corpses, looking at the fresh grass, thinking of Hamlet. He wasn't that bad a philosopher, the poor prince. Skulls spoke to him in human words. Nowadays, that kind of skill would really come in handy for a lieutenant of the French army.

‘Lieutenant, there's some civilian here who wants to see you!' a corporal calls out to me.

What the hell does a civilian want in these nether regions?

A character enters. A shabby, shrivelled little old man. He is wearing his Sunday best. His frock coat is bespattered with mud. A half-empty sack dangles from his cowering shoulders.

There must be a frozen potato in it – every time he moves, something rattles in the sack.

‘
Eh bien
, what do you want?'

‘My name, you see, is Monsieur Marescot,' the civilian whispers, and bows. ‘That is why I've come…'

‘So?'

‘I would like to bury Madame Marescot and the rest of my family, Monsieur Lieutenant.'

‘What?'

‘My name, you see, is Papa Marescot.'The old man lifts his hat from his gray forehead. ‘Perhaps you have heard of me, Monsieur Lieutenant!'

Papa Marescot? I have heard this name before. Of course I have heard it. This is the story:Three days ago, at the beginning of our occupation, all non-enemy civilians had been issued the order to evacuate. Some left, others stayed. Those who stayed hid in cellars. But their courage was no match for the bombardment – the stone defense proved hopeless. Many were killed. A whole family had been crushed beneath the debris of a cellar. It was the Marescot family. Their name had stuck in my mind, a true French name. They had been a family of four, the father, mother, and two daughters. Only the father survived.

‘You poor man! So you are Marescot? This is so sad. Why did you have to go into that damned cellar, why?'

The corporal interrupted me.

‘It looks like they're starting up again, Lieutenant!'

That was to be expected. The Germans had noticed the movement in our trenches. The volley came from the right flank, then it moved farther left. I grabbed Papa Marescot by the collar and pulled him down. My boys ducked their heads and sat quietly under cover, no one as much as sticking his nose out.

Papa Marescot sat pale and shivering in his Sunday best. A five-inch kitten was meowing nearby.

‘What can I do for you, Papa? This is no time to beat about the bush! As you can see, we're at each other's throats here!'

‘
Mon lieutenant
, I've told you everything. I would like to bury my family.'

‘Fine, I'll send the men to collect the bodies.'

‘I have the bodies with me, Monsieur Lieutenant!'

‘What?'

He pointed to the sack. In it were the meager remains of Papa Marescot's family.

I shuddered with horror.

‘Very well, Papa, I will have my men bury them.'

He looked at me as if I had just uttered the greatest idiocy.

‘When this hellish din has died down,'I continued, ‘we shall dig an excellent grave for them. Rest assured,
père Maresco
, we will take care of everything.'

‘But I have a family vault.'

‘Splendid, where is it?'

‘But… but …'

‘But what?'

‘But we're sitting in it as we speak,
mon lieutenant
.'

Isaac Babel
was born in 1894 in Odessa, the inspiration for many of his best short stories. Schooled by private tutors because there was a quota for Jewish pupils at state schools, he grew up speaking fluent French, the language in which he first wrote. In 1915, he moved to Petrograd. At that time he was much influenced by French writers and ‘Papa Marescot's Family', one of the first stories Babel wrote in Russian, shows clearly the influence of Maupassant. According to one of his stories, Babel fought on the Romanian front until the end of 1917. He returned to Petrograd in 1918 and worked as a reporter on Gorky's newspaper
Novaya zhizn
. As the Russian Revolution hardened, Babel became more and more disillusioned. A trip in 1930 to the Ukraine enabled him to see at first hand the effects of the forced collectivization of the peasantry. His response was to become ‘a master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence'. But this wisdom came too late. His works were deemed to be ‘off message', and not even Maxim Gorky, his patron, could save him. As part of Stalin's Great Purge, Babel was arrested in 1939. After ‘confessing' to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, he was executed in January 1940.

*
What do you expect, one holes up where one can.

DALTON TRUMBO

A DATE WITH THE SHELL

from
Johnny Got His Gun

H
E HAD LOST ALL TRACK OF TIME
. All his work to trap it all his counting and calculation of it might just as well never have happened. He had lost track of everything except the tapping. The instant he awakened he began to tap and he continued until the moment when drowsiness overcame him. Even as he fell asleep the last portion of his energy and thought went into the tapping so that it seemed he dreamed of tapping. Because he tapped while he was awake and dreamed of tapping while he was asleep his old difficulty in distinguishing between wakefulness and sleep sprang up again. He was never quite positive that he was not dreaming when awake and tapping when asleep. He had lost time so utterly that he had no idea how long the tapping had been going on. Maybe only weeks maybe a month perhaps even a year. The one sense that remained to him out of the original five had been completely hypnotized by the tapping and as for thinking he didn't even pretend to any more. He didn't speculate about the new night nurses in their comings and goings. He didn't listen for vibrations against the floor. He didn't think of the past and he didn't consider the future. He only lay and tapped his message over and over again to people on the outside who didn't understand.

The day nurse tried hard to soothe him but she did it only as if she were trying to calm an irritable patient. She did it in such a way that he knew he would never break through as long as he had her. It never seemed to occur to her that there was a mind an intelligence working behind the rhythm of his head against the pillow. She was simply watching over an incurably sick patient trying to make his sickness as comfortable as possible. She never thought that to be dumb was a sickness and that he had found the cure for it that he was trying to tell her he was well he was not dumb any longer he was a man who could talk. She gave him hot baths. She shifted the position of his bed. She adjusted the pillow in back of his head now higher now lower. When she moved it higher the increased angle bent his head forward. After tapping for a time in this position he could feel pain shooting all the way down his spine and across his back. But he kept right on tapping.

She got to massaging him and he liked that she had such a brisk gentle touch to her fingers but he kept on tapping. And then one day he felt a change in the touch of her fingers. They were not gentle and brisk any longer. He felt the change through the tips of her fingers through the tenderness of her touch he felt pity and hesitancy and a great gathering love that was neither him for her nor her for him but rather a kind of love that took in all living things and tried to make them a little more comfortable a little less unhappy a little more nearly like others of their kind.