The Prospector (32 page)

That was the very beginning of the war and we didn't know it. At the time we thought the fighting would soon be over, that all around us the countryside was deserted like these open graves where they dumped the dead horses.

Stretching out before us like the sea: those hills, those forests, so very dark in spite of the bright summer light, almost unreal, over which only the crows have the right to fly. What lies out there? Our enemies, silent, invisible. They are living over there, conversing, eating, sleeping like we are, but we never see them. From time to time the sound of machine guns in the distance to the north-west or to the south tells us they still exist. Or else the high-pitched humming of an aeroplane slipping between two clouds that we never see again.

So we work at building roads. Every day trucks bring loads of stones that they dump in piles along the banks of the Ancre. The soldiers from the Territorial Army and the New Army join us in the road construction, in preparing the railway that will cross the river to reach Hardecourt. No one would recognize this land after these past few months. In the place where, in the beginning of winter, there was nothing but pasture, fields, woods, a few old farms, now stretches a network of stone roads, railways, with their sheet-metal shelters, their hangars for trucks and aeroplanes, tanks, cannon, munitions. Over all of that, the camouflage teams have strung great brown tarps, tent cloths that imitate the scabby prairies. When the wind blows the tarps snap like the sails of a ship and you can hear a metallic hum in the barbed wire. The heavy cannon have been buried in the centre of large craters, looking like giant antlions, wicked land crabs. The carts come and go endlessly, bringing loads of artillery shells: the Navy's 37- and 47 mm-calibre shells, but also 58-, 75-calibre shells. Beyond the railway the men are digging trenches on the banks of the Ancre, pouring concrete platforms for cannon, building fortified shelters. In the plains south of Hardecourt, near Albert, Aveluy, Mesnil, where the valley grows narrower, props in trompe l'œil have been set up: fake ruins, fake wells that hide machine-gun positions. With old uniforms we make figures stuffed with straw that look like the bodies of soldiers sprawled on the ground. With bits of sheet metal and branches we set up fake hollow trees to shield lookouts, machine guns, artillery. On the roads, the railway, the bridges, we've put up large grass-coloured raffia screens, bales of hay. With an old barge brought from Flanders, the British Expeditionary Corps has prepared a river gunboat that will sail down the Ancre all the way to the Somme.

Now that summer is here, bringing such long days, we feel new strength, as if everything we were witnessing being prepared here were nothing but a game, and we don't think about death any more. After the despair of the long winter months spent in the mud of the Ancre, Odilon has become gay and self-confident. After days of working on the roads and railways he drinks coffee and talks with the Canadians before curfew in the evenings. Nights are starry and I recall the nights in Boucan, the sky over English Bay. For the first time in months we allow ourselves to confide in one another. The men talk about their parents, their fiancées, their wives and children. Photographs are passed around, dirtied, mouldy old bits of cardboard upon which, in the flickering light of the lamps, smiling faces appear, distant, fragile figures, like spectres. Odilon and I don't have any photographs, but in my coat pocket I have the last letter I received from Laure, in London, before boarding the
Dreadnought
. I've read and reread it so many times I could recite it by heart, with those half-mocking and somewhat melancholy words I so love. She mentions Mananava, where we'll be reunited one day, when all this is over. Does she really believe that? One night I can't keep from talking to Odilon about Mananava, about the two tropicbirds that circle over the ravine at twilight. Has he listened to me? I think he's gone to sleep with his head on his bag in the underground shelter that serves as a barracks. It doesn't matter. I need to go on talking, not for him, but for myself. So that my voice will reach out beyond this hellhole, all the way out to the island where Laure is surrounded by the night silence, eyes wide, listening to the rustling of the rain, as in the old days in the house in Boucan.

We've been working on setting up this scenery for so long that we don't believe in the reality of war any more. Ypres, the forced marches in Flanders, are far behind. Most of my comrades didn't live through that. At first this trompe l'œil work made them laugh, they who'd been expecting the smell of gunpowder, the thundering of cannon. Now they don't understand any more, they're growing impatient. ‘Is this what war is all about?' asks Odilon after a harrowing day spent digging out mine galleries and trenches. The sky above us is leaden, heavy. The storm breaks with a sudden downpour and when it's time for the relief guard we are drenched, as if we'd fallen in the river.

Evenings, in the underground shelter, the men play cards, dreaming out loud as they await curfew. News is passed around, the fighting in Verdun, and for the first time, we hear those strange names that will be repeated so often: Douamont,
le
ravin de la Dame
or
the Lady's Ravine, Fort Vaux, and the name that makes me shudder in spite of myself,
le Mort-Homme
or Dead Man's Hill. One soldier, an English-speaking Canadian, tells of the Tavannes Tunnel, where the wounded and dying are piled, while shells explode overhead. He relates the lurid incandescence of explosions, the smoke, the ripping sound of 370 mm mortar shells, of all the men that are being mutilated and burned at this very moment. Can it be summer already? On some evenings the sunset over the trenches is extraordinarily beautiful. Huge violet and crimson-coloured clouds hovering in the grey, golden sky. Can those who are dying at Douamont see it? I imagine life up in the sky, soaring so high above the earth as if on the wings of the tropicbirds. You wouldn't see the trenches, the shell marks any more, you'd be far away.

We all know that combat is near now. The preparations we've been working on since the beginning of winter have come to an end. The teams don't go down to the river any more, the trains have almost stopped running. In the shelters under the tarps, the cannon are ready, the light machine guns are in the circular dugouts at the ends of the trenches.

Around mid-June Rawlinson's soldiers begin to arrive. Englishmen, Scots and battalions from India, South Africa, Australia, divisions coming back from Flanders, from Artois. We've never seen so many men before. They turn up on all sides, march along the roads, the railways, settle into the kilometres of trenches we've dug. They say the attack will take place on 29 June. The cannon start firing as early as the 24th. All along the bank of the Ancre to the south, along the bank of the Somme, where the French forces are entrenched, the deafening blasts of cannon roll. After so many days of silence, after this long, huddled wait, we feel giddy, feverish, we're trembling with impatience.

All day, all night long, the cannon boom, a red glow lights up the sky over the hills around us.

Out there, on the other side, they remain silent. Why don't they respond? Have they vanished? How can they resist this deluge of artillery fire? We don't sleep for six days and six nights, constantly combing the landscape in front of us. On the sixth day the rain begins to fall, a torrential rain that turns the trenches into streams of mud. The cannon fall silent for several hours, as if the sky itself has joined in battle.

Crouching in the shelters, we watch the rain falling all day until evening and we're seized with anxiety, as if the rain will never stop. The Englishmen talk about the flooding in Flanders, hordes of green uniforms swimming in the swamped waters of the Lys. Most of us feel disappointed that the attack has been put off. We study the skies and, as evening is approaching, Odilon announces that the clouds have grown thinner, that you can even see a patch of sky, and everyone cries, ‘Hurrah!' Maybe it's not too late. Maybe the attack will take place during the night. We watch the darkness creeping slowly into the Ancre Valley, drowning the forests and the hills facing us. It is a strange night that has fallen, not one of us is really sleeping. Near dawn, just as I'm dozing off with my head resting on my knees, I'm startled awake by the brouhaha of the attack. The light is already bright, blinding, the wind blowing in the valley is hot and dry, the sort of wind I haven't felt since Rodrigues and English Bay. From the still damp riverbanks a glowing, gossamer mist is rising, and the odour that I perceive just then, the odour that penetrates and disconcerts me: the smell of summer, of earth, of grass. And also what I glimpse between the stanchions of the shelter, the gnats dancing in the light, buoyed by the wind. There is such peace in that moment, everything seems to be suspended, stopped.

All of us are standing in the muddy trench, helmets pushed down tight, bayonets fixed to the barrels of our rifles. We're peering over the embankment at the blue sky where white clouds, light as down, fluff. We are tense, we're listening to the sounds of summer, the water flowing in the river, the chirping insects, the singing of a lark. We're waiting with painful impatience in the peaceful silence, and when the first rumblings of cannon come from the north, the south and the east, we flinch. Soon the heavy English artillery begins to thunder behind us, and in response to their powerful blasts the earth-shaking boom of the shells hitting the ground on the other side of the river echoes out. The bombardment is nerve-rattling – after that long rainy day – to us it seems incomprehensible that it should be rumbling around in that utterly clear blue sky and that beautiful bright summer sunlight.

After an eternity the din of explosions comes to an end. The silence that follows is filled with pain and dazedness. At exactly seven-thirty the order to attack is passed down from trench to trench, repeated by sergeants and corporals. When it's my turn to shout it out, I look at Odilon's face, I catch the last expression on his face. Now I'm running, leaning forwards, clutching my rifle in both hands, towards the bank of the Ancre, where the pontoons are covered with soldiers. I can hear the spitting of machine guns in front of me, behind me. Where are the enemy bullets? Still running, we make it across the moored pontoons in a racket of boots on the wooden planks. The river water is heavy, blood-coloured. Men slip in the mud on the other bank, fall, do not get up again.

The dark hills are above me, I can feel their threat like a penetrating gaze. Black plumes of smoke are rising on all sides, smoke with no fire, the smoke of death. Isolated rifle shots ring out. Spurts of machine-gun fire come up out of the ground in the distance, without our being able to tell from where. I run behind the group of men, not trying to find shelter, towards the objective that has been pointed out to us for months: the hills that lay between us and Thiepval. Men are running, joining us on the right, in a shell-torn field: they're from the 10th Corps, the 2nd Corps, and Rawlinson's division. In the middle of that vast and empty field the bushes burned by the gases and shells look like scarecrows. The sound of light machine-gun fire bursts forth all of a sudden, straight ahead of me at the end of the field. Barely a light cloud of bluish smoke floating here and there at the edge of the dark hills; the Germans are buried in the mortar craters, their LMGs are spraying the field. Men are already falling, cut down, puppets with no strings, crumpling up in groups of ten, of twenty. Were any orders given? I didn't hear anything, but I throw myself on the ground, I'm looking around for shelter, a crater, a trench, a muddy tree stump. I'm crawling over the field. All around me I can see shapes crawling like I am, like huge slugs, their faces hidden behind their rifles. Others are lying still, faces in the muddy earth. And the cracking of rifles resounding in the still air, the spurts of LMG fire, in front, behind, everywhere, leaving their small blue, transparent clouds floating in the warm breeze. After crawling like that through the loose earth, I finally find what I'm looking for: a block of stone, hardly larger than a boundary stone, left in the field. I stretch out against it, my face so close to the stone I can see every crack, every moss stain. I remain there, not moving, my body racked with pain, ears ringing with the blasts of the bombs that have stopped falling now. I think, say out loud, now's the time to let them have it! Where are the other men? Are there still men on this earth or only these pathetic, ridiculous larvae, crawling along and then stopping, disappearing in the mud? I lie there for so long, my head against the stone, listening to the LMGs and the rifles that my face grows as cold as stone. Then I hear the cannon behind me. Shells explode in the hills, black clouds from fires rise into the hot sky.

I hear officers shout out the order to attack, just as they had a little while ago. I'm running straight out ahead again, towards the mortar craters where the LMGs are buried. There they are all right, like huge burned insects, and the bodies of the dead Germans look like their victims. The men run in close ranks towards the hills. The LMGs hidden in other craters spray the field, killing dozens, scores of men at a time. Along with two Canadians I roll, head over heels, into a crater occupied by German bodies. Together we heave the cadavers overboard. My comrades are pale, their faces stained with mud and smoke. We stare at each other, saying nothing. In any case the noise of the battle would drown out our words. It even drowns out our thoughts. Protected by the gun shield of the LMG, I examine the objective: the hills of Thiepval are still just as dark, just as distant. We'll never make it.

Around two o'clock in the afternoon I hear the retreat being sounded. The two Canadians immediately leap out of the shelter. They run towards the riverbank so fast I can't keep up with them. I can feel cannon blasting ahead of me, hear the howling of heavy mortar sailing over us. We've only got a few minutes to get back to the base, back to the shelter of the trenches. The sky is filled with smoke, the sunlight that was so beautiful this morning is smirched now, tarnished. When I finally get to the trench, breathless, I look at the men who are already there, I attempt to recognize their eyes in their exhausted faces, in the blank, absent look of men who have narrowly escaped death. I look for Odilon's eyes and my heart is pounding in my chest because I don't recognize them. I move hurriedly through the trench, all the way to the night bunker. ‘Odilon? Odilon?' The men look at me in bewilderment. Do they even know who Odilon is? There are so many missing. For the rest of the day, as the bombardments continue, I keep hoping – irrationally – that I will finally see him appear at the edge of the trench with his calm, child's face, his smile. The officer calls roll in the evening, puts an ‘X' in front of the names of the absentees. How many of ours are missing? Twenty, thirty men, maybe more. Slumped against the banking, I smoke and drink bitter coffee, looking up at the beautiful night sky. The next day and those that follow, the rumour goes around that we've been beaten at Thiepval, as well as at Ovillers, at Beaumont-Hamel. They say that Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French army, had requested Haig to take Thiepval at any cost and that Haig refused to send his troops into another massacre. Have we lost the war?