Fear (2 page)

I should add two other points. I have not looked at these pages for fifteen years and have just reread them. It is always a surprise for an author to confront a text to which he once put his name. A surprise and a test. For men like to think they learn something as they grow older, That, at least, is how they console themselves.

The tone of
Fear
is extremely scornful and arrogant in places. It is the arrogance of youth and nothing in it could be changed without eliminating youth itself. The young Dartemont thinks what cannot be thought officially. He is still naïve enough to believe that everything is susceptible to reason. He fiercely asserts weighty and unpalatable truths. It is a matter of choosing whether to speak these truths or keep quiet about them. But he is too angry to be cautious. And acquiescence is often a mark of decrepitude.

A second point. Today I would not write this book in exactly the same way. But should I alter it, and to what extent? I am aware that former readers would take me to task if I changed the original text, that they would see it as a concession or capitulation. So, apart from some rare replacements of words or epithets, the text remains that of the first edition. I have even resisted the temptation to add more artistry, reminding myself that literary embellishments to a finished book only weaken it and there is no going back on the risk I took at the start.

One last thing. How will this book be ‘used’, for what propaganda? My answer is simply that it stood apart from all propaganda, and was not written to serve any.

G.C.

THE WOUND

‘I am not a sheep, which means I am nothing.’
 

Stendhal

1. THE PROCLAMATION

‘The danger in these strong communities, founded on similar, steadfast individual members, is an increasing, inherited stupidity, which follows all stability like its shadow.’

Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human
, I, 224
(trans. Helen Zimmern)

THE FIRE WAS ALREADY SMOULDERING
somewhere down in the depths of Europe, but carefree France donned its summer costumes, straw hats and flannel trousers, and packed its bags for the holidays. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky – such an optimistic, bright blue sky. It was terribly hot and drought was the only possible worry. It would be so lovely out in the countryside, or down by the sea. The scent of iced absinthe hung over the café terraces and gypsy orchestras played popular tunes from the
The Merry Widow
, which was then all the rage. The newspapers were full of details from a big murder trial that everyone was talking about; would the woman who some were calling the ‘blood clot’ be condemned or acquitted, would the thundering Labori, her lawyer, and the crimson-faced, raging little Borgia in a tail-coat, who had once led us (saved us, some said) carry the day?[
3
] We could see no further than that. Trains were packed and the booking offices did a roaring trade in round-trip tickets: the well-to-do were looking forward to a two-month holiday.

Then, all of a sudden, bolts of lightning pierce the perfect sky, one after another: ultimatum . . . ultimatum . . . ultimatum . . . But France, gazing at the clouds gathering in the east, says: ‘That’s where the storm will be, over there.’

A clap of thunder in the clear sky above the Île-de-France. Lightning strikes the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Priority! The telegraph is working flat out, for reasons of state. Post offices send out telegrams in cipher, marked ‘Urgent’.

The proclamation is posted up on every town hall in the country.

The shouting starts: ‘It’s official!’

Crowds of people swarm on to the streets, pushing and shoving, running in all directions.

Cafés empty. Shops empty. Cinemas, museums, banks, churches, bachelor flats and police stations empty.

The whole of France now stands gazing at the poster and reads: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – General Mobilisation.’

The whole of France stands on tiptoe to see the poster, all squeezed together in a fraternal huddle, dripping with sweat beneath a burning sun, and repeats the word ‘mobilisation’ without understanding it.

A voice goes off in the crowd like a firecracker: IT’S WAR!

And then France goes into a spin, rushing along the streets and boulevards that are too narrow for such crowds, through the villages, and out across the countryside: war, war, war . . .

Hey! Over there! War!

The country policemen bang their little drums and all the churches ring all the bells in their ancient Romanesque towers and tall, fine Gothic steeples. All together now! War!

The sentries in their tricolour sentry-boxes present arms. The mayors put on their sashes. The prefects put on their old uniforms. The generals assemble their staff. The ministers, in a tizzy, consult each other. War! Whatever next?

No one can keep still. Not the bank clerks, not the drapers’ assistants or the factory workers or the dressmakers or the typists or even the concierges. We’re closing! We’re closing! The ticket offices are closed, the strong-rooms are closed, the factories and the offices are closed. The steel shutters are down. We are all off to see what’s happening!

Military men take on a great importance and smile at the public acclaim. Career officers tell themselves: ‘Our hour has come. No more grovelling around in the lower ranks for us.’

In the teeming streets, men and women, arm in arm, launch themselves into a great dizzy, senseless farandole, because it’s war, a farandole which lasts through part of the night that follows this extraordinary day on which the posters went up on the town hall walls.

It starts just like a festival.

Only the cafés stay open.

And you can still smell the scent of iced absinthe, the scent of peacetime.

Women are crying. Why? A foreboding? Or just nerves?

War!

Everyone is getting ready. Everyone is going.

What is war?

No one has the foggiest idea . . .

It’s more than forty years since the last one. The few surviving witnesses, identifiable by their medals, are old men who talk a lot of drivel, whose youth has deserted them and are well on their way to a place in Les Invalides.[
4
] It was not because we lacked valour that we lost the war of 1870 but because we were betrayed by Bazaine,[
5
] think the French. Ah, if it hadn’t been for Bazaine . . .

In recent years we have learned of other, more distant wars. The one between the English and the Boers, for example. We know about that one mainly through the caricatures of Caran d’Ache[
6
] and the engravings in illustrated magazines. The courageous president Kruger led the Boers in their resolute resistance; we admired him for it, and hoped he would triumph, so as to upset the English who burned Joan of Arc and made a martyr of Napoleon on Saint Helena. Then there was the Russo-Japanese war, Port Arthur and all that. Those Japanese must be formidable soldiers; they beat the famous Cossacks, our allies, who, it must be said, lacked railways. The colonial wars do not seem to us to be very alarming. They evoke expeditions to the heart of the desert, pillaging Arab encampments, the Spahis with their red burnous, Arabs firing Damascene muskets into the air and galloping off on their little horses kicking up the golden sand. As for the Balkan wars, the province of journalists, they didn’t bother us. Living in the centre of Europe as we do, and convinced of the superiority of our civilisation, we consider that these regions are inhabited by coarse, inferior people. To us their wars resemble brawls between hooligans on suburban wastelands.

War was far from our thoughts. To imagine it, we had to refer back to History, to what little we knew of it. This was reassuring. For History offered us a past packed with glorious wars, great victories and ringing declarations, with a cast of remarkable and celebrated figures: Charles Martel,[
7
] Charlemagne, Saint Louis[
8
] sitting under an oak tree on his return from Palestine, Joan of Arc who kicked the English out of France, the hypocrite Louis XI who put people in cages while kissing his devotional medals, the gallant Francois I (‘All is lost save honour’), Henri IV, good-natured and cynical (‘A kingdom is well worth a Mass’[
9
]), the majestic Louis XIV, prolific producer of bastards, indeed all our skirt-lifting, jingoist kings, our eloquent revolutionaries, and Bayard, Jean Bart, Condé, Turenne, Moreau, Hoche, Masséna . . . And towering over them all, the mirage of Napoleon, in which the brilliant Corsican looms through the cannon smoke in his simple military uniform surrounded by his marshals, his dukes, his princes, his scarlet kings, in all their plumes and finery.

It must be said that after bothering all of Europe with our turbulence over so many centuries we have calmed down with age. But if anyone should dare to challenge us, we are ready for them . . . And now the die is cast, we must go to war! We are not afraid, to war we will go. We are still French, are we not?

Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible. They die the victims of their own stupid docility.

When you have seen war as I have just seen it, you ask yourself: ‘How can we put up with such a thing? What frontier traced on a map, what national honour could possibly justify it? How can what is nothing but banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?’

They told the Germans: ‘Forward to a bright and joyous war! On to Paris! God is with us, for a greater Germany!’ And the good, peaceful Germans, who take everything seriously, set forth to conquer, transforming themselves into savage beasts.

They told the French: ‘The nation is under attack. We will fight for Justice and Retribution. On to Berlin!’ And the pacifist French, the French who take nothing at all seriously, interrupted their modest little
rentier
reveries to go and fight.

So it was with the Austrians, the Belgians, the English, the Russians, the Turks, and then the Italians. In a single week, twenty million men, busy with their lives and loves, with making money and planning a future, received the order to stop everything to go and kill other men. And those twenty million individuals obeyed the order because they had been convinced that this was
their duty
.

Twenty million, all in good faith, following God and their prince . . . twenty million idiots . . . like me!

Or rather, no, I did not believe this was my duty. Nineteen years old and I had not yet come to believe that there was anything great or noble in sticking a bayonet into a man’s stomach, in rejoicing in his death.

But I went all the same.

Because it would have been hard for me to do anything else? No, that is not the real reason and I should not make myself out to be better than I am. I went against all my convictions, but still of my own free will – not to fight but out of curiosity: to see.

Through my own behaviour I can explain that of a great many others, especially in France.

In just a few hours, war turned everything upside down, spread the semblance of disorder everywhere – something the French always enjoy. They set off without any hatred at all, drawn by an adventure from which everything could be expected. The weather was lovely. This war was breaking out right at the beginning of August. Ordinary workers were the most eager: instead of their fortnight’s annual holiday, they were going to get several months, visiting new places, and all at the expense of the Germans.

A great medley of clothes, customs and classes, a great clamour, a great cocktail of drinks, a new force given to individual initiatives, a need to smash things up, to leap over fences, to break laws – all this, at the start, made the war acceptable. It was confused with freedom, and discipline was then accepted in the belief that it was lacking.

Everywhere had the atmosphere of a funfair, a riot, a disaster and a triumph; a vast, intoxicating upheaval. The daily round had come to a halt. Men stopped being factory workers or civil servants, clerks or common labourers, in order to become explorers and conquerors. Or so at least they believed. They dreamed of the North as if it were America, or the pampas, or a virgin forest, of Germany as if it were a banquet; they dreamed of laying waste to the countryside, breaking open wine barrels, burning towns, the white stomachs of the blonde women of Germania, of pillage and plunder, of all that life normally denied them. Each individual believed in his destiny, no one thought of death, except the death of others.

In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos.

In Berlin those who wanted all this make an appearance on the palace balconies, in their finest uniforms, in postures suitable for the immortalising of famous conquerors.

Those who are unleashing on us two million fanatics, armed with rapid-fire artillery, machine guns, repeater rifles, hand grenades, aeroplanes, chemicals and electricity, shine with pride. Those who gave the signal for the massacre are smiling at their coming glory.

This is the moment when the first – and last – machine gun should have done its work, emptied its belt of bullets on to that emperor and his advisors, men who believe themselves to be strong, superhuman, arbiters of our destinies, and who are nothing but miserable imbeciles. Their cretinous vanity is destroying the world.

Meanwhile in Paris those who did not know how to prevent all this, who are surprised and overwhelmed by it, run around consulting each other, advising each other, rushing out reassuring communiqués, and mobilising the police against the spectre of revolution. The police, zealous as ever, strike down anyone who is not displaying sufficient enthusiasm.

In Brussels, in London, in Rome, those who feel threatened assess the balance of forces, weigh up their chances, and choose their camp.