Fear (6 page)

‘I’m amazed that no one has hit him back,’ Bertrand said to me.

‘It would be too dangerous. A man who defended himself would no doubt carry the day. But there would be nothing to stop his colonel then ordering him on a mission where he’d get himself killed.’

Once a week we were sent to the showers. The sanitation service had dreamt up the idea of eradicating parasites by soaking us in cresol. Medical orderlies washed us down with a sponge. This treatment made our skin burn for an hour but had no effect at all on the lice we rediscovered afterwards in our clothes – which had not been disinfected – in fine form and with healthy appetites. But still the weekly showers became an attraction, thanks to ‘Old Father Rosebud’. This was the name we had given to a divisional general, a thin, dirty, hunched man with bloodshot eyes, who was always there. This sadistic officer only liked to see soldiers when they were naked. He would inspect each new batch, lined up under the showers, moving along the line with the little mincing steps of an old man, keeping his eyes fixed somewhere not far below their waist. If one of the objects of his gaze struck him by its dimensions he would congratulate the possessor: ‘You’ve got a fine one there!’ His face would wrinkle up in pleasure, and he dribbled. The only other place one encountered him was the latrines. There, he would lose himself in contemplation of the ditches, plunge his cane in, and welcome the men, who were surprised to see him. ‘Go on, lads, don’t be shy, let it go. Healthy bowels make healthy soldiers. I’m just here to check on your morale.’ This behaviour, which would have been unacceptable anywhere except in a war, entertained the troops, who were not fussy about their distractions.

‘It is terrifying to think that the lives of ten thousand men may depend on a general like this,’ said Bertrand. ‘How are we expected to win the war with people like him at the top?’

‘We don’t see what is going on in the other camp,’ I replied. ‘They’ve got their own mad brutes who make just as many mistakes. The best proof is that they set off to conquer with everything they needed for a swift victory, and they failed.’

‘How do you think this is going to end?’

‘No one knows. The men who are running the war have been overwhelmed by events. The forces on both sides are still so huge that they balance each other out. It’s like when you play draughts: you have to remove a lot of pieces before you can get a true picture of the game. A lot more people must be killed before things will take shape.’

‘We keep
nibbling
at them, as . . .’[
12
]

‘The nibbling is mutual. The generals of both sides fight the war with the same military principles and cancel each other out. It takes a great idea to win a war: the wooden horse of Troy, Hannibal’s elephants, Napoleon crossing the Alps through the Saint Bernard Pass . . . those were real ideas.’

‘And the Paris taxis?’[
13
]

‘An idea too – which didn’t really come from the military. And still . . .’

‘And what about valour?’

‘Valour is a virtue for ordinary soldiers; leaders need the virtue of intelligence. What we lack are leaders with outstanding intelligence. Genius shakes up the old rules and principles, genius
invents
.’

‘Do you think that Napoleon . . . ?’

‘Napoleon would have done what he always did. He’d make something new from whatever was available to him in 1914 just like he did in 1800. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, they were
thinkers
. Today all we’ve got are
specialists
, blinded by dogma, who can’t think beyond the narrow boundaries of their military training.’

‘But they know how to do their job.’

‘No, they don’t even know that. Who was there to teach them? This war followed forty years of peace. The only training they could have got was through war games, manoeuvres, empty shams whose results couldn’t be measured. Our generals are like students fresh from college: all theory and no practice. They came to war with modern equipment and a military system that’s a century out of date. But now they’re learning, they are
experimenting with us
. The people of Europe are in the hands of arrogant, all-powerful, ignoramuses.’

‘So what do you think it takes to make a great military leader?’

‘Maybe the first requirement would be that they came from outside the army, so they could bring a fresh approach to understanding war. It isn’t so much a military leader we need as a real leader, which would be something much greater.’

‘Perhaps they’ll still find one . . .’

‘Perhaps . . .’

The heat, the dirt, and the boredom had worn us out.

My most vivid memory from this time was of a dead body, not one I saw but one I smelt. It was a night when we were trying to deepen a communication trench, hardly able to see where we were digging. As one of us struck his pick into the earth there was a squelch, the sound of something bursting. The pick had hit a damp, rotten stomach, which released its miasma right into our faces, in a sudden blast of foul vapour. The stench filled the air, covered our mouths like a foetid flannel so we could not breathe, pricked our eyelids with poisonous needles which brought tears to our eyes. This pestilential geyser caused a panic and the diggers fled the accursed spot. The decomposing body’s disgusting gasses spread out, filled the darkness and our lungs, reigned over the silence. The NCOs had to force us back to this angry corpse, and then we shovelled furiously, desperate to cover it up and calm it down. But our bodies had caught the awful, fecund smell of putrefaction, which is life and death, and for a long time that smell irritated our mucous membranes, stimulated the secretions of our glands, aroused in us some secret organic attraction of matter for matter, even when it is corrupt and almost extinguished. Our own promised, perhaps imminent, putrefaction found communion with this other, powerful extreme of putrefaction, which holds dominion over our pale souls and hunts them down remorselessly.

That night I reflected on the destiny of the unknown soldier whose grave we had disturbed, and upon which many others would trample. I imagined a man like me, someone young, full of plans and ambitions, of loves still uncertain, scarcely out of childhood and about to launch himself into life. To me life is like a game you begin at twenty where victory is called success: money for most people, reputation for some, esteem for a very few. To live, to endure, that is nothing; to achieve is everything. I compare someone who dies young to a player who has just been dealt his cards and then forbidden to play. Maybe this particular player was taking his revenge . . . Twenty years of learning, of subordination, of hopes and desires, the sum of feelings that a human being carries within himself and which gives him his value, had all found their conclusion in a corner of a communication trench. If I must die now, I will not say it is awful or terrible, but it is unjust and absurd, because I have not yet attempted anything, I have done nothing but wait for my chance and my moment, built up my resources and waited. The life of my will and my tastes is only just starting – or will start, because the war has deferred it. If I disappear now, I will have been nothing but subordinate and anonymous. I will have been defeated.

I got my first proper view of a wide section of the front on 15 August 1915. A few kilometres outside our village was a hill called Mont-Saint-Éloi, somewhere near the famous Berthonval farm, I think, from where our spring offensive was launched and which must now therefore be nothing but a pile of rubble. There was a monument on this hill, a church, damaged by shellfire and out of bounds because it was dangerous. But, being curious to see, I managed to slip away with Bertrand and we climbed one of the towers, up a stone stairway that was shaky in places, and partially blocked by debris from the walls, cracked by the bombardment.

From up there you could see right across the plains of Artois, but it was impossible to make out any real signs of a battle. A few white puffs of smoke, followed by explosions, told us that this was indeed where the war was, but we could not see any trace of the armies on the ground observing and destroying each other slowly in this arid, silent landscape. Such a calm expanse, baking in the sunshine, confounded our expectations. We could see the trenches quite clearly but they looked like tiny embankments, or narrow, winding streams, and it seemed incredible that this fragile network could offer serious resistance to attacks, that people did not simply step across it to move forward. I later thought that some generals, who had never done sentry duty at a lookout post nor charged at barbed wire under machine-gun fire, must have seen the trenches as we saw them then, with our novice eyes, and had the same illusions. Such illusions seem to have determined the murderous and pointless offensive in which I took part.

Soon after, we joined a fighting unit.

4. BAPTISM OF FIRE

WE MOVED UP TO THE LINE
at the beginning of September, on a quiet, cool evening. The trench system spread out over eight to ten kilometres, but we wandered around all night, packs on our backs, as the guides who led our column kept getting lost at the various junctions. We often had to retrace our steps and wait while scouts explored the desolate, silent labyrinth in which they, in their turn, got lost. Behind us, some small groups had vanished altogether, through the fault of men who had dropped back a few metres, lost sight of those in front of them, and then set off in the wrong direction. So we all had to take responsibility for those behind us. The march was forever being stopped by shouts of ‘Halt!’ and ‘Turn here!’ which made it very tiring.

I was sustained by the notion that this night was my baptism of fire, and my equipment seemed less of a burden than usual. Little by little we advanced into the active zone, the danger zone. It felt warmer and stuffier, like a place that was lived in; there was a powerful smell of human bodies, a mixture of fermentation and excrement, and food that had gone bad. Men were snoring behind the embankments we brushed past, and glimmers of light marked the openings of the dugouts where they lay. We had to keep ducking to avoid the tangle of wires, traverses, and plank bridges. The first stray bullets began to plough through the air, but the rifle shots themselves were scarcely audible. Shells passed over us like great birds of passage, way up high, then came to earth somewhere off in the depths of the battlefield where they burst with dull thuds. Now rockets were illuminating a flickering landscape, briefly bathing the tattered natural world in baleful moonlight. After these bursts of false day, the night was even blacker and we groped our way forward like blind men. The more we advanced, the more tortuous the passageways became, and the more densely populated too, so it seemed. We finally emerged into ruins and I had the impression that I was entering some town that had been exhumed from the dead. But now the night was nearly over. We saw our pale faces, tinged with green by the dawn and exhaustion. Our squad slipped down into the nearest cellar, settled in by the light of a candle, and slept.

When I woke a few hours later I remembered that I was in Neuville-Saint-Vaast, just a few hundred metres from the front lines. At last, I told myself, I was at the heart of the adventure, with my luck, my strength, and my curiosity intact. I hurried out like an eager tourist, leaving my weapons behind. I was greeted by a beautiful, clear sky, which seemed to me to bode well, and I set off to see the sights, drifting aimlessly along the main street, a real boulevard of war. It was crowded with soldiers bustling about who took no notice of me. The confusion was a delight. I had been transported to an unknown country, like none I had ever seen, and this chaos, which I intended to explore, enchanted me, for I saw it as the symbol of the freedom that surely awaited me here. Nothing remained of the houses except some walls and piles of rubble above the cellars where soldiers sheltered; a few kept parts of their broken timber frames, which stretched out their burned beams in anguish. Mutilated trees were frozen in the postures of supplicants. One, which still had leaves, made me think of the poignant good humour of an invalid. It was pleasant to lose myself in the infinite maze of streets, to feel alone and adrift, and then to find my path again, with the special sense of a true warrior.

The shelters, of all shapes and sizes, dug out of mounds of earth, offered a curious sight. What was particularly striking about these makeshift constructions was that the materials used were themselves just bits of scrap and rubbish: old pieces of wood, old weapons, old pots and pans. With no resources except their wits, the combatants had come up with this primitive solution. A few metal implements sufficed for all their needs and life thus returned to the most basic conditions, as if to the dawn of time.

I went back to our cellar, then set off once more. Continuing my explorations away from the main thoroughfares, I came upon the bodies of two long-dead Germans in the basement of a house. These men must have been hit by grenades and then walled up, in the haste of battle. In this airless space they had not decomposed but shrivelled and then a more recent shell had blown apart their tomb and scattered their remains. I spent some time in their company, turning them over with a stick, not out of hatred or disrespect but motivated rather by a kind of fraternal pity, as if asking them to deliver up the secret of their death. The flattened uniforms seemed empty. Of the scattered remains nothing really survived except for half a head, a mask, but a mask of magnificent horror. The skin on it had dried and turned green, taking on the dark tones of an antique bronze with its patina of age. A pitted eye socket was empty and around it had streamed like tears a paste, now hardened, which must have been brains. It was the only blemish that spoilt the whole thing, but perhaps it really added to it, like the marks of wear add something to the worn stone of ancient statues. It was as if a pious hand had closed the eye, and, beneath the eyelid you could imagine the smooth contour and the shape of the eyeball. The mouth was fixed in the last screams of a terrible death agony, with a rictus of the lips baring the teeth, a mouth wide open, spitting out the soul like a clot of blood. I wished I could have kept this mask that death had fashioned, on which its fatal genius had achieved a synthesis of war, so that a cast could be made and given to women and zealots. I did at least make a sketch which I’ve kept in my notebook, but it does not express the holy horror with which I was filled by its model. The skull lent the chiaroscuro of the ruins a grandeur that I found hard to leave behind, and I only went outside again when the fading daylight cast formless shadows over the forehead, cheek bones and teeth, turning it into a grinning Asian.