The Fires of Autumn (6 page)

He slowly rubbed his closed eyes, picturing once more the
cellar, half under water, where he tended the wounded. That was home to him. For a long time he would know no other. He smiled as he recalled the 14th July, the day when he stood on the staircase at the Rue Monge and planned his future. It was sad and funny to think about that …‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘this filthy war.’

Adolphe Brun looked at him, outraged. Yes, he had forgotten the rules of the game. Here, among civilians, it was not acceptable to speak ill of the war. It had to be described as wonderful, savage, but inspiring. My God, those things were true, of course. But as a doctor, he mostly saw the other face of war, a face with a deadly grimace. How did young Bernard Jacquelain see it? Eighteen years old with a broad chest, strong muscles, sharp reflexes, piercing eyes … Perfect prey for the war! He felt sorry for him, but his pity was the cold, clear-eyed pity of a doctor. During an operation, the arms and legs are sacrificed to save the rest of the body; men are snatched up and thrown into the fire, him along with many others, so that the country may survive … He accepted this. It made him sad, but he accepted it. ‘You can’t cheat,’ he said to himself once more.

All the while, he was growing more and more desperately impatient; he looked at the time and wondered when he could politely leave with his wife. A small gold clock sat opposite him on the mantelpiece; it ticked away very quickly, with the sound of a rodent gnawing away at a piece of furniture. Nearly three o’clock … At three o’clock he would leave the Bruns; he would walk down the staircase, Thérèse on his arm; they would head for a little hotel he knew in Versailles where they would spend their wedding night. And the next day, while she was still asleep (his wife … her hair falling over her neck, her shoulders, just as it did when she was a child, her fine, sweet-smelling hair … that cloud of spun gold …) while she was still asleep, he would very quietly leave, without saying goodbye, without even kissing her, because his heart would
break if he had to give her one last kiss and see her eyes fill with tears.

Finally the meal was over. Madame Brun carried the empty cake dish into the kitchen, the one that had held her masterpiece, her triumph, a specialty of Savoie filled with cherry cream. Not a crumb was left. She had been so overcome with emotion by making this dessert that she had hardly noticed anything else, the wedding, or that Thérèse had left … But nothing would change, because tomorrow, with Martial back at the front, Thérèse would return to the room she had before she was married and her life would carry on as if nothing had happened. The elderly Madame Brun was delighted at this thought with the sweet childlike cynicism of the elderly.

In the dining room, the men had fallen silent, one after the other. Even Adolphe Brun had not been able to take part in the women’s chatter for long; Madame Humbert’s loud, strident voice could be heard above everyone else’s, like the big drum in an orchestra, and during certain patriotic tirades, she sounded like a shrill, heartbreaking fife, while Renée’s voice was a flute alongside hers and Madame Jacquelain sighed like a mandolin. Thérèse was visibly trying to be cheerful, talking and laughing; it was the moment when she began to learn how to behave like a soldier’s wife, no crying, no lamenting in public, rarely talking about herself and never about the one who was ‘over there’, the woman who continues waiting for him when everyone else has stopped waiting, the one who remembers when everyone else has forgotten, the one who hopes against all hope.

The women were talking about the war.

They descended from such lofty conversation to discuss the theatre; the Parisian theatres had reopened in December. Madame Jacquelain exclaimed that it was sacrilege: ‘How can people go out in the evening when our dear little soldiers are so miserable? I wouldn’t dare do that, not me …’

Madame Humbert did not agree:

‘But come now, my dear, it all depends on the performance. At the Comédie Française they’ve been showing
Horace
. Marthe Chenal sang the
Marseillaise
at the Opera House. Well, what do you want? We need things like that to keep our spirits up. Civilians need that.’

‘We’re young,’ said Renée, ‘we need to take our minds off things.’

She looked at Détang and smiled brightly, provocatively. She and her mother had always dreamed of finding her a rich husband. But the war was wreaking terrible havoc with the men. ‘Soon, it won’t be a question of choice. It will be like it is at the butcher’s: since August, you had to take whatever you could get,’ Madame Humbert had said with a disillusioned sigh, as she sewed her hats beneath the lamplight every evening. ‘Soon a lad like Détang, with no fortune and no prospects, a nobody, will seem like a good bargain, just as long as the war agrees to send him home with at least one arm or leg.’

‘He’s not stupid,’ Renée would say to her mother, ‘he’s only as enthusiastic as necessary. It’s very odd: he never gets carried away. He gets everyone else to speak. He does talk a lot but he never actually says anything. He’s got a true Southern personality. He told me that if he makes it through this war he wants to go into politics, and it’s not a bad idea for him. He could be successful.’

‘Yes,’ her mother replied, ‘but you must be very careful and not give in to him at all. He’s the kind of man who only gets married as a last resort. I know the type: your father was just the same.’

Now she turned to Madame Jacquelain. ‘Don’t forget about business here in Paris. Businesses have to thrive. Women are starting to think about their clothing again, thank goodness. I’ve designed a gorgeous new style of hat. It’s inspired by the times: it’s a policeman’s hat. Very elegant looking and all the rage. It
has an embroidered insignia, a piece of braid and a gold tassel, or even feathers and a rosette; no one will wear anything else this winter.’

Amid the hum of the conversations, the little clock on the mantelpiece, with its silvery tones, very quickly, shyly, struck three times. It was time for everyone to go. Martial stood up, trembling. Since he was leaving the next day, he wouldn’t be seeing his family and friends again. The kisses and handshakes began; Madame Jacquelain quietly begged Martial: ‘If my son is sent to the front lines, you’ll look after him, won’t you?’ (She imagined the front was a kind of lycée where the older boys could defend and protect the younger ones against the unfair attacks of the Germans.) Monsieur Jacquelain spoke in his deep, hoarse voice: ‘You’ll think of me …’, for during dinner, he had made sure to get some medical advice from Martial and made him promise to prepare a diet for his stomach troubles ‘as soon as he had a free moment’.

Martial nodded and nervously pulled at his beard, where a few grey hairs were already beginning to show. Thérèse had stood up with him.

‘I don’t often have any free time over there,’ he pointed out gently.

But Monsieur Jacquelain refused to believe it:

‘There are surely quiet moments; you can’t be operating all the time. It would be impossible for anyone to do that. In the newspapers, they report there are very few sick people and that the wounded heal very quickly, thanks to their good morale. Is that true?’

‘Umm … morale … of course …’

But Adolphe Brun had pulled his nephew towards him and was hugging him; then he let him go and looked at him, his wide, bright eyes full of tears. He wanted to say something, make a joke … tell some funny story that Martial could tell the other soldiers that would make them say:

‘Those old blokes from Paris, I mean … they’re really something. They still know how to laugh.’

But he couldn’t think of anything. He just slapped the doctor on the shoulder, on his thin, yielding shoulder beneath the thick material of his uniform:

‘Off you go, my boy …,’ he muttered, ‘you’re a good, brave lad.’

The first-aid post was set up in the cellar; the house, solidly built and very old, had good foundations. It was a comfortable house in French Flanders, three kilometres from the German trenches. It had once looked squat, resilient, reassuring, its solid pillars framing the low door with its large rusty nails. A part of the house remained standing, the part where the silhouette of a tall, slim, mysterious woman wearing a turban had been sculpted above the casement window. The village had passed from one side to the other during the fighting that autumn in 1914. For the moment, the French occupied it. In this never-ending war that had started a few months before, people battled fiercely over a fountain, a forest, a cemetery, a bit of crumbling wall. The sudden advances of the enemy were no longer to be feared, but the bombardments grew more terrifying with every passing day; rubble piled up over the ruins. On sunny days, what had once been a pretty little French village (every gate was decorated with roses in bloom) now resembled a demolition site. Sunny days were rare. In the rain, obscured by the fog, it looked like a cemetery for houses, a heartbreaking sight. But the first-aid post stood firm.

‘Even if the house crumbles, the cellar won’t be affected,’ Martial had said. ‘So of course it will hold up.’

He was very proud of his cellar; it gave him pleasure to look at the thick walls, the vaulted stone ceiling above his head and the small alcoves that were dug out of the rock; one of them was his operating room; the other was where he slept; the third was a luxurious bedroom reserved for high-ranking officers who had been wounded. In his cellar, Martial could give free rein to his desire to be a home-owner, a feeling that circumstances had never before allowed him: orphaned when he was eight years old, he had moved from a school dormitory to a barrack room by way of furnished student accommodation. Everywhere, even in his dingy lodgings on the Rue Saint-Jacques as a first-year medical student, he had tried to ‘make it into a home for himself’, as he used to say with emotion. He had patched up the curtains that hung in ribbons, washed the skirting boards, polished the rickety night tables and arranged his books and family photos on the bookcase. He had spent so many hours imagining his future apartment on the Rue Monge: the living room with a yellow sofa, a leafy plant on the piano … his bedroom (the large bed and wardrobe with a mirror on the door), his consulting room. All of that had been taken away from him and replaced by a cellar in a strange house up north. Unfortunately, water was coming through the floor in certain places: the canal was nearby and, damaged in several places by the bombs, threatened to cave in at any moment and flood everything. The climate wasn’t exactly ideal; the entire region was soaked with rain and covered in mud. Everyone slept in a thick, whitish sludge that continuously shifted and sloshed about; they ate the rainwater that fell into their soup – more rainwater than soup – they fought, fell, died in mud.

A well-situated, enormous staircase led up from the cellar; the men lay on its rough, uneven, wide steps. Their wounds had just been dressed; they were waiting to be evacuated to ambulances. Some of them slept on their haversacks, others on the bare stone; a smell of idoform, blood and damp seeped from the walls. Sickly,
sweet clouds of chloroform hung in the air. From the tiny room where he worked, the doctor could see the wounded men newly arrived from the most recent battles. First their shapeless shoes weighed down with clods of yellowish mud that they banged, in vain, against the floor to loosen the clinging earth, the entrails of the gutted land they carried with them; then their drenched, torn, stained greatcoats, stiff with encrusted mud, then the hollow faces almost hidden by their full beards. Some of them had boots, helmets and faces so covered in mud that they looked like shapeless masses of silt on the move; others had every single strand of hair in their moustache caked in mud. It was a war zone where you could no longer tell which bodies were yours and which were the enemy’s – the mud covered them with the same shroud.

The stretchers came down; trembling, panting, bleeding bodies were placed on the wooden trestles used as operating tables; if there was no more room on the trestles, they were laid on the ground. One corner of the cellar had been closed off with an improvised partition – a piece of canvas thrown over two metal rakes they had found in the garden and stuck into the ground: this was the morgue.

At the beginning, what wore the doctor out most was the incessant movement around him, all the strange faces that went by, reappeared, disappeared, a crowd, a crush of French soldiers and German prisoners, blonds, dark-haired men, the haggard features of the dying, the pale, astonished faces of children wounded for the first time who make an effort to show off, to put on a brave face, to smile, farmers who say ‘Out you come, out you come!’ and groan and seem to want to rip the pain from their bodies as if they were pulling out a plough that had got stuck in the mud – the weak men who cried like women, the silent ones, the courageous, the cowards and the ones who didn’t hold back: ‘Just my luck!’ they would say, ‘I’m done for’ when their injury was ‘really nasty’, and even those who – just like in the newspapers intended
to feed the patriotism of the masses – murmured as they turned pale from the pain: ‘Oh, it’s really nothing! I’m sure they can patch me up.’

He had seen so many of them! Even his brief moments of sleep were peopled with enormous crowds. He would fall asleep and dream that he was being crushed on all sides by strangers who prevented him from moving, who grabbed his hands, breathed on his face with the smell of tobacco and rough wine, stretching out their bloody stumps to him, calling him with tears in their eyes. He would gently push them away, but they would clutch at his clothes, trying to pull him towards them. They grabbed him from behind and made him stumble and fall. Then they would stamp on him with their heavy shoes, as if he were caught in a charge. They would cry out, and the heart-rending, shrill sound of their voices would wake the doctor up. Then he would find himself surrounded by groaning wounded men once more and he would get back to work.