War Stories Page 12

  ‘I don’t know. I must’ve been, because I could see the sister.’

  ‘And was this always at night?’

  ‘No. It happened once during the day. I’d been to my club for lunch, and when I came out I sat on a bench, and . . . I suppose I must’ve nodded off.’ He was forcing himself to go on. ‘When I woke up, the pavement was covered in corpses. Old ones, new ones, black, green.’ His mouth twisted. ‘People were treading on their faces.’

  Rivers took a deep breath. ‘You say you’d just woken up?’

  ‘Yes. I used to sleep quite a bit during the day, because I was afraid to go to sleep at night.’

  ‘When did all this stop?’

  ‘As soon as I left the hospital. The atmosphere in that place was really terrible. There was one man who used to boast about killing German prisoners. You can imagine what living with him was like.’

  ‘And the nightmares haven’t recurred?’

  ‘No. I do dream, of course, but not about the war. Sometimes a dream seems to go on after I’ve woken up, so there’s a kind of in-between stage.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know whether that’s abnormal.’

  ‘I hope not. It happens to me all the time.’ Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘When you look back now on your time in the hospital, do you think you were “shell-shocked”?’

  ‘I don’t know. Somebody who came to see me told my uncle he thought I was. As against that, I wrote one or two good poems while I was in there. We-ell . . .’ He smiled. ‘I was pleased with them.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s possible to write a good poem in a state of shock?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Rivers nodded. ‘You may be right. Would it be possible for me to see them?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll copy them out.’

  Rivers said, ‘I’d like to move on now to the . . . thinking behind the Declaration. You say your motives aren’t religious?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Would you describe yourself as a pacifist?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I can’t possibly say “No war is ever justified”, because I haven’t thought about it enough. Perhaps some wars are. Perhaps this one was when it started. I just don’t think our war aims – whatever they may be – and we don’t know – justify this level of slaughter.’

  ‘And you say you have thought about your qualifications for saying that?’

  ‘Yes. I’m only too well aware of how it sounds. A second-lieutenant, no less, saying “The war must stop”. On the other hand, I have been there. I’m at least as well qualified as some of the old men you see sitting around in clubs, cackling on about “attrition” and “wastage of manpower” and . . .’ His voice became a vicious parody of an old man’s voice. ‘“Lost heavily in that last scrap.” You don’t talk like that if you’ve watched them die.’

  ‘No intelligent or sensitive person would talk like that anyway.’

  A slightly awkward pause. ‘I’m not saying there are no exceptions.’

  Rivers laughed. ‘The point is you hate civilians, don’t you? The “callous”, the “complacent”, the “unimaginative”. Or is “hate” too strong a word?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So. What you felt for the Germans, rather briefly, in the spring of last year, you now feel for the overwhelming majority of your fellow-countrymen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know, I think you were quite right not to say too much to the Board.’

  ‘That wasn’t my idea, it was Graves’s. He was afraid I’d sound too sane.’

  ‘When you say the Board was “rigged”, what did you mean?’

  ‘I meant the decision to send me here, or somewhere similar, had been taken before I went in.’

  ‘And this had all been fixed by Captain Graves?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sassoon leant forward. ‘The point is they weren’t going to court-martial me. They were just going to lock me up somewhere . . .’ He looked round the room. ‘Worse than this.’

  Rivers smiled. ‘There are worse places, believe me.’

  ‘I’m sure there are,’ Sassoon said politely.

  ‘They were going to certify you, in fact?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Did anybody on the Board say anything to you about this?’

  ‘No, because it was –’

  ‘All fixed beforehand. Yes, I see.’

  Sassoon said, ‘May I ask you a question?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Do you think I’m mad?’

  ‘No, of course you’re not mad. Did you think you were going mad?’

  ‘It crossed my mind. You know when you’re brought face to face with the fact that, yes, you did see corpses on the pavement . . .’

  ‘Hallucinations in the half-waking state are surprisingly common, you know. They’re not the same thing as psychotic hallucinations. Children have them quite frequently.’

  Sassoon had started pulling at a loose thread on the breast of his tunic. Rivers watched him for a while. ‘You must’ve been in agony when you did that.’

  Sassoon lowered his hand. ‘No-o. Agony’s lying in a shell-hole with your legs shot off. I was upset.’ For a moment he looked almost hostile, then he relaxed. ‘It was a futile gesture. I’m not particularly proud of it.’

  ‘You threw it in the Mersey, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t heavy enough to sink, so it just’ – a glint of amusement – ‘bobbed around. There was a ship sailing past, quite a long way out, in the estuary, and I looked at this little scrap of ribbon floating and I looked at the ship, and I thought that me trying to stop the war was a bit like trying to stop the ship would have been. You know, all they’d’ve seen from the deck was this little figure jumping up and down, waving its arms, and they wouldn’t’ve known what on earth it was getting so excited about.’

  ‘So you realized then that it was futile?’

  Sassoon lifted his head. ‘It still had to be done. You can’t just acquiesce.’

  Rivers hesitated. ‘Look, I think we’ve . . . we’ve got about as far as we can get today. You must be very tired.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning at ten. Oh, and could you ask Captain Graves to see me as soon as he arrives?’

  Sassoon stood up. ‘You said a bit back you didn’t think I was mad.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you’re not. As a matter of fact I don’t even think you’ve got a war neurosis.’

  Sassoon digested this. ‘What have I got, then?’

  ‘You seem to have a very powerful anti-war neurosis.’

  They looked at each other and laughed. Rivers said, ‘You realize, don’t you, that it’s my duty to . . . to try to change that? I can’t pretend to be neutral.’

  Sassoon’s glance took in both their uniforms. ‘No, of course not.’

  Sebastien Japrisot

  THE WOMAN ON LOAN

  Some soldiers were prepared to do anything to get out of the war. Desertion was the obvious but also the most dangerous expedient. In his novel A Very Long Engagement (1991), Sebastien Japrisot tells the story of a woman who, after the war, tries to find out what happened to her fiancé, who had been court-martialled for self-mutilation. During her investigations she learns of another soldier’s desperate – and rather unusual – attempt to obtain the ticket home.

  ELODIE GORDES

  43, Rue Montgallet

  Paris

  Wednesday, July 7

  Mademoiselle,

  I thought it easier for me to write you and here I have started this letter over a good three times now. I do not understand how what hurts me so much in the telling will be of use to you, or what it has to do with the death of your fiancé, but you say it is vital and I felt such sorrow in you, the other day, I would be ashamed to make you suffer even more by remaining silent. Only I beg of you, do not speak to anyone of what I will tell you, as until today I have not revealed these things to another soul.

  In that photo of those bound soldiers I was much distresse
d to see Kléber Bouquet, but when I said I did not know him it was only half a lie. Before the war, for more than three years my husband spoke often of him, as they shared the money they earned every Saturday at the open-air market where they hawked their furniture, but I never saw him. I did not even know his name, for my husband called him the Eskimo.

  Now, so that you will understand me, I must speak of certain matters, and these above all I beg you to keep secret because the happiness of the children is at stake.

  AS I WRITE this the children have been long abed, today is Friday, making it two nights ago that I began this letter. I feel worry and trepidation as I come to what you desired to know all in an instant, that day of the thunderstorm, like a bolt from on high. No doubt I cannot help putting off the telling, but there is something else too, I am trying to make you understand that ours was a folly like many another which would never have come to pass without the war. The war destroyed everything, even Benjamin Gordes, and finally the Eskimo, and simple good sense, and me.

  In August of 1914, grief-stricken as I was knowing he might never return, I was relieved to learn from his first letter that my husband had met up in his regiment with his friend from the furniture market. He had always spoken of the Eskimo with a fondness I felt in him for no other. He admired him for his steadiness, his cheerfulness, his air of adventure, and most likely he felt admired in return for his skill as a cabinet-maker. One proof of how deep this friendship went was that when mobilization came, Benjamin, as the father of five children, should have been assigned to the territorial army and remained back at the home front to repair roads or train tracks, but no, he insisted on going off with the rest of his regiment. He told me: ‘I would rather be with the Eskimo than with some lot of old men who’ll get bombarded anyway. As long as we can be together, I’ll not feel so afraid.’ Perhaps it gnawed at his conscience, I admit, to be excused for children that were his in name only. That was him all over, more’s the pity.

  I will not dwell on what those terrible years were for me, you have certainly lived through the same heartache. Apart from the children, my days were given over to waiting. Waiting for a letter, waiting for the official daily bulletin, waiting for the next day to come so that I might spend it waiting. Benjamin had never much taken to writing, for he stupidly feared to make a fool of himself, still he did not ever let me go long without news, though of course we were at the mercy of the post office. I already told you he did not speak of the war to me, which is true, but the longer the war lasted, the more sadness and discouragement I could feel in his letters. His spirits lifted only when he mentioned the Eskimo, and that is how I learned his name. ‘Yesterday I went with Kléber to see a show, some entertainment for the troops, we laughed heartily.’ ‘I must go, duty calls, Kléber and I take on two unwary grenadiers in a game of manille.’ ‘Remember, in your next package, to send some shag for Kléber, always puffing away on that pipe of his.’ ‘Kléber has it on good authority, we will soon be going on leave.’

  Leave. This word came up again and again. In fact, Benjamin’s first leave was after the fighting in Artois, at the end of July 1915. That made it almost one year to the day he had been gone. To say he was a changed man does not come close, for he was not the same man at all. Doting on the children one moment, shouting at them the next for making too much of a racket. And then he would sit silent at the table after meals for a long time, finishing up his bottle. He hardly ever touched wine before the war and now he had to have his bottle at noon and suppertime. One day during that week at home he went over to his workshop and returned after nightfall unsteady on his feet and smelling of drink. I had put the children to bed. That was the evening I first saw him cry. He could not stomach any more of the war, he was afraid, he had a terrible sense that if he did not do something, he would never come home again.

  The next day, sober once more, he held me in his arms, he told me: ‘Don’t be angry with me, I’ve taken to drink like some others because out there it’s the only way I can keep going. I never thought to see the day I would do such a thing.’

  He left. His letters grew sadder still. I found out later that his regiment was in Champagne during the autumn and winter, and outside Verdun in March of 1916. He came home on leave on April 15, I remember it was a Saturday. He was more thin and pale than ever, with something dead, yes, something already dead in his eyes. He had stopped drinking. He saw the children growing up without him, he tried to take an interest in them but they quickly wore him out. He told me, in our bed where he no longer felt desire for me, lying in the dark: ‘This war will never end, the Boches are being massacred and so are we. You don’t know what courage is until you see the English fight, but their courage is not enough, nor is ours, nor is the enemy’s. We are drowning in mud. It will never end.’ Another night, when I lay huddled close to him, he said: ‘Either I desert and they catch me or I need another child. When you have six children, they send you home for good.’ After a long silence, in a changed voice, he said: ‘You understand?’

  Do you understand? I feel sure you understand what he meant. I am certain you are already laughing and making fun of me as you read this.

  Please excuse me. That was a foolish thing to say. You are not laughing at me. You would like your fiancé to come home, too.

  That night, I told Benjamin he had gone mad. He fell asleep. Me, I could not. He came back to it the next day and the others as well, whenever the children could not hear us. He would say: ‘You will not be deceiving me, because I am the one asking you to do it. And what difference can it make since the other five are not mine in any case? Would I want such a thing if my blood were strong enough to give you the sixth child? Would I want this if I were free of all ties and a fatalist like Kléber?’

  He had said the name: Kléber.

  One afternoon we were outdoors, we had left the children for an hour with the downstairs neighbours, the two of us were walking along the Quai de Bercy, and he told me: ‘You must promise me before I go. With Kléber, it doesn’t bother me. All I can see is that then I would be out of it and we would be happy, as though the war had never been.’

  The day he left, I went with him to the station. At the Gare du Nord he kissed me through the bars of the gate, he looked at me, I had the terrible feeling I did not know him any more. He said: ‘I understand, you feel you no longer know who I am. Yet it really is me, Benjamin. But I cannot survive any longer, save me! Promise you’ll do it. Promise.’

  I nodded to say yes, I was weeping. I watched him trudge away in his uniform, a dirty blue colour it was, carrying his helmet and haversacks.

  I am telling you about my husband, and about myself, not about Kléber Bouquet. And yet it was Kléber who told me, later on, what I would come to believe: you take what comes, when it comes, you do not struggle against the war, or against life, or against death, you pretend, and the only master of this world is time.

  Time only made Benjamin’s obsession worse. What he could no longer bear was how the war went on and on. All he spoke of in his letters was the month when Kléber would be on leave. All he wanted to know from me was what my best days would be to conceive a child.

  I wrote him: ‘Even if it takes, there would still be eight or nine months to wait, the war will be over by then.’ He wrote back: ‘What I need is hope. If I could find reason to hope again for eight or nine months, that would already be something.’ And Kléber told me: ‘When we were in Artois, Benjamin lost heart to see all those dead bodies, the horrible wounds, and the butchery of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and Vimy, across from Lens. Poor Frenchmen, poor Moroccans, poor Boches. They tossed them into carts, one after another, as though they had never been anything at all. And one time there was a fat fellow up in a cart packing in the corpses, arranging them so they would take the least amount of space, and he walked all over them. So Benjamin yelled at him, calling him every name in the book, and this man jumped on him and they fought rolling around on the ground like dogs. Maybe Benjamin had no heart left
for war, but he had courage enough to tangle with a big lout trampling on the bodies of fallen soldiers.’

  Mademoiselle, I do not know if I am making clear to you what I mean, that nothing is ever black or white, because time turns everything to grey. Today, Sunday, July 11, having written this letter by fits and starts, I am no longer the same person I was last Wednesday when I was so afraid to speak to you of these matters. Now I tell myself that if my memories can help you, the pain they cost me is a small price to pay. To be frank, there is something for me in this as well, I am no longer ashamed, it is all as one to me.

  Kléber Bouquet arrived on leave in June of 1916. On June 7, a Monday, he left a note in my mailbox saying he would come by the following afternoon and if I did not want to see him, he would understand, I had only to hang a coloured cloth in a window facing the street. The next morning I took the children to their Aunt Odile in Joinville-le-Pont, telling her merely that I had some things to attend to and might be busy for a few days.

  At around three o’clock in the afternoon, watching from the window of my bedroom, I saw a man stop on the pavement across the street and look up at my building. He was in light-coloured summer clothing, wearing a boater. We looked at each other for a few moments, stock-still, both of us, and I could not bring myself to give him the slightest sign. Finally he crossed the street.

  I did not open the door until I heard his footsteps reach our landing, then I went to the dining room. He came in, taking off his straw hat, almost as ill at ease as myself, saying simply: ‘Hello, Elodie.’ I replied hello. He closed the door, came into the room. He was as Benjamin had described him to me: a robust man with a placid face, a frank look in his eyes, with brown hair and moustache, and the large hands of a carpenter. The only thing missing from the portrait was his smile, but this was quite beyond him, while as for me, I leave you to imagine. We surely seemed like two foolish actors at a loss for their lines. I have no idea how, after a few seconds when I no longer dared look him in the face, I was able to say: ‘Do sit down, I’ve made some coffee.’