War Stories Page 3

  And another thought I had (behind a tree) was that I wished Déroulède*1 – the one I’d heard so much about – had been there to describe his reactions when a bullet tore open his guts.

  Those Germans squatting on the road, shooting so obstinately, were rotten shots, but they seemed to have ammunition to burn, whole warehouses full or so it seemed to me. Nobody could say this war was over! I have to hand it to the colonel, his bravery was remarkable. He roamed around in the middle of the road, up and down and back and forth in the midst of the bullets as calmly as if he’d been waiting for a friend on a station platform, except just a tiny bit impatient.

  One thing I’d better tell you right away, I’d never been able to stomach the country, I’d always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody’s ever home, those roads that don’t go anywhere. And if to all that you add a war, it’s completely unbearable. A sudden wind had come up on both sides of the road, the clattering leaves of the poplars mingled with the little dry crackle aimed at us from down the road. Those unknown soldiers missed us every time, but they spun a thousand deaths around us, so close they seemed to clothe us. I was afraid to move.

  That colonel, I could see, was a monster. Now I knew it for sure, he was worse than a dog, he couldn’t conceive of his own death. At the same time I realized that there must be plenty of brave men like him in our army, and just as many no doubt in the army facing us. How many, I wondered. One or two million, say several millions in all? The thought turned my fear to panic. With such people this infernal lunacy could go on for ever . . . Why would they stop? Never had the world seemed so implacably doomed.

  Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying! . . . All alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen, armed to the eyeballs? With and without helmets, without horses, on motorcycles, bellowing, in cars, screeching, shooting, plotting, flying, kneeling, digging, taking cover, bounding over trails, bombarding, shut up on earth as if it were a loony bin, ready to demolish everything on it, Germany, France, whole continents, everything that breathes, destroy, destroy, madder than mad dogs, worshipping their madness (which dogs don’t), a hundred, a thousand times madder than a thousand dogs, and a lot more vicious! A pretty mess we were in! No doubt about it, this crusade I’d let myself in for was the apocalypse!

  You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex. How, when I left the Place Clichy, could I have imagined such horror? Who could have suspected, before getting really into the war, all the ingredients that go to make up the rotten, heroic, good-for-nothing soul of man? And there I was, caught up in a mass flight into collective murder, into the fiery furnace . . . Something had come up from the depths, and it was happening now.

  The colonel was still as cool as a cucumber, I watched him as he stood on the embankment, taking little messages sent by the general, reading them without haste as the bullets flew all around him, and tearing them into little pieces. Did none of those messages include an order to put an immediate stop to this abomination? Did no top brass tell him there had been a misunderstanding? A horrible mistake? A misdeal? That somebody’s got it all wrong, that the plan had been for manœuvres, a sham battle, not a massacre! Not at all! ‘Keep it up, colonel! You’re doing fine!’ That’s what General des Entrayes,*2 the head of our division and commander over us all, must have written in those notes that were being brought every five minutes by a courier, who looked greener and more shitless each time. I could have palled up with that boy, we’d have been scared together. But we had no time to fraternize.

  So there was no mistake? So there was no law against people shooting at people they couldn’t even see! It was one of the things you could do without anybody reading you the riot act. In fact, it was recognized and probably encouraged by upstanding citizens, like the draft, or marriage, or hunting! . . . No two ways about it. I was suddenly on the most intimate terms with war. I’d lost my virginity. You’ve got to be pretty much alone with her as I was then to get a good look at her, the slut, full face and profile. A war had been switched on between us and the other side, and now it was burning! Like the current between the two carbons of an arc lamp! And this lamp was in no hurry to go out! It would get us all, the colonel and everyone else, he looked pretty spiffy now, but he wouldn’t roast up any bigger than me when the current from the other side got him between the shoulders.

  There are different ways of being condemned to death. Oh! What wouldn’t I have given to be in prison instead of here! What a fool I’d been! If only I had had a little foresight and stolen something or other when it would have been so easy and there was still time. I never think of anything. You come out of prison alive, you don’t out of a war! The rest is blarney.

  If only I’d had time, but I didn’t. There was nothing left to steal. How pleasant it would be in a cosy little cell, I said to myself, where the bullets couldn’t get in. Where they never got in! I knew of one that was ready and waiting, all sunny and warm! I saw it in my dreams, the prison of Saint-Germain to be exact, right near the forest. I knew it well, I’d often passed that way. How a man changes! I was a child in those days, and that prison frightened me. Because I didn’t know what men are like. Never again will I believe what they say or what they think. Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.

  How much longer would this madness have to go on before these monsters dropped with exhaustion? How long could a convulsion like this last? Months? Years? How many? Maybe till the whole world’s dead, and all these madmen? Every last one of them? And seeing that events were taking such a desperate turn, I decided to stake everything on one throw, to make one last try, to see if I couldn’t stop the war, just me, all by myself! At least in this one spot where I happened to be.

  The colonel was only two steps away from me, pacing. I’d talk to him. Something I’d never done. This was a time for daring. The way things stood, there was practically nothing to lose. ‘What is it?’ he’d ask me, startled, I imagined, at my bold interruption. Then I’d explain the situation as I saw it, and we’d see what he thought. The essential is to talk things over. Two heads are better than one.

  I was about to take the decisive step when, at that very moment, who should arrive at the double but a dismounted cavalryman (as we said in those days), exhausted, shaky in the joints, holding his helmet upside-down in one hand like Belisarius,*3 trembling, all covered with mud, his face even greener than the courier I mentioned before. He stammered and gulped. You’d have thought he was struggling to climb out of a tomb, and it had made him sick to his stomach. Could it be that this spook didn’t like bullets any more than I did? That he saw them coming like me?

  ‘What is it?’ Disturbed, brutally, the colonel stopped him short; flinging at him a glance that might have been steel.

  It made our colonel very angry to see that wretched cavalryman so incorrectly clad and shitting in his pants with fright. The colonel had no use for fear, that was a sure thing. And especially that helmet held in the hand like a bowler was really too much in a combat regiment like ours that was just getting into the war. It was as if this dismounted cavalryman had seen the war and taken his hat off in greeting.

  Under the colonel’s withering look the wobbly messenger snapped to attention, pressing his little finger to the seam of his trousers as the occasion demanded. And so he stood on the embankment, stiff as a board, swaying, the sweat running down his chin strap; his jaws were trembling so hard that little abortive cries kept coming out of him, like a little dog dreaming. You couldn’t make out whether he wanted to speak to us or whether he was crying.

  Our Germans squatting at the end of the road had just changed weaponry. Now they were having their fun with a machine gun, sputtering like handfuls of matches, and all around us flew swarms of angry bullets, as hostile as wasps.

  The man finally managed to articulate a few words:

  ‘Colonel, sir, Sergeant Barousse has been killed.’

  ‘So what?’


  ‘He was on his way to meet the bread wagon on the Etrapes road, sir.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘He was blown up by a shell!’

  ‘So what, dammit!’

  ‘That’s what, colonel, sir.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s all, colonel sir.’

  ‘What about the bread?’ the colonel asked.

  That was the end of the dialogue, because, I remember distinctly, he barely had time to say ‘What about the bread?’ That was all. After that there was nothing but flame and noise. But the kinds of noise you wouldn’t have thought possible. Our eyes, ears, nose and mouth were so full of that noise that I thought it was all over and I’d turned into noise and flame myself.

  After a while the flame went away, the noise stayed in my head, and my arms and legs trembled as if somebody were shaking me from behind. My limbs seemed to be leaving me, but then in the end they stayed on. The smoke stung my eyes for a long time, and the prickly smell of powder and sulphur hung on, strong enough to kill all the fleas and bedbugs in the whole world.

  I thought of Sergeant Barousse, who had just gone up in smoke as the man had told us. That was good news. Great, I thought to myself. That makes one less stinker in the regiment! He wanted to have me court-martialled for a tin of meat. ‘It’s an ill wind,’ I said to myself. In that respect, you can’t deny it, the war seemed to serve a purpose now and then! I knew of three or four more in the regiment, real scum, that I’d have gladly helped to make the acquaintance of a shell, like Barousse.

  As for the colonel, I didn’t wish him any harm. But he was dead too. At first I didn’t see him. The blast had carried him up an embankment and laid him down on his side, right in the arms of the dismounted cavalryman, the courier, who was finished too. They were embracing each other for the moment and for all eternity, but the cavalryman’s head was gone, all he had was an opening at the top of the neck, with blood in it bubbling and glugging like jam in a pan. The colonel’s belly was wide open and he was making a nasty face about it. It must have hurt when it happened. So much the worse for him! If he’d got out when the shooting started, it wouldn’t have happened.

  All that tangled meat was bleeding profusely.

  Shells were still bursting to the right and left of the scene.

  I’d had enough, I was glad to have such a good pretext for clearing out. I even hummed a tune, and reeled like when you’ve been rowing a long way and your legs are wobbly. ‘Just one shell!’ I said to myself. ‘Amazing how quick just one shell can clean things up. Could you believe it?’ I kept saying to myself. ‘Could you believe it!’

  There was nobody left at the end of the road. The Germans were gone. But that little episode had taught me a quick lesson, to keep to the cover of the trees. I was in a hurry to get back to our command post, to see if anyone else in our regiment had been killed on reconnaissance. There must be some good dodges, I said to myself, for getting taken prisoner . . . Here and there in the fields a few puffs of smoke still clung to the ground. ‘Maybe they’re all dead,’ I thought. ‘Seeing they refuse to understand anything whatsoever, the best solution would be for them all to get killed instantly . . . The war would be over, and we’d go home . . . Maybe we’d march across the Place Clichy in triumph . . . Just one or two survivors . . . In my dream . . . Strapping good fellows marching behind the general, all the rest would be dead like the colonel . . . Like Barousse . . . like Vanaille (another bastard) . . . etc. They’d shower us with decorations and flowers, we’d march through the Arc de Triomphe. We’d go to a restaurant, they’d serve us free of charge, we’d never pay for anything any more, never as long as we lived! We’re heroes! we’d say when they brought the bill . . . defenders of the Patrie! That would do it! . . . We’d pay with little French flags! . . . The lady at the cash desk would refuse to take money from heroes, she’d even give us some, with kisses thrown in, as we filed out. Life would be worth living.’

  As I was running, I noticed my arm was bleeding, just a little though, a far from satisfactory wound, a scratch. I’d have to start all over.

  It was raining again, the fields of Flanders oozed with dirty water. For a long time I didn’t meet a soul, only the wind and a little later the sun. From time to time, I couldn’t tell from where, a bullet would come flying merrily through the air and sunshine, looking for me, intent on killing me, there in the wilderness. Why? Never again, not if I lived another hundred years, would I go walking in the country. A solemn oath.

  Walking along, I remembered the ceremony of the day before. It had taken place in a meadow, at the foot of a hill; the colonel had harangued the regiment in his booming voice: ‘Keep your courage up!’ he had cried. ‘Keep your courage up! and Vive la France!’ When you have no imagination, dying is small beer; when you do have imagination, dying is too much. That’s my opinion. My understanding had never taken in so many things at once.

  The colonel had never had any imagination. That was the source of all his trouble, especially ours. Was I the only man in that regiment with an imagination about death? I preferred my own kind of death, the kind that comes late . . . in twenty years . . . thirty . . . maybe more . . . to this death they were trying to deal me right away . . . eating Flanders mud, my whole mouth full of it, fuller than full, split to the ears by a shell fragment. A man’s entitled to an opinion about his own death. But which way, if that was the case, should I go? Straight ahead? My back to the enemy. If the MPs were to catch me roaming around I knew my goose was cooked. They’d give me a slapdash trial that same afternoon in some deserted classroom . . . There were lots of empty classrooms wherever we went. They’d play court martial with me the way kids play when the teacher isn’t there. The noncoms seated on the platform, me standing in handcuffs in front of the little desks. In the morning they’d shoot me: twelve bullets plus one. So what was the answer?

  And I thought of the colonel again, such a brave man with his breastplate and his helmet and his moustaches, if they had exhibited him in a music hall, walking as I saw him under the bullets and shellfire, he’d have filled the Alhambra, he’d have outshone Fragson,*4 and he was a big star at the time I’m telling you about. Keep your courage down! That’s what I was thinking.

  After hours and hours of cautious, furtive walking, I finally caught sight of our men near a clump of farmhouses. That was one of our advance posts. It belonged to a squadron that was billeted nearby. Nobody killed, they told me. Every last one of them alive! I was the one with the big news: ‘The colonel’s dead,’ I shouted, as soon as I was near enough. ‘Plenty more colonels where he came from.’ That was the snappy comeback of Corporal Pistil, who was on duty just then, what’s more, he was organizing details.

  ‘All right, you jerk, until they find a replacement for the colonel, you can be picking up meat with Empouille and Kerdoncuff here, take two sacks each. The distribution point is behind the church . . . the one you see over there . . . Don’t let them give you a lot of bones like yesterday, and try and get back before nightfall, you lugs!’

  So I hit the road again with the other two.

  That pissed me off. ‘I’ll never tell them anything after this,’ I said to myself. I could see it was no use talking to those slobs, a tragedy like I’d just seen was wasted on such swine! It had happened too long ago to capture their interest. And to think that a week earlier they’d have given me four columns and my picture in the papers for the death of a colonel the way I’d seen it. A bunch of halfwits.

  The meat for the whole regiment was being distributed in a summery field, shaded by cherry trees and parched by the August sun. On sacks and tent cloths spread out on the grass there were pounds and pounds of guts, chunks of white and yellow fat, disembowelled sheep with their organs scattered every which way, oozing intricate little rivulets into the grass round about, a whole ox, split down the middle, hanging on a tree, and the four regimental butchers all hacking away at it, cursing and swearing and pulling off choice morsels. The squadro
ns were fighting tooth and nail over the innards, especially the kidneys, and all around them swarms of flies the like of which one sees only on such occasions, as self-important and musical as little birds.

  Blood and more blood, everywhere, all over the grass, in sluggish confluent puddles, looking for a congenial slope. A few steps further on, the last pig was being killed. Four men and a butcher were already fighting over some of the prospective cuts.

  ‘You crook, you! You’re the one that made off with the tenderloin yesterday!’

  Leaning against a tree, I had barely time enough to honour that alimentary dispute with two or three glances, before being overcome by an enormous urge to vomit, which I did so hard that I passed out.

  They carried me back to the outfit on a stretcher. Naturally they swiped my two oilcloth sacks, the chance was too good to miss.

  I woke to one of the corporal’s harangues. The war wasn’t over.

  David Malouf

  INVISIBLE ENEMIES

  When Jim Saddler, the protagonist of David Malouf’s novel Fly Away Peter (1982), leaves rural Australia for the trenches of France, he is at first proud to have become part of history and fascinated by ‘vast numbers of men engaged in an endeavour that was clearly equal in scale to anything the Pharaohs had imagined’. But he soon learns that he has instead become part of the bizarre machine of trench warfare where death can come at any moment and the enemy can’t even be seen.

  OFTEN, AS JIM later discovered, you entered the war through an ordinary looking gap in a hedge. One minute you were in a ploughed field, with snowy troughs between ridges that marked old furrows and peasants off at the edge of it digging turnips or winter greens, and the next you were through the hedge and on duckboards, and although you could look back and still see farmers at work, or sullenly watching as the soldiers passed over their land and went slowly below ground, there was all the difference in the world between your state and theirs. They were in a field and very nearly at home. You were in the trench system that led to the war.