1914 Read online

  9

  AT THE END OF JANUARY, as expected, Blanche brought a child into the world, a female, seven pounds and fifteen and two-thirds ounces, first name Juliette. Lacking a legal father—a lack all the more up in the air in that this presumed-by-everyone biological father had crashed almost six months earlier just outside Jonchery-sur-Vesle—she received her mother’s family name. So: Juliette Borne.

  That the mother had had a child outside of wedlock did not cause much scandal or even provoke excessive gossip. The Borne family was not particularly straitlaced. For six months Blanche simply stayed home for the most part and then, after the birth, the war was blamed for the wedding having been postponed, Blanche acquired an engagement in public that had never privately taken place, and the infant’s illegitimacy was obscured by the swiftly heroized figure of the supposed father, wreathed in bravery and, thanks to the hurried efforts of Monteil, decorated posthumously with a medal. Even though Blanche’s father, thinking of the long term, regretted in his heart of hearts that without a male heir, the future of the factory was not assured, Juliette’s birth did not prevent this child, fatherless even before her birth, from immediately becoming the apple of all eyes.

  I’ll never forgive myself, sighed Monteil; I’ll never get over this. The family had indeed hoped, thanks to the doctor’s connections, that by dodging the front Charles would be less exposed to enemy fire in the air than on the ground. The connections had worked, of course; everything had gone well: he’d been exempted from ground combat and reassigned to the newborn aviation corps—which no civilian could have imagined then would ever play an active role in combat—as if it were a cushy berth. Whereas that turned out to be a miscalculation: Juliette’s putative father disappeared even more swiftly from the sky than he might perhaps have done from the mud. I’ll always blame myself for this, Monteil continued. Maybe he would have been better off in the infantry, after all. We had no way of knowing. Blanche replied briefly that regrets were useless, no point in going on and on about it, and it mightn’t be such a bad idea if he would instead take a look at Juliette.

  Who was three months old, it was the beginning of spring, and Blanche could see things budding in the trees—trees still bereft, however, of even the tiniest bird—through the window next to which she had parked the baby carriage. Forgive me, said Monteil, heaving himself heavily out of his armchair to remove the child from her carriage and examine her— respiration, temperature, alertness—and then declare that my word, she seems to be doing very nicely. Good, Blanche said to him in thanks as she rewrapped the infant. And your parents, Monteil inquired. They’re holding up well, said Blanche; it was hard after Charles died, but the child provides a distraction for them. Yes, Monteil began to ramble on again, I’ll be angry with myself forever for what I did but it was for his own good, wasn’t it. Couldn’t be helped, said Blanche firmly. And his brother, aside from that, asked Monteil. Excuse me, said Blanche, whose brother? Charles’s brother, Monteil prompted her, have you any news? Postcards, replied Blanche, he sends them regularly. And even a letter, from time to time. At the moment, I think they’re in the Somme, he’s not complaining very much. That’s fine, then, observed Monteil. Anyway, Blanche reminded him, he’s never been one for complaints, Anthime. You know how he is: he always adapts.

  10

  AS A MATTER OF FACT, Anthime had adapted. What’s more, even if he hadn’t, if he’d obviously been having trouble dealing with things and tried to tell anyone, postal censorship wasn’t a big help to anyone trying to carp. Yes, Anthime got used fairly quickly to the daily chores of cleaning, digging and earthwork maintenance, the loading and transportation of materials, as well as the periods in the trenches, the shifts of guard duty at night, the days off. These last existed in name only, moreover, consisting of drilling, instruction, maneuvers, typhoid vaccinations, showers when all was going well, march pasts, parades under arms, ceremonies such as the awarding of the Croix de Guerre, invented six months earlier, or, for example, the recent presentation to a sergeant major in the platoon of a citation for devotion to duty at the front in spite of his rheumatism. Anthime had also grown used to the relocations, the changes in the uniforms, and above all, the others.

  The others were mostly but not simply peasants, agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and homeworkers, a basically proletarian population in which those who knew how to read, write, and count, like Anthime Sèze, were both in the minority and in a position to help their comrades compose letters or read those they received. The news in this mail was then passed on to anyone interested, although Anthime had kept mum upon learning of Charles’s death, sharing this only with Bossis, Arcenel, and Padioleau. Somehow, the four of them always managed in spite of all the troop movements to wind up not too far from one another.

  As for changes in the uniforms, it was in the spring that new greatcoats were issued in a light blue that proved quite becoming in the newly returned sunshine. The overly garish red pants had almost disappeared, either covered by blue overalls or replaced by velvet trousers. In the defensive accessories department, the men first received cervelières, close-fitting steel skullcaps, to be worn under the kepi, while a few weeks later, in May, appeared the first sign of a not-so-jolly technological innovation: gags and goggles with mica lenses were distributed to every soldier for protection against combat gases.

  Uncomfortable, always sliding off, the migraineprovoking cervelière was not a huge success; more and more of the men stopped wearing them and soon used them only for culinary ends, for cooking up an egg or as an extra soup bowl. It was in the early days of September, after the Ardennes and the Somme,9 when Anthime’s company had moved back toward the northeastern province of Champagne, that this skullcap was replaced by a helmet meant to provide more serious protection, yet initially painted bright blue. Putting them on, the men found it funny not to recognize one another, for the helmets obscured much of their faces. When everyone stopped laughing and realized that sunlight reflecting off this fetching blue made them all attractive targets, they slathered the helmets with mud the way they’d done with the mess tins the year before. Anyway, whatever their color, the men were not half pleased to have them during the fall offensive. Especially on one difficult day at the end of October, when wearing a helmet was no laughing matter.

  That day, brutal shelling had begun in the early morning: at first the enemy had sent over only large-caliber shells, well-aimed 170s and 245s that pummeled the earth deep into the lines, shaking loose landslides that buried the wounded and able-bodied alike, quickly stifling them in avalanches of dirt. Anthime almost didn’t make it out of a hole that suddenly fell in on him after a bomb landed. Escaping hundreds of bullets whizzing by barely a few feet from him and dozens of shells within a fifty-yard radius, jumping this way and that in the hail of debris, he thought at one point he was done for when a percussion-fuse shell fell quite close to him, landing in a breach of his trench they’d plugged with bags of earth, one of which, sliced open and hurled through the air by the shell’s impact, almost knocked him senseless but—luckily—shielded him from the shrapnel. Taking advantage of the general fear and chaos thus sown throughout the network, the enemy infantry chose that moment to attack en masse, terrifying the entire troop into fleeing panic-stricken toward the rear lines screaming that the Huns were coming.

  Dragging themselves on their bellies to the nearest hiding place, Anthime and Bossis managed to hide inside a sap—a narrow tunnel leading out from the main trench—running a few yards below the ground, and that’s when the bullets and shells were joined by gases, all sorts of them: blinding, asphyxiating, blistering, sneezing, and tear gases liberally diffused by the enemy with special shells or gas bottles in successive waves and in the direction of the wind. The instant he smelled chlorine, Anthime put on his protective mask and then signaled Bossis to leave the sap and get into the open air where, although they were exposed to projectiles, they could at least escape those even more insidious killers, the particularly heavy
vapors that gathered to linger in the bottom of holes, trenches, and tunnels long after their clouds had passed on.

  As if all that were not enough, hardly had they clambered from their hiding place when a Nieuport biplane fighter, one of their own, picked that moment to crash and explode near the shelter,10 hurling wreckage all over the trench and intensifying a cataclysm of dust and smoke—through which Anthime and Bossis could see the incineration of two airmen killed on impact and still strapped in, transformed into sizzling skeletons hanging by their seat straps. Meanwhile, although unnoticed amid this turmoil, daylight was failing, and when the sun actually went down a relative calm seemed to return for a moment. But it seemed as well that the desired conclusion to the day would be a last display, a final burst of fireworks, for a gigantic bombardment began again, leaving Anthime and Bossis once more covered in dirt from a fresh explosion when a shell landed on the tunnel they’d only just left, which caved in as they watched.

  The shelling died down that night, which might almost have allowed them to rest, if they hadn’t had to go all the way to Perthes in the dark through three miles of communication trenches to look for provisions, their supply deliveries having been disrupted by the offensive. Upon his return, Anthime had just enough time before going to sleep to find a letter from Blanche waiting for him with news of Juliette—a second tooth—and to learn from a quartermaster sergeant that the 120th had taken two trenches on the right. On the left, toward the butte at Souain, those across the way had also taken two that had supposedly been immediately clawed back again: in short, no end in sight.

  And from the next morning on it went on and on some more, in that perpetual polyphonic thunder beneath the vast entrenched cold. Big guns pounding out their basso continuo, time shells and percussion-fuse shells of all calibers, bullets that whistle, bang, sigh, or whine depending on their trajectory, machine guns, grenades, flamethrowers: danger is everywhere, overhead from the planes and incoming shells, facing you from the enemy artillery, and even from below when, thinking to take advantage of a quiet moment down in the trench, you try to sleep but hear the enemy digging secretly away beneath that very trench, underneath you, carving out tunnels in which to place mines to blow the trench to bits, and you with it.

  You cling to your rifle, to your knife with its blade rusted, tarnished, darkened by poison gases, barely shining at all in the chilly brightness of the flares, in the air reeking of rotting horses, the putrefaction of fallen men and, from those still more or less on their feet in the mud, the stench of their sweat and piss and shit, of their filth and vomit, not to mention that pervasive stink of dank, rancid mustiness, when in theory you’re out in the open air at the front. But no: you even smell of mold yourself, outside and in, inside yourself, you, dug in behind those networks of barbed wire littered with putrefying and disintegrating cadavers to which sappers sometimes attach telephone cables, because sappers don’t have it easy. They sweat from fatigue and fear, take off their greatcoats to work more freely, and might hang them on an arm sticking out of the tumbled soil, using it as a coat tree.

  All this has been described a thousand times, so perhaps it’s not worthwhile to linger any longer over that sordid, stinking opera. And perhaps there’s not much point either in comparing the war to an opera, especially since no one cares a lot about opera, even if war is operatically grandiose, exaggerated, excessive, full of longueurs, makes a great deal of noise and is often, in the end, rather boring.

  11

  ONE FOLLOWING MORNING, much like the others, snow decided to fall along with the shells—at a different rhythm, naturally, for the shells had been less plentiful than usual, only three so far that day—whereas Padioleau decided to complain.

  I’m hungry, Padioleau was moaning, I’m cold, I’m thirsty and also I’m tired. Well sure, said Arcenel, just like the rest of us. But I feel very low, too, continued Padioleau, plus I’ve got a stomachache. It’ll pass, your stomachache, predicted Anthime, we’ve all got one, more or less. Yes but the worst part, insisted Padioleau, it’s that I can’t figure out if I feel low because of the stomachache (You’re beginning to piss us off, observed Bossis) or if I’ve a stomachache because I feel low, if you see what I mean. Fuck off, announced Arcenel.

  That’s when the first three shells that had flown too far, exploding uselessly behind the lines, were followed by a fourth and more carefully aimed 105-millimeter percussion-fuse shell that produced better results in the trench: after blowing the captain’s orderly into six pieces, it spun off a mess of shrapnel that decapitated a liaison officer, pinned Bossis through his solar plexus to a tunnel prop, hacked up various soldiers from various angles, and bisected the body of an infantry scout lengthwise. Stationed not far from the man, Anthime was for an instant able to see all the scout’s organs— sliced in two from his brain to his pelvis, as in an anatomical drawing—before hunkering down automatically and half off balance to protect himself, deafened by the god-awful din, blinded by the torrent of rocks and dirt, the clouds of ash and fine debris, vomiting meanwhile from fear and revulsion all over his lower legs and onto his feet, sunk up to the ankles in mud.

  After that everything seemed just about over. As the smoke and dust gradually cleared from the trench, a kind of quiet returned, even though other massive detonations still sounded solemnly all around but at a distance, as if in an echo. Those who’d been spared stood up fairly spattered with bits of military flesh, dirt-crusted scraps rats were already snatching off them and fighting over among the bodily remains here and there: a head without its lower jaw, a hand wearing its wedding ring, a single foot in its boot, an eye.

  So silence seemed intent on returning—when a tardy piece of shrapnel showed up, from who knows where and one wonders how, as clipped as a postscript: an iron fragment shaped like a polished Neolithic ax, smoking hot, the size of a man’s hand, fully as sharp as a large shard of glass. Without even a glance at the others, as if it were settling a personal score, it sped directly toward Anthime as he was getting to his feet and, willy-nilly, lopped off his right arm clean as a whistle, just below the shoulder.

  Five hours later, everybody at the field hospital congratulated Anthime, showing him how they envied him this “good wound,” one of the best there was: serious, of course, crippling, but not more than many others, really, and coveted by all as one of those that ship you away forever from the front. Such was the enthusiasm of his comrades propped up on their elbows at the edge of their cots, waving their kepis—at least those who weren’t too damaged to wave—that Anthime almost didn’t dare complain or weep from pain, or lament the loss of his arm, the disappearance of which he was not actually fully aware. Not fully aware either, in truth, of the pain or the state of the world in general, no more than he could envisage—looking at the others without seeing them—never being himself able ever again to lean on his elbows except on one side. Out of his coma and then out of what served as a surgical unit, his eyes open but focused on nothing, it simply seemed to him— although he didn’t really know why—that given the laughter, there must be some reason to be happy. Reason enough for him to feel almost ashamed of his condition, again without fully understanding why: so as if he were reacting automatically to the other patients’ applause, to join in the merriment he gave a laugh that came out like a long spasm and sounded like braying, which shut everyone up instanter. A serious shot of morphine then returned him to the absence of all things.

  And six months after that, the folded sleeve of his jacket affixed to his right side with a safety pin, another pin anchoring a new Croix de Guerre on the other side of his chest, Anthime was strolling along a quay by the Loire. It was Sunday again and he’d passed his remaining arm through the right arm of Blanche, who, with her left hand, was pushing a carriage containing Juliette, asleep. Anthime was in black, Blanche in mourning as well, with everything around them blending rather well with that color in touches of gray, chestnut brown, hunter green, save for the tarnished gilding on the shops, which gleamed d
ully in the early June sunshine. Anthime and Blanche were not saying much, except to mention briefly the news in the papers. At least you’ve avoided Verdun,11 she had just said, but he had not thought it advisable to reply.

  After almost two years of fighting, with increased recruitment a constant drain on the country, there were even fewer people in the streets, whether it was Sunday or not. And not even many women or children anymore, given the cost of living and the difficulties in shopping, because women received only the wartime allowance at best and in the absence of husbands and brothers, many had had to find work: posting bills, delivering mail, punching tickets, or driving locomotives, when they didn’t wind up in factories, armaments plants in particular. No longer going to school, the children had plenty to keep them busy too: much in demand from the age of eleven on, they replaced their elders in businesses as well as in the fields outside the city, where they worked horses, threshed grain, cared for livestock. That left mostly the elderly, the marginal, a few invalids like Anthime, and some dogs on leashes or on the loose.

  One of those strays, in the excitement of its sexual arousal by another mutt across the street on the Quai de la Fosse, ran clumsily into a wheel of the baby carriage, which teetered threateningly for an instant until a swift kick from Blanche’s high heel sent the culprit off squealing. After making sure that the young woman had the situation in hand and that his niece had not awakened, Anthime watched the woebegone animal—now tacking from one curb to the other, its erection maintained but useless now that its heart’s desire had vanished during the carriage incident—until it disappeared at the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie.