Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  The team of several men commanded by my mentor included, besides the gunners, a gun layer and a shooter. Positioned to the right of the gun and standing in profile in relation to its axis, the shooter was supposed to manipulate the small rope that actuated the hammer (holding the rope in his right hand and pulling it toward him, then releasing it, which would cause the hammer to strike the detonator placed in the center of the cartridge) after which, the shot having been fired and the barrel of the gun having first recoiled on its slides and then returned to its original position because of the spring action of the braking device—a system whose principle I had known about for a long time because when I was just under fourteen, at the start of World War I, I had read an article in L’Illustration about our 75 gun in which some optimist stressed the superiority of its hydro-pneumatic system over the spring brake of the German 77—he had to use both hands to maneuver the lever that opened the breech and caused the ejection of the case. A pair of simple enough operations, so that for one to be known as a good shooter one only had to perform them fast enough and with sufficient regularity (something I obviously did not have to worry about, since my “honorary shot” would be a single one and the titular shooter would immediately step back into the spot he had been obliged to give up to me). In order to earn a perfect score, the noninitiate was merely required not to forget to maneuver the lever, something the neophyte (it seems) usually neglects to do, stupefied as his is, being new to it, by the powerful detonation.

  The prospect of substituting myself for the shooter and firing a shot frightened me almost as much as that of a real and imminent baptism of fire. To take it upon myself to do it was already a difficult resolution and as I made up my mind to it, I felt like a brave soldier offering himself as volunteer for a dangerous mission. To go through with the thing after deciding to do it was yet another stage to be passed and I did not manage it without first losing my nerve (declaring to my mentor with a small, rather pitiful laugh that I did not feel in top form that morning, although everything had been arranged the night before). It is clear to me that I would have wriggled out of doing this thing altogether (a brilliant feat of arms for me, since I have only very rarely been able to subdue the convulsions of my poor carcass) if I had not been afraid that in so doing I would lose face in the eyes of my friend with the beautiful name from an old chivalric romance and would no longer be able to count myself, even in an honorary way, among those he judged worthy of being his seconds in case he went into action.

  It was at one of the last sessions (when I came to the point of saying to myself that if I let my failure of nerve stand as a permanent thing I would be very ashamed for a long time and would regret, yet again, having retreated before something that involved no risk but was merely unpleasant) that I made up my mind—the shooting had not yet begun—to announce to my mentor that I felt ready that day. The night before, I had decided nothing: because the act frightened me, I preferred to do it as though unexpectedly, so that up to the last minute I could take refuge in the idea that since I hadn’t committed myself I could just as well decide not to do it. Of course it all went very simply and even the thunder whose violence I was so dreading was not as awesome as I had thought it would be. Maybe I had cotton in my ears? In all honesty, I can’t recall if I had thought to take that precaution and I also can’t say whether, as I pulled on the little rope, I stuck my other finger in my left ear—the one closest to the point where the explosion takes place—as custom would have allowed me to do, according to my mentor (who unfailingly though delicately made that gesture himself at the moment when he gave the order to fire by lowering his right arm). What I do remember, however, was that—naturally—I neglected to go on and open the breech, too proud of myself and in too much of a hurry, after all, to get away from the gun.

  The man who gave up his spot for me so that I could fire the gun and then immediately returned to his post to work the lever (as though my omission had been anticipated) bore a name that could have been—and perhaps was, or will be—the name of a bullfighter; he was of Spanish stock, like so many of the men from Oran at our Center, among whom there was also a mason I once heard singing the flamenco where he sat all alone in a corner of the barracks yard. Shortly after that great day, my mentor drew for my wife a caricature depicting me seen from the back pulling on the little rope with a light hand, a flower held between the fingers of my other hand, with the gun silhouetted in the background. All in all, then, it was in an atmosphere almost of family festivity that I underwent this practical initiation into the artillery, an ordeal on which I could feast for a while (since I had, in however small a way, triumphed over my nervousness) but which was soon to merge with other trifles from the time of the “phony war,” leaving me with no diploma other than this pen-and-ink drawing, now lying in the drawer of a secretary which is not mine, celebrating my “honorary shot” or rather the salute I could have dedicated, as a farewell, to those months of isolation and friendship. It has been many years since I last saw that drawing, and I think in truth it is best that it stay where it is, for I am astonished now that I attached such great importance to those military games, which were no more than a comedy completely outside me, and that I was so dumbfounded, as though at a display of miracles steeped in meaning, by certain other suns of our artillery sessions, seductive fireworks that they were: the Saturn ring that one of the guns spat out during the first firing, a sign of the Apocalypse traced in the air in an incandescent swirl by the metal belt of a shell that had accidentally come apart; a distant landscape of mountains that appeared once on the horizon in the direction toward which we were shooting, as though our ostensible aim had been to shell a mirage; a gun operated less quickly than the others and which had gotten behind, so that once the firing was over it continued to launch shot after shot, as obstinate as a dog howling all by itself; the bloody head of a ram (a truly sacrificial object) set down on a white sheet to be photographed for documentary purposes, on the day of the last firing session (when time shells were used, which made it more complicated and slower than shootings with percussion-fuse shells), the weather being gray and gloomy so that it felt very much like the “end of summer,” when the casino is half closed and many of the summer people have already packed their bags.

  Except for two or three bombardments (passively endured, without there being any combat that required boldness and quick thinking) I was not to experience any other shooting, up to the end of the hostilities, but this entirely theoretical experience arranged by my mentor. As a soldier in the phony war and a civilian at the time of the Resistance, I preserved my body intact, but because it had never been put at risk it seemed unfinished to me, as though despite my age I hadn’t yet reached puberty. True, at the time of the parade of the Forces françaises libres down the Champs-Elysées, along with many other Parisians, I had to lie facedown for several minutes on the sidewalk near the Astoria Hotel to avoid the bullets of the snipers on the rooftops; but that was really a picturesque interlude in the hurly-burly of a festival and too benign to be regarded as a baptism of fire. If I search for something that, lacking the real thing, I could substitute for it, the best I can do is to note that a few days before that belly-flop exercise, at the time when Paris was undertaking to liberate itself on its own, though I was not involved in any fighting, I had the opportunity (though accidental) to experience how space was suddenly metamorphosed by the immediate presence of danger into something real, with its three dimensions no longer mathematical coordinates against which perspective melted away but a well-defined frame in which I knew my body was situated and perceived no less intensely the proximity of other objects the sight of which worried me. Returning from the Musée de l’Homme about noon on the first day of the uprising, on the bicycle that had been my means of transport every day during the entire Occupation, I had just turned onto the Pont de la Concorde in order to go from the Right Bank of the Seine to the Left when I found myself between a puddle of blood (immediately perceived as human and fr
eshly spilled) spreading out on the sidewalk to my right and, stopped on my left, a German armored car full of helmeted soldiers with weapons in their fists; for several seconds I was aware of myself as a body drastically exposed, unarmed, denuded, with the sharp sensation of the weight of my buttocks on the saddle and the force of my feet on the pedals, all spatial dimensions being summed up in the distance that separated me from the bloody pool to the right and the steel car to the left, recognizing that now time, too, was a dimension, one created by the motion of the bike activated by the effort of my knees and improving with each passing moment my position in the system.

  Compared with the fear born of something one imagines (for instance, being in the hands of a police force such as the Gestapo and waiting to see what they will or will not do with you) there was something ambiguous and almost pleasant in my directly physical fear of being used as a target: this was an awareness of my body taken to the highest pitch, as occurs in a state of desire, where what is revealed at the same time as the superlative existence of another body is our own nature as organism, at that moment standing (or placed in some way, it hardly matters how) in a void occupied by nothing but itself and this other body, whose intoxicating reality, a reality that makes us feel we too are more real, it would seem impossible to heighten by even one more degree, except by unclothing it at the same time that we unclothe our own. The fear of bullets is also connected to the idea of nudity, since it reminds us—in a hostile way, but with the precision of an image that incites us to caresses—that wrapped up as it is in the materials that usually hide it from others and allow us to forget it, our flesh continues to exist, as vulnerable, sensitive, and naked as if no clothing enveloped it. Even for a coward (someone whose main concern is his own safety and who thus, except by accident, deprives himself of many joys because he does not dare pay the necessary price), mightn’t there be something voluptuous about discovering that he is in this way nude within the superimposed layers of manufactured products that make up our customary carapace? There is nothing surprising, then, in the fact that many people derive a sort of pleasure from war that helps them to accept its constraints, at least if they have not been demoralized by too long a series of disasters; however atrocious war may be, it disguises them as something other than what they are (which not only represents a sort of adventure in itself but also makes it easier to be courageous, because in uniform one is less oneself than in civilian dress, the costume like the military life as a whole tending to transform one from an individual into a small particle of a collective entity) and it even draws them out of daily life when fear leads them to so extreme a renunciation that one cannot any longer even speak of solitude in connection with it. No doubt it would take a considerable accumulation of fear and pain to cause them to be disgusted forever by these too costly emotions and to bring them out of the abjection that consists in relying on outside events—not willed but suffered—to cause a change in one’s life (an abjection that characterized me to some extent, since despite my fear of it, war, in 1939, when seen in a certain light, appeared to me as a sort of evasion and salvation, being, on the one hand, the only truly important thing that could still happen to me, and, on the other, a lightning-fast removal from my usual surroundings).

  I speak about this war as though I had actually fought in it, whereas it is just barely permissible for me to say that I knew certain of its most harmless aspects (since, being a serviceman from an older age-group mistakenly assigned to a corps of specialists, I always remained outside the combat area) and it is easy for me to remember what it might have involved in the way of amusements, never having been led to experience its horror. I would probably write about it in a completely different way if I had done more than simply brush with danger occasionally: clearly there is no comparison between wondering, during a limited time, if the spot you are occupying will be flattened by bombs or if certain people will have the idea of firing at you, and experiencing, during long days whose end can’t be known, the unenviable condition of being cannon fodder. If I deduce from the fear I had on one occasion of being “used as a target” what “fear of bullets” may be like, I am dodging the issue, because there is a difference between risking one’s life and merely being in a position to see such a risk, as yet still imaginary, become actual.

  This danger, never more than merely brushed with—as though, while I did not want to remain altogether a stranger to the war, I was at least anxious not to do more than touch it with my fingertips—is all I will be able to accept responsibility for, of that dirty business. Because a written request of mine to this effect had been granted, if a position warfare had begun in France, as almost everyone thought it would, I would have been assigned to an “Army Archeological Service” in the process of being formed on the very eve of the breakthrough that was to bring about the collapse. I would no longer have been responsible for distributing fire and water, but for inspecting the area of operations to oversee, insofar as possible, the protection of the monuments, to identify everything that might be brought to light by the rather special excavations represented by the digging of trenches and, if required, to obtain assurances from the authorities involved that the need for respecting such sites would be taken into consideration in planning the lines of defense. I found this prospect attractive, not only because in this way what was unwarranted about my assignment to a company of chemists would have been corrected, but because such duties would have led me to fight the war, in some sense, without fighting it, certainly exposing myself to some danger but only in order to play at being, not a soldier, but a spoilsport, dedicated in completely conscious absurdity to a militarily useless work and, thus, involving myself in the tragedy as a dandy who barely comes into contact with it, too detached either to run from it or to lend his help to it. Toward the end of the Occupation, I made a moral gesture: I joined the FTP [francs-tireurs et partisans: a unit of the Resistance] “on D-Day at H-Hour,” using the pseudonym Gerard (in honor of the dreamer in Aurélia) and the regimental number 1092. To assume the risk of having to risk my life when the fighting started—this was the meaning of this gesture which, like everything else I happened to attempt in the domain of courage, remained rather ineffective: my activity as a partisan was in fact limited to handing over to someone named Marc, a few days before the uprising, a box of 6/35 cartridges that I had held on to after giving up, in compliance with the requirement formulated by the Germans when they first moved in, the cylinder revolver I had inherited from my father and kept in one of my desk drawers at the Musée de l’Homme. Then, coerced by a friend from the Comité du Théâtre, I occupied the Comédie Française at the start of the uprising with other members of the Comité, was very nearly involved in a rather adventurous mission (to do with some weapons that, for a moment, it seemed someone had to go and fetch from the Place de la République) but changed plans when the Front National, which had formed at the Musée de l’Homme as it had in the other institutions of the Palais de Chaillot, decided to occupy that building. When, ashamed of the inertia of the sixteenth arrondissement (where I was staying in a friend’s house so as to be able to go to the museum without exposing myself to the dangers of a long trip across Paris), I returned to my own neighborhood of La Monnaie—where barricades were going up—to see what was happening there, I at last made a firm resolution to participate actively: a SITA truck for removing household trash was blocking the rue des Grands-Augustins and had to be moved, and I went down from my apartment to offer to help, something that, in my mind, was only a first step; but here again I only brushed with real action, because by the time I reached the sidewalk they no longer needed any help, and the next evening, all the bells, including the great bells of Notre Dame, began ringing to celebrate the arrival of the liberating troops. Thus, during the uprising as during the war, all I did was make a few gestures, none of which had any consequences and which I also performed as pure formalities, hoping that events would not take such a turn that I would actually have to fight. At a certain
point, was it that things had turned out in such a way that this same individual who had dreamed of being a jockey when he was very small, though he was incapable even of performing his gymnastics properly, had progressed so little that when he was over forty he would still be trying (as in the fictional life of a game) to deceive himself by various ritual mimicries, semblances of positive action in which a person who tries to save his prestige despite his fundamental deficiency chooses to cloak himself?

  Of this war, which I lived through from beginning to end without ever testing my courage in a decisive way (or rather, simply enough, in this way proved what a coward I was, since all that was required to put myself to the test was to want to do it), what I will remember, for lack of epic events or cloak-and-dagger story adventures, will be the moments of close companionship it allowed me to experience: the camaraderie of soldiers (somewhat of a fantasy) in the North African desert; the deeper friendship of the few men of my circle who, in occupied Paris, knew that their reactions were roughly the same and that even those who were less reliable had the minimum of loyalty that allows one to trust another person. All in all, I learned an important lesson about friendship from the war, and my firm desire, beyond mere vanity, not to appear blameworthy in the eyes of a carefully chosen group no doubt represents what I acquired (or finished acquiring) in the course of that period. But how far have I progressed if I do not have any golden rule by which I could determine with whom I should consider myself to be truly close and on what basis—firm enough so that the phrase “friends for life” has some chance of not being a mere empty gesture—a fidelity should be established on my part toward those who will stand before me like a moral conscience personified, a Dulcinea in whose presence one does not want to lose prestige? And can I even—if I examine this more closely—count on such a comedy of masks, since it leads me to realize that in order to have the strength not to fail, I need to find partners to whom I would be bound by a pact based either on the very strength I would like to acquire, or on things worthwhile only to the extent that it is henceforth understood that precisely with respect to them is one incapable of failing? A strange sort of acrobatics I am indulging in here, as I seek—like a music-hall oddball miming a fighting match all by himself—the jiujitsu hold by which I might triumph over myself by a simple pressure exerted in the requisite conditions with only my thumb and index finger, like those yellow-skinned men wearing ample belted tunics and short broad trousers whom, as a child, I saw in photographs confronting each other without violence in an unarmed combat whose consequences (I thought) might nevertheless prove fatal. Up to this day, it has never been in real-life confrontations but only in the solitude of dreams that I have seemed capable of mastering a certain hold or a certain secret lunge that would allow me to win as though it were child’s play: bearing down upon a winged bull I was facing in front of the portals of the Musée de l’Homme, I observed, at the moment that I thrust at him, that he was no more substantial than a balloon animal, as though the only secret for abolishing terror and overcoming obstacles was the pure and simple decision one made to charge at them. I admit that it is hard for me not to think, sometimes, that with experience, things I am afraid of will melt away like the bull, which, falsely, had frightened me in the dream, and that even death will prove to have been no more than a bogus figure of fear when at last I arrive—sooner than I imagine, perhaps—at that “hour of truth.” However childish these bursts of euphoria may be, I must nevertheless remember that a little courage is enough, in many cases, to change into a sand castle what one had made into a mountain, and that this inner power, which gives one such control over what is outside, is a matter of willing even more than of knowing, whence the futility of resorting to technical subterfuges if a firm will is lacking at the very outset.