by Frank Wynne
My love for the land around there knew no bounds. There are corners of the world so spellbinding that they hold our gaze with a sensual charm. We love them with a physical passion. Those of us enchanted by the earth hold tender memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain lakes, certain hills, oft-seen and as dear to us as life’s most joyful moments. At times, indeed, our thoughts stray back to a forest glade, a stretch of riverbank, or an orchard carpeted with flowers, glimpsed only once on a bright day but etched in our hearts like the images of women in light filmy dresses passed in the street one spring morning, leaving us, in flesh and spirit, with an unquelled and unforgettable desire, a feeling of happiness but a breath away.
I loved the countryside around Virelogne, dotted here and there with small woods, crossed by streams running through the soil like veins bringing blood to the earth. You could fish there for crayfish, trout and eels. What bliss! There were places you could bathe and often snipe to be found in the tall grasses that grew along the edges of these brooks.
I walked along briskly, nimble as a goat, watching my two dogs ahead of me scenting the air. Serval, one hundred meters to my right, was beating a field of medick. I rounded the scrub at the edge of the Saudres Wood, and there caught sight of a ruined cottage.
All at once, I remembered it as I had last seen it, in 1869, neat, ivy-clad, with hens in front of the door. Can anything be sadder than a dead house, its decrepit skeleton looming grimly, recalling a disaster?
I also remembered that some old woman had invited me in for a glass of wine one day when I had overexerted myself, and that Serval had later told me the story of the people who lived there. The father, an incorrigible poacher, had been killed by the gendarmes. The son, whom I had seen once or twice, was a tall, gangly youth who was said to be a ferocious slayer of game. They were known as the Savages.
Was that their real name?
I called out to Serval. He came towards me with his long, loping stride.
“What became of the folk who lived there?” I asked.
And he told me this tale:
When the war broke out, the younger Savage, then thirty-three, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. No-one felt much sympathy for her though, because the old woman had money; everyone knew that.
And so she was left alone in that house on the edge of the woods, quite cut off from the village. However, she was not at all afraid, being of the same breed as her men, a severe old woman, tall and gaunt, who rarely laughed and with whom one never ventured a joke. Indeed, farm women seldom laugh. That’s for the men, that! The women’s souls are sad and blinkered from leading such dismal, colourless lives. The farmer learns a little crude and raucous gaiety in the tavern, but his wife is perpetually grim-faced and stern. Her muscles have never learned to arrange themselves for laughter.
Mother Savage continued her life as she always had in her thatched cottage, which was soon covered with the snows of winter. She went to the village once a week to buy bread and a little meat, then returned to her small dwelling. As there was talk of wolves, she never left home without a rifle over her shoulder, her son’s rifle, rusty, the rifle-butt worn by years of use. She was a curious sight, the formidable Savage, a little hunched, trudging along through the snow, the barrel of the weapon jutting up above the black headscarf that hugged her head, imprisoning the white hair no-one had ever seen.
One day, the Prussians arrived. They were distributed amongst the inhabitants according to the wealth of each household. The old woman, known to be rich, was assigned four.
They were four strapping, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-bearded boys, still a trifle plump despite the hardships they had already endured, behaving like good boys, albeit victors in a conquered land. Although alone with this elderly woman, they were full of consideration for her, sparing her as much trouble and expense as they could. In the mornings, all four of them could be seen around the well in their shirtsleeves, washing, splashing water on their pink-and-white Northern skin in the raw wintry air, while Mother Savage bustled about making soup. Then they set about cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing the flagstones, chopping wood, peeling potatoes, doing the washing, tending to all the household chores, like four dutiful sons around their mother.
But the whole time, the old woman was thinking of her own son, her tall, skinny, brown-eyed boy with his high-bridged nose and his thick moustache that turned his top lip into a black bush. Every day, she asked each of the soldiers quartered at her house, “Do you know where the French regiment is, the twenty-third march battalion? My boy’s with them.”
“Nein, not know, no know at all,” they answered. And, mindful of her suffering and her worries, as they too had mothers back home, they showered her with little attentions. All in all, she liked them well enough, her four enemies, because country folk harbour no patriotic hatred; that is the province of the upper classes. The lower classes, those who pay the heaviest price because each new burden crushes them further, those who are killed in droves, who are the real cannon fodder because they are so numerous, those who suffer most cruelly from the brutal atrocities of war because they are the most vulnerable and the least resistant, they have little understanding of this warmongering fervour, of these vexatious points of honour and of these ostensible political machinations which in six months deplete two nations, the victorious and the vanquished.
There was gossip about Mother Savage’s Germans; people would say, ‘Now them four have got their feet under the table.’
Then, one morning when the old woman was alone at home, she caught sight of a figure in the far distance, walking towards the cottage. As he got closer, she recognised him as the man who usually delivered the post. He handed her a folded piece of paper and she took the glasses that she used for sewing out of their case. Then she read:
Madame Savage,
I’m writing this letter to bring you some sad news. Your son, Victor, was killed yesterday by a cannonball. It seems it split him in two. I was close by and, seeing as how we were next to each other in the company, he had asked me to let you know at once if anything happened to him.
I took his watch out of his pocket so that I can bring it back to you when the war is over.
I send you my kindest regards.
Césaire Rivot
Private 2nd Class, 23rd infantry battalion
The letter was dated three weeks earlier.
She did not shed a tear. She stood stock-still, stunned, in such a daze that she could not yet feel any pain. She muttered to herself: “So, that’s it now. Victor’s been killed”. Then, slowly, slowly, the tears welled up in her eyes and grief engulfed her heart. Thoughts teemed in her head, one after the other, hideous, tormenting thoughts. She would never hold him close to her again, her little boy, her big boy, never again! The gendarmes had killed the father, now the Prussians had killed the son. He had been sliced in two by a cannonball. And it seemed as though she saw it happening, that dreadful thing: his head falling, his eyes wide open, whilst he chewed the corner of his thick moustache, like he did when he was angry.
What had they done with his body, afterwards? If only they had brought him back to her, her boy, as they had brought her husband back, with a bullet between his eyes.
Just at that moment she heard voices approaching. It was the Prussian boys coming back from the village. She quickly slid the letter into her pocket and greeted them quite normally, seeming quite composed, having had time to dry her eyes.
They were laughing, the four of them, delighted with themselves because they were bringing back a fine-looking rabbit, stolen no doubt, and they indicated to the old woman that they were all going to have something delicious to eat.
Straight away she set about preparing the meal, but when it came to having to kill the rabbit, she did not have the heart. And yet it was certainly not the first one she had killed one! One of the soldiers stunned it with a single sharp blow behind its ears. Once the animal was dead, she began to pull its red body from its ski
n, but the sight of the blood that she was handling, that covered her hands, the warm blood, congealing as it cooled, set her atremble from head to foot; all she could see was her beloved boy cut in two, soaked red with his own blood, like this still quivering animal.
She sat at the table with her Prussians, but she could not eat, not even a mouthful. They devoured the rabbit without minding her at all. She observed them out of the corner of her eye without speaking, mulling over an idea, but her face was so emotionless that they noticed nothing particular about her.
Quite suddenly, she said: “Well, it’s a month now we’ve been here together and I don’t even know your names”. They realised, not without some difficulty, what she meant and told her their names. But that was not enough for her, she made them write their names on a piece of paper along with their addresses, then, perching her glasses on her large nose, she studied this strange, foreign writing before she folded the paper and put it in her pocket resting against the letter informing her of her son’s death.
At the end of the meal, she said to the men:
“Right, I’m off to do something for you.”
And she started carrying bundles of hay up to the loft where they slept.
They were amazed by the trouble she was going to, but she explained that they would be much warmer, so they set about helping her. They piled the hay bales right up to the straw roof on all sides so that they made a sort of large room with four walls, warm and sweet-smelling, where they would have a wonderful sleep.
At dinnertime, one of the soldiers was rather worried to see that Mother Savage was still not eating anything. She told them that she had stomach cramps. Then she lit a large fire to warm the place and the four Germans went up to their beds, climbing the ladder that they used every evening.
As soon as the trap door was closed, the old woman took away the ladder, silently opened the outside door, and went to look for bales of hay to fill her kitchen. She went barefooted in the snow, so quietly that she could not be heard. From time to time she stopped to listen to the deep, irregular snoring of the four sleeping soldiers.
When she was satisfied that her preparations were complete, she threw one of the bales into the hearth and, when she had set it alight, she scattered burning bunches of straw over the other bales, and then she moved back outside and watched.
In just a few seconds a vivid brightness lit up the entire interior of that humble cottage, then it became a terrifying inferno, an enormous blazing furnace, its flames climbing up and out the narrow window, casting a vivid glow upon the snow.
Loud yelling came from the upper part of the house, then piercing human screams, harrowing cries of anguish and terror. Then, as the trap door crashed into the room below, a tongue of fire spiralled up into the loft, wrapped itself around the thatched roof and flared up into the sky as one monumental flame. And the whole cottage was ablaze.
All sounds from inside ceased save the crackling of the flames, the cracking of the walls, the creaking of the beams. Then, suddenly, the roof crashed down and the flaming carcass of that dwelling was hurled into the air, amidst billowing smoke, a staggering whirlwind of sparks.
The countryside around, starkly white against the glowing fire, glistened like a silver sheet, stained red.
In the distance a bell began to ring.
Old Mother Savage remained standing in front of her ruined home armed with her rifle, her son’s rifle, lest one of the men should have escaped his fate.
When she was sure that all was over, she threw her weapon into the raging fire. The sound of it exploding rattled all around.
People started to arrive on the scene, local farm-folk and the Prussians.
They found the woman sitting on the trunk of a tree, serene, contented.
The German officer, who spoke French as though French-born, asked her, “Where are your soldiers?”
She stretched out her skinny arm towards the glowing mass of the burnt out fire and said, in a strong, steady voice:
“In there!”
People were crowding round her. The Prussian asked:
“How did the fire start?”
She declared:
“It was me. I started it.”
No-one believed her; they thought the disaster had unhinged her. So, as everyone gathered round her to listen, she described it all, from beginning to end, from the arrival of the letter to the last cries of the men who had perished, burnt alive, along with her house. She omitted not a single detail, neither of what she had felt, nor of what she had done.
When she had finished, she took two pieces of paper out of her pocket, and, adjusting her glasses to see which was which in the last traces of light from the fire, holding one up, she said: “This one is Victor’s death”. Holding up the other, she added, nodding her head towards the dying embers: “This one is their names so that you can write to their families.” Calmly she held out the sheet of white paper to the officer who gripped her by the shoulders, and she said:
“Write and tell them how it happened, and be sure to tell their parents that it was me who did it, Victoire Simon, the Savage! Don’t forget that.”
The officer shouted out his orders in German. They seized hold of her and threw her against the still smouldering wall of her home. Then a dozen men briskly lined up just twenty metres away. She did not move. She had understood; she was ready.
An order rang out, followed immediately by a long volley of gunshots. One tardy shot rang out all alone, after all the others.
The old woman did not fall. She crumpled as though someone had hacked off her legs.
The Prussian officer went over to her. She was almost cut in two, and in her clenched fist she kept her letter, soaked in blood.
My friend Serval finished there:
“And it’s because of that, in reprisal, that the Germans destroyed the local château, which happened to be mine.”
As for me? I was thinking of the mothers of those four sweet boys, burnt to death in there; and of the dreadful bravery of that other mother, shot up against that wall.
And I picked up a little stone, still blackened by the fire.
SECRET SORROW
Knut Hamsun
Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Ferguson
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun’s work spans more than seventy years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than twenty novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some essays. Because of his support for the Nazis, he was charged with treason and committed to a psychiatric hospital. In 1943, he sent Germany’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift. Otto Dietrich describes in his memoirs how the meeting between Hamsun and Hitler was the only time that another person was able to get a word in edgeways with the Führer. He attributes the cause to Hamsun’s deafness and notes that Hitler remained incensed for several days.
1
I’ve just met him for the fourth time. He follows me wherever I go, I can never feel safe from him, he appears right in front of me in the most out of the way places. Once I even met him in my room in Kristiania; he had got in before me and was standing there …
But let me begin at the beginning.
I met him for the first time in Copenhagen. It was Christmas 1879; I had a place in Klareboderne.
One day as I was sitting alone in my room—I remember very clearly that I was supposed to be copying out some music, and that it was causing me a great deal of trouble, since I was quite unable to read music—there was a knock on my door. Light and subdued, like a woman’s knock. I shout: Come in! and a man enters.
A man of about thirty, pale, with a somewhat glowering expression, and narrow in the shoulder, remarkably narrow. He wore a glove on only one of his hands.
He removed his hat as soon as he entered and his large eyes remained fixed on me the entire time as
he approached where I sat writing. He apologised for intruding like this; he’d seen me entering and leaving the lodging house a couple of times and it occurred to him that we were old acquaintances. Didn’t I remember him from Helsinki, from the police-station in Helsinki?
I had never been to Helsinki, there must be some misunderstanding …
No? Then perhaps it was Malmö. The more he thought about it the more certain he was that it was in Malmö he had bumped into me.
But I hadn’t been to Malmö either.
He mentioned a couple of other places, and each time I answered he said, ‘Just wait now! I’m convinced I’ve met you before, I just can’t recall where.’ Finally he mentioned Kristiania, and I grudgingly conceded that we might possibly have come across one another there. He made me feel unsure of myself, and I could not rule out the possibility that I might once have met him in Kristiania.
‘I don’t have any particular news for you,’ he said. ‘It just occurred to me to drop in and say hello to a fellow-countryman and old acquaintance.’
We conversed briefly, on matters of no importance, I’ve completely forgotten what. All I remember is that he formulated himself in a curiously ambiguous way, as if he were really saying something quite different from what he actually said, and that in general he gave the impression of being a secretive man.
When he rose to leave he once again apologised for disturbing me. Among other things he said:
‘I get bored. I can’t think what to do any more. Sometimes I play a practical joke on the police, just to pass the time. But it’s so easy I can hardly be bothered.’
He said this seriously, but I chose to treat it as a joke.
At the door he turned as though suddenly remembering something and invited me to go for a drive with him that evening, ‘for old time’s sake’. At first I said no—I really can’t explain why—but a moment later I accepted his invitation. The last thing he said to me was that I mustn’t take any money with me. One could never be too careful. I could leave my money with my landlord, he said. I didn’t quite get it, but said yes anyway and promised to be outside The Horse at five o’clock.