The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Even Albert, terrified at the thought of dying, is ready to gut the first man he encounters. But there are many obstacles along the way; as he runs, he veers toward the right. At first, he advanced along the line indicated by the lieutenant, but as the bullets whined and the shells droned, he had no choice but to zigzag. Especially since Péricourt, directly ahead of him, has just been hit by a bullet and crumples at his feet so suddenly that Albert scarcely has time to step over him. He loses his balance, staggers a few yards more, carried forward by momentum, only to stumble upon the body of old Grisonnier, whose unexpected death triggered this final, bloody slaughter.

  Despite the bullets whistling all around, when Albert sees him sprawled there, he stops in his tracks.

  He recognizes Grisonnier by his greatcoat, because the old man always wore something red in his buttonhole, “my légion d’horreur,” he called it. Grisonnier was not a great wit. He was not exactly subtle, but he was a brave man, and everyone loved him. There could be no doubt that it was him. His huge head was buried in the mud, and the rest of his body looked as though he had fallen headlong. Next to him, Albert recognized the kid, Louis Thérieux. He, too, is partly covered by mud, huddled up in a fetal position. It is heartbreaking to die at such an age, in such a way . . .

  Albert does not know what comes over him, but instinctively he grabs the old man’s shoulder and heaves. The dead man topples over and lands heavily on his belly. It takes several seconds for the penny to drop. Then suddenly the truth is glaringly obvious: when a man is advancing toward the enemy, he does not die from two bullets in his back.

  Albert steps over the body and takes a few paces, he is still half-crouching though he does not know why, since a bullet can strike whether a man is standing or stooping, but instinctively he offers as small a target as possible, as though war were constantly waged for fear the sky should fall. Now he stands before the body of young Louis. The boy’s hands, clenched into fists, are pressed against his mouth, and in this pose he seems so young; he is barely twenty-two. Albert cannot see his face, which is caked in mud. He can see only the boy’s back. One bullet wound. With the two bullets in the old man, that makes three. And only three shots were fired.

  As he straightens up again, Albert is still shaken by what he has discovered. By what it means. A few days from the armistice, the men were in no hurry to take on the Boches; the only way to goad them into an attack was to start a fight: so where was Pradelle when these two men were shot in the back?

  Dear God . . .

  Shocked by the realization, Albert turns and sees Lieutenant Pradelle bearing down on him, moving as fast as his heavy pack will allow, his head held high. What Albert most notices is the lieutenant’s stare, his bright, cold eyes. He is utterly single minded. Suddenly, the whole story becomes clear.

  It is at that moment that Albert realizes he is going to die.

  He tries to move, but everything in him refuses to obey: his mind, his legs, everything. Everything is happening too quickly. As I said, Albert was never a man in a hurry. In three swift strides, Pradelle is upon him. Next to them is a gaping hole, a crater made by a shell. The lieutenant’s shoulder hits Albert square in the chest, winding him. He loses his footing, tries to stop himself, but falls back, arms spread, into the void.

  And, as he falls into the crater, as though in slow motion, he sees Pradelle take a step back, and in his expression Albert sees the extent of his defiance, his conviction, and his provocation.

  Albert rolls as he hits the bottom of the crater, his momentum barely slowed by his pack. His legs become tangled with his rifle, but he manages to struggle to his feet and quickly presses himself against the muddy slope as though ducking behind a door for fear of being surprised. Leaning his weight on his heels (the compacted clay is as slippery as soap), he tries to catch his breath. His fleeting, tangled thoughts keep returning to the cold, hard look in Pradelle’s eyes. Up above, the battle seems to have intensified; the sky is strung with garlands of smoke. The milky vault is lit by blue and orange haloes. The shells fired from both sides rain down as they did at the Battle of Gravelotte2 in a deafening thunder of whistles and explosions. Albert looks up. There, standing on a ledge, overhanging the crater like the angel of death, is the silhouette of Lieutenant Pradelle.

  To Albert, it seems as though he spent a long time falling. In fact, barely six feet separate the men. Probably less. But it makes all the difference. Lieutenant Pradelle stands above, feet apart, his hands firmly gripping his belt. Behind him, the flickering glow of battle. Calm, motionless, he looks down into the hole. He stares at Albert, a half smile playing on his lips. He will not lift a finger to help him out. Albert is shocked, he sees red, he grabs his rifle, stumbles but manages to right himself, raises the weapon, and suddenly there is no one standing on the edge of the pit. Pradelle has disappeared.

  Albert is alone.

  He drops the rifle and tries to get his second wind. He cannot afford to waste time, he should scramble up the side of the crater and run after Pradelle, shoot him in the back, grab him by the throat. Or find the others, talk to them, scream at them, do something, though he does not know what. But he feels so tired. Exhaustion has finally overtaken him. Because this is all so stupid. It is as though he has just set down his suitcase, as though he has arrived. He could not climb the slope even if he wanted. He was within a hair’s breadth of surviving the war, and now here he is at the bottom of a shell crater. He slumps rather than sits and takes his head in his hands. He tries to assess the situation, but his confidence has suddenly melted away. Like an ice cream. Like the lemon sorbets Cécile loves, so sour that she clenches her teeth and screws her face up in a catlike expression that makes Albert want to hug her. When was it that he last had a letter from Cécile? This is another reason for his exhaustion. He does not talk about it to anyone, but Cécile’s letters have dwindled to brief notes. With the end of the war in sight, she writes as though it were already over, as though there is no longer any point in writing long letters. It is not the same for those who have whole families, who are constantly getting letters, but for Albert there is only Cécile . . . There is his mother, too, of course, but she is more tiresome than anything else. Her letters have the same hectoring tone as her conversation, as she tries to make his decisions for him. These things have been wearing Albert down, eating away at him; and then there are all his comrades who have died, the fallen friends he tries not to think about too much. He has experienced these moments of abject despair before, but this one comes at a bad time. Just when he needs to summon all his strength. He could not say why, but something inside him has suddenly given way. He can feel it in his belly. It is a vast weariness, as heavy as stone. A stubborn refusal, something utterly passive and detached. Like the end of something. When he first enlisted and, like so many men, tried to imagine what war would be like, he secretly thought that, if the worst came to the worst, he would simply play dead. He would collapse, or, for the sake of credibility, he could scream and pretend he had just taken a bullet through the heart. Then all he would need to do was lie there and wait until all was calm again. When it was dark, he would inch toward the body of a fallen comrade, someone who was really dead, and steal his papers. After that, he could continue his reptilian crawl for hours on end, stopping and holding his breath whenever he heard voices in the darkness. Taking a thousand precautions, he would carry on until he came to a road, and he would head north (or south, depending). As he trudged, he would learn the details of his new identity by heart. Then he would fall in with a lost unit, whose caporal-chef, a heavyset man with . . . As you can see, for a bank teller Albert has a vivid imagination. Perhaps he was influenced by Mme Maillard’s flights of fancy. In the beginning, this romantic vision of warfare was one he shared with many of his comrades. He would imagine serried ranks of soldiers in their striking blue-and-red uniforms marching toward the terrified enemy. Their fixed bayonets would sparkle in the sunshine as the plumes of smoke from a few carefully aimed shel
ls confirmed the enemy had been routed. In his heart, Albert had signed up for a war from the pages of Stendhal only to be confronted by a banal, barbaric slaughter that claimed a thousand lives a day for fifty months. To get a sense of the carnage, one had only to peer out over the lip of a trench and survey the scene: a wasteland devoid of any plants, pockmarked by thousands of craters, littered with hundreds of rotting corpses exuding a putrid stench that made your stomach lurch again and again. At every lull in the fighting, rats as large as hares would scurry hungrily from one corpse to another, fighting the blowflies for the worm-eaten remains. Albert knew all this, because he had served as a stretcher bearer at the Battle of the Aisne and, when he could find no more wounded men whimpering or howling, he collected bodies in various stages of decomposition. He knew everything there was to know. It was a difficult task for Albert, who had always been tenderhearted.

  And, to make matters worse for a man who is about to be buried alive, Albert is a little claustrophobic.

  As a child, the very thought that his mother might inadvertently close the bedroom door after she said goodnight had made him feel sick. He would simply lie there. He never said anything. He did not want to trouble his mother, who was always telling him she had troubles enough already. But the night and the darkness frightened him. Even quite recently, when he and Cécile were rolling around in the sheets, whenever Albert was completely covered, he found it difficult to breathe and felt a panic rising in him. Especially since Cécile would sometime wind her legs around him and hold him there. Just to see, she would say with a laugh. Suffocation is the form of death he most fears. Fortunately, he is not thinking about this because next to what is about to happen, being trapped between Cécile’s silken thighs will seem like paradise. If he knew what lay in store, Albert would want to die.

  Which would not necessarily be a bad thing, since that is what is going to happen. Though not just yet. In a little while, when the fateful shell explodes a few yards from his shelter, raising up a wave of earth as high as a wall, which will collapse and cover him completely, he will not have long to live, but it will be just long enough to realize what is happening to him. Albert will be seized by that desperate desire to survive, a primitive resistance of the sort that laboratory rats must feel when picked up by their hind paws, or pigs about to have their throats cut, or cattle about to be slaughtered . . . We will have to wait a while before this happens . . . Wait for his lungs to whiten as they gasp for air, for his body to tire of his desperate attempts to free himself, for his head to feel as though it will explode, for his mind to be engulfed by madness, for . . . let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  Albert turns and looks up for a last time; it is not very far when he thinks about it—it is simply too far for him. He tries to summon his strength, to focus on nothing but scrambling up this slope, getting out of this hole. He picks up his pack and his rifle, steels himself, and begins to climb. It is not easy. His feet slip and slide in the mud; he can get no purchase. He digs his fingers into the clay, lashes out with the toe of his boot, trying to create a foothold, only to fall back. So he drops his rifle and his pack. If he had to strip naked, he would not hesitate. He presses himself against the muddy hill and begins to crawl on his belly. His movements are like those of a squirrel in a cage: he scrambles at the empty air, falls, and lands in the very same spot. He pants, he groans, and then he howls. Panic is getting the better of him. He can feel tears welling; he beats his fists against the wall of earth. The edge of the crater is almost within reach, for Christ’s sake; when he extends his arms he can almost touch it, but the soles of his boots skid, and every inch he gains is just as quickly lost. I have to get out of this fucking shell crater! he screams to himself. And he will do it. He is prepared to die, someday, but not now; it would be too stupid, too senseless. He will get out of here and hunt down Lieutenant Pradelle. He will go looking in the German trenches if necessary; he will find him, and he will kill him. It gives him courage, the thought of gunning that fucker down.

  For a moment he ponders the miserable notion that, despite trying for more than four years, the Boches have failed to kill him; it is a French officer who will do the job.

  Shit.

  Albert kneels and opens his pack. He takes everything out, slips his canteen between his legs; he will spread his greatcoat over the slippery slope and dig anything and everything that might serve as a crampon into the sodden earth. He turns, and at precisely that moment he hears the whine of the shell above him. Suddenly worried, Albert looks up. In his four years at the front he has learned to tell a 75mm shell from a 95mm, a 105mm from a 120mm . . . This time he hesitates. Perhaps because of the depth of the crater, or perhaps because of the distance, the shell is heralded by a strange, new sound, at once quieter and more muffled than usual, a sort of dull roar that rises to a piercing shriek. Albert’s mind just has time to form a question. The explosion is immeasurable. The earth shakes with terrible spasms, emits a deep, mournful groan, and then erupts like a volcano. Thrown off balance by the blast, Albert is surprised to look up and see that the world has suddenly gone dark. A dozen yards above his head, where the sky should be, he watches as, in slow motion, the dark earth furls into a great wave whose shifting, sinuous crest is surging toward him, about to break and engulf him completely. A light, almost indolent rain of pebbles, clods, and assorted rubble heralds its arrival. Albert curls into a ball and holds his breath. This is not a good move, on the contrary, he should stretch himself out as much as possible, as anyone who has been buried alive will tell you. There follow two or three suspended seconds during which Albert stares up at the mantle of earth that hovers in the sky, seemingly deciding on the time and place of its fall.

  In a moment, this blanket will crash down and cover him.

  To give you an idea, under normal circumstances Albert looks rather like a Tintoretto self-portrait. He has always had rather hangdog features with finely delineated lips, a protruding chin, and dark rings around his eyes accentuated by his arched black eyebrows. But in this moment, as he looks up at the sky and sees death bearing down on him, he looks more like Saint Sebastian. Suddenly he looks haggard. His face is creased by pain and fear into a kind of prayer, which is all the more useless since Albert has never believed in anything in his life, and, given the misfortune about to befall him, he is not going to start believing in something now. Even supposing he had the time.

  With a thunderous crack, the sheet of clay collapses on him. One might believe that the impact would kill him on the spot, Albert would be dead, it would all be over. What happens is worse. The pebbles and stones continue to rain down on him, then comes the soil, covering him with a blanket that grows heavier and heavier. Albert is pinned to the ground.

  Gradually, as the earth piles up above him, he is engulfed, compressed, crushed.

  Light flickers out.

  Everything stops.

  This is a new world, a world in which Cécile no longer exists.

  The first thing he notices, just before panic overtakes him, is that the noise of the war has stopped. As though everything had suddenly fallen silent, and God had blown the final whistle. Of course, if he stopped to think, he would realize that nothing has stopped, that the noise is simply muffled by the weight of the earth above him, almost inaudible. But just now, Albert has more pressing concerns than listening for whether the war is still going on, because all that matters is that, for him, it is about to end.

  The moment the din abated, Albert was trapped. I’m under the earth, he thinks, though it is a somewhat abstract concept. It is only when he thinks “I am buried alive” that it becomes appallingly concrete.

  And when he realizes the extent of the catastrophe, the nature of the death that awaits him, when it becomes clear that he is going to choke to death, to suffocate, Albert goes insane: instantly, utterly insane. Everything in his head becomes confused, he screams and with that scream squanders what little oxygen he has left. I’m buried alive, he thinks over and over, a
nd his mind is so consumed by this terrible conclusion that he has not even thought to open his eyes. He tries to move. Every last ounce of strength, every wave of the panic surging through him is transformed into muscular exertion. As he struggles, he uses up incalculable energy. And it is all in vain.

  Then, suddenly, he stops.

  Because he has just realized that he can move his hands. Only slightly, but he can move them. He holds his breath. As it fell, the sodden clay fashioned a sort of shell around his arms, his shoulders, his neck. The world in which he lies almost petrified affords him a few scant inches here and there. In fact, the layer of earth covering him is not very deep. Albert knows this. Sixteen inches, perhaps. But he is underneath and this blanket is enough to paralyze him, to inhibit all movement, to condemn him.

  All around him, the ground is trembling. Above him, in the distance, the war rages on, the shells continue to pound and shake the earth.

  Albert opens his eyes, warily at first. It is dark but not pitch dark. Infinitesimal rays of sunlight are managing to filter through. A faint, pale glow, a flicker of life.

  He forces himself to take short, halting breaths. He moves his elbows a few inches and manages to spread his legs a little, packing the soil by his feet. Taking infinite precautions, and struggling to contain the panic he feels mounting in him, he tries to lift his face so he can breathe. Immediately a slab of earth collapses like a bubble bursting. Instinctively, he tenses every muscle and curls his body into a ball, but nothing else happens. How long does he lie in this perilous position as the air around him grows thinner, imagining the death that awaits him, trying to understand what it means to be deprived of oxygen, to have every vessel in him burst like a balloon, his wide eyes staring as though searching for the air he lacks? Moving as slowly as possible, while he strives not to breathe more than necessary, not to think more than necessary, not to picture the position he is in, his hand inches forward, feeling the ground. Unexpectedly, his fingers encounter something, but the faint glow, though brighter, is not enough to make out his surroundings. He runs his fingertips over something soft; it is not dirt, not clay, something silky, almost velvety.