The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  The wall of earth has disappeared. Immediately, with a surge of strength he cannot explain, he sets off again, scrambling like a rat in the trenches, crawling on his back, drawn inexorably to the place he has been staring at. All of a sudden he realizes that he has reached the spot where the wall of earth collapsed and sees a glittering shard of steel that pierces the powdery soil. A few inches at most. It is the tip of a bayonet. The significance is obvious. There is a soldier buried underneath.

  Péricourt has heard tales of soldiers being buried alive, but it is not something he has ever personally witnessed. In the units he fought with, there were sappers with picks and shovels ready to dig out men who found themselves in that terrible position. They always arrived too late and when they were dragged out, the soldiers’ faces were blue, their eyes bulging. The thought of Pradelle flickers for a moment through Édouard’s mind, but he dismisses it.

  He has to act fast.

  He rolls over onto his belly and howls in pain as the ragged wound in his leg gapes open and is pressed into the stony ground. His hoarse scream has scarcely died as he feverishly scratches at the muddy ground, his hands hooked into claws. Tools that are pitifully inadequate if the buried man is already struggling for air, something Édouard soon realizes. How deeply is the soldier buried? If only he had something he could use to dig with. Péricourt glances to his right. His eye falls on the two corpses; there is nothing else, nothing he might use as a tool, nothing. The only solution is somehow to detach the bayonet and use it to dig, but that will take hours. He thinks he can hear the man screaming. But even if the man were not buried too deeply, it would be impossible to hear him screaming over the thunderous roar of battle—it is merely a figment of Édouard’s imagination, his mind is racing, he knows that time is of the essence. If those buried alive are not dug out quickly, they come out dead. As he scrambles with his fingernails at the dirt either side of the bayonet, he wonders if he knows this man; he mentally conjures up the names, the faces of the men in his unit. Given the circumstances, it seems incongruous: he wants to save his comrade, he wants it to be someone he knows, someone he likes. This thought helps him work more quickly. He glances left and right, desperately searching for help of some kind, but nothing comes, his fingers ache. He has managed to dig out a hole about four inches on either side, but when he tries to extract the bayonet, it does not move at all, it is as well rooted as a healthy tooth, he feels discouraged. How long has he been working, two minutes, three? The guy is probably already dead. His shoulders begin to hurt because of his awkward position. He cannot carry on much longer, he feels a creeping doubt, a mounting weariness, his movements become slower, his breathing more labored, his biceps cramp, he pounds the earth with his fists. Suddenly, he is sure he feels it move! He begins to weep, great wrenching sobs, he grabs the steel shaft with both hands and tugs with all his might, wiping away the tears blurring his vision with the back of his hand, the work now suddenly effortless, he stops tugging and returns to digging, then plunges his hand into the hole and tries to extract the bayonet. He lets out a howl of victory as it comes loose. He pulls it out and, for a brief instant, he stares at it in disbelief, as though this is the first time he has seen such a thing, then angrily plants it in the soil, screaming and roaring, stabbing at the earth. Using the blunt edge, he carves a wide circle; then, turning the blade so it is horizontal, he hacks away at the dirt, sweeping it aside with his free hand. How long does it take? The pain in his right leg is excruciating now. But finally he sees something, he reaches down and feels a patch of fabric, a button; he burrows like a lunatic, like a hunting dog, he reaches down again and feels a uniform jacket, he is using both hands now, both arms, the wave of earth clearly collapsed into some sort of shell crater, his fingertips brush against things he does not recognize. Then he feels the polished surface of a helmet, he follows the curve, and just beneath he finds his buried comrade. “Hey!” Édouard is still sobbing, still shouting even as his arms whirl, propelled by some unknown force, churning away at the muddy soil. Finally the soldier’s face appears less than a foot away. He looks like he is sleeping. Édouard recognizes him—what was his name again? He is dead. The realization is so devastating that Édouard Péricourt stops and stares down at his fallen comrade, and in that moment, he feels as though he, too, is dead, that what he is contemplating is his own death, and the pain of it is vast, overwhelming . . .

  Still sobbing, he digs out the body, moving quickly now: there are the shoulders, the torso, the waist. Lying next to the face of the dead soldier is the head of a horse. It seems curious that they should have been buried together, thinks Édouard, face-to-face. Through his tears, he cannot help but imagine sketching the scene. The work would be easier if he could stand up or shift position, but even so he carries on, talking aloud, blubbering like a child and babbling inanities—“Don’t worry, pal”—as though the man can hear him. He wants to huddle up against him and finds himself muttering things he would be ashamed to say if they were overheard, because deep down it is his own death he is mourning. He is weeping for the fear he can now finally admit he has felt for the past two years, the terrible dread that one day he would be the dead comrade of a soldier who was merely wounded. The war is ending. These tears for his comrade he sheds for his own childhood, his own life. He has been lucky. Crippled for the rest of his days, dragging his right leg behind him. But so what? He is alive. With large, sweeping gestures he finally digs out the body.

  The name comes back to him: Maillard. The man’s first name, he never knew: he was always Maillard.

  With it comes a doubt. He brings his face close to Albert’s, longing to hush the world that is exploding all around so he can listen because he cannot help but wonder: is he really dead? From his position sprawled next to him, it is not easy, but he slaps the man’s face and watches as Maillard’s head follows the movement without flinching; it means nothing, and it is a terrible idea for Édouard to imagine that the soldier is not completely dead, an idea that will only cause him more pain, but there it is. Now that there is a doubt, he has no choice but to make sure, and for us who are watching, it is a terrible thing to witness. We want to scream, “Let it go, you did your best,” to take his hands, grip them tightly so that he will stop moving, stop trembling, to say the sort of things one might say to a child having a tantrum, to hold him until his tears run dry. To comfort him, in a word. But there is no one, not you, not me, to show Édouard the way, and from somewhere in the depths of his mind, a notion develops that perhaps Maillard is not really dead. Édouard saw it happen once, or heard the story from someone who did, it is a myth of the front lines, one no one ever actually witnesses, the story of a soldier everyone thought was dead who came back to life, whose heart began to beat again.

  While he is thinking this, and in spite of the agonizing pain, Édouard manages to stand on his good leg. He sees his right leg, trailing uselessly behind, but sees it through a mist of fear mingled with exhaustion, pain, and despair.

  He gathers his strength.

  For a fleeting second he manages to stand on one leg like a heron; balancing precariously, he glances around then, taking a quick, deep breath, he lets his full weight fall onto Albert’s chest.

  There is an ominous crack of crushed and breaking ribs. Édouard hears a groan. Beneath him, the ground shifts and he slips down, as though falling off a chair, but it is not the earth rising up. It is Albert turning over, spewing his guts and coughing. Édouard cannot believe his eyes, he feels tears welling up again. You have to admit, Édouard has the luck of the devil. Albert carries on vomiting, and Édouard cheerfully pats him on the back, laughing and crying at the same time. There he sits on the ravaged battlefield beside a horse’s severed head, one leg bent backward and bleeding, feeling he might pass out from exhaustion, while next to him this man who has returned from the dead is throwing up . . .

  Even for the end of the war, it was curious scene. An arresting image. But it was not the last. As Albert Maillard slowly
regains consciousness, spluttering hoarsely as he rolls onto his side, Édouard, his body ramrod straight, is hurling abuse at the heavens as though smoking a stick of dynamite.

  It is at this point that a sliver of shrapnel as big as a soup plate comes hurtling toward him. A thick shard and moving at a dizzying speed.

  The gods, it would appear, have answered him.

  4

  The two men came to in very different ways.

  Albert, having returned from the dead and spewed his guts, gradually became aware of a sky streaked with shells, a clear sign that he had come back to the real world. He could not know it yet, but the charge initiated and led by Lieutenant Pradelle was already almost over. In the end, Hill 113 had been easily captured. After a brief but forceful resistance, the enemy had surrendered and been taken prisoner. From beginning to end, the operation had been a formality that left thirty-eight men dead, twenty-seven wounded, and two missing in action (the Boches were not included in these calculations). In short, an excellent result.

  When the stretcher bearers found him on the battlefield, Albert was cradling Édouard Péricourt’s head in his lap and singing softly, in a state his rescuers described as “delusional.” Every one of his ribs was fractured, cracked, or broken, but his lungs were undamaged. He was in terrible pain, which, all in all, was a good sign, a sign that he was alive. He was not, however, in the greatest health, and was forced to postpone thinking about the issues raised by his situation.

  By what astonishing miracle, by the grace of what higher power, by what improbable chance was it that his heart had stopped beating only a few short seconds before Soldat Péricourt attempted his highly individual method of resuscitation? All Albert could say for certain was that the engine had started up again—stuttering and jolting, and with a few backfires—and that the essentials were intact.

  Having bandaged him up securely, the doctors announced that the limits of their skills ended there and consigned him to an enormous general ward where some soldiers lay dying, others were gravely wounded, a handful had been crippled in some way, and the able-bodied played cards, peering through their bandages.

  Thanks to the taking of Hill 113, the field hospital, which had stood almost idle for weeks while waiting for the armistice, geared up for action again, but, since casualties of the offensive had not been too numerous, doctors could work at the sort of unhurried pace they had four years earlier. A period when nurses could take time to attend to a man dying of thirst. When doctors did not have to give up treating soldiers long before they were indeed dead. When surgeons who had not slept for three days were no longer writhing with cramps from hours spent hacking through femurs, tibias, and humeri.

  As soon as he was brought in, Édouard had undergone two rudimentary procedures. His right leg had been fractured in several places and suffered ruptured ligaments and tendons; he would limp for the rest of his life. The most serious operation consisted of exploring his facial wounds to remove foreign bodies (as far as a front-line field hospital was equipped to do so). They had vaccinated him, cleared his airway, taken steps to deal with the risk of gas gangrene, debrided the wounds to prevent them from becoming infected; the rest—which is to say the most essential treatment—they would have to leave to a better-equipped hospital in the civilian zone, and only then—assuming the patient did not die—could he be sent to a specialist facility.

  An urgent transfer was ordered for Édouard, and in the meantime Albert—whose tale had been retold and embellished all over the hospital—was allowed to remain at his comrade’s bedside. Fortunately, it had been possible to place the patient in a private room in the south wing of the building, where he was not surrounded by the groans of the dying.

  Powerless to help, Albert watched Édouard recover consciousness by gradual stages, though he scarcely understood the process. Sometimes he noticed a gesture, a facial expression that he thought he could interpret, but they were so fleeting they had vanished before Albert could find a word to describe them. As I have said, Albert never had been particularly bright, and the ordeal he had been through had not helped matters.

  Édouard was in agony from his wounds; he screamed and thrashed so wildly that he had to be strapped to the bed. It was then that Albert realized that the choice of a room in the empty wing had not been for Édouard’s comfort, but so that other patients would not have to endure his constant screams. Four years of war were not enough; Albert’s naivety was still boundless.

  He spent hours sitting, wringing his hands, listening to his comrade’s cries, a litany of moans and howls and wracking sobs that spanned the whole gamut of what a man may express when he finds himself at the very limit of pain and madness.

  From a man incapable of holding a conversation with his assistant manager at the bank, Albert was transformed into a passionate advocate, pleading that the hunk of shrapnel lodged in his comrade was no splinter wound. By his own standards, he acquitted himself well and felt he had been effective. In fact he had simply been pathetic, though that proved to be sufficient. Since there was nothing more to be done while they waited for a transfer, the young surgeon agreed to prescribe morphine for Édouard’s pain on condition that he was given the minimum dose and gradually weaned off it. It was unimaginable that Édouard would be here for much longer. His condition required prompt specialist care. His transfer was classed “urgent.”

  Thanks to the morphine, Édouard’s slow recovery was less brutal. His first conscious sensations were jumbled: cold, heat, faint sounds he could not make out, voices he did not recognize; more difficult were the shooting pains through his chest and upper torso that seemed to keep time with his heartbeat, an unending series of waves that became unbearable as the morphine wore off. His head was like a resonance chamber; each wave ended with a muffled thud like the sound of a ship’s mooring buoys colliding with the jetty as it docks.

  He could feel his leg, too. The right leg that had been shattered by a stray bullet and which he had further damaged when he went to save Albert Maillard. But this pain, too, was tempered by the drugs. He was vaguely aware that he still had his leg, which was true. Granted it was smashed to a pulp, but it was still capable (at least partially) of performing the tasks expected of a leg returning from the Great War. For a long time, his awareness of what was going on was murky, drowned out by a flood of images. Édouard was living in a confused dream world where, in no particular order, he was assailed by everything he had seen, heard, and felt.

  His brain conflated reality, sketches, paintings as though his life were no more than one more mixed-media masterpiece in the museum of his imagination. The evanescent beauty of a Botticelli and the palpable fear of Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard were succeeded by the face of a street merchant on the rue des Martyrs, whose solemn expression had always attracted Édouard’s attention, and—who knows why?—by his father’s detachable collar, the one with the slightly pinkish tinge.

  Out of the grayness of everyday objects, of characters from Bosch, of nudes and savage warriors, came the recurring image of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. He had only ever seen the painting once, a reproduction secretly glimpsed at the home of a family friend. It was a long time ago, long before the war, he would have been eleven, perhaps twelve. He would still have been studying at the Institution Sainte-Clotilde at the time. Sainte Clotilde, daughter of Chilperic and Carétène, an out-and-out slut . . . Édouard had sketched her in every possible position: being mounted by her uncle Godegisel, taken doggy-style by King Clovis and, sometime around AD 493, giving the king of Burgundy a blow job with the bishop of Reims taking her from behind. This was what led to his third—and final—suspension. Everyone agreed it was extraordinarily detailed; indeed, they wondered, given his age, where he had come by the models. There were individual details . . . His father, who considered art to be a degenerate depravity, remained tight lipped. In fact, long before he started school at Sainte-Clotilde, things had not been going well for Édouard. Especially when it came to his fa
ther. Édouard had always expressed himself through drawing. In every school he attended, all his teachers would sooner or later find a caricature a yard high scrawled on the blackboard. It might just as well have been signed; it would be classic Péricourt. Over the years, his inspiration, which had focused on the schools in which his father, using his connections, managed to have him enrolled, shifted to encompass other themes, what one might call his “religious period,” culminating in the scene in which the music teacher, Mlle Juste, in the guise of a voluptuous Judith, held up the severed head of a Holofernes who was the spitting image of M. Lapurce, the math teacher. Everyone had known they were doing it. Until their final parting, as depicted in this splendid decapitation, Édouard had kept a visual record, a series of sometimes shocking tableaux sketched on blackboards, walls, and scraps of paper that even the teachers, when they confiscated them, passed around among themselves before handing them to the principal. Anyone watching the diffident mathematics teacher loping across the playground could not but see him as a lecherous, preposterously well-endowed satyr. Édouard, at the time, was eight years old. This biblical scene earned him an interview in the principal’s office. The conversation did little to improve matters. When the principal, holding the sketch at arm’s length, made some outraged reference to Judith, Édouard felt the need to point out that, although in the drawing the young woman was holding the severed head by the hair, it was resting on a salver, consequently she might well be Salome rather than Judith and the head therefore of John the Baptist rather than Holofernes. Édouard was something of a pedant, the sort of know-it-all who could be profoundly irritating.