Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  The weather was mild, water flowed unceasingly past the mill, water nymphs, a welcoming house, three half-red roses, the mill wheel, the water frothing, Lena looked at me as she sang ‘if only I could make all the millstones go round, the girl in the mill would see how constant I am’ and desire seized me, the girl from the mill is mine.

  Once a week since the month of February 1913, Lena and Hans have been travelling from Waltenberg to Lucerne for her singing lesson with Madame Nietnagel. They would sit down in the drawing room, I want to see your canines, Madame Nietnagel would say, a voluminous lady, all sweetness but with crocodile eyes. Lena displayed her canines as she sang, Hans kept a straight face. Madame Nietnagel was simultaneously courteous and merciless. She liked Lena, considered she had talent. The dollars did not really come into it: Madame Nietnagel had money, she took pupils only to slow the onset of old age. She liked them. But when Lena objected to any of her comments, Madame Nietnagel would remark calmly:

  ‘I will say one more thing: do not chop the air with your hands and please, less chin. You do not have a small chin, so avoid sticking it out, and have a thought for your abdomen.’

  There would be a pause. Madame Nietnagel would smile, tell anecdotes, serve small biscuits with tea in pink cups. Then Lena would resume: ‘my heart is too full…’

  Tonight in the clearing, the time for manoeuvres is over, the sky acquires hues of cherry, riders in rows of six, the NCOs in serrefile, my sergeants are true warriors, re-enlisted men every man jack of them, the cavalry has been waiting forty years for this, swoop down on the Hun, the real thing, in the name of Alsace and Lorraine, in the name of all the cavalries in the world, to bury their reputation for serving no purpose, which every cavalry in the world has worn round its neck for fifty years, ever since one charge by a light brigade at Balaclava, when English hussars fell to the withering fire of Russian batteries, the Crimean War, there was a poem about it for children and young ladies but all cavalrymen everywhere have heard that the leader of the expeditionary force, Lord Raglan had only this to say of the English hussars: ‘That’s what comes of forgetting that the only thing the cavalry is good for is rounding up prisoners.’

  It’s the first time that the troopers of the 12th Dragoons are about to launch a real charge since the beginning of the war. Until this point, they have taken part in skirmishes, done more than their fair share of reconnaissance missions, taken pointless losses when they were shelled as they waited for an order to be issued, any order, but this is the first time that they have the honour of charging in full formation crying Saint George, and also to blot out the memory of those farmers who refused to sell them provisions the day before yesterday.

  ‘We’ve got nothing left!’

  ‘Come off it! Lieutenant, they want to keep the whole lot for theirselves, let’s use the thumbscrews.’

  ‘No! Remember the company motto: “Contending for Glory!” Now, to horse!’

  Max many miles away, much later, new wounds later, in the trenches at the front on the Somme, watches clouds of brown smoke coming his way, the commanding officer standing next to Max is quicker on the uptake than most and orders a withdrawal at the double. A few men have begun to cough, a gust from a side wind blowing in from the sea saves Max, his CO and their men, but the attack takes a heavy toll a little further along the line.

  It’s another kind of war we’re seeing the beginning of, the CO said, he thought he’d seen it all in Algeria twenty years before with those caves, after they’d set fire to bales of straw in the entry to the caves, old hands in the colonies called it wog-hunting, an old custom of the country, there was smoke, a lot of coughing and spluttering, the way it’s done with moles, fifty years and it’s still the only thing they understand, the settlers repeating ‘old Pélissier was right, he shut their traps for them’, and once, at the back of a cave, a narrow fault in the rock, a current of air, the natives had huddled there together, women, children.

  There was only room for two or three to breathe in that space, and they’d have been crushed by the others while the chemistry of straw fires transformed the lungs of the natives into balls of red fire, a few men had tried to get out, there were rifles waiting for them.

  ‘No prisoners!’ the colonel had shouted. ‘None, they don’t take prisoners either, remember the comrades you found with their private parts stuffed in their mouths, also the Morins’ farm, the entire family, got to make examples!’

  The day when a lieutenant asked if the examples weren’t becoming so numerous in their sector that there’d soon be no one left to follow them, he was given a month in the cells for insubordination, which in the event was commuted to a transfer to Paris because he bore a name which was six and a half centuries old and far too grand for cells, even republican cells.

  ‘And that, my dear Goffard, is why, despite my seniority, I never made it beyond the rank of major.’

  After the gas attack, a couple of weeks’ rest then back to the front. In one of the deeper and increasingly sophisticated trenches cannily laid out by the men to make them disappear as completely from view as possible, in the lull that followed the umpteenth bombardment from enemy lines, the CO who was the product of six and a half centuries spoke at length with Max in the low, careful voice of a man who has seen it all:

  ‘Before the war, Goffard, I killed a man, a duel, just after my wife died. A love letter in a drawer, it was all about their assignations, myself I’d never have told a woman a hundredth part of what it said.

  I tracked down the author of the letter and I killed him in a duel, stuck my blade exactly where I wanted it to go, in his throat. Day before yesterday, I received a note from my sister-in-law, she wants to defend my wife’s memory, she can’t hold back any longer, says that her sister was innocent, that I killed a man for nothing.

  ‘Why am I telling you all this? See those two Boche gun emplacements directly ahead, they’re called pillboxes, pillboxes, spanking new, very trim, see how our shelling has hardly scratched them? They say the Hun builds them with English concrete, just imagine, here we’ve been at war for more than a year and the Hun is using English concrete, you wonder how that can be. In twenty minutes I shall give out the order I’ve just got, our infantry is to make a “determinedly offensive” charge against those German pillboxes made of English concrete, using bayonets only. It is a bloody cretinous order, Goffard, “determinedly”, such a moronic adverb, dying for nothing, as usual.

  ‘And if my sister-in-law is right, then my role won’t have changed one iota. You will follow me in the second wave, you can order a retreat if the going gets too rough. Will you go and see my sister-in-law? You’ll find her address in my kit, don’t wait, she’ll explain what really happened. I won’t be around any more to find out but if she does know the truth someone’s got to be there to hear her tell it. You can tell her I always loved my wife. Can you feel the mildness in the air? It’s time to tag on to the back of the queue of all the men who’ve died already. Go and tell the men to be ready.’

  Somewhere in Europe or in her country on the other side of the ocean, the woman Hans wants to find will hold out her hand to him, he will have become a much better man than he was before, the war will be over, she looks at him as she sings: ‘if only I could make all the millstones go round, the girl in the mill would see how constant I am’, why had they ever separated?

  A few incidents, no more. Such as the day Hans left, she hadn’t said a word, but she’d seen him sneaking a look at his watch. Hans has never been able to look at his watch casually or discreetly, he always attempts to hide the gesture, one hand carelessly loitering near the fob while at the same time doing all he can to be seen, because it is not right to dissemble, he manages the thing in such a way that he can be observed in an attempt to dissemble though not quite obviously enough to be caught in the act, for then it would not be dissembling; the guilty hand slides over the cloth of his waistcoat, the thumb giving the impression of seeking support in the opening of the little watc
h pocket, the other fingers being already much lower so no one could suspect them of trying to slip round the watch nestling in that pocket, but as the hand creeps down, the reprimand will out.

  Hans does not allow the opportunity for this to arise, he waits until the woman he is conversing with has her back to him before he looks at his watch.

  And she who has observed him placing his hand over his waistcoat pocket is generally forced to keep what she knows but cannot see to herself, she is seized by doubt, she may have been mistaken, it shortens her temper, she must find something else to criticise, her back is turned to him, she looks out of the window, the woman who suffers faces the man who is bored and suddenly she blurts out:

  ‘You don’t look as if you are here.’

  On this occasion, Lena had spotted the gesture and Hans’s hand, caught in the act, instead of sliding had come to a sudden rest, Lena had said in French:

  ‘Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.’

  Had she really been as cross as that?

  Still further along in both space and time, later, a year, three years later, in the middle of the war, at the end of the war, who can tell? Hans saw a comrade return from the firing line holding his entrails in his hands, and he thought of those first months of the war, of the day he had almost been skewered on the end of a French dragoon’s sabre, then, seeing his wounded comrade, he remembered fabled King Renaud and thought or almost sang in French, the language which was always current in his family – and it mattered very little that they lived on the shores of the Baltic, at Rosmar, in a Reich which was increasingly adopting its true tongue, the French of Racine, Stendhal and, yes, even Tallement des Réaux was part of the air you breathed if you were civilised, even young people used bits and bobs of Parisian argot – seeing his comrade returning long after the others, Hans thought old King Renaud ‘is come home from the wars’, hummed it in French, breaking the word up to accommodate the rhythm, ‘de gue-erre revient’, despite all they’d been saying lately about France.

  And the comrade who was holding his guts like King Renaud wanted to go on walking with his knapsack on his back as he used to walk in the old days, in peacetime, the grape-harvest, with the pannier which stood out whitely against the green of the vines, at Grindisheim, in the sunshine, he had walked to fight off the fever he had caught one evening sitting by the fire with his back to the door, because walking cures every ailment, he had walked like Renaud carrying his entrails.

  And two days later, the wounded man would write to his wife:

  ‘I can’t walk any more, it hurts like nobody knows when they fish bits of bone or shrapnel out of me, nobody knows how much, they gave me an enema which did no good, I’m in a bad way, I didn’t want to say anything in my last letter, dearest, I didn’t want to bother you.’

  At Monfaubert, the dragoons are in action, the fire in their bellies stoked by thoughts of glory, country, the sergeant-major barking orders, revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, a single body, the anxious, tortured faces of those who have come under fire before, features twisted and apprehensive, the officers ride back up the ranks to enact part of the piece of theatre which is being staged, lithe, ramrod-backed in their boots, a light hand on the reins, a faint smile of excitement on their lips, giving out orders three centuries old, ‘Lower lances!’ or ‘Draw swords!’; when they were three hundred paces from the Prussians, the Captain cried:

  ‘Attack!’

  Ride directly towards the enemy, without hesitation. A hundred dragoons, all ex-farmhands emboldened by terror but emboldened all the same, the column hurtles into the valley of death, it’s hardly the pictorial grouping most likely to satisfy eye and soul, it consists of the two main lines of twenty riders, one line for each troop, the troops being staggered in echelons to widen the line of attack, here the Captain has formed them into columns six abreast to reduce the size of the target offered to enemy fire, it is less spectacular but makes little difference, they sally forth to the sound of the squadron buglers as if they’re on parade, determined to restore the smile to their faces, to settle accounts, to avenge Sedan and Reichstoffen, to forget that once more the battle is taking place on French soil, that once more, as the major newspapers put it, the German army ‘has been drawn into our national space’.

  The German sentries facing the dragoons have not yet grasped what is happening. They see a coloured mass emerge against a background of foliage and tree trunks, they hear the bugles blow excitedly, the tune is not a German tune, the full gallop at three hundred metres, the dragoons behaving as if they are on manoeuvres, gathering for the final charge in front of the stands when their speed draws from the lady spectators shrieks like those once heard at jousts in days of yore. Several dragoons fall during the headlong rush but there is no one now to rescue them despite the screams that burst out of their entrails. The rest bear down on Hans’s comrades, the evening sentries who up to that point had detected nothing more sinister than the smell of peas and bacon and potatoes cooking on the embers. All Hans is aware of are gunshots and screams and he feels ashamed.

  And Max, in another place at a later date, has watched his CO set off towards the pillboxes after being told one last time:

  ‘Go and see my sister-in-law, tell her I was hit by a bullet in the forehead, and listen to her story, the one she wants to tell about my wife.’

  An almost last, then one definitely last swig of brandy for all ranks and the CO climbs out of the trench at the head of his men, red trousers, blue greatcoats, everyone in full infantry kit, zigzagging in the deathly hush which settles when the men with guns opposite are adjusting their sights and before the bellicose cries which the attackers shout out to forget, Max saw the extinction brought on by the war, to which it clung as traveller’s joy binds itself around the young elm, of everything that had gone before in the days when death still went under the name of accident or disaster, two trains colliding head-on on the outskirts of Melun, the passengers dodging between the flames before falling into the inferno which lit a chaos of shadowy figures, disembowelled carriages, twisted rails, heaped ballast and, looming over it all, the express’s engine, immense, towering, spurting jets of steam.

  At the CO’s side marches Lazare, a ladies’ dressmaker, he has written to tell his children that they mustn’t do anything to upset their mother, he makes the company laugh with his jokes which are so much funnier than anything his comrades come up with:

  ‘When I’m sure of a thing, I bet on it. When I’m not sure, I give my word of honour.’

  He laughs with them, with the laughter he has provoked, and for Monsieur Henri Lavedan, a member of the French Academy, this laughter of the trenches is a special kind of laughter:

  ‘It appeases hunger, satisfies appetite, and quenches thirst when the Hun is all a man has to fill his belly with. Actually, the French soldier could never dispense with laughter. When he fights as when he plays he must go at it heart and soul. He started laughing the day France was mobilised, so come on, my lusty lads, my chaffinches, my lascars! Laugh! Sing! Dance!’

  Lazare was in the artillery, he asked to be transferred to us to be closer to the shooting, you have to, he’d say, when you’ve been French for only two generations.

  Max knows Lazare is going to be killed, we have grown so old in so few months, death looms up in the midst of youth like youth itself, drunk with joy, while life grown sterile staggers along in dirty greatcoats to meet its end. Max stands on a threshold, he watches, feeling quite unreal, it’s also possible to feel unreal when you know that thirty years from now Lazare’s wife will not return from Ravensbrück.

  On each day that preceded this determinedly offensive sortie against the pillboxes, Lazare wrote to his wife. In one letter, he even told her: ‘The treats I like best are, first, biscuits and fruit cake, then chocolate, honey, oranges and acid drops, we do three compulsory exercise sessions a day, physical training, bayonet practice and community singing, they’re teaching us “La Madelon”.’

  Ma
x watches Lazare, the infantrymen, his comrades, the CO, all in red and blue as they move off, they’ve talked about these colours, especially the red, didn’t they make it easier for the enemy to spot our soldiers? Contrary to certain allegations, the argument had not been ignored but one remark – in addition to worries about the continuing domestic production of madder from which the dye was made – had settled the matter from on high:

  ‘In the matter of the dress of the French soldier, the disadvantage of the brightness of the colours is more than compensated for by the ardour which they inspire in him.’

  The stuff of legend, by Saint George! On 4 September the troopers of the 12th Dragoons charge across the field of Monfaubert. Three troops of cavalry with fear in their bellies, thumping hearts, the sound of bugles and full battle kit of which all will end up being obliterated: army-red trousers with sky-blue piping, dark blue tunic with white trim to collar and facings, the clover-leaf shoulder tabs picked out in white cotton, blue collar-patch, silver buttons, red numbers, polished steel helmet with crest and black horse-hair plume (red for buglers), brass chin-strap, snuff-coloured horse-cloth, black gaiters, tan belts and straps, fatigue coat, saddle girth, blade-shaped cantle, greatcoat in a tight roll sixty-six centimetres wide, short under-saddle made of webbing, riveted girth-leathers, an explosive charge, lance-holder and Marbach key.