by Pete Ayrton
The plain in which this village lies hidden is completely pastoral, with nothing military about it at all. An hour after the last man in blue has vanished, it will look once more exactly like one of Millet’s pictures. Even the village has a curious beauty of its own. It is the one I told you of in my previous letters. To think that we’ve been here a month already! It’s all so good that it’s really rather frightening. I keep on wondering what horrible thing is going to happen next. But I do my best to enjoy the moment. The great thing is just to go on living.
The village rather reminds me of the places in the Beauce that we used to visit in the car. (Dear car! I often think of it. Do you remember how we used to bump along those village streets?) A group of large, squat farms, neither too crowded nor too far apart. Huge walls with only a few windows. Plenty of big square buildings. Great roofs with their slopes set at right angles. In the middle of the village is a large open space with a pond surrounded by a wall – there’s even a balustrade on one side – which serves as a drinking-place for animals. They reach it by a gentle slope which leads straight down into the greenish-grey water.
Oh, I can tell you the name of the village. Until now I’ve always concealed it because instructions on that subject have again been renewed. But what possible harm can it do? We are so far from the front! Besides, no one but you is going to read this letter.
It is called Grandes-Loges. Perhaps you can find it on a road-map (about twelve kilometres south of Mourmelon-le-Grand). I like the name. It is as old and solid as a farmer’s clothes-press. I can imagine us staying here, you and I, with some rich peasant uncle and his stableful of animals. He would put us up for a month during the winter. We should have good solid meals, washed down with the local wine (which is no more nor less than Champagne!), and we would go for long walks in the plain. When night fell we would make love for hours together in our room – it would be a bit cold (but there would be a feather bed with plenty of thick blankets and a huge eiderdown).
There are two battalions of the 151st regiment here. The second battalion is at Bouy – a few kilometres away – with the regimental details. That makes it all the quieter for us.
I have got for my company an enormous loft, which is over a stable, and so quite dry. My own quarters are in a real room belonging to a building near by. It must formerly have belonged to one of the farmhands. It’s got a great rough floor, a beamed roof, and a tiny window through which I can see the plain and the blue sky I have told you of.
For once, Cotin – the fellow who obsesses and terrifies my mind like a problem that is at once insoluble and quite uninteresting – has had what might be called a good idea. He has made the men gather, from the neighbouring wood, logs and branches of pine and fir, even ivy and mistletoe, and has shown them how to build little cabins, rustic huts, dotted about anyhow, in the huge, healthy loft, which is about as hospitable as a desert and as cold as a railway station. This has given the men no end of fun. Some of them have been extraordinarily ingenious in building and adorning their little hide-outs. One of them has even built a miniature house, with two floors, an outside staircase, and a balcony. It looks charming. Each of these small constructions is inhabited by a squad, a half-squad, or sometimes by still smaller groups, just as the men want to arrange. They pay one another visits. Quite apart from occupying their minds, they keep warmer this way and get a sense of greater intimacy. The whole thing looks rather like a model of a charcoal-burners’ camp in a booth at the Lyons fair. It is all very cheerful.
But the most marvellous thing of all, the thing that really makes this place seem like paradise, is that we don’t hear a single gun – or not what you would call hearing – not one. I wonder whether you can understand, can realize exactly what that means. Not only does a stray shell never come our way, but even by straining our ears we can hear nothing that even remotely resembles the sound of a gun firing or the burst of a shell. For instance, since I started this letter I’ve heard the sound of voices, the clatter of mess-tins, the noise of wheels on the road – even, though you’ll hardly believe it, the clucking of a hen that’s just laid an egg – but not the remotest suspicion of boom-boo-oo-oom, boom!…
It makes one want to cry, to tremble, with the sheer wonder of it. Oh, my dear darling! For all your sensitive understanding, I don’t suppose you can begin to realize what it means for all us poor wretches to live beneath a blue winter sky, with white clouds, unsmirched by even the faintest whisper of gunfire.
There is very little for us to do. We are spared the awful drill in the bare fields with which they used to poison our periods of rest. For the last few days they have been sending us to a point rather farther to the north to dig trenches, machine-gun emplacements, communications, and to set up a lot of wire. The only trouble about that is the distance we have to cover, and the uncomfortable thought: ‘They must be worried, to organize positions so far to the rear.’ But, as I said before, it’s no good meeting trouble half-way. We’ll do as much digging as they want if only we can stay a bit longer at Grandes-Loges.
Odette darling! When next you write tell me something of the quays of the Seine near where we live, between the Halle-aux-Vins and the Pont National. How I’d love to be walking with you by the river and watching the Métro viaduct, graceful as a leaping goat, and the Bercy reservoirs beyond! I’d like to plunge with you into the narrow lanes of Picpus. The days are already lengthening. When it’s clear and not too cold, the evening light seems to hang suspended just a second or so longer than one expects, and for the two or three minutes before darkness falls, there is a feeling of spring in the air.
Here, where we are, the thought of spring is not wholly a mockery. The heart soars, and then suddenly awakes to all the horror of what it is missing, what it has lost. Who will give me back this day as it might have been if only I could have spent it with you, our evening together, the walk we might have taken, the silent laughter with which you would have turned to me when I took you in my arms as we climbed the slope of one of those Picpus alleys? Who will give me back the happiest years of my life – even if I live to know others just as happy? Who will compensate me for these long months of exile? Poor us, dear, darling wife, who have not even had the consolation of finding life empty, who would have been contented with modest treasures which we could have enjoyed without harming anybody. Sometimes I think I have discovered the secret of this monstrous tragedy in which we have been caught. There are not enough people in the world who value living for its own sake, not enough who can find in the peace of every day the most wondrous miracle of all. Most men and women are tormented by miserable little worries and demand the dramatic as a dog devoured by fleas demands a violent counter-irritant and jumps into the fire to find it. I would go even so far as to say that many human beings ought never to have been born at all and spend most of their lives trying to correct that elementary mistake. The pity is that they should have to involve us in their attempt to get back to the primordial chaos.
Jules Romains was born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule in the Loire valley in 1885. He moved to Paris to study and had his first success in 1925 with the play Dr Knock, a brilliant satire on doctors and the ‘science’ of medicine. In 1932, he started writing the Men of Good Will, which contained fourteen volumes when Romains finished it in 1946. The extract is taken from The Prelude to Verdun, which powerfully captures the eerie atmosphere of battle. The series is an attempt to portray the whole of French society from October 1908 to October 1933. A reflection of Romains’ spiritual beliefs, it presents the changes that occurred over this 25-year period as being the achievement of collectives – villages, factories and schools – and not of individuals.
Men of Good Will celebrates over a quarter-century the friendship of the writer Jallez and the politician Jerphanion. One of Romains’ many achievements is to convey the poignancy of the everyday pleasures of life lost to those on the front.
JEAN GIONO
JULIA REMEMBERS
from To the Slaught
erhouse
translated by Norman Glass
‘IT’LL BE A FINE CLEAR NIGHT,’ Julia said. ‘You can tell from the air, and you can see Saint Victor’s.’
The alpine wind had swept the twilight free of clouds and the edges of the sky stood out sharp as a scythe. Where the sun set, the hump of Lure with its smoking collieries rose up in celestial green lovely as meadow dew.
‘Where are you going?’ the father asked.
‘To feed the animals.’
As usual on windy days, night descended abruptly, complete with bright stars in the broad milky way.
Julia groped her way along the shed wall for the door. I wonder if it’ll be like the last time, she thought. And that was all she needed to excite her. She lifted the wooden latch. Yes, it was just like the last time and it would always be the same. Every time she’d come to this door she’d be greeted by the smell of fresh hay, that smell that made her heart beat like water brimming over the edge of a fountain. That smell of hay and horses. A smell of solid life which scraped her skin like a stone. The last time, she remembered, she’d dropped the pitchfork, and when she bent down to pick it up the smell rose up so strongly she got gooseflesh. Her body wanted to burst into flowers. She felt she was being carried away by the leaves and the wind. No use in fighting against it. She remembered her marriage night, everybody tipsy with wine, and the new linen against her skin, and the corset which squeezed her in the right places, and then Joseph kissing her with his mouth wide open as though he was biting into a slice of melon…
Julia climbed the ladder and got piles of hay ready. The smell made her giddy. The stack was like a huge flower opening at every thrust. She watched the forkfuls steaming in the lantern-light.
She returned to the kitchen, shaking her legs at the door to let the hay dust drop from under her dress. Madeleine was knitting, or making a skirt perhaps. It was hard to tell which, because she was sitting almost completely in the shadow. Jerome was sleeping, his mouth closed tight. The clock was ticking. Not a cheerful sight! Sometimes you need to… Ah! it was hard to be away from men. Julia sniffed her hands heavy with the smell of horses.
‘Hello, Madeleine,’ she said.
Up in her room Julia lit the candle and moved it away in case the heat cracked the glass face of the clock. Just underneath the clock there was the remains of a photograph of her and Joseph at their wedding. Those white gloves were so uncomfortable! Joseph had orange blossom in his button-hole. Oh, the monster!
Julia undid her corset and pulled up the lace of her slip. She bent down to take off her shoes. Her breasts were heavy. The shoelace was caught in a knot. She’d better sit down. Her cold bare arms rubbed against her naked breasts which felt so much warmer.
She peeled off her stockings as though skinning a rabbit. She had to take them off inside out because the sweat had stuck them to her foot. She hung them over the back of the chair to dry. She looked at her bare feet, enjoying the sensation of wiggling her toes. The hay dust got into everything. Stockings, the corners of shoes, and made everything sticky. She wiped her feet and rubbed a swollen vein on the foot which hurt when she moved her big toe. She stood up and went to the small square mirror to arrange her hair.
Walking across the stone slabs with her bare feet, she felt she was stepping through a dew-drenched meadow. The smell of horses still clung to her hands. She let down her black hair, heavy as wet wool. She didn’t bother to use a comb, she twisted her hair with her hands. Whatever she did, she felt her breasts. If she bent down, she was conscious of their weight, if she lifted up her arms, they pulled at her flesh like string. Joseph always had that living smell, like a horse’s smell, that smell of work and strength which filled your nose when he undressed. A smell of leather and sweaty hair, like the smell of those big summer salads when you crush garlic and mix it with vinegar and mustard powder in the salad bowl.
She took off her skirt and petticoat at the same time and stepped out of the pile of clothes. She gave her hips a brisk rubbing. This hay gets all over you, she thought. She might have been covered with fleas. She hurried to be completely naked in order to feel the tart night round her skin. She’d walk arm in arm with the cold wind, looking up at the stars, she’d feel her body and brains cleaned and freshened by the alpine wind. She took off her blouse, then blew out the candle and went to the window. She rubbed her breasts all over with a duster, she might have been cleaning little melons. And it’s true, with the veins and the nipple hard as the end of a stalk, they really were like little melons crackling between her fingers.
The wind flew high in the night like an immense bird. At the end of August there was always a smell of corn in the sheafs, corn abandoned by men, and the smell of roasting on the threshing-floors. The wind dropped and the night grew hot. Her whole body breathed and tingled and she could hear her blood beating in the night which pressed upon her. She had two creases in her hips going down to her belly, her flat, smooth belly. The clock ticked on. Her breasts were still now, like solid hillside stones. Joseph used to say, ‘They’re winter turnips. Show me your winter turnips. Give me your winter turnips!’ Joseph! Her heart was sour with longing for that old smell of man and work. Julia went to uncover the bed, so used to Joseph that his place was carved out in it. There might be a phantom lying under the white sheet. She drew back the sheet to shake away the imprint, but it refused to move. She put on her clean night-shirt and stretched out in Joseph’s place. Just before she fell asleep, Julia sniffed the horse smell on her fingers, then she stuck her hand between her thighs.
JEAN GIONO
THE SALT OF THE EARTH
from To the Slaughterhouse
translated by Norman Glass
MADELEINE WIPED HER HANDS QUICKLY on the dishcloth. Her body shook when she thought about the rendezvous whistle. She was about to leave when her father came in. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘come and read this letter. Give Julia a call.’
Through the window, in the spring air, she could see the blue tops of the mountains above the almond trees, and down there, under the oaks, Oliver would be whistling.
‘Oh, it’s always the same…’ Madeleine muttered.
‘What’s that?’ Jerome asked.
‘Nothing. Give me the letter.’ She closed the window and took her brother’s letter.
‘Julia!’ the father called.
Julia’s big healthy body took up all the doorway. Her thighs were plump under her skirt. She ran a hand through her hair, black and shining like oil at the bottom of an earthenware jar.
‘We’ve got a letter from Joseph,’ Jerome said. ‘Read loudly, Madeleine.’ Leaning on his stick, he turned his good ear towards her. Julia looked out of the window, towards the spring, the mountains, and the almond blossoms.
‘“Dear wife and father…”’
‘What’s the date?’
‘March 22nd… “Dear wife and father. Here’s some good news for you. When I got the parcel we were on the march and you know my feet don’t take too kindly to the road, so I waited. Thank you for the meat pie. Please send me some lard because I need it as usual to rub my feet. I can’t walk for an hour without getting blisters. It’s not so bad now that I’ve got the slippers, I put them on as soon as we arrive. But they let the water in. I was glad to get a card the other day from cousin Maria and hear she’s taking life in her stride. I wanted to reply, but she scribbled the address and I can’t make it out. If she’s changed her farm, she’ll come to Chauranes for sure. I know her. Be sure you don’t lend her my old plough. That’s what she’s after. And as for getting anything back from her!…”’
‘Wait a minute,’the father said. ‘Come to think about it, Julia, how is that old plough?’
‘It’s hung up by the hook and the handles,’ she said. ‘I had a look at it. The wood’s straight. It hasn’t warped and it’s nearly a month now since I poured on the remains of the oil.’
‘That’s good, because we have to think about using it. Maria’s at Saint-Firmin, isn’t she?�
�
‘Yes, at Chauvinières near Saint-Firmin.’
‘Read on…’
‘“Life isn’t much fun here, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s hope we’ll all soon be home. It was snowing a while ago, now it’s raining. Don’t forget the lard. Dear wife, I was at a farm where they’ve found a use for pig manure. I saw them putting it on the little plants. But it burns them up, I told them. They told me no, because it’s the piss which burns, so they make a drain for the piss to run down and then they can use the dung. The ground isn’t bad at all, it’s been taken over from the landowners. Remember the fellow I told you about who came from Perpignan where he worked in a shoe factory, well, he got killed yesterday, but it was his own fault. They’ve told me that we may be going to the real fighting. I can’t tell you where it is, but you must have read about it in the papers. Don’t worry. It isn’t even certain yet. Anyhow, we don’t have any choice. Oh, I’ve got something else to tell you. A fellow from Valensole who’s got relations at Colon told me that Bonnet’s son had been killed. Tell his mother how sorry I am. Also I want to tell you what dolts you are for missing the Casimir farm. It was up for sale so you should have bought it, even if it wasn’t ready yet for planting. I’ll look after that myself when I get back. And how are things with Casimir? You told me his son, Oliver, is going to the front, so this time don’t miss the opportunity. Those young ones always want to play the hero. Even if he doesn’t get killed, there’s only the grandfather and the mother and they might want to sell the land at the foot of the hill. That would be fine for us. Father, keep an eye on what’s happening there. Soon as Oliver leaves, look the ground over. I don’t seem to have anything more to say. A kiss for my sister, Madeleine. Don’t forget what I’ve told you. I’m thinking about it. I kiss my dear wife and father. Joseph.”’