Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  “I know, I know,” said the principal. He also knew why Pierre wasn’t writing. What a letter the last one had been! It’s you who’ve sent me here, you and those like you. Even if I survive, I’ll never see you again. I’ll never forgive you. That’s what his letter had said. He sighed. “Leave it be, gentlemen.”

  Babinot was forward enough to pat his arm affectedly, relinquishing the role of drum major. “We must drive out dark thoughts,” he said. “Do you know what my son wrote me? It’s a story passed down the trench. Eleven in the morning. The captain was sheltering in his post, when a volley of shells came. Everyone had their heads down, then they saw two cooks who came carrying breakfast in a huge vat, moving along calmly, without hurrying, through enemy fire. They entered the shelter like nothing had happened, and of course, the captain reprimanded them, ‘Are you crazy to walk out in this? Couldn’t you wait until the volley was over?’ And then, do you know what the cooks said? Ah, ha ha! ‘But it’s kidneys, sir, it’s kidneys,’ they both cried at once. ‘It couldn’t wait!’ Ah ha ha! Kidneys! Kidneys they said . . . Don’t you think that’s wonderful? You know, it was just yesterday I got a letter where he told me that those men, in a . . .”

  “Excuse me, dear Babinot,” said the principal, “I’ve got to get back to my office to . . .work. Forgive me.”

  “But of course,” said Babinot, “God forbid I keep you from working, Monsieur.”

  The principal left.

  “He seems very upset,” said Monsieur Robillard. “Is it fifteen days that he hasn’t had any news?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s hard, that’s so hard!”

  “What was I saying?” said Babinot. “Ah, yes! Another story I got from my son. You’re aware that . . .”

  But Babinot had no luck that morning. He was interrupted once again. The principal had barely turned his back when a curious couple appeared at the end of the gallery, a couple for comedy’s sake, the pair formed by the tutors Glâtre and Moka, inseparable. Arcadian lovers, the wicked Nabucet called them. They hurried toward the group.

  Since nicknames were all the rage at the lycée—where Merlin was Cripure and Babinot was Henri IV (because of his goatee and his love of that farcical king and his chicken in every pot), where Bourcier the dean was Wolf-in-Sheep’s-Clothing, Nabucet was Cherry-on-Top or Isn’t-It-So, where Glâtre was Monsieur Abbot—Moka had the privilege of two nicknames, so that the name on his birth certificate was entirely forgotten. They called him Moka and What-Would-Jesus-Do. Moka was the name of his dog, a crying runt of a fox terrier he took everywhere, just like the horrible hunchback. Noël looked after the dog when Moka was tutoring. As for the source of the moniker What-Would-Jesus-Do? you only had to ask the question to see him touch his forehead in a particular way.

  They approached together, Moka gesticulating, and his companion the opposite—very calm, hands behind his back, thinking. There was something in the character of Glâtre, small and round and fat, to justify his nickname—a hint of the seminary, where he’d supposedly spent his youth. Defrocked or not, he wore a black suit, a stiff collar, big shoes, and a bowler hat. But more than a defrocked priest, he had the air of a poor old man keeping up appearances.

  As for Moka . . . thin and tall, he towered over Glâtre by a whole head. He too was already dressed up for the party, magnificent in his tux, a nice tux made for someone else’s marriage and smelling strongly of mothballs, which made Cripure grimace. Moka wore a snowy placket-front shirt and, like a real groom, a white rose in his buttonhole. When he tipped his hat to the gentlemen, a superb crest of red hair appeared, falling over his milky forehead like a gas jet. He bowed especially low to Cripure, his old master, and the red crest fluttered like a clown’s tassel when he’s about to jump through a hoop. It fell in his eyes, hiding them. Eyes that were too blue, a girl’s eyes.

  “We have a plan,” he said straightening up. His voice was curiously musical. “Yes, a plan . . .” It must be a very important plan, since Moka’s eyes were glowing with mischief.

  “Aha!” said Babinot. “Can we hear it?”

  Moka turned to Glâtre, as if for a final consultation, but Glâtre shrugged. “We were thinking,” said Moka . . .

  “What!” Glâtre broke in. “What do you mean, we? It’s your project my friend, take responsibility for your own actions.”

  “Oh?”

  “Why yes, yes.”

  “Oh? Well then.” He cracked his knuckles, and began, “I had thought we could organize a kind of little museum, you see, where we could exhibit photographs and things from the front, you understand—”

  “Things like shell casings and helmets from Boches,” added Glâtre.

  “We could do it in the parlor,” said Moka.

  “By the hair of my chin,” cried Babinot, who grabbed Moka’s arms with an affectionate brusqueness, “that’s a lovely idea, you know. Well! Do you believe it? I had thought a little bit about that, a while ago. I can’t rightly remember,” he said, scratching his head, “why it came about that the plan didn’t happen . . . it’s true we have so many things bouncing around in our heads! But in the parlor, just as you were thinking.”

  Moka was delighted. “Great minds think alike,” he said.

  Suddenly Babinot frowned. “Ay yai yai!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Oh, it’s such a shame!”

  “But what is, dear Monsieur Babinot?” said Moka. He thought everything was ruined and his plan was out the window.

  “Oh, what misfortune! What misfortune, my friend,” replied Babinot. “You might have been able to speak to the general about it today, you understand. Oh! What bad luck. You know he’s been ill, don’t you? He won’t be with us this afternoon. Tsk, tsk.”

  Babinot dug a pinky into his ear and closed one eye. His hand wriggled vigorously.

  “Too bad,” he said. “We’ll do it another time. We’ll speak to Nabucet about it right away.”

  “Great.”

  “He’s just the man you need,” said Monsieur Robillard.

  “Exactly. Totally agreed. The general will come, we can have a grand opening . . . It’ll be perfect. Oh you know what else I was thinking?”

  They had formed a circle around him. Cripure hung his head, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his goatskin.

  “You’d like, wouldn’t you,” Babinot asked, “to basically recreate the atmosphere of the front, to put an image before the eyes of our students, isn’t that so? Yes? Perfect. But do you know what I’d like to ask the general? Can you guess?”

  No one replied.

  “No guesses?”

  “No.”

  “What if, outside the museum,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “to complement it . . .you still can’t guess?”

  They all thought about it, even Cripure.

  “Look at this courtyard,” said Babinot, “doesn’t it seem strangely empty?”

  Actually, there were students scattered under the galleries and in the doorways. The bell was about to ring for the end of recess.

  “A barren waste!” said Babinot. “Well, do you know what I’m going to ask the general for?” Babinot paused and raised his index finger. “A little cannon,” he finished. “Aha! None of you thought of that! A handsome little seventy-seven taken from the enemy, that’s what I’m going to ask the general for.” And he ran off, laughing and shouting to Moka, “Think of the cannon, my friend!”

  •

  Of course, Cripure loved his country, and that patriotism was perhaps the most authentic feeling in him. But in the end, it wasn’t right to confuse, as Babinot did, that love of country with a love of militarism or, as so many did, with a love of death. Most of all, it wasn’t right to confuse it with a flat acceptance of conforming to others. But the way things were, Cripure had to hide even here. Despite his love for his country, which went deep, he couldn’t bring himself to express it like the others, since he wasn’t at all in agreement about their way of loving
. And in a moment when patriotism was on everyone’s lips, when from morning till night there was only talk of France, Cripure alone was unable to speak, and he suffered for it, brushed off, here like everywhere else, into loneliness or comedy. He certainly had to pretend to love France their way. It was too dangerous otherwise. He had even—and this memory was more than painful—forced the note once. He had proven himself more chauvinistic than all of them put together. No one had forced him to say what he’d said, last year, on prize day. He very well could have limited himself to necessary banalities, stuck to pedagogical generalities, idiotologies as he called them, instead of launching into such a crude praise of heroes. They hadn’t asked for all that. So why had he painfully composed a speech that would have suited a lower-level politician and spoken for a whole hour by the clock about the monuments they would raise to the eternal glory of the poilus? Why had he prostituted himself? Once again, he could have skipped it. No one expected anything more from him than agreement. But far from opposing them, far from scrutinizing the war, he had glorified it instead, spoken of it as a grand and terrible source of heroism and even beauty, had forced himself to find a moral in it. The speech had created a little sensation, but not at all the way he had hoped or expected. They hadn’t much liked what he had said, precisely because he had forced it. For some, it had seemed natural for Cripure to fall in line and practice the sacred politics of unity, and that was all they had seen. But others, like Nabucet, had perfectly understood the insincere side of his flattery, like that of a valet who exaggerates his master’s praises, and they had turned their backs on him, so completely that poor Cripure was once again deserted, despite his efforts. Trouble for nothing. Now go teach ethics.

  LUCIEN Bourcier roamed limping through the streets, his suitcase in hand. He could have hired Père Yves’s cab and gone straight to the port, a handful of kilometers away, where the Devonshire had been anchored since the day before. But the Devonshire was only a small cargo ship that allowed a few passengers, and it didn’t have cabins, just berths. So the passengers weren’t allowed to board until an hour before the scheduled departure. The Devonshire would weigh anchor tomorrow at seven a.m., with the tide, so Lucien couldn’t board until six. Left to find a room for the night. And for the day. He was determined to stay out of sight. Alone. He carefully avoided taking a room in a hotel—he knew too well that his mother would be frantically searching until she found his hiding place, so she could harass him one last time. She’d send messengers to all the hotels in town—messengers who were more skillful than policemen. But maybe they wouldn’t imagine that Madame de Villaplane’s rooming house could take him in for such a short stay, and he guessed her house would offer the peace he wanted. He headed that way.

  He didn’t regret anything. Tomorrow he’d be in London, a few days later in Sweden. Then he’d figure out how to get farther. In the town square, all the stores were open. A tarp was stretched between two posts, making a stand that sold whistles, cockades, and flags to conscripts. And drinks and food as well. They fried cod in the open air, and sausages, which the conscripts scarfed down with rough wine. On the steps of the town hall, a policeman called the roll.

  Lucien circled the square, wandering from one stall to another, fascinated by all these young men he stared at as though he were

  looking for someone he knew. For the most part, they were young peasant boys who had come on foot that morning, in groups led by a fiddler. The ones from town never stayed in the square. Cod, black bread, rough wine, that wasn’t for them. They were in the cafés or had already gone home to take the news to their parents: armed service or deferral. No alternatives. These malnourished kids already wore on their hats the sign of death to come. How unwarlike they seemed, and yet, how unready for death. How little they appeared to think about it! Nearly all the young faces, even the toughest ones, had some confidence in them, a childlike trust, a pathetic ignorance of lies. They hadn’t yet learned someone could betray them. They were ready to hold out their hands, to be led, as long as the promised fairy tale proved to be lovely and noble. They didn’t have conditions, it didn’t seem to occur to them to demand to know what, at the other end, would make up for the loss of their young lives, and if this innocent acceptance of pain and death would at least allay the sufferings of the world. But did they accept it? Had they internalized this debate, or were these thoughts his alone, as Lucien suspected, the reasoning of an intellectual? But no, no. That would mean he believed these young men were incapable of a single thought. Lucien fiercely rejected that—his whole self rebelled against such a dark view. No, a thousand times no, until death, no! Thinking wasn’t and couldn’t be the privilege of only a few, and if it was, what was it good for, this thought that justified a scorn for life? And justified the shame men felt—imposed by other men? For better or worse, they had to break out of this savagery, to give life back its value. Not life as it was for most people—crushed, mutilated, denied, stolen—but life as it could be created. Here, in the square, among the fryers, the atmosphere like a carnival or even a party, there was enough pure and noble life to make a world. He caught, in the passing gestures and glances, how this world could appear in its simplest and most essential qualities. In the delicate, brotherly gesture of two men sharing bread, it was there, ready to burst out, blazing from uncorrupted hearts, a will that was sleeping for the moment, but which would wake one day for all time. They didn’t seem to suspect what they were capable of, but everything in them was prepared for awakening and change. There was no hope except in them, in their youthful energy and freshness.

  So he thought as he continued to wander among the groups. Yes, there was no hope but in them, once they finally broke the spell—which hid them from their humanity, still so visible under this pageantry—and got a glimpse of joy. Then, they would fight for it, they would know how to seize it. Humanity hadn’t said its last words. It was cowardly to pretend, as Cripure had the previous day, that it would sink, drowned in blood. No. No. Humanity had barely uttered its first cry. After so many early horrors, it would end by seeing life as a prize, as a thing to be respected, a real brotherly love. The question wasn’t what that life would be like, the real question, the only one, was: What can we make of living? We could do anything, on the condition that we don’t begin by repressing vitality. It was a massive revolution, not, as Cripure still believed, one that required all thought to be suppressed, but the opposite—that all thought would be released, that the chances would be on the side of life and not of death. And if it couldn’t happen without violence, they would use force. Where others used deaths for dying, they would use them for living. And if it was true that most people were nothing but drudges, then it wasn’t more difficult to impose life on drudges than to impose death. You could make a free man out of a living drudge. Then they’d at least get rid of some evil. But a dead drudge? All the revolutions up to this point had begun within a certain circle. Now it was time to break the circle, to make a new start, as the factory workers and peasants in Russia had just done, men who were brothers of these little conscripts, their first comrades. How long would he wait before the others . . .

  He sat on a bench and stayed there, even though it was cold. His thoughts took a different course—toward those comrades, whom all these little peasant boys would so much resemble before long, when they had lost that confidence and become shocked in their turn. He remembered his last meetings with his two friends, Pierre Marchandeau and Louis Babinot, his classmates who, before deployment, had been so taken by the year they had spent in philosophy class with Cripure. When he’d seen Pierre for the last time, he could barely unclench his teeth. They had spent an afternoon together. Pierre hadn’t opened his mouth except to say that they had messed him up. That day, they’d understood each other completely. The meeting had happened when they were both on furlough together, in a country of fields and sun. If Pierre survived, Lucien knew he’d find him again one day; they’d find each other at the start of a new battle. The last ti
me he’d seen Louis Babinot had been very different. At night. In a train station. He remembered the scene perfectly.

  Gas lamps had been shining through the windows of the offices, and flares illuminated detachments and groups of lone soldiers who were waiting on the platform for the train. Some artillerymen arrived, under the command of sergeant—they were returning to the base to regroup their formations, and the prospect of passing through Paris was exciting to them. A police sergeant with a chinstrap was on duty.

  The train had been late. Lucien and Louis went into the waiting room, a murky lean-to, with an unlit woodstove in the center, and, to one side, a pile of straw bedding where twenty men were stretched out. Bags, weapons, helmets, everything was heaped in chaos. The men were sad—they had been called back up. The next day, the supply train would deposit them at the front. Oil lanterns glimmered through the room filled with pipe smoke. Outside, every ten minutes, troop trains passed, further delaying the civilian train the artillerymen hoped to take. Endless convoys of forty or more freight cars followed one another. On flat cars, cannon, camp kitchens, regimental freight, and ambulances scrolled by, and ruffled heads appeared in the windows of rare passenger cars. Everything was going back “up there.” In the waiting room, the soldiers were sleeping. An officer called the roll, picking out each of them. A wake-up call. Fumbling in the dark, the men gathered their equipment. A rifle fell. The officer with a lantern in his hand continued the roll call, and the men grouped themselves into little units. “It’s time,” Louis Babinot had said. He was getting on that train too. Lucien was coming back from the hospital, he was being sent home to convalesce, and he had only come to see Louis Babinot. The officer, convinced all his men had been called, took the lead of the little group and started toward a chain of dark railway cars they would soon attach to the supply train. Policemen—from where?—arrived, carrying their canteens.