The Red Collar

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  CHAPTER II

  He’d spoken these words quite quietly, in a muted voice. He couldn’t possibly have been heard from outside. But out on the square, the dog had instantly started howling again.

  The major automatically looked over at the door.

  “Well, at least there’s someone who cares what happens to you. Is there anyone else who cares about you, corporal? Anyone who’d rather you extricated yourself from this regrettable affair and were free?”

  “I’ll say it again,” Morlac replied. “I’m responsible for my actions and can’t think of any reason to apologize.”

  The war had left its mark on him too, it would seem. Something about his voice implied he was hopelessly sincere. As if the certainty that he would soon die, which he’d experienced day after day at the front, had melted all the falsity inside him, all the carapaces, the tanned hides of lies that life and its ordeals and contact with other people lay down over the truth in ordinary individuals. The two men had this in common, an exhaustion that robbed all strength and any desire to say or think anything that wasn’t true. But also, in among these thought patterns, any thought that related to the future, to happiness and hope, was impossible to formulate because it was immediately destroyed by the sordid realities of war. So all that was left were a few sorry sentences, spoken with the utter blankness of despair.

  “Has that dog been following you around for long?”

  Morlac scratched his arm. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt which showed off his biceps. He wasn’t actually very well muscled. Average height with brown hair, he had a receding hairline and light-colored eyes. He was obviously a country type but there was an inspired look about him, an intensity in his eyes that might be associated with a prophet or a shepherd visited by apparitions.

  “Since forever.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lantier was starting to write a report of the interrogation. He needed precise details to complete the exercise. But he did it without any enthusiasm.

  “He followed me when they came to call me up to war.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “If I can smoke.”

  The major rummaged in his vest and took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Morlac lit one with the tinder lighter the officer handed him. He blew the smoke through his nose like an enraged bull.

  “It was late autumn. You know all this; it’s in your papers. We still had plowing to do. My father hadn’t been well enough to follow the horses for a long time. And I also had to do the neighbors’ fields, because their son had been among the first to go. They came in the middle of the day, the police. I saw them coming up the line of linden trees and I just knew. My father and I had talked about what I should do. I was all for hiding. But he knew them and he said they’d get me sooner or later. So I went along with them.”

  “Were you the only one they had to get?”

  “Of course I wasn’t,” he said quietly. “They already had three other conscripts with them. Men I knew by sight. The police got me to climb into their cart and then we went and picked up three more.”

  “And the dog?”

  “He followed.”

  Did the animal hear that? He hadn’t stopped barking since his master woke up, but now he was being discussed he was silent.

  “He wasn’t the only one actually. All the others had dogs that followed them in the early days. The cops laughed. I think they deliberately made them run behind the cart. It made it feel kind of cheerful, like going off for a day’s hunting. So the guys we went to fetch let themselves be loaded into the cart without a scene.”

  He described all this with laughter in his voice but his eyes were still sad, and sitting facing him, the officer displayed the same superficial brightness.

  “Had you had the dog long?”

  “Some friends gave him to me.”

  The major noted everything down scrupulously. There was something slightly comical about the way he earnestly recorded this business about a dog. But the animal did play an important role in the affair he’d come to investigate.

  “What breed is it?”

  “The bitch was a Briard Sheepdog, pretty much purebred as I understand it. No one really knows about the dog. Apparently every male in the neighborhood had a shot at her.”

  There was nothing lewd about what he was saying, more a sense of disgust. It was strange how the war had made anything carnal like this unbearable. As if this magma surrounding our origins, these mysteries of reproduction, were tragically correlated to the orgy of blood and death, the hideous scramble that the shelling had produced in the trenches.

  “Anyway,” the officer interjected, “the dog followed you and then what?”

  “Then he carried on. He was craftier than the others, I s’pose. We were rounded up in Nevers, and from there we caught a train for the East. Most of the dogs stayed on the platform, but not this one, he crouched down and as the train set off, he leapt onto the flat car.”

  “Didn’t the NCOs drive him away?”

  “It made them laugh. If there had been thirty of them they’d have chucked them out, but just one, they quite liked it deep down. He became the regimental mascot. At least that’s what they called him.”

  The two men were now facing each other, each on a board bed, separated by the narrow confines of the cell. It felt a bit like during the war, in the blockhouses. There was plenty of time. Life dawdled by and yet a shell could end it all at any moment.

  “And you obviously liked it. Were you attached to your dog?”

  Morlac delved thoughtfully inside the pack of cigarettes. He drew out one that was half broken, snapped it in two and lit one of the ends.

  “You might think this is strange, especially with what I’ve just done, but I’ve never felt very strongly about dogs. I don’t like hurting animals; I take care of them if need be. But if need be I’ll kill them, too, with rabbits and sheep for example. With a dog, I’ll take it hunting or into the fields to watch over the cows. But stroking it and all that, that’s not really my style.”

  “Weren’t you happy he followed you?” Lantier asked, looking up.

  “To be honest, it was more like I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to be noticed, in that whole war thing. Especially at the beginning. I didn’t know how things would turn out but I kept thinking that at some point I might need to slip away so, with a dog . . . ”

  “You wanted to desert?”

  Lantier wasn’t asking the question as an investigator, more as an officer, one who thought he knew his men and finds a character trait he wasn’t expecting in one of them.

  “I think you may have been prepared for what war would be like. I wasn’t. In the early days what I mostly saw were the fields left behind to my mother and my sister, who couldn’t work them, and the hay that hadn’t been brought in. So I thought if I wasn’t needed that badly by the army, I’d try to get back to where I was useful. Do you understand?”

  The officer was a city dweller. He’d been born in Paris and had always lived there. He’d often noticed amongst his men how differently those from towns and those from the country viewed the home front. To a townie, home meant pleasure and comfort—laziness, basically. To a peasant, home was the land and work, a different battle.

  “Were there other dogs in your convoy apart from yours?”

  “Not in the train. But in Reims, when we got off, we found quite a few.”

  “Didn’t your officers say anything?”

  “There wasn’t anything to say. The dogs looked after themselves. I don’t know if they were going through the garbage at night or if people threw them scraps. Both, probably. Anyway, they didn’t need looking after.”

  “Then did you go to the front?” Lantier moved the interrogation forward.

  “I stayed there six months in the supply corps. We weren’t on the front line bu
t sometimes we came very close and the shells often took their toll.”

  “And was the dog still with you?”

  “Still with me.”

  “That’s pretty remarkable.”

  “He’s a remarkable dog,” Morlac replied steadily. “Even in the most ravaged landscapes he always managed to find something to eat. The main thing was he knew what to do around the officers. Most of the dogs ended up having problems. There were even some that were unceremoniously eliminated with a rifle shot because they stole from the stores. I don’t know where you were but you must have seen that, too.”

  During conversations in the trenches it was sometimes possible to forget issues of rank like this. It was rather like those card games where a road-mender can rail at a notary without anyone taking offense. Inside that cell, the investigating officer remained an investigating officer, carefully writing his report, but the interrogation was also a conversation between fellow soldiers who would soon be leveled by death.

  “I spent most of the war with the English in the Somme,” said the officer.

  “Were there any dogs?”

  “A few. In fact, when I was given your case I immediately remembered several of my own men who became so attached to their dogs it was only thanks to them they could cope with the war at all. They ended up thinking of them as brothers-in-arms, alter egos. To tell you the truth, and despite your provocative comments, I intend to draft my statement in those terms. At the end of the day you established a connection with this dog as a comrade-in-arms. Put like that, you’ll get a pardon, I’m sure of it.”

  Morlac straightened and hurled his cigarette against the wall at the far end of the cell. He looked furious. The war, which had deprived him of the softer facial expressions associated with joy and pleasure, had clearly developed his capacity to express anger and even loathing. The officer was familiar with reactions like this from soldiers but he hadn’t expected it in this instance and, more significantly, couldn’t work out the grounds for it.

  “I don’t want you to write that, do you hear me!” Morlac shouted. “It’s not true, it’s just not true.”

  “Easy, easy! What’s gotten into you?” Lantier asked with an ill-tempered sigh.

  “I didn’t do what I did because I love my dog. Exactly the opposite in fact.”

  “Don’t you love him?”

  “This isn’t about whether or not I love him. I didn’t do it for him, I tell you.”

  “Who for, then?” Lantier looked him in the eye.

  “Who for? Well, for you, how about that, for the officers, the politicians, the profiteers. And for all the idiots who follow them, who send others off to war, and also for the ones who actually go. I did it for everyone who believes in that claptrap: Heroism! Bravery! Patriotism!”

  He’d risen to his feet as he shouted these last few words. The blanket had fallen to the floor and he was just in his underwear as he stood there yelling, scowling at the officer. He looked ridiculous and pathetic but also worrisome, because there was a palpable sense that his anger could drive him to extreme acts, and nothing and no one could stop him from completing them.

  After a brief stunned silence, Lantier recovered his officer’s instincts. He snapped the file shut, stood up very straight and, with all the authority readily available to a clothed man—and, what’s more, in uniform—before a naked man, he said forcefully, “Calm down, Morlac! You’re overstepping the line. Don’t overestimate my good nature. It has its limits.”

  “You want me to talk, I’m talking.”

  “And what you’re saying is unacceptable. You’re aggravating your situation. Not only have you failed to mitigate the gesture that brought you here, but you’re compounding it with insults to an officer and dishonor to the nation.”

  “I’ve already sacrificed too much for it, for the nation. That gives me the right to tell it a few home truths.”

  He wasn’t backing down. Disheveled as he was, Morlac was squaring up to the investigating officer and answering him back. That was what four years of war had produced: men who were no longer afraid, who’d survived so many horrors that nothing and no one could make them look away. Luckily, there weren’t too many of them. Lantier knew it was better to cut this short than continue a discussion that undermined the authority he represented.

  “You pull yourself together, old boy. We’ll leave it at that for today.”

  Dujeux, the jailer, must have come over when he heard raised voices. He popped out from behind the door, threw a thunderous look at Morlac, and escorted the officer away, clanking his keys along the metal doors as he walked.

  Outside, the dog had started baying again.

  * * *

  Lantier du Grez had offices in Bourges, right in the town center in the Louis XIV building that the locals called the Condé Barracks. He liked it well enough, until something better came along. His wife had stayed in Paris with their two children, and he was hoping for a transfer so he could go home to them at last.

  Until he had finished investigating the Morlac case, there was unfortunately no question of him returning, either to Bourges or to Paris. For the duration of his inquiry he had taken lodgings in a modest hotel for traveling salesmen, near the station. The brass bed creaked and the towels were threadbare. The only pleasant time in the establishment was breakfast. The owner, who was a war widow, kept a farm with her sister on the outskirts of town. The butter, milk and eggs came from this farm. She baked her own bread and made her own jams.

  At half past seven in the morning it was already obvious it would be a hot day. Lantier had breakfasted by a wide-open window. He thought about this wretched man and his dog. Truth be told, he hadn’t stopped thinking about him since the previous day.

  He’d had to leave him abruptly. He couldn’t allow himself to be insulted, taking into account what he represented. But personally, he was peculiarly fascinated by this stubborn little character.

  During the course of that endless war, Lantier had been through every kind of emotion. He’d started out as a young idealist typical of his social standing (solidly middle-class despite the lesser nobility suggested by his family name). All that mattered at first was his country and the high-blown ideals that went with it: Honor, Family, Tradition. He thought individuals and their pitiful personal interests had to be subjugated for their sake. And then, in the trenches, he’d lived at close quarters with these individuals, and had sometimes taken their side. Once or twice he’d reached the point where he wondered whether their suffering was owed more respect than the ideals in whose name it was inflicted on them.

  After the armistice, Lantier saw his appointment to the military justice system as serendipity. The relevant committees must have felt he was ripe for this difficult responsibility: protecting the military institution, defending the interests of the nation and also understanding men’s failings.

  But this prisoner was different. He belonged in both camps: he was a hero, he had defended his country, yet at the same time he loathed it.

  Lantier spent the whole morning strolling about town. He’d stopped at a bistro outside the abbey-church, and had organized the notes he’d taken the previous day in the prison.

  He didn’t intend to see Morlac again before the afternoon. He had to give him time to calm down and think, even if he didn’t really believe Morlac would.

  When the church bell struck noon, the streets were in a state of complete torpor. Lantier cut across town to have lunch in a restaurant he’d spotted near the covered market. The shutters were closed on all the houses to keep the rooms cool. Behind metal doorways he heard women’s voices and the clink of plates coming from gardens: People were getting ready to eat outside.

  The restaurant was deserted, except for one table at the back where an elderly man was seated. Lantier du Grez settled himself at the far end of the banquette, toward the window. The room had a high ceiling with s
tucco yellowed by grease on the walls and tall, badly flaking mercury mirrors. The owner had wound the canvas awning down over the terrace and opened everything he could—windows, doors, transoms—to create a draft. But the steam laden with a smell of frying that came up from the kitchen defeated all these efforts, and it was very hot.

  The food on offer was the same all through the year, essentially comprising hearty dishes suitable for rainy weather. Lantier ordered rabbit chasseur, hoping against his better judgment that the sauce wouldn’t be too fatty.

  He asked for a newspaper and the owner brought him one that was two days old. He read the headlines, which were mostly about the prowess of the aviator Charles Godefroy, who’d flown his plane under the Arc de Triomphe.

  “You’re here for Morlac, aren’t you?”

  Lantier looked over at the old man who’d called across to him. The latter rose slightly from the banquette with a sketchy wave of the hand.

  “Norbert Seignelet, attorney-at-law.”

  “My pleasure. Major Lantier du Grez.”

  There’d been an attorney-at-law in his section when he was a lieutenant. He’d been a punctilious, self-righteous character, always negotiating interpretations of the law in order to do as little as possible. And yet, with the first offensive, he’d climbed out of the trench before the others and was killed within two yards of the parapet.

  “I am indeed here to investigate the Morlac case. Do you know the man?”

  “Sadly for me, Major Lantier, I know everyone in this town, in the whole region, even. That’s what happens with my line of work and my age. I should add that in my family we’ve been exercising the same duty for five generations.”

  Lantier nodded, but, as his rabbit had arrived steaming, he busied himself spooning the meat from the earthenware serving dish, careful not to take too much sauce.

  “When I saw him go past with his dog in the Bastille Day parade, I would never have imagined . . . ” the attorney said, adopting a cautiously comical expression which could have evolved into indignation or an unabashed smile, depending on the route Lantier adopted. But the latter, who had tucked into his rabbit, chose not to help him out.