by Alexis Jenni
The Colonel introduced himself to the other colonel, Naegelin, of the Zouave regiment, a pale Frenchman from Oran, who welcomed him politely, as he had all the soldiers of freedom who had swelled his ranks since Toulon, if a little sceptical about his rank, his name, his service record. The Colonel had his men line up; he had them salute; he stepped forward and presented himself, throwing out his chest and booming in an affected tone that his men did not recognize. But they cut a fine figure as they lined up in the sunshine, equipped with mismatched British weapons, uniforms that were a little worn, a little dirty, a little rough and ready as they stood to attention, but trembling with excitement and jutting their chins with a zeal one no longer sees in soldiers, not in those made soft by a long peace nor those disillusioned by a long war.
Naegelin saluted, shook his hand and immediately turned away and busied himself with other tasks. They were integrated as a reserve company under their usual command. That night in the tent, the Colonel gave them fictitious ranks. Pointing at each of them in turn, he appointed four captains and eight lieutenants. ‘Capitaine? Isn’t this a bit much?’ one of them asked, confused, winding between his fingers the length of gold ribbon he had just been given.
‘Are you saying you don’t know how to sew? Put those stripes on your sleeve right now. If you’ve got no stripe, you keep your trap shut; when you’ve got stripes, then you can open your mouth. Things are moving fast. Woe betide those who lag behind.’
Salagnon was among them, because he was there, because men were needed. ‘I like you, Salagnon. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Now, get sewing.’
No sooner said than done. Decisions were made quickly in 1944. If, since 1940, no one had made a decision unless it was to keep shtum, they were making up for it now. Everything was possible. Everything. In every sense.
All night, tanks took the road heading north. Each illuminated the tank in front with their lowered headlights, each pushing before them a stretch of lighted road. By day, the planes flew in low and fast in orderly groups of four. According to the wind, they heard rumblings or explosions, the sound of a forge that seemed to come from the ground itself, the dull roar of shells being fired. By night, haloes of flame flickered on the horizon.
They were left to their own devices. The Colonel accepted all missions, but decided nothing. In the evening he would walk through the lanes and with gruff swings of his cane decapitate thistles, nettles and any weed that poked its head above the long grass.
The wounded arrived by the truckload, battered and bruised, crudely bandaged, covered in blood, the most serious hidden under blankets. They were taken to the hospital tent, where the Kaloyannis, with equal gentleness, helped them to survive or to die. The Colonel’s reserve company helped with the transport, they carried stretchers, lined up corpses in the sunshine as they were carried, one by one, from the green tent marked with a red cross. Or else they spent long hours doing nothing, since army life is divided into periods of feverish, back-breaking activity and lulls to be filled with marches and fatigue duties. But here in the countryside, with nothing, many dozed, cleaned their weapons until they knew every little scratch or foraged so there would be more to eat.
For Salagnon this free time was given over to drawing; when time stood still he felt a tingling in his eyes and in his fingers. On the scraps of American wrapping paper he could find he sketched engineers, stripped to the waist, tinkering with the tank engines or patching truck tyres in the shade of the poplar trees, and others beneath the shifting foliage siphoning petrol using thick hosepipes which they wound around their waists; he sketched the maquisards scattered on the grass, lying among the flowers, giving shape to the clouds scudding across the sky. He drew Eurydice as she passed. He drew her several times. And as he was drawing her for the umpteenth time, unthinking, utterly focused on his pencil and the line it traced, a hand alighted on his shoulder, but so gently that he did not start. Kaloyannis stood, silently admiring the sketch of his daughter on the paper. Salagnon froze, not knowing what to do, whether to show the man the drawing or apologize and try to hide it.
‘You draw my daughter very well,’ he said at length. ‘Perhaps you would like to come to the hospital more often? So you could draw her portrait and give it to me.’
Salagnon assented with a sigh of relief.
Salagnon often came to sit by Roseval’s bed. When the patient closed his eyes, Victorien would sketch him. He gave him a very pure face on which there was no trace of sweat, no sign of his wheezing breath, the tenseness in his lips or the shivers that moved in waves over his bandaged belly until he trembled all over. He did not depict the sallow, greenish pallor or any of the unintelligible words he muttered without opening his eyes. He sketched the portrait of a man half-asleep, lying on his back.
Before closing his eyes, Roseval had clutched his hand, had squeezed it hard and spoken in a low, clear voice.
‘You know Salagnon, there’s only one thing I regret. Not dying, nothing to be done about that. The thing I regret is dying a virgin. I’d like to have… Can you do it for me? When the time comes, can you think of me?’
‘Of course. I promise.’
Roseval let go of his hand, closed his eyes and Salagnon sketched his portrait in pencil on the coarse, brown paper used to wrap American munitions.
‘You draw him as though he were asleep,’ said Eurydice, leaning over his shoulder. ‘But he’s in pain.’
‘He looks more like himself when he’s not in pain. I want to preserve him the way he was.’
‘What did you promise him? As I came in I heard you promise him something before he let go of your hand.’
He blushed a little, added a few shadows to the drawing, making the features more pronounced, like a sleeper dreaming, a sleeper who is still alive inside, although he no longer moves.
‘To live for him. To live for those who die and will not get to see the end.’
‘Will you get to see it, the end?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe not; but in that case someone else will see it for me.’
He considered adding something to the drawing, and decided against for fear of spoiling it. He turned to Eurydice, looked up at her. She was studying him carefully.
‘Would you live for me if I should die before the end?’
In the drawing, Roseval was asleep. A tranquil, handsome young man lying in a field of flowers, waiting, awaited.
‘Yes,’ he murmured, blushing as though he had just kissed her. Salagnon felt his hand quiver. Together they walked out of the hospital tent and, after a simple nod, they went their separate ways. They walked without turning back and each felt swaddled, something like a veil, a cloak, a sheet, the attentiveness of the other enveloping them completely, following their every movement.
In the afternoon they went in a truck to fetch the dead. Brioude knew how to drive, so he took the wheel, the others huddled together on the seat: Salagnon, Rochette, Moreau and Ben Tobbal, which was the surname of Ahmed. Brioude had asked him before they all clambered into the truck. ‘I can’t call you by your first name. I’d feel like I was talking to a child. And with that thick moustache of yours…’ Ahmed had told him: Ben Tobbal, smiling under his moustache. Thereafter, Brioude always referred to him by his surname, though he was the only one. It was simply a result of his mania for order, his rather gruff egalitarianism, something he did unthinkingly. The summer air whipping through the windows smelled of warm grass; they drove through the meadows bordering the Saône, jolting along the rocky path, clinging to whatever they could find, bouncing in theirs seats, thrown against each other, trying not to knock Brioude’s hand off the gearstick, their hair dishevelled by the war air whirling through the cab.
Brioude hummed as he drove. They were going to collect the bodies, to bring back the dead. This was one of the tasks Naegelin assigned to the Colonel’s irregulars, and whenever he mentioned the Colonel’s rank, he did so in quotation marks, with a little pause before and a sort of wink after.
&nbs
p; They crossed the Flemish landscape of the Saône Valley, where fields of lush green are carved out by the slightly darker threads of hedges. Across the blue sky floated flat-bottomed clouds, dazzlingly white, while below, the Saône, which sprawls rather than flows, was a bronze mirror that glides, mingling reflections of sky and clay.
On the banks of the river a number of tanks were burning. The vast meadow had lost nothing of its beauty or its sweeping proportions; someone had simply placed disturbing things in the pristine landscape. Tanks burned on the grass, like hulking ruminants slaughtered where they grazed. On a promontory that overlooked the meadow, a lopsided Tiger tank was visible above the hedge, its turret hatch blackened and gaping.
Bumping across the rutted field, they circled the green tanks. Each had sustained a direct hit at the base of the turret; and each time the hollow-charge had caused the lightly armoured Sherman tank to splutter and explode from within. The abandoned hulks were still smouldering. Around them floated an oily smell that caught in the throat, a thick smoke that reeked of rubber, petrol, scorched metal, explosives and something else. The smell caught in the nose like soot.
In coming to fetch the dead, they had hoped to find bodies laid out as though asleep, marked by shrapnel wounds, with perhaps some part of the body neatly severed, some limb missing. What they collected looked more like animals that had fallen into a fire. They were shrunken in size and though their stiff limbs made them easy to carry, it made them difficult to stack. All the delicate parts of the body had disappeared, the clothes were unrecognizable. They collected them like logs. When one of these objects moved, emitting a feeble groan – they could not tell from where, since there was no mouth left to speak – they dropped it in alarm. They stood around, their faces pale, their hands trembling. Ben Tobbal stepped forward, knelt down beside the body, holding up a syringe. He injected something into the chest on which fragments of an officer’s stripes were still visible on the charred fabric. The movement and the sound ceased. ‘You can put him in the truck,’ said Ben Tobbal softly.
They walked as far as the Tiger tank, climbed up on the hull and peered inside. Aside from the soot on the hatch, it seemed undamaged, simply teetering over the ledge with one caterpillar tread in the air. They were curious to find out what these invincible Panzers were like inside. The stench was worse than that of the burned-out tanks. It did not spread but pooled inside, liquid, heavy, it corroded the soul. The walls were spattered with a revolting, viscous slime that coated the controls and covered the seats; a liquefied mass from which bones protruded quivered deep within the hull. They recognized the remains of a uniform, an undamaged collar, a sleeve with an arm still inside, half a gunner’s helmet caked with a viscid liquid. The stench filled the cockpit. On the side of the turret they saw four neat holes, the edges crisp and clean, the marks of bullets fired by the planes.
Brioude vomited. Ben Tobbal patted him on the back as though to help him get it all out. ‘You only react the first time, you know. After this, you won’t care.’
When he got back to the camp Salagnon sketched the tanks in the field. He made them small, set on the horizon, scattered throughout the field, while a great cloud of smoke filled the page.
After this they were assigned to work in the hospital tent under the genial command of the surgeon-major. The Colonel angrily protested, but Naegelin pretended not to remember his name or notice his presence. And so they looked after the wounded, who lay on campbeds in the shadows of the tent. They waited to be transferred to hospitals in towns that had been liberated; they waited to get better; they were waiting in the muggy shadows of the hospital tent; they shooed the flies that buzzed around the sheets; they spent hours staring at the canvas roof, those who could still see, their limbs bandaged and stained crimson.
Salagnon would sit with them and draw their faces, their bare chests half covered by a sheet, their mangled limbs bandaged in white. Posing was comforting; it gave purpose to their stillness and drawing kept him occupied. Afterwards he would give them the drawing, which they carefully packed away in their kitbags. Kaloyannis encouraged him to come often and had the Supply Corps sent him fine-grained paper, pencils, nib pens, ink and even some of the small brushes usually used to oil the parts of telescopic sights. ‘My patients heal faster when they’re watched,’ he explained to the quartermaster sergeant, who was worried about handing over paper usually used for official orders and mentions in dispatches, uneasy about providing Salagnon with materials for drawing, a pointless activity that strangely seemed to interest everyone.
In the hospital tent Kaloyannis operated, bandaged, healed; he left to the Muslim nurses the task of giving injections, which, if performed tactfully, is a prayer for the dead. He had set aside a corner of the tent where he rested during the hottest hours of the day, chatting with a few officers, mostly French soldiers from France. He had Ahmed serve tea fragrant with mint. The sitting area, screened by a curtain, consisted of little more than a rug, some cushions on which to sit and a copper tray set on a munitions crate, but the first time the Colonel stepped inside he exclaimed joyfully, ‘You’ve brought a little piece of Africa home!’ He pushed back his sky-blue kepi at a rakish angle that made Kaloyannis smile.
The Colonel often visited the doctor’s ‘Moorish café’ with maquisards who were at a loose end, and especially with Salagnon. They reclined on the cushions, sipping tea and listening to the chattering of Kaloyannis, who loved to talk. He lived in Algiers, rarely set foot outside Bab El Oued and had never seen the Sahara; this seemed to reassure the Colonel, who said little of his life outside the army beyond brief anecdotes.
Salagnon carried on drawing Eurydice and she never tired of his gaze. The kindly Kaloyannis would look at his daughter with an air of tender admiration, while the taciturn colonel observed the situation with a keen eye. Outside, during the hottest hours, the landscape was bleached white by the sun’s glare; the open flaps of the tent let in a light breeze that soothed the skin, blowing gently on the sweat. ‘This is the principle of Bedouin tents,’ said the Colonel and launched into an explanation of the ethnography and the physics of the black tents in the desert, which, it went without saying, he had visited personally; without saying. Kaloyannis teased him, pretending to know nothing about Bedouins or even whether there were any in Algeria. Having only ever encountered Arabs in the street – excepting Ahmed and his nurses – the only exotic stories he could tell were of shoe-shine boys. And he told them. And by dint of his joviality and his passion, his listeners were transported.
Salagnon recounted what he had seen in the fields. He remembered the smell as though it were a physical ache, his nose and his throat bore the scars.
‘What I saw in the German tank was appalling. I don’t know how to describe it.’
‘A single German Panzer can wipe out several of our tanks,’ said the Colonel. ‘They have to be destroyed.’
‘It was barely scratched and inside there was nothing; nothing but this thing.’
‘We’re lucky that we have machines,’ said Kaloyannis. ‘Can you imagine having to do it by hand? Having to liquefy four people in a car by pushing a blowtorch through the door? You’d have to get close enough to see them through the windscreen, push the nozzle through the keyhole and light it. It would take a long time for the car to fill with flames and all the while you’d see everything through the windows while you held the blowtorch steady; you’d be forced to watch through the window as people burned, making sure to keep the nozzle firmly pressed against the lock until everything inside had melted and, when you were done, there would hardly be a blister on the paintwork. Can you imagine standing that close? You’d be able to hear everything, and for the person holding the blowtorch the sight would be unbearable. No one would do it.’
‘Most of the American pilots are decent guys with a strict sense of morality, because of their bizarre religion. They wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to kill anyone if they didn’t have machines. The pilot who did it didn’t see a t
hing; he lined up the tank in his sights, pressed a little red button on the joystick; he never saw the impact, he was long gone by then. It’s thanks to machines that we can burn men alive. Without technology we wouldn’t be able to kill so many; we wouldn’t have the stomach for it.’
‘You’ve got a weird sense of humour, Kaloyannis.’
‘I’ve never seen you laugh, Colonel. It’s no indication of strength. Or of health. You’re stiff as a board. If someone knocked you down, you’d splinter. And what would the pieces look like? A jigsaw puzzle?’
‘It’s impossible to be angry with you, Kaloyannis.’
‘That’s the best thing about prattling in patois. If you lay it on thick, people find it easier to swallow.’
‘But that thing you said about machines is gruesome.’
‘I’m just articulating the philosophical truth of this war, Colonel. I cannot help it if the truth rankles.’
‘It’s a paradoxical philosophy.’
‘You see that, Colonel? Comedy, medicine, philosophy: I’m everywhere. We are everywhere; isn’t that what you were trying to say?’
‘I wouldn’t have put it that way, but now that you’ve said it…’
‘Well, there you go, the great paradox has been uttered: I am one, yet I am everywhere. Glory be to the Lord, who compensates for my limited number with the gift of ubiquity. It allows me to tease men driven by sad passions. Maybe one day I’ll manage to get them to laugh at themselves.’