by Alexis Jenni
It could be discussed from a practical standpoint: we are all familiar with the armoured column; that explains why no one notices it. This is how we waged the wars fought over there, and we lost those wars by using armoured columns. Armour makes us feel protected. We brutalized everybody; we killed many; and we lost the wars. All of them. We.
The police officers are young, very young. We dispatch young men in armoured columns to retake control of no-go areas. They wreak havoc and leave again. Just as they did over there. The art of war does not change.
Novel IV
The first times, and what came after
VICTORIEN AND EURYDICE walked between the lines of tanks. Night had drawn in, but a darkling summer night, the sky bright with stars and moon, filled with the chirrup of insects and the noise of the camp. Salagnon, being sensitive to shapes, marvelled at the beauty of the tanks. They squatted there, five obstinate tons of steel, sleeping cattle, they radiated mass; for simply to see them, to walk in their shadow, to touch their steel flanks was to sense something immovable, anchored in the depths of the earth. They were like so many caves in which nothing bad could occur.
But Salagnon knew all too well that such power saved no one. He had spent hours gathering up the mangled bodies of dead tank crews, piecing them together, placing them in caskets in which, by the end, it was impossible to tell how many bodies they contained. Armour plating, fortresses, body armour afford a sense of protection, but to believe in that protection is folly: feeling safe is the easiest way to get oneself killed. Victorien had seen how easily armour plating could be pierced, since there is ammunition that can pass right through. It is easy to place a childlike trust in the steel plate hiding you. It is very thick, extremely heavy, totally opaque; it hides you and so you believe that as long as you cannot be seen, no harm can come to you. Behind this thick steel plate, you become a target. Naked, we are nothing; protected by a shell we become a target. Several men climb into a steel cage. They view the world through a slot no bigger than a letterbox. They see little, they move slowly, they are crammed with other men into a shuddering steel box. Unable to see, they assume they cannot be seen; it is childish. This hulking machine sitting on the grass is the only thing that is visible; it is the target. They are inside. Everyone outside is trying desperately to destroy it; they invent weapons, cannon, mines, dynamite; trenches dug in the ground, missiles fired from planes. Everything; until they destroy it. They end up mangled inside the box, mingled with twisted steel, a tin of corned beef opened with a sledgehammer and left lying on the ground.
Salagnon had seen the remains of these targets. Neither stone nor steel can offer protection. If a man remains naked, he can run among countless identical men and stray bullets may waver and miss their target; probability offers greater protection than layers of armour plating. Naked, he is forgotten; protected by a tank, he will be targeted relentlessly. Protection impresses, it creates the illusion of strength; the layers of armour become thicker, become heavier, they become slow and visible, they cry out to be destroyed.
Eurydice and Victorien slipped between the tanks lined up in neat rows, into the narrow gaps between them. They walked away from the camp along a rutted path lined with hedgerows; when they reached the darkness, they held hands. They could see the vast expanse of sky, which glittered with stars so precise they seemed freshly polished. They can make out fleeting images, crystal-clear pictures that shifted to become something else the moment they looked away. The air smelled of boiling sap, as warm as a bath; their clothes could have melted away and their skin would not have shivered. Eurydice’s hand in Victorien’s throbbed like a tiny heart. He sensed her not by her warmth but by a gentle quivering, by her breath, so close it seemed nestled in her palm. They walked until they could no longer hear the clamour of the camp, the engines, the clanging of metal, the voices. They wandered into a meadow and lay down. The grass that had been cut in June had grown back, so that it rose above them as they lay on their backs, surrounded by a wall of slender leaves and grass flowerets, a crown of delicate, distinct, ink-black strokes framed against a sky a shade more grey. They saw it scattered with stars and shifting images. They lay, unmoving. Around them the crickets resumed their chirruping. Victorien kissed Eurydice.
He first kissed her by pressing his lips to hers, the sort of kiss one knows one must perform, since it marks the entry to an intimate relationship. They both entered. Then he kissed her with his tongue, anxious to taste her lips. Desire kindled in him, although he had never thought about it, and Eurydice in his arms felt the same desires. Lying on the grass, they propped themselves on their elbows and their mouths opened to one another, their lips fitting together snugly, their tongues, safely sheltered, marvellously lubricated, sinuously entwining. Never had Victorien imagined such voluptuous caresses. The sky thrummed from end to end with the sound like a sheet of metal being shaken. Invisible planes flew high overhead, hundreds of planes laden with bombs moving as one across the steel surface of the sky. Victorien’s heart pounded in his throat, there where the carotids swell with blood. Eurydice’s belly quivered. Their beings rose to the surface like fish thrown breadcrumbs; they were deep in the lake, the water was still, then suddenly they appeared all at once, mouths pressed into the air, while the whole surface quivers. Eurydice’s skin was alive and Victorien could feel that life coursing beneath his fingertips; and when he curved his hand to cup her breast, he felt he held Eurydice’s whole life, full and round, in his palm. She was breathing rapidly, her eyes closed, her whole being surging through her. Victorien’s penis was cramped, hindering his every movement, and when he unbuttoned his trousers he felt a great relief. This new limb, which never emerged like this, brushed Eurydice’s bare thighs. It moved with a life of its own, snuffled at her skin in panting breaths, moved along her thighs in little bounds. It wanted to bury itself in her. Eurydice gave a heavy sigh and whispered:
‘I want it to stop, Victorien. I don’t want to be reckless.’
‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it’s so overwhelming. I want to keep my feet on the ground. But just now I don’t really know where my body is. I want to find it again before I fly away.’
‘I know where mine is.’
‘I’ll hold it close.’
With infinite tenderness, she grasped his sex – yes, that is the word, in spite of appearances, the word in its oldest sense – and with great nobility of spirit she stroked his sex until he ejaculated. Lying on his back, Victorien watched the stars moving, when they all suddenly snuffed out and re-ignited. Eurydice nestled against him and kissed his neck, behind his ear, precisely where the carotid passes, and gradually the drumming subsided. To the north, the muffled roar was like an echo in which it was impossible to make out the detail; a constant, unceasing rumble, while on the horizon reddish lights flickered in counterpoint and yellow flashes appeared and quickly faded.
This was the first time anyone had touched his penis. It troubled him so much he could think of nothing else. When Eurydice pressed herself against him, he saw time suddenly open up before him: he knew that this young woman would for ever be right here, even if it happened that they never saw each other again.
He wondered whether he had kept the promise he had made to Roseval. The thought occurred to him as he arrived back at the camp, holding Eurydice’s hand. He blushed in the balmy darkness, although only he was aware of it. But still he wondered. His hand on Eurydice’s shoulder, pulling her towards him, he decided that he had. Though not entirely. But he would happily have stayed this way for ever. He had escaped the bitterness of loneliness and disappointment. The business of war made it possible for him to remain in this situation which, otherwise, would not last. Every day the wounded arrived in greater numbers; they had to be scraped off the ground, farther and farther afield, and brought back in the truck; he was sent out on urgent missions that took him away from Eurydice. Each time he left he would slip her a short message, a drawing, a loving word, and when he h
ad to leave immediately, when he had to run to the truck, he would take a scrap of wrapping paper and, with a single stroke, sketch a heart, a tree, the bend of a hip, a pair of parted lips, the curve of a shoulder; these drawings – elliptical, unfinished, not yet dry, pressed into her hand as he rushed away – she cherished most of all.
An armoured car impresses, but it is a metal tomb. An armoured train? It is as fragile as a glass bottle; when hit, it shatters. Two men wearing espadrilles ambling along a path, their backpacks stuffed with explosives the size of cakes of soap, can bring it crashing to a halt without ever seeing it. In a few short minutes they blow up the tracks. Two men are sent, so the task will be more enjoyable, so they can chat while they work; one man would be enough.
The armoured train running through the Saône Valley never made it past Chalon. The tracks were sabotaged under cover of darkness, forcing it to stop in a squeal of brakes, an agonizing shriek of grinding metal, a great horizontal spray of sparks. The buckled rails curled like the tusks of a fossilized elephant, shattered sleepers fell in splinters into the freshly gouged crater. Four American planes, in two passes, blew up the engine and the two freight wagons at the front and the rear, from where, sheltered behind sandbags, multi-barrelled autocannon attempted to track them. In a fleeting fireball, everything disappeared; the sandbags ripped, the barrels twisted, the gunners disfigured, burned, mutilated and mingled with the sand in the space of a few seconds. Those in the train carriages piled out on to the tracks, heads low, running, trying to dodge the explosions, throwing themselves to the ground to avoid the hail of bullets hitting the tracks. Up above, the pilots turned the knife in the wound, wheeling around again and again to strafe the tracks, bloodying the gravel. The survivors plunged into the thickets, where they came face to face with the French soldiers lying in wait since the night before. The first were killed in the confusion, the others were forced to lie on their bellies, hands behind their heads. The train was burning; bodies in grey uniforms lay sprawled on the railway embankment. The planes flicked their wings and flew off. A whole column of prisoners was marched back to the camp; they went willingly; they were relaxed, their jackets slung over their shoulders, their hands in their pockets, happy that it was all over and they were still alive.
The Colonel went to see Naegelin.
‘These are the prisoners from Porquigny. The massacre. Old men, women, children. Twenty-eight corpses in the streets, forty-seven in the houses, gunned down in cold blood, some with their hands tied behind their backs.’
‘So?’
‘So, we shoot them.’
‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘OK, then we have a trial and then we shoot them.’
‘Who is going to judge them? Your men? That would be an act of revenge, just another crime. Our men? We’re soldiers, it’s not our job to judge. The civilian judges? Two months ago they were passing sentence on résistants on behalf of the Germans. I’m happy to believe that the law is impartial, but that would be taking things too far. There is no one in France to judge them right now.’
‘So you’re not going to do anything?’
‘I will transfer them to the Americans. I’ll advise them that they were involved in a civilian massacre. They’ll decide. That will be all, “Colonel”.’
The clearly enunciated quotation marks dismissed the colonel as definitively as a wave of the hand.
The German prisoners were put into a paddock. A square of ground was marked out with barbed wire and they were left there. Stripped of their weapons and helmets, scattered throughout the field, lacking the discipline that caused them to act as one, the prisoners looked like what they really were: exhausted men of varying ages whose faces bore the mark of many years of tension, fear and acquaintance with death. Now lying on the grass in random groups, heads resting on their folded arms or on each other’s stomachs, with no belts, no helmets, the jackets unbuttoned, they closed their eyes and let the sunlight wash over their tanned faces. Other amorphous groups stood next to the rolls of barbed wire, smoking, one hand in their pockets, saying nothing, scarcely moving, staring vacantly into the distance at the French sentry guarding them, his rifle shouldered, attempting to project a rigid severity. But the sentries, having attempted their harshest glares, no longer know where to look. The Germans, vaguely amused, gazed blankly at them, calmly ruminating in their paddock, and after a time the sentries took to staring at the ground, at the feet of those they were guarding, and this seemed to them absurd.
The maquisards, who were issued with American uniforms, came to see these half-dressed soldiers lolling in the sun. The Germans narrowed their eyes and waited. Salagnon was struck by the haughty grace of an officer standing off to one side. He wore his casually unbuttoned uniform like a summer suit. He stood, smoking coolly as he waited for the game to end. He had lost. Too bad. Salagnon found himself drawn to this face. Mistaking it for some sort of attraction, he did not dare look him in the eye; eventually he realized it was simply recognition. He planted himself in front of the man. Hands in his pockets, the German went on smoking, looking at him without seeing, squinting against the sunlight and the smoke from the cigarette dangling from his lips. They were standing in the same field, facing one another, and the two metres that separated them was a no-man’s-land of wire bristling with spikes; they were as close as if they had been sitting at the same table.
‘You carried out an inspection on my father’s shop. In Lyon in 1943.’
‘I inspected a lot of shops. I was appointed the stupid task of inspecting shops. An attempt to stamp out the black market. I found it particularly tedious. I don’t remember your father.’
‘So you don’t recognize me?’
‘You, yes. I recognized you the moment I saw you. You’ve been hanging around here for an hour pretending not to notice me. You’ve changed, but not too much. I’m guessing you’ve discovered how to use your prick. Am I wrong?’
‘Why did you spare my father? He was trafficking and you knew it.’
‘Everyone traffics. No one follows the regulations. So I spare or I condemn. Depending. We were not planning to kill everyone. If the war had carried on, perhaps we would have. As we did in Poland. But now, it’s over.’
‘Were you responsible for Porquigny?’
‘Me, my men, orders from above: everyone was responsible; no one in particular. The Résistance, as you call it, commanded support; so we terrorized to undermine that support.’
‘You killed civilians.’
‘If we killed only soldiers it would be a conventional war. Terror is a sophisticated weapon; it involves spreading panic and clearing the way ahead. That way, we calmly advance while our enemies lose their support. It’s important to create a sense of faceless terror; it is a military strategy.’
‘Did you kill?’
‘Personally, I have no taste for blood. Terror is merely a technique; to employ it requires psychopaths; to coordinate it requires someone who is sane. I have a number of Turkmen I brought back from Russia, nomads for whom brutality is a game, who laugh at the slaughter of their animals before they eat them. Now they have a taste for blood; they simply need to be encouraged to abandon their flocks and apply it a little more widely. They’re capable of dismembering a man with a saw. I’ve seen them do it. They were aboard the armoured train with me, a secret weapon for sowing terror. They are my hounds. I set them loose or I hold them back. I simply control the leash. But what would you have done in my place? In our place?’
‘But I’m not. I specifically chose not to be in your place.’
‘Things change, young man. I was tasked with maintaining law and order. Perhaps tomorrow it will be you. Yesterday I spared you, because you were a little sad, because you had made a mistake in your declension, and today I am your prisoner. Yesterday we were the masters, now I don’t know what you plan to do with me.’
‘You will be handed over to the Americans.’
‘Things change. Make the most of your newly won
victory. Make the most of this glorious summer. The summer of 1940 was the most wonderful of my whole life. Later, it was not so good. Things had changed.’
It was bound to happen. By relentlessly attempting to kill him with explosive projectiles, they almost succeeded. He was wounded. During sorties to recover their dead, they were met with gunfire. Germans were prowling through the countryside. Shells following the arc of the sky landed twenty kilometres away. A lone plane would appear suddenly from the clouds to strafe everything in sight and disappear again. It was possible to die by a quirk of fate.
With Brioude, Salagnon escaped the sniper hiding in the water tower. The Germans had moved on, but he had stayed behind, forgotten perhaps, perched on a slab of concrete thirty metres high. All around him the fields were littered with corpses and burned-out vehicles, the relics of a battle he must have been a part of and which everyone thought was over. When the Colonel’s maquisards came to recover the bodies, working in pairs, carrying a stretcher, he started shooting and hit Morellet in the thigh. They dived behind a hedge and returned fire, but the German was out of range. Brioude and Salagnon found themselves exposed, standing in the middle of the broad meadow, beneath the water tower strewn with bodies and smouldering tanks. The sniper got them in his sights, taking his time, intent on killing them before they could find a place to hide. From behind the hedge, the rest of the platoon fired in bursts; their bullets pitted the concrete without reaching him. Perched high in the air, he was out of range; he would draw back only to reappear and fire at what he estimated was his enemy’s position. Brioude and Salagnon plunged into the long grass as a bullet buried itself in the ground; they sheltered behind corpses and felt one of the bodies judder softly with the impact of the bullet; ducked behind a burned-out jeep as a bullet ricocheted against the metal, missing them once more. They crawled, they got up again, they jumped, they varied their speed, signalling to each other, their hearts pounding, and each time the sniper missed them. Metre by metre they gained ground, attempting to cross the field, each time gaining a few more metres of life as the sniper shifted his aim and missed again. When they burst through the hedge and rolled on the ground next to the others, they were greeted by a muffled cheer. They lay on their backs, panting for breath, sweating horribly; and they burst out laughing, happy to have won, happy to be alive.