by Julien Gracq
He leaned on the table and drummed his finger tips against the black window, quite bewildered. After this disagreeable shock, a reflex system of compensatory speculations began to function. He could hardly conceive that the war would knock at the blockhouse door one of these days: in this ponderous military machinery, every cog frozen solid in the earth, action of any kind assumed for the imagination the abnormal aspect, prepared for in advance, of a moving day. “Besides, who even wants to talk about it?” Grange asked himself, shrugging his shoulders. “No one takes such things seriously. Why, even in conversations at Moriarmé . . .” and here he stopped short, remembering Varin (“But Varin! . . .” he thought). Unfortunately, shrugging his shoulders did not get rid of everything; something remained: an anxiety he could neither localize nor reduce, the same disturbance, he decided, that kept his men from falling asleep on the nights there were “papers” on his desk. When he had finished reading Le Petit Ardennais and the newspapers from Paris, Grange sometimes wondered what accounted for his stubborn impression that “the newspapers were so bad.” Nothing was happening. The war in Finland was obviously drawing to a close. In the east, which had caused a lot of talk for a while, everything seemed calm: the Caucasus oil wells still refused to go up in flames. These alarms had been so many backfires which, after having briefly reddened the horizon, burnt down and went out one after the other. And now, on the northeast front, the silence was beginning to grow a little ominous—broken only by discreet coughs and sounds of chairs being moved, by which guests indicate that time is weighing heavily, almost indecorously, between the hors-d’oeuvre and the appearance of a more substantial course. For this silence, now distinctly irritating, was a hunger, and yawning made him think not so much of boredom as of the fearful gape of jaws which meant something quite different. The winter was growing old—he felt its peace cracking like the floating island in Jules Verne which, day by day, the thaw diminished.
When he had wrestled a while with these joyless thoughts the night provoked—his Larvae, as he called them—he would glance at the map of Belgium tacked over his bed—compliments of the Petit Ardennais—printed in three colors and surrounded by a fringe of French, German, and Belgian flags with perforated outlines, to be used at the appropriate moment for marking the fronts: it was as if, Grange thought, frowning with surprise each time it occurred to him—as if a circle of flies were waiting around a cheese for the glass bell to be raised. Soberly he measured a few distances, using his nail file and the scale at the corner of the map. On the whole, the Belgian buffer wasn’t very thick. From the German frontier to the Meuse, it was probably little less than a hundred kilometers: three hours on the road, driving slowly. Luckily, these were Ardennes kilometers, allergic to armies, as anyone could see: in 1914 Joffre had come to grief over them and the lesson had not been wasted. Grange observed with satisfaction the enormous green stain which thrust its tentacles from Liége to beyond the Meuse; as far as forests went, it was about as serious an obstacle as you could find; he noticed, moreover, that nowhere was it more compact than opposite Les Falizes. “Not a single clearing!” he sighed with a secret satisfecit that drew up the corners of his mouth. Besides, there were references. “An enormous forest of small trees,” Michelet had written: an army did not go counter to such great, placid evidences. Worse than a forest, really: a jungle. And there was the Belgian army to reckon with besides: seventeen divisions. They must have prepared formidable defenses. “The forest roads,” he dreamed on, scowling. “With a few barbwire emplacements! . . .”; the trouble was, he suddenly realized, that the trees were so small—but you couldn’t have all the luck on your side. He thought for another moment, under his blankets, about the Belgian army, about the forest, about the tank traps and barbwire emplacements, about the lessons of history. If someone had reminded him of the curious forgetfulness that put the Army of the Meuse between parentheses, he would have been rather shocked. He never thought of it, that was all, strange as it seemed—and probably he would not have enjoyed exploring his motives. Half dozing already, he listened calmly to the forest growing.
TOWARD the middle of January, after snowfalls which rendered the roads entirely impracticable, the weather cleared and a German reconnaissance plane appeared at lunchtime over the Meuse valley. It was only a tiny silver speck, occasionally glistening in the sun as the distance slowed its progress to a crawl across the sky; a languid trail of globular puffs followed behind at some distance, blooming in its wake with a cottony “plop.” The spectacle seemed not in the least warlike to Grange, but rather ornamental, graceful: the bursts were as regularly spaced one behind the other as if the clear morning sky had been neatly planted by some celestial dibble. The airplane returned almost every day for a week. Grange decided the snow showed up the earthworks under construction along the Meuse more clearly: the Germans were profiting by this condition to take photographs. As the coffee was served in the blockhouse, the odd, irregular buzzing made every head turn toward the windows.
“What a trick!” Gourcuff murmured, winking broadly toward the plane. He sheltered his eyes comically with his helmet, as if against the sun, actually protecting himself against the shell splinters that sometimes tinkled off the roof slates. But the anti-aircraft crews never hit the plane: they were using the same .75 caliber that had taken pot shots at the Taubes during the last war.
“Old equipment!” Olivon sighed, impartial and bored, lifting his cup again. Again they heard, for a moment, the heavy oily “plop” exploding gently in the calm blue air with the prudent rhythm of an official salute.
Varin must be going out of his mind, Grange thought. After the reconnaissance, he must be expecting the attack any day now. Grange imagined the captain prowling up and down his office, his hands behind his back, with that insolent way he had of suddenly planting himself in front of his interlocutor, nostrils flaring, his mouth a little twisted: “You still don’t see?” On certain days, the world back of the blockhouse melted into the fog altogether, but never Varin: he remained terribly distinct, perhaps because of the shiny nickel-plated telephone on his desk and the nervous hand, quicker than a cat’s paw, that picked up the receiver, cutting off the first ring; Grange could imagine the big push only vaguely save for one image that was extraordinarily precise: Varin’s thin hand on the telephone and the avid, nervous twitch of his lips which were all that moved in his face as he bent over the phone. He wondered why this picture was so precise and so remarkably disagreeable. Sometimes he dreamed with childish satisfaction about what would happen—during a war, after all, bombs were not out of the question—if one day, far behind the blockhouse lost on the brink of a world a prey to spirits and surprises, Varin’s telephone were cut.
Toward the end of the week, a warm fog covered the Roof; the German reconnaissance planes stopped coming. Then the weather cleared again, dry and very bright now, and two days of brutal cold paralyzed the plateau: the ice on the road virtually severed the blockhouse from Les Falizes, and the men sulked in the bitter humor of sailors becalmed. The morning of the third day, Grange, shivering as he put on his clothes, was surprised to look out his window and see a man from the blockhouse at Les Buttés making his way through the waist-high snow. Les Buttés was relaying an urgent message from Moriarmé: it was the alerting order—number one alert.
“Still there’s nothing on the radio,” he repeated incredulously. “And besides, with snow like this! . . .” But suddenly the snow meant nothing beside the little square of white paper on Grange’s desk, and the radio’s silence smelled of a trap; in wartime an order, a piece of news, a simple rumor, suddenly casts the ominous light of an eclipse over everything, and the world swings into a new season. Behind the partition (to make assurance doubly sure, he had ordered a review of their arms) the sound of gun breaches against the raw wood sent the men’s bad humor through Grange’s nerves. They didn’t put much stock in these alerts but found them supremely annoying. It was a kind of forfeit: a whole capital of mild, comfortable daydre
ams, of security measures saved up and consolidated from week to week, gone up in a puff of smoke: they were starting again from zero. Then, even to its distant heart behind the Meuse, the army shuddered, wondered, seethed with all its awakened antennas. Toward noon, Captain Varin himself appeared in front of the blockhouse.
“Olivon will heat some coffee for you,” Grange said, when they had sat down. “Les Buttés relayed the alert this morning,” he continued, coughing and grimacing indiscreetly. The captain shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know any more about it than you do, my friend. But even so, this time, I’d be surprised. . . . We got stuck three times on the way up from l’Eclaterie.” He gestured wearily toward the snow-choked road. “Everything in order here?” he continued, almost absentmindedly.
“Those embrasure funnels still haven’t come.”
The captain shrugged again. Everyone in Moriarmé knew he had been furious for three months over missing equipment: he suffered from these lidless blockhouses as from a mutilation.
“I know,” he said, with a bitter twitch of his lips. “I can’t make them myself.”
He sipped his coffee in silence. “There’s something up his sleeve,” Grange thought. “Something he’s not in a hurry to get out.”
The captain put down his cup and unconsciously glanced out the window, like all visitors to the blockhouse; at once the silence of the forest, so difficult to dispel, flowed into the room as calmly as water fills a wreck gone to the bottom.
“Let’s go down,” Varin said suddenly. The thaw’s humid chill became almost intolerable inside the block itself. A few empty bottles rolled across the cement floor near the escape hatch. Through the embrasure, a thin dust-colored shaft of light reflected from the snow outside fell across the raw concrete.
“You should have put something under those munition cases before the thaw,” the captain said in his bored tone. “The concrete breeds rust in the winter. God knows what would happen if that alert meant anything!” His eyes fixed on the road through the embrasure, he continued as if he were dreaming aloud: “Everyone’s asleep. The less they do, the less they want to do—and as for keeping things greased, the hell with it. There’s not one gun in two ready to fire in the whole blockhouse line after this rotten snow.”
Grange opened, then closed the breach of the antitank gun, which engaged with a delicate, brutal click.
“I’m not saying that for you,” Varin snapped. Then, reflectively: “A percentage. And if it were only the guns that were rusting . . .” The captain slapped his soft leather gloves against his leggings, and insolently raised his chin toward Grange, his nostrils flaring. “A hell of an army, my friend, and it looks to me as if it wants to be an army in hell, before long. All right, it’s none of our business,” he broke off, resuming the fierce gaiety of tone so characteristic of the man. “Another thing, Grange,” he continued after a moment’s silence, pulling on his gloves, his eyes lowered: “how would you feel about being transferred to regimental headquarters?”
“Headquarters?”
“To the auxiliary company that’s being brought up to strength. It seems I’m more than well supplied with lieutenants since you’ve come. And they’ve been nice enough to leave the choice of hara-kari up to me.”
Grange looked at the captain and suddenly felt himself blushing. The auxiliary company was one of the best-known soft spots in the service. “It’s a little embarrassing,” he said after a moment, his voice harsh. “If at least I knew what it was that made you . . .”
“No, Grange,” the captain said, putting one hand on his shoulder for a moment. “You don’t see what I’m getting at. If the choice were up to me, I’d keep you.”
“Then the answer is no,” Grange replied, making a sweeping gesture with his finger tips.
“Definitely?”
“Definitely.”
The captain frowned and coughed. With the tip of his shoe he rolled an empty bottle toward the trap door. He seemed embarrassed, undecided.
“There’s no point of honor in this business,” he said, suddenly turning back toward Grange. “No point of honor. An administrative transfer, that’s all. This isn’t a post for you, here. You’d be replaced by a non-commissioned officer.”
“No,” Grange said again, his voice slightly muffled.
There was another silence.
“A woman?” Varin asked, his face producing the wintry grimace that must have been, Grange decided, his libidinous expression.
“No,” Grange continued after a moment. “Not really.”
“Well, then?”
“I prefer staying under your orders.”
“No,” the captain said, tapping his revolver holster and staring at Grange with a mocking curiosity that melted him a little. “No, not that. . . . That would surprise me.”
After inspecting the block, they climbed back up to Grange’s room for a moment. The captain gave him a number of documents which he glanced at in passing: for the most part it was the usual singsong, what Grange called “customs”: upkeep of blockhouse materiel, tightening of the frontier patrols, installation of the mines and barbwire emplacements. There was one novelty, however: a booklet on how to identify the silhouettes of the German armored units; Grange leafed through it for a moment, suddenly thoughtful again. This time there could be no question of the Siegfried Line: the war was fast growing overripe behind the unchanged official phrases—imperceptibly, with the year, it had changed direction.
“There it is, all right,” the captain said, looking over Grange’s shoulder. “They’re starting to get serious now. . . .” In the captain’s vocabulary, they never meant the Germans, but merely the stormy peaks of power, the big chiefs, against whom he whetted his own mental secession. At heart, he’s on Lucifer’s side, Grange realized, startled by the sympathy that impelled him toward the captain, only he’s a specialist: he sees God with stars on his shoulders.
“I’m sure you know how late in the day it is,” he said. He smiled clumsily; the old pique between them suddenly started up again, once more rubbed him against the grain.
“More or less,” the captain said, lighting his cigarette with mock calmness. He brushed the notebook off the desk. “And believe me, I’m not sticking my neck out: you’ll see them coming with the swallows.” They looked out the window for a moment, at loose ends, and drank some more coffee. The noonday sun was already recovering a little strength; the road was mottled with brown puddles. They could hear the snow melting, drop by drop, onto the hencoop.
“Why do you want to stay here?” Varin suddenly asked again. “No,” he waved his hand, “please . . . I don’t like volunteers, and I know what I’m talking about. If you tell me you want to fight in the front lines, I’ll think less of you, and I won’t believe you.”
“No,” Grange said. “It’s something else. I like it here.” He felt as if he were hearing the words for the first time, astonished to have known the truth so long.
“Yes, that must be it,” the captain said after a moment’s silence. He looked fixedly down the road again. “You’re a strange man!” he said with an uncertain smile, then stood up to say good-bye and snapped his helmet’s chin strap. The mask of his face became handsome and hard again, sharpened by fatigue, the great nose hawklike, the eyes heavily ringed.
“Well, then, I’ve said what I had to say,” he concluded, holding out his hand with something that for the first time resembled cordiality. “ ‘Having reread, continue,’ as they say in indoctrination courses.”
“ ‘Continue,’ ” Grange said. “I’m not sure you’re particularly pleased.”
“You’re wrong, my friend,” Varin said seriously, lighting another cigarette. “I have no objection to fighting the war with men who have found their own way of deserting.”
That evening, Grange went out for a short walk. His conversation with the captain had disturbed him, he needed air. What astonished him was the sudden realization he had come to, talking with Varin, of how l
ittle Mona counted in his sudden, almost animal desire to stay.
“To live here?” he said, almost aloud. He looked back through the network of bare trunks at the wretched structure with its long streaks of rust running down the concrete, the little garden littered with tin cans, the rickety chicken coop, and shrugged his shoulders. Here or somewhere else—any quarters were good enough for him. No, it was something else. What most reminded him of his exaltation at Les Falizes, where he seemed to breathe as never before, was the beginning of summer vacations in his childhood—the fever seizing him as soon as he could look out the train windows, still miles away from the coast, and see the trees gradually shrink, stunted by the salt wind—the anxiety suddenly filling his throat at the mere thought that his room in the hotel might not overlook the sea. And the next day there would be the sand castles too, when his heart beat stronger than anywhere else just standing next to them, because he knew, and at the same time could not believe, that the tide would soon cover them.
Evenings, once he had sent off several letters, which became more and more of a chore—there were too many barriers to cross to make himself understood—and signed his daily report, Grange went to bed early. He liked to read in bed during the long winter evenings, accompanied by the snores that penetrated the thin partition between him and the crew; its key hanging at the head of his bed, he enjoyed feeling the blockhouse around him drifting through the night in marching order, watertight, closed in on itself like a ship that shuts its hatches. But this evening, instead of his book, he leaned down and picked up the pamphlet Varin had brushed to the floor and turned its pages for a long time. The ponderous gray silhouettes, which he had never seen reproduced before, seemed curiously exotic—another world—with that simultaneously baroque, theatrical, and sinister quality of German war machines which, despite all the requirements of technology, still managed to remind him of Fafnir. “Unheimlich,” he thought: there was no French word; he studied them with a mixture of repugnance and fascination. Outside, the heavy rain of the Ardennes was beginning to fall with the darkness, its drumming muffled by the snow. Unconsciously, he strained to hear the occasional noises from the crew room, afraid of being surprised, as if he were poring over obscene photographs.