by Julien Gracq
“The National Workshops,” he whistled between his teeth. “After all, when you think what they pay their men! . . .”
He made a dismissive gesture with one hand, feeling quite unperturbed by this sleeping army in its enchanted forest. And in some obscure corner of his thoughts he even recognized a certain complicity. There was a confused but powerful charm in sprawling in this besotted boat that had thrown its helm, then its oars overboard—the curious charm of drifting with the current.
They sat on the logs and lit their cigarettes without speaking. A heavy barrage of storm clouds had gathered in the west, where the sun had almost set. From the hut, they could hear only an occasional rustle of leaves, a sparrow flying to its roost, and then quite near a rabbit bolting into the brake. Toward Belgium, the bluish distances were already darkening. A heavy dome of clouds gradually slipped across the sky; at the horizon, a palpitation of heat lightning flashed across the darkness. The evening’s calm was not that of sleep: fanned by this distant trembling, it was as if the earth was waiting only for this heavy lid which reached further into the sky at every moment. A few drops splattered on the tin roof, then stopped; a powdery, scorched odor rose from the earth, filling their nostrils with all the heat’s intensity.
“Funny kind of spring,” Grange said, unbuttoning his collar. “I feel like sleeping out here on the grass.”
“I know,” Hervouët answered. “I don’t feel like going back either.”
“We’ll go as far as Les Censes de Braye. Take a look at the emplacements there.”
As soon as they had turned onto the new path that led to the frontier—a smuggler’s trail—they plunged into a green and bitter savor that the oncoming night crushed from the earth, headier than the smell of new-mown hay. Occasionally a cold mist rose as high as their faces, brutally chilling their temples: puddles from the last storm still flooded all the hollows of the path. Above them, the branches divided to reveal a streak of yellow sky; the storm clouds had begun to devour it. With the zigzags of the path, Grange’s sense of direction quickly vanished. A familiar sense of well-being filled his mind; he slipped into the forest night as if into a kind of freedom.
“We must be there, mon lieutenant.”
They heard a tin can clatter. The emplacement cut across the path here: they had bumped into the wire before they had guessed it was there. Beyond the frontier, the path ran down toward a shallow ravine; a wisp of fog was already oozing up, as deliberate as cigar smoke. The Belgian side rose abruptly, a grass-grown, deforested slope with a few scattered pine saplings. The moon had risen, and what the clouds had not yet obscured of its light clung to this smooth slope, still touched by a vestige of daylight, and made the clearing beyond the pool of fog, beyond the dark cones of the saplings, a forbidden and magical site, half fairy ring and half witches’ circle. Behind the hilltop, towards which the meadow sloped up, there was silhouetted between the trees the ridge of a low roof—probably a woodcutter’s hut.
“Things are pretty quiet now,” Hervouët said, nodding toward the roof. “The wire gets in their way.”
“That cabin?”
“Smugglers. It’s a hideout.”
Grange had come to understand why he liked taking Hervouët along on his night rounds: the frontier fascinated him, and he had learned all its secrets, from the minutest detail of its crude, ingenious hiding places to the sudden commotion of the forest creatures. Nothing, Grange felt, bound them closer to each other than these whispered conversations, these long silences while their gloved hands groped along the invisible thread of barbed wire, the lifeline that stretched across the leaden night.
“There’s no money in it any more,” Hervouët said, scowling. “And besides, they’re busy other places.”
“Called up?” Grange asked mildly, raising his head: he had heard from Moriarmé that frontier crossings were quite rare now.
“Yes,” Hervouët answered. “The smugglers, and then the rest. Probably because it looks bad. They’ve called up a lot recently. Just at Waregnies . . .”
“There still hasn’t been an alert,” Grange said, without conviction.
“If you ask me, they know something all the same, mon lieutenant.” Hervouët shook his head. “They’re closer than we are. And besides, it’s bound to happen. It’s the time of year.”
They smoked for a moment in silence. The air was lighter now; the clouds disappeared; one or two long rolls of thunder faded behind the Belgian horizon with a pacified grumble. The moon had risen over the forest now: beyond the clearing in the woods, the slope was frosted with a cold, mineral light, spotted by the inky shadow of the saplings on the grass. This evening, as never before, Grange felt he was living in a forgotten wilderness: the whole immensity of the Ardennes throbbed in this ghostly clearing like the heart of a magic forest pounding around its fountain. This slumbering vigil of the treetops disturbed him. He reflected on the strange expression Hervouët had just used: “No one’s behind us.” What they had left behind, what they were supposed to protect, no longer mattered very much: the lines were cut; in this darkness full of forebodings all raisons d’être had lost their hold. Perhaps for the first time, Grange told himself, he was mobilized in a dream army. “I’m dreaming here—we’re all dreaming—but of what?” Everything around him was anxiety and vacillation, as if the world men had woven was unraveling stitch by stitch. There remained only a pure, blind waiting: the starry night, the forgotten forest, the enormous tide that swelled behind the horizon brutally stripped them all, as the sound of waves breaking behind dunes creates a sudden nakedness.
They talked for a moment about Hervouët’s leave—his turn was coming up. The sea would have fallen now at La Brière, Grange decided. He conjured up quite clearly the wide cinder towpaths between the canals, the everlasting mist that hung over the peat fires. He remembered the mysterious sickness, the slow fever that came with the summer, burning deep under the grass with neither flame nor heat, so that you could stir up showers of sparks just by dragging a stick across the peat—the earth was like a dog showing its teeth.
“All that! . . .” Hervouët concluded, almost with indifference. They were unconsciously speaking of the place as if it were some primitive Africa, pleasant to dream of exploring but not to be taken very seriously.
“And you won’t be sad about leaving Les Mazures?” Grange asked, touching him lightly on the shoulder.
“There’s no one left at Les Mazures any more,” Hervouët said, not looking at him. “They were evacuated yesterday.” And with a shrug of the shoulders he added, “It’s just as well. It’s no time for women now.”
They walked back in silence as far as the cut. The moon, turning the fog into steam, made it into a vague jungle; on the other side of the widened clearing, the rampart of the forest stood in the cold light, motionless and upright like a man.
“Go on back,” Grange said to Hervouët. “I have to stop at Les Falizes.”
Mona’s light was still on. Grange drummed noisily two or three times on the grating latch; this was his usual way of announcing himself when she wasn’t asleep yet. Mona was reading, lying barefoot on the bed, wearing blue jeans and one of Julia’s blouses.
“Come sit down.” Without getting up, she moved over to make room for him on the bed. Nothing seemed so intimate, so binding, as these blind-man’s gestures of hers. “What’s the matter, poppy?” she asked, leaning on one elbow, her eyes suddenly troubled.
“The war,” he said with an exhausted sigh, familiarly hooking his helmet onto the cupboard key. He felt his heart give a little start: where his helmet always swung for a moment on its chin strap, a tiny curved rut had been worn in the polished wood.
“How silly you are,” she cried, pulling him against her mouth. But they quickly broke apart: against hers, his lips tasted of fever, a sour, faded taste.
“Darling, you’re sick. It must be marsh fever,” she said, seizing his wrist and nodding knowingly. “Julia always says it’s so bad to go into those bo
gs on your patrols the way you do.”
“No, Mona, I mean it. The war—seriously. You must leave,” he said, turning his head, his tone less firm than he would have liked.
“How boring you are, darling!” Mona heaved a little premonitory sigh which he knew quite well by now. It was the sandman’s hour: sleep suddenly threw her across the bed, as defenseless as a lamb with its legs tied together. For Mona, sleep was sometimes a subtle form of escape, like animals that play dead in the face of danger.
He seized her shoulder and shook her a little. “You must leave, Mona, do you understand?” he repeated, his voice serious.
“But why—what’s the matter?” With a sudden thrust of her hips Mona sat up and stared at him, her eyes wild, as if waking from a nightmare.
“Tell Julia.” He took her fingers in his, mechanically. “Tomorrow.” His eyes were hard and abstracted; he felt time weighing on his shoulders and thought of railroad stations early in the morning, when farewells have a taste of ashes, but when the early wind is so fresh. He dared not tell her that, light as she was, she encumbered his life, and that he wanted to be alone now.
Mona cried for a long time; heavily shaken against Grange’s shoulder, her head was quite sticky with her tears. When the sobbing stopped, they listened together to the noises of the wakened forest that came through the open door, and he felt her gentle plantlike breathing begin again, as if the storm were dripping from her leaves now. “A whole season,” he thought, and wondered if he had loved her. It was less and more than that: there had been room only for her.
THE night of May ninth, Lieutenant Grange slept badly. He had gone to bed with a headache, all his windows open, though even the forest night could not prevail against the precocious heat. When he awoke at dawn, it seemed at first as if he had been dreaming heavily: his head was full of a peculiar insistent buzzing. He was aware of a sudden current of cool, wet air streaming over him from the nearby window, but this draft slipped over his face with a particular tonality, musical and vibrant, as if it were woven of a crackling of wing cases. For a moment in his bewilderment he had the pleasant sensation that time had somehow run together, that the forest dawn had mingled with the torrid noon, electrified by the hum of cicadas. The image vanished as he realized that a pane of his window, where the putty had fallen out of the frame, was rattling near his cheek. “It’s the window,” he told himself as he buried his head in the pillow again, “I’ll have to tell Olivon about it.” Yet somewhere in his fog, without quite connecting it with this rattling, he also felt a shrill note of panic urgency rising from second to second in the morning air, a kind of gleaming weight in the light, and he also became curiously aware of the fragility, the grotesque thinness of the roof over him which seemed to be flying away. He nestled into his bed, uncomfortable, naked, and exposed to the sound that streamed from the sky, swelling as it approached. Two knocks at his door wakened him completely this time.
“They’re going over, mon yeutenant,” Olivon called from behind the partition. His voice was strangely throaty, its indifference a little choked, pitched somewhere between incredulity and panic.
The men were already at the windows, barefoot, tousled, hastily buckling their belts. The sun had not yet appeared, but the night was pale in the east, already graying the vast horizon of the Belgian forests. The wet dawn was cold—the soles of his feet were freezing on the raw cement. A great whine slowly rising to its zenith came in through the open windows. The sound did not seem earthly; it involved, rather, the whole vault of the sky, which suddenly became a solid firmament and began to vibrate like a sheet of tin: at first he thought of some strange meteorological phenomenon, an aurora borealis in which sound had inexplicably been substituted for light. What reinforced this impression was the response of the night-drenched earth, where nothing human stirred yet which grew troubled, the voices of its creatures raised in confused alarm; toward Les Buttés, in the darkness where sounds carried far, dogs howled continually, as if at the full moon, and from time to time over the low, even whine he could hear rising from the nearby underbrush a muffled, cautious cackle of alarm. At the horizon, a new throbbing wave began to swell, rising slowly toward its calm culmination, flowing majestically across the sky, and this time, suddenly, the dogs were still: there was nothing but that one sound. Then the whine fell, losing its powerful unison, its quality of a seamless wave, leaving behind a trail of coughs, isolated, wandering murmurs, and some cocks crowed in the empty forest across the stupefied and vacant earth, as after a storm: the sun was beginning to rise.
The men felt suddenly chilled, but did not think to close the windows; they waited, ears straining to catch the faint sounds the wind was beginning to carry over the forest. Olivon made coffee. They began a rather heated discussion: Olivon was the only one to maintain that they had been English planes returning from Germany.
“They’re after Hitler’s fleet, mon yeutenant. That’s all the English care about—they don’t give a damn for anything else.”
Grange was always struck by the broad winks the men exchanged whenever English tactics were mentioned. For them, perfidious Albion was still the master of cunning, exemplar of sly double-dealing.
“We’ll read about it in the papers,” Gourcuff concluded, who, when in doubt, uncorked his bottle of red wine early.
But it was soon clear that the day was not to return so easily to its customary somnolence. Once more a hum swelled on the horizon, less powerful this time, apparently shifting toward the north; suddenly the slow stream of black specks that glided over the forest began to caper about: two, three, four huge explosions shook the morning, and from the belly of the broken earth, in the direction of the distant cavalry billetings, rose the furious cough of machine guns. And this time there was silence in the crew room. A wisp of paltry gray smoke, almost disappointing after such racket, slowly unraveled far above the woods. They stared at it a long time without speaking a word.
“Better get dressed,” Gourcuff concluded sagely. The telephone rang.
“Is that you, Grange?” The voice was low, a little muffled, less ironic than Grange would have supposed, despite the commotion in the background: the captain’s office was unusually noisy this morning. “I’m sending on the orders for number one alert. . . .” Varin’s voice emphasized the word with humorous relish. “It’ll be confirmed in writing.” The voice grew more familiar, almost bantering now: the captain must have got rid of some official visitor. “That was one, you know, not two—we’ve still got some discipline around here, even if we fight like customs inspectors. But of course this is only an installment. You’ve got a radio?”
“No, ours is broken.”
“Too bad, my friend, too bad. It’s fascinating this morning. They’ve gone into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.” The captain’s tone changed to one of advice: “Better send two of your men to the frontier. With tools. The Belgians will lift their barricade this morning. Maybe they’ll need a hand.”
“I’ll send them right away.”
The captain did not hang up. “Are you all right?” he asked after a moment’s silence, in a new tone in which there was a note of timidity.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I mean . . .” The captain suddenly seemed embarrassed, confused. “I mean, after all, this time, it has something to do with you.”
Grange felt the news had little effect on his men. The fog of the phony war was lifting now, partially revealing a perspective that was not a pretty one, and all too foreseeable. But there still remained a margin of uncertainty where things could still get stuck, bogged down, extinguished. They would live on that. Belgium, Holland—they were much closer than Norway. But with a little ingenuity they could still keep things vague enough for comfort.
“At least we keep quiet about it,” Olivon said, glancing around the room with a proprietary look. “It’s not like the cavalry,” he added hypocritically. “They’ll be slobbering over it all day.”
During the first hours
of the morning, the morale of the crew room began to rise noticeably. Hervouët and Gourcuff came back from the frontier with canteens of gin and pockets stuffed with cigarettes and little Belgian flags. The burgomaster of Waregnies himself had come to raise the barricade. There were a lot of women. The sentiments of the Belgians strongly impressed the men. The news of the great distant shock had left them stunned: they measured it by the recoil which almost instantaneously struck along the frontier.
“The Boches—they’re going to get what’s coming to them!” Gourcuff proclaimed, already red, sweaty, and optimistic with wine.
Toward eight, the traffic began to be heavy. Two sidecars and a motorcycle went by, heading toward the frontier at top speed. Then a signal truck and an engineer’s detachment. Behind the blockhouse, toward the cavalry billetings, rose the whine of motors. Grange, Olivon, Gourcuff, and Hervouët were sitting on the window sills, their legs dangling against the wall, as if it were Bastille Day. The sun burned brightly, the morning was cloudless. Toward nine, they heard a tremendous series of backfires in the west which slowly turned into a low drone: the cavalry had begun to move.
It was the noise that triumphed over everything; a heavy, terebrating commotion of armor plate, chains, canteens, caterpillar treads, and shuddering metal that snatched at the nape of the neck and did not let go again. The little groups of civilians standing at the roadside—appearing by magic out of the empty woods to watch the procession—raised a few cheers when the first tanks passed, but they soon left off, discouraged: now they were waiting as if for a long freight train to pass; the men on the tanks rode by, mute, indifferent, and almost allegorical, like firemen sitting in rows along their ladders. The sun was already hot on armor plates; the crews were in shirt sleeves, some naked to the waist—beneath their heavy visorless helmets, the sweating faces seemed strangely young, but their youth was worn, feverish, devoured from within, like the young men on threshing machines or mine cars, thrown by loose handfuls into the maw of the machine: rather than the roses on the rifles of 1914, one was reminded of the railroad engineer lifting his goggles from his hollow, too brilliant eyes, of the coal stoker in the bunker. And, as much as the tremendous racket, it was this workmanlike, frightening taciturnity that froze the roadside groups to silence before the strange grease-stained human stream caught in steel up to the waist.