by Julien Gracq
The caravan took a long time passing, its gray dust rolling heavily over the treetops, with whistles, jams, squealing of brakes, and sudden stops that roughly shook the tanks, making the armor plating clatter. And for a long time, the blockhouse crew had not said a word: there was only the hard sun, the stale, dry dust in their throats, the racket of hot steel and the grinding stones of the road. By ten, the tanks passed at longer intervals: the supply and service vehicles, as well as the liaison cars from behind the lines, had to keep to the main highways, which were more practicable. From time to time a few isolated sidecars passed, faster than tanks on the empty road. Grange felt as if the show was over: the civilian groups were ragged now, slowly moving off down the road, still in a daze; as the last tanks passed they waved distractedly, not even stopping, as if to stragglers in a race.
Then there were two long, empty hours. Toward noon, an infantry company came up the road toward Belgium. The men were marching in Indian file on one side of the road, hugging the shade in widely spaced detachments: they looked, Grange thought, much more as if they were setting out on an adventure. The airplane put the infantry back in an earlier age, reviving the convoy of salt-smugglers, the gay chouannerie of the hedge-wars, the warpath of the Last of the Mohicans.
Grange offered the second lieutenant of the last section and his already sweating men something to drink; he was suddenly a little ashamed of his too-plentiful cellar. This morning, moreover, he wanted to exchange news with everyone who passed: the road fastened its rumors upon him like leeches. The infantry battalion was to cover the cavalry division: according to the second lieutenant, they would be replacing the latter at the bridges.
“Only they’re on wheels and we’ve got our legs,” he added, his glass in his hand, pink and smiling and a little out of breath. “There’s a mess up there, believe me. We’re not anywhere near where we’re supposed to be.”
The men moved on. Their Meuse encampments had been machine-gunned that morning. They disappeared with a curious movement, edging along the trees, their helmets a little lopsided from glancing up so often at the streak of open sky above the road.
During the afternoon, another procession appeared on the road, moving in the opposite direction: the last inhabitants of Les Falizes were leaving to be immediately evacuated from the Meuse stations. There was a gloomy, almost military rhythm in this column with nothing of the sordid pathos of farms abandoned in panic, barnyards full of feathers split from slashed eiderdowns. Besides, there were very few people left at Les Falizes now: the old men and the children had left at the beginning of winter with the heavy baggage—and these last frontiersmen were like the population of an empire’s disputed marches for whom the calendar held in store other risks than frost or hail. They withdrew after notice had been given—rather sternly, decorously, without calling the Heavens to witness, without balking, accustomed to abrupt warnings, like men to whom the military authorities have granted a few patches of ground in a rifle range. The women, almost all young, wept quietly, sitting on neat packets of linen wrapped in sheets; the men walked in silence, but with a firm expression, beside their carts; even the Bihoreau boy limped after his donkey, fiercely hammering the road with his wooden leg. Madame Tranet rode in his cart, her hair bound up in a red kerchief: leaning against the side, already soiled by sweat and the jolts of the road, she looked like a Russian baba; a veil of affliction and dust the color of the road floated around the thin procession, and it was not only anxiety which suddenly aged their faces; a powerful hand was shaking the dice, they were entering the world of short farewells and vague separations; already the countryside was slipping before their eyes in the faded colors of recollection. Olivon embraced Madame Tranet, but the place and the watching eyes embarrassed him: at the last moment he merely gave her a great smack on the cheek. “The key’s next to the door,” she said in a low voice, making a sign with one hand. “You know, for coffee. . . .”
Grange shook hands with her in silence.
“After the war, when we’ve hung old Hitler!” Gourcuff shouted without conviction, but the words sounded like an obscenity and roused neither echoes nor laughter. The procession moved off. Madame Tranet had untied her kerchief; from farther and farther away, leaning against the cartrail, she waved at them. The men walked on without turning back, their shoulders heavy, their gait reconciled to long roads.
The exodus from Les Falizes suddenly cast a pall over the blockhouse, which the cavalry’s splendid array had so excited only that morning. Toward the end of the afternoon, a series of muffled, almost subterranean explosions came from the south, very far away; the shock, instead of shaking the window glass, seemed this time to rise from the concrete floor which shuddered like an anvil under their feet: obscure messages, heavy with significance, were passing deep in the bowels of the troubled earth. The men in the crew room ate to pass the time, munching on bread and pieces of chocolate: you could tell the war had actually begun by the sound of grinding jaws that filled the silences. But at the impact of the explosions, they stopped eating and immediately raised their heads toward the sound with an expression of dull anxiety, like a horse looking up from its manger and suddenly pricking up its ears. When the silence returned, after the diminutive earthquake, they heard the birds cheeping in the trees quite near the windows and beneath them the clatter of the empty bottles rolling across the blockhouse floor—and for a long time they listened to the troubled murmurs of the distance with that new ear they discovered deep within themselves.
During the evening, Grange decided to go up to Les Falizes for some bales of wire the engineers had left there: Moriarmé sent orders for the immediate reinforcement of the blockhouse’s little emplacement. The last hum of the airplanes had died away; there was a vacant sweetness in the evening air, as if the day were secretly unclasping its armor, relieved of its excessive tension; from far away came the dull hammering of a woodpecker against the oak trunks, and its whinnying call as it flew off into the thickets. The war’s tide had withdrawn, but leaving its gray foam hanging from the bushes; on the path to Les Falizes, empty bottles, gasoline tins, and tin cans littered the roadside—the soft asphalt, rolled by the caterpillar treads, was corrugated with tiny gleaming ridges. When Grange stepped into the clearing, the edge of the forest cast long shadows over the meadow; every pane of the rest home’s windows gleamed in the warm light. When he reached the first houses, Grange stopped for a moment, suddenly uncomfortable, sat down on a boulder that had rolled into the roadside grass, and held his breath a few seconds. He listened to the silence. It was a flat, stale silence that fell across the honeyed sunlight and seemed to stuff his ears with a soft wadding, like snow. When you took the road here, you suddenly penetrated this silence the way you might fall on the other side of a fence, a little stunned, disoriented, vaguely expecting a hand to be laid on your shoulder.
“Is it possible I’m alone here?” Grange wondered stupidly, and unconsciously turned around, his back tingling with an unpleasant shudder. He looked at the tall, dark, already cool grass in which the boulder was half-buried, the tiny empty road—palisaded with its closed, hostile doors and windows—where the wind noiselessly raised tiny cones of dust. The windows of the rest home darkened now, and the light suddenly seemed to have fallen; a fine powder sanded the gray of the walls: the colors of tiles, shutters, and doors had already faded.
Grange left the road and turned into the alley that ran behind the houses; he walked to Mona’s house between cabbage beds, tiny haystacks, and bean poles. He had not been back to Les Falizes since she had left; mechanically he drummed two or three times against the latch. Again he turned around, seized by a stronger foreboding: a half-dozen white hens had stopped scratching at the haystack and were staring at him, one foot raised, fastening their red eyes on him with a low cackle: it was as if these ignorant creatures, at this twilight moment between night and day, lamented their separation from man in the tones of a secret, wary council. When he raised the latch and pushed the door
, it opened easily. With the shutters closed the room was very dark at this late hour; he could see only the little brass table gleaming in the dim air, and the waxed panels of the cupboards barely awakened by the light from the half-open door. The room’s incredible disorder was gone: the hammock was folded, the complicated network of string too; an ageless cloistral sadness flowed from these severe furnishings, from the bare walls that smelled of the long winter’s dry rot, mingled with the waxy odor of the rough linen piled in the cupboards. A great blue fly wakened on a curtain, surprised by the ray of light, and began to buzz noisily in the heavy air.
“Well, it was here. . . .” Grange thought, frightened. He wanted to go away; the silence pressed strangely against his temples. He was nauseated by this close air, this ancient chalky light that slipped between the blinds and the windowframe. He opened the door wide; a hen appeared on the sill, thrusting her head forward to inspect the half-darkness, but the rug seemed to bewilder her; after a moment of perplexity she disappeared toward her hay with a cluck of disdain. Through the limpid air he could still hear, at increasing intervals, the cries of the birds gathering for the night in the cafe chestnut tree. Grange sat on the bed for a moment dreaming: the bed yielded to his weight with a familiar creak of its springs; a sudden desire to lie down here seized him, to turn his face to the wall, forever abandoning thoughts and dreams. In an hour, the forest night would come in through the open door with its wild aromas, its wary noises, absolving this feverish world; he eagerly imagined the pool of calm, the cool darkness that would filter into the hollow of the closed house with the night; he felt as if something inside himself had been desperately choked off, stopped flowing. His throat closed; he shrugged his shoulders nervously. The key was still in the lock; he closed the door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket. Outside it was still light, but already chilly; a tender, delicate network of yellow light slipped across the vegetable beds through the peach and cherry trees.
He easily found the rolls of wire in a padlocked lean-to behind the rest home. There was nothing more to do at Les Falizes, but he had no desire to return to the blockhouse: the night would be heavy and uncertain, and the idea that Varin might have telephoned the blockhouse depressed him again. He set out on the little road once more, climbing back up toward Les Platanes, walking hesitantly. Several windows that overlooked the road had no curtains now; their mute stare both embarrassed and attracted him: he zigzagged from one to the next across the empty street. When he pressed his face against one, he could see, through the uneven little panes set with green bottle ends, the red tiles of the bare floor, the sheetless walnut bed, and on the smoky walls the pale rectangles where the fly-specked mirrors and family photographs had been taken down; sometimes, over the bed, where there was a pale cross, the Easter palm, still fresh, was hanging on a nail or trailing across the gray-striped cotton mattress cover. It was these pale areas on the walls that gave a particular impression of dilapidation: the houses seemed to have surrendered, capitulated altogether, as if a tiny night light had just gone out here, in broad daylight. Occasionally Grange stopped in spite of himself to listen: the birds were no longer scolding now, he could hear only a gentle cheeping in the cafe chestnut tree, and, far behind the house, the thrushes calling at the forest’s edge.
From the little gardens, in the motionless air, the odor of syringa, lilac, and wisteria drifted across the road, each perfectly distinct. When he reached the Café des Platanes, Grange remembered Madame Tranet’s last words.
“After all, it was an invitation,” he decided, plucking up his courage. The umbrella had disappeared, but the garden table and chairs were still there. The chestnut tree, drowned in its diminishing racket of birds, threw a deep shadow across the little terrace, which looked like a scene from a play; the door at the back was only waiting for the moonlight in order to open. Grange went in and after searching the glazed cupboard with his flashlight, picked out a bottle of cognac. Suddenly he felt terribly thirsty; he went to the well and filled a bucket with water. In the abandoned silence, the pulley made a tremendous, incongruous racket: a disapproving cackle awakened in the chestnut tree, but muffled, already nocturnal. “If I stayed here, I’d begin talking to the birds,” Grange thought. The western sky remained luminous and yellow; below him, through the blacksmith-shop windows, the schoolroom desks glowed in the watery light like so many little mirrors. He sat back in his chair and comfortably stretched his legs out on the table. A black cat crossed the road, carefully setting down its paws one after the other, stared at him slyly a moment, then, after due consideration, jumped onto the terrace. Grange picked it up by the back of the neck; once on his lap, the animal, which at first tried to escape, began to purr lewdly, like a tiny captive city. Grange drank slowly, feeling a vague exaltation, something of the uneasy ecstasy of “anything goes,” a suppressed desire for night plunder and broken crockery, as well as the pure well-being that streamed from the cool evening, and, far beneath, a muffled animal anguish born of this silence that promised the trumpets of Judgment. But the warm little life that slept on his knees reassured him.
“Mon lieutena-ant! . . .”
He heard Hervouët shouting for him at the first houses of the village as though from the depths of a dark forest. Together they searched the houses, sometimes using their flashlights in the late twilight, and finally discovered an old wheelbarrow onto which they loaded the rolls of barbed wire. Now that there were two of them, the solitude of the phantom village became quite pleasant: they felt free and bold, ready for adventure, glad to be carrying with them whatever they had. Before leaving, they took another cognac under the chestnut tree. The night had fallen, calm and very clear; above their heads, the tree against the sky was a heavy, irregular cloud of ink casting a darker shadow on the terrace, but through its fringe of leaves and even in its rents twinkled a swarm of stars; they spoke in low voices, peacefully, with intervals of silence; the solitude, the odor of the forest, the velvet shadow of the chestnut tree, the ghostly royalty of this dead village, gave Grange an impression of singular luxury. The earth was wild once more, rejuvenated by an aroma of high grass and night campfires, restoring the fierce moods of an outdoor life; there was a silence that filled his ears; something in man was avenged here, and cheered: it was as if the sky were full of new stars. Hidden in the shadow of the trees, only the red tips of their cigarettes moving, they stared into the blue darkness at the road, the roofs that were beginning to soften in the moonlight. The bats had stopped fluttering around the chestnut tree; from the edge of the nearby forest rose the wood owl’s strange challenge.
THE morning of the next day was very still. The road from Les Falizes was empty; the forest returned to its solitude. But the Roof’s calm was no longer the same. The time hung heavily; a weight had formed beneath the men’s stomachs, a turbulence seized hands and feet alike. No one wanted to sit down—they ate their lunch standing at the window. The air was warm and heavy. The dust of the day before still whitened the motionless leaves; only a film of heat trembled over the road.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, the look of things suddenly changed. A heavy whine rose with the heat from the Meuse, and one after another, almost simultaneously, bouquets of huge explosions burst around the arc of the western horizon. And this time smoke rose over the forest horizon—gray and slow: first three columns, than seven, eight, ten, fifteen. They were not disturbing, not even really sinister. But they were there, unavoidably inflecting the landscape, like a new season; come what might, they would no longer be living without them. A swift hand had run along the Roof’s edge, lighting the footlights. “The theater of war,” Grange reflected. “Not a bad description.” What astonished him was this brutal crescendo, this thundering, rattling way of setting the scene, and then, suddenly, this oblivion, this void—a drunkard who pounds on the table hard enough to break it in two, then foggily tries to remember what he was so angry about.
“Well, still, it’s only the Meuse they’re bombing,” he t
old himself later, disturbed all the same. “What could be more normal than a bombardment? Why, it would be surprising if they didn’t bomb it. The roads, and the Belgian railway—everything’s over that way.” Puzzled, he looked out of his window at the smoke on the horizon; two or three columns were already fraying out, fading. While he watched an idea stirred in his mind—vague still, but troublesome, stubborn as an odor. He had noticed with some surprise that there had been no troops passing toward Belgium after the infantry battalion. Since the night before, the road had been empty: apparently there was to be no infantry support behind the cavalry.
“That’s funny,” he reflected. “What are they waiting for? Then . . . Maybe Varin and the battalion have been bombed out.” With his compass Grange tried to take bearings on Moriarmé, which seemed to coincide behind the woods with one of the heaviest columns of smoke, but to his surprise he realized he was doing this only for form’s sake, almost absent-mindedly. His horizon of awareness was shrinking: from that too he could tell the war had really come.
The men finished laying the rolls of wire. The bombardment had made them sullen, but the work went on all the faster: it kept them from thinking. Between the blows of his wooden mallet, Gourcuff was muttering furiously through clenched teeth. The wire had no barbs on it: the engineers had left only the dregs at Les Falizes; the great nickel-plated rolls, spread in zigzags around the blockhouse, looked like a playground.