by Julien Gracq
When the weapons were ready, Gourcuff filled their glasses from his canteen. Hervouët lit his cigarette, which had gone out, from Grange’s: each mouth felt the other suck in the smoke with short, greedy puffs. Then, with the sandbags that were piled in one corner, they finished stuffing the gun embrasure as well as they could. The redoubt suddenly grew very dim; they could no longer hear the noises of the forest; only a thin ray of light flashed down the barrel of the gun: it was as if the blockhouse were sinking into the ground. Grange opened the door wide again: the darkness had become more oppressive than their fear; again they heard the calm sounds of the woods.
“We can see them coming, after all,” he said, blinking in the sudden brightness. They listened for a moment to the murmurs that slipped through the open door, as gentle to hear as a cool wind against their faces.
“Can’t hear a thing,” Hervouët declared, shaking his head. “Not a thing.”
The light began to grow yellower. Through the door they could see only the underbrush which reached almost to the blockhouse on this side: a moist, writhing chaos of growth.
“Eagle ferns,” Grange thought, “those are eagle ferns.” It was as if he were seeing them for the first time. He felt a curious joy at having identified the plant: as if he had called an animal by its name. Again they listened for a long time to the silence that flowed through the door, as warming as a lull in the wind.
“We should fall back,” Grange mused, giddy with indecision. “If we stay here waiting for orders! . . . The cavalry that was supposed to pick us up must have swallowed its assignment, that’s for sure.” But he felt no desire to leave: the sun-drenched silence pleased him, and just the thought of Moriarmé with its uproar of sweating and exhausted troops, the merciless grinding of machinery, gave him a fit of nausea. And now that the fog of terror was beginning to dissolve, a tiny, bracing idea began to fill his mind: what luck—after all, what really amazingly good luck—that the telephone was cut.
“After all, it couldn’t be clearer,” he decided, suddenly relieved. “There are no orders: they will have to make a move to send them up to me. No orders, no falling back.”
Somewhat hypocritically he added, to comfort himself further, “Besides, if I don’t see anything coming, what’s to stop me from sending Gourcuff down to Moriarmé?”
He looked at his watch again. It was almost five. The men were now slipping out of the blockhouse one by one, basking in the sun against the warm concrete. The end of the afternoon was very calm; a warm, ripening light already stretched shadows across the road.
“They don’t give a damn about us, those cavalry guys,” Hervouët said, and spat on the ground.
Grange took a few steps down the road, sniffing at the wind. Toward Moriarmé, as toward Belgium, there was nothing in sight. But once he had passed the blockhouse, it was like emerging from a zone of silence: suddenly, far off but very distinctly, came the heavy roll of cannonfire, rising behind him to the north, from the direction of the valley. Toward Belgium, the silence was absolute, and almost magical: the sun, as far as the eye could reach, gilded the soft undulations of the forest with a stormy yellow that rose, range after range, to the horizon. Grange gestured toward the blockhouse: the four men stood clustered in the middle of the road, slowly turning their heads and listening for the sounds in the wind.
“It’s over the Meuse,” Hervouët said at last, in a tone of voice that rendered homage to the facts. “From around Les Braux, I think.”
And the fear returned, no longer the hot, brutal breath of panic that had catapulted them inside the blockhouse, but a marvelous, almost appealing terror that Grange felt rising from the depths of his childhood—from fairy tales: the terror of children lost in the woods at twilight, listening to the faraway branches crack beneath the dreadful heels of the seven-league boots.
They waited. Once they had picked it out, the rumble of cannonfire filled their ears wherever they were: there was nothing else to hear; it was as if all life in this corner of the earth were escaping, leaking toward that one awakened site. On each side of the road, the forest walls hid the columns of smoke: when Grange put his fingers in his ears for a second, all he could see down the road was a gentle May afternoon already warm under the golden haze, marvelously flowing toward the blue distances. As the moments passed, Grange felt braced by unreal security, a paradoxical result of the battle’s giant strides which had overstepped them. The air grew deliciously cool; the filmy light, slanting through the late-afternoon forest, was so rich, so unaccustomed, that he had a sudden, irresistible desire to bathe in it, to steep his limbs in the coppery glow.
“What’s to stop me?” he asked himself, with another burst of vague jubilation. “The bridges are cut. I’m alone here. I can do what I want. . . .”
He lit a cigarette and with his hands in his pocket began to walk down the middle of the road. “Stay there,” he shouted back at the blockhouse. “I’ll take a look.” The cannon had begun rumbling from farther away now; there were long silences when they could hear the crows resuming their racket in the oak trees. “There’s probably not more than one French soldier east of the Meuse by now,” Grange thought as he walked along. “Who knows what’s happening? Maybe nothing at all!” But at this notion, which seemed almost plausible to him, Grange’s heart beat with dim excitement; he felt his mind floating high on the waters of catastrophe. “Maybe nothing at all!” The earth seemed fair and pure to him, as it must have been after the flood; two magpies alighted together beside the road ahead, looking like fabled creatures, carefully smoothing their long tails on the grass. “How far could I walk like this?” he wondered with astonishment, and it seemed to him that his eyes pressed against their sockets to the point of pain: there must be faults, unknown veins in the earth, into which he could vanish for once and all. At moments he stopped and listened: he could hear nothing for several minutes; the world seemed to go back to sleep, having shaken itself free of men with a sluggish wriggle of its shoulders. “Maybe I’m on the other side,” he mused happily; never had he felt so close to himself. He began to whistle and took off his helmet which he swung beside him from its chin strap, like a basket; now and then he touched his pistol butt in its unbuckled holster; all sense of danger had faded, but the touch of the weapon cooled his finger tips; he encouraged this strange new sense of self-sufficiency, of carrying everything he possessed on his back. “With a cane in your hand! . . .” He thought of Varin with a burst of gaiety, then the memory of Mona surged through his mind with the perfume of the May forest: he was beginning to understand what Varin had guessed in his own way, what she had released in him without knowing it: this need to cast off his moorings one by one, this sense of unburdening, of profound frivolity that made his heart leap up—a command to drop everything. “I’ve been tied by a rotten thread all this time,” he decided with a low laugh. From time to time he kicked a stone ahead of him. “The forest,” he thought again. “I’m in the forest.” He couldn’t have said anything more than that: it was as if his mind were yielding to a better kind of light. Walking was enough: the world opened gently before him as he advanced, like a ford through a river.
“There are no Germans,” he suddenly said aloud, shrugging his shoulders and raising his index finger before him, his voice ripe with the wisdom of drunkards. He felt a little like a drunkard, in fact, staggering now because suddenly every axis passed through him at once: legislator and judge, invulnerable, redeemed.
He passed near the mine field and continued on toward the frontier. The slope of the road now concealed the blockhouse. The cannonfire had stopped; the silence was complete. Here, where the forest grew higher, shadows already covered the road, but above the treetops the bright sky ran on, more inviting in its soft escape than anything on earth. Between the ruts, a patch of grass had invaded the road: the forest seemed to close over it more densely. Grange felt pressing against his shoulders an unknown wind that rose over this uncertain, lawless earth, open wider than the night’s ima
ginings.
“I’d just have to keep going,” he mused, his head whirling, with a gesture that was almost an assent. Again his gaze plunged down the road; this time he thought he saw a tiny shadow moving in the distance and then disappearing again: a man, or an animal, had just disappeared into the underbrush with a timid, agile hop.
He cocked his pistol and walked on. The man had not run any further: probably at the end of fear and courage, he was crouched behind an ash-bole almost at the edge of the road, chin on knees. On the other side of the tree that half concealed him he stuck out his head and stared in Grange’s eyes without even making a gesture of escape, his squirrellike eyes inflamed and watery. There was a terror so naked in these round, red, apparently lidless eyes that the man seemed tiny and imponderable: one might have picked him out from behind that tree trunk with one hand.
Judging from his face, he was a tramp, a poacher, or perhaps one of those Flemish laborers who carry their lunch over their shoulders in a sack through the beet fields of Picardy; the sack, the patched jacket, the old hobnailed boots, certainly indicated that he was no stranger to the life of the roads. Grange realized that the retreat must have forced out of its dens a whole curious tribe who found themselves homeless without making much of a fuss—the way the rain floods out the snails. The Belgian seemed only half-reassured by Grange’s uniform: evidently fear of the enemy coincided with another, older, fear of the police. This somewhat disquieting survivor of the fogs did not displease Grange: at such a moment he had no desire to listen to anyone’s whimpering.
The man had run away from his village, near Marche, the morning before. A German armored detachment had set fire to it soon after.
“With rapid-fire cannons!” the man declared, his throat dry and his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. The use of such an astounding weapon seemed to take his breath away. But the rest of his story was uncertain; his professional discretion revealed only traces of what must have been a private, game-stocked route, a cross-country circuit strewn with chicken feathers. It seemed he had met no one.
“Fantastic!” Grange wondered, astonished. The touch of the incomprehensible void that widened around him made him even more enthusiastic: he flung himself into it. Deep within himself, he admitted to doing so a little complacently: he was combatting what was agonizing with what was unheard-of.
They walked back to the blockhouse, talking calmly. The sun had set now; the night was already gathering in the shadows. Grange did not want to let his Belgian go; impulsively, he offered to put him up for the night. “It’s quiet around here,” he declared with a briskness less and less assumed, “and thank God we’ve more than enough. Besides, it’s getting dark.” As they walked on, he made a number of remarks to his Belgian companion full of a detached optimism, slightly light-headed: the war, Grange said, had its ups and its downs, but what mattered was knowing “how to take it or leave it”—here, anyway, everyone was in a good mood.
“It takes more than what’s happened around here to shake up old soldiers!” he whispered in his companion’s ear, winking and pinching his arm. The Belgian began to glance at him sidelong with an odd expression. As they walked on in the gathering darkness, Grange waved his handkerchief toward the blockhouse, fearing a random shot; at the end of the path he could guess three pairs of eyes keener than those in a crow’s-nest were watching, and this notion stirred him. “I’m bringing something back,” he thought, “but neither crow nor dove.” The darkness around them was beginning to black out the ground altogether. Occasionally he glanced at his companion, who seemed to be floating rather than walking beside him on the road, his gait singularly light. It was a scarcely human presence—rather that of a peculiar bat fluttering here in the twilight that rose over the earth. Grange felt perfectly calm. The world seemed no longer inhabited save by dead souls—faint and light as the tongues of fire hovering over the marshes; the time for questions had come to an end, the day had died away. “It’s really very late,” he thought, almost placidly. “Between night and day . . . but it’s not such a bad time. You can see better than you’d think.”
He found his garrison not so much nervous as hungry. It seemed to Grange that Gourcuff was already almost drunk. They took advantage of the remaining light that still floated beneath the trees to eat their dinner. An unsteady table and two or three chairs had survived the shipwreck of the house above; they fished them out of the underbrush and dragged them behind the blockhouse, where the branches shadowed a tiny weedy lawn, almost within arm’s reach of the road. The silence of the forest had become ghostly—for a long time now the rumbling of the cannons had stopped entirely—above them, the foliage grew heavier and darker; but from the cut of the road, to the right, where the gravel gleamed in the last twilight, filtered a strange gray light the color of stone. When night had fallen, they set two empty bottles on the table and stuck candles in them: the air was so still that a thin thread of smoke rose straight up into the branches over the flame; masses of leaves lit from below emerged vaguely from the darkness; a vestige of ashen light still floated over the road, like the midnight twilight of the North.
When the meal was over, they sat around the table smoking over their empty glasses. It was beginning to grow cooler now. Only the Belgian continued to scrape at his plate; at intervals, astonished by the silence, he glanced up at one or another of the men with his rodent’s eyes, as if he were expecting a kick while his mouth kept busy at its own work. Grange supposed there was not one light in the forest from here to the Meuse; he lit one of the candles that had gone out with his lighter; the tiny oval of flame formed again around its dark heart. The gleam must be visible from far away down the road, he mused, and darkness would be much safer; they wanted no one to come now. But he had no desire to put out the candles that drew the four naked faces out of the night, long, ashen shadows moving across them as though they were running down a corridor of wind-blown curtains. Grange liked these faces.
“The hell with it,” he repeated to himself almost careless now. He knew that a ground swell had just swept over the earth beyond them, but beneath him he felt only the gentle backwash and the sudden intoxication of his own lightness—they were beached here, a little dazed, in the silence of a forbidden garden. Again he felt an almost voluptuous, dizzying nausea. “I’m not answerable for anything now,” he told himself, and his eyelids flickered two or three times. He thrust his hand into his pocket and felt the key of Mona’s house. A great livid moon rose slowly over the forest as he watched; its slanting beams glowed on the road, the rough gravel bristled with sharp shadows, becoming a stream bed once again. Nothing seemed more important now than to be sitting beside such a stream, at the heart of the earth’s deep labor. He felt a sudden revulsion at the pit of his stomach, as if he had run into the sea across a cold beach: he recognized the fear of being killed; but a part of himself stood aside, floating on the current of the buoyant night: he felt something of what the passengers in the ark must have felt when the waters first lifted it off the ground.
GRANGE took his turn on guard toward three in the morning: he decided that dawn would be the critical hour, and he wanted to have some time to prepare for it. The blockhouse door was still ajar: here the dark concrete face opened on a crack of ashen night that seemed to be painted on the wall. Gourcuff and Olivon were sleeping side by side on the straw mattress—in the corner where the escape hatch was, the glowworm of Hervouët’s cigarette gleamed near the floor; at regular intervals the dull tap of an invisible finger knocked off the invisible ash. Grange felt cheated: he did not want anyone to be awake beside him in the darkness. The silence was like a night stop in a railroad station sonorous with frost; It was very cold. He pushed his shoulder against the door, which swung open noiselessly, and deep in his throat tasted the fog like clean linen: the night, steeped in this heavy mist, dissolved gently, motionlessly, toward the dawn.
He unscrewed the top of the thermos standing on a cartridge case and poured himself some hot coffee: the gleam
of his flashlight awakened long shiny ovals on the anti-tank shells standing against the gun carriage; it looked as if he had emptied out a basket full of bottles. The flashlight beam traveled over the low ceiling, the dust, the oozing walls. The bitter fog that slipped in from the forest hung in drops on the faint light; his tongue stirred—his mouth tasted of rot. “It’s a funny kind of den!” he thought, surprised afresh by the look of their cellar; he squinted his eyes and pressed his lips together: his stomach was turning and he felt the sweetish, muddy dregs, the low tides of courage, slosh within him. He put out the flashlight: at once his anxiety faded a little; he realized that the night still held around the blockhouse, as a heavy snowfall holds—but the black chill made his teeth chatter: he was seized with a panic urge to bury himself deep in the warm mattress, his shoulder close beside Gourcuff’s.
“That’s a good start!” he murmured, and sat down warily on a crate: he felt a kind of soft dizzying undulations sliding through his brain. “The best thing is to breathe deeply a few times,” he decided, throwing back his head with ponderous gravity, and he began exercising, when a sudden, terrifying thought began whirling through his mind: Twelve kilometers. Twelve kilometers this side of the Meuse! . . . A tide had washed over him that snapped his every hope: it was impossible—with lunatic precision he reviewed the events of the day before; certainly somewhere there must be a gap—an order misunderstood—a paper misplaced: “A court martial on top of everything,” he thought, shivering as if he were naked. “That’s a good one!” He wanted to cry, to run away. But he felt it was not so easy. Deep in his heart he heard a tiny, cheerful—impertinent—wind blowing, the wind that makes the dead leaves dance on the roads at the beginning of winter.
He switched on his flashlight again and made a quick inspection of the blockhouse. Everything seemed to be in order: the gun was pointed toward its night marks—on a crate next to the automatic rifle were piled some thirty refills; in a corner, the shiny heap of cartridges glistened helter-skelter, as if a wheelbarrow had been knocked over. He decided to check the escape tunnel for the last time. Noiselessly, he moved back the hatchway: the dirt steps were hard, reinforced with boards whose edges caught on his heels; at the bottom of the tiny flight of stairs he plunged along a short gallery clean-swept beneath its wooden coffering; some twenty yards farther began an inclined ramp leading to the open air, its opening camouflaged by pine branches: he needed to be alone now, at this hour of the dawn. “I’ve got to wake up Olivon in twenty minutes,” he reminded himself soberly—“two of us will hardly be too many: chances are the Germans will come through early.” Yet the image of the war did not fill his mind; he might have been hidden in a tranquil convent, wakening in a sea of white veils and the unreal fog of ground-glass windows; he was only a man crouching at the mouth of a forgotten lair watching the dawn slowly fade the darkness of the forest—again he wondered why staying seemed so extraordinarily important to him.