Since Musyne was slipping away from me, I took myself for an idealist, which is the name we give to our little instincts clothed in high-sounding words. My leave was drawing to an end. The newspapers were summoning every conceivable combatant to the colors, first of all, it goes without saying, the ones without connections. An official order had gone out that no one should think of anything but winning the war.
Musyne, like Lola, was extremely eager to have me get back to the front on the double and stay there, and since I seemed to be dragging my feet, she decided to expedite matters, which was unusual for her.
One night when for a change we went home to Billancourt together, the fire brigade came by blowing bugles, and everybody in our house went scrambling down to the cellar in honor of some zeppelin.
Those petty panics, when a whole neighborhood in pajamas would pick up candles and vanish, cackling and clucking, into the bowels of the earth to escape a peril that was almost entirely imaginary, showed up the terrifying futility of those people, who behaved by turns like frightened hens and sheepish sheep. These preposterous inconsistencies ought to disgust the most patient, the most tenacious of sociophiles for good and all.
At the first blast of the bugle, Musyne forgot every bit of the heroism for which she had been cited at the Theater of the Armies. She insisted on rushing into some hole and dragging me with her, into the Métro, the sewers, anywhere, as long as it was sheltered and deep enough under ground! After a while the sight of all those people, our fellow tenants, fat and thin, jovial and majestic, descending four by four, into the salutary pit, armed even me with indifference. Brave or cowardly— there’s not much difference. A poltroon in one situation, a hero in another—it’s the same man, and he doesn’t think any more in one aspect than in the other. Everything unrelated to making money is infinitely beyond him. The question of life and death escapes him completely. Even on the subject of his own death his cogitations are feeble and ass-backward. He understands money and theatricals, nothing else.
Musyne whined when I resisted. Other tenants urged us to come along, and in the end I gave in. There were several cellar compartments to choose from, and various suggestions were made. The majority finally favored the butcher’s storage cellar, it was deeper down, so they said, than any of the others. On the stairs I caught a whiff of an acrid odor that I knew only too well and which I absolutely couldn’t bear.
“Musyne,” I said, “are you really going down there? With all that meat hanging on hooks?”
The question surprised her. “Why not?”
“Well,” I said, “I have certain memories. I’d rather go back upstairs …”
“You mean you’re leaving me?”
“You’ll join me as soon as it’s over.”
“But it may go on a long time …”
“I’d rather wait for you upstairs,” I said. “I don’t like meat, and it’ll be over soon.”
During the alert, sheltered in their dens, the tenants exchanged sprightly comments. Some ladies in kimonos, the last to arrive, swept with elegance and grace into that odoriferous chasm, where the butcher and his wife bade them welcome, at the same time apologizing for the artificial cold, indispensable for the conservation of their merchandise.
Musyne vanished with the rest. I waited in our apartment, a night, a whole day, a year … She never came back to me.
From that time on I became harder and harder to please. I had only two thoughts in my head: to save my skin and go to America. But getting away from the war was a first step which kept me busy and breathless for months and months.
The patriots kept clamoring: “Guns! Men! Ammunition!” They never seemed to get tired. It looked as if they wouldn’t be able to sleep until poor Belgium and innocent little Alsace were wrested from the German yoke. It was an obsession which, so we were told, prevented the best of our fellow citizens from breathing, eating, or copulating. But it didn’t seem to prevent the survivors from swinging business deals. Morale was doing all right on the home front.
There was every reason to ship us back to our regiments in a hurry. But when the medics looked me over, they still found me subnormal, barely good enough to be sent to another hospital, this one for the bones and nervous system. One morning six of us, three artillerymen and three dragoons, all of us sick and wounded, left the depot in quest of this institution where shattered courage, demolished reflexes, and broken arms were repaired. First, like all wounded soldiers at the time, we stopped for a checkup at the Val-de-Grace,* that noble pot-bellied citadel, with its beard of trees. The corridors smelled like a third-class railway carriage—a smell that’s gone today, forever no doubt, compounded of feet, straw, and oil lamps. We didn’t hang fire at the Val, they’d barely caught sight of us when two administrative, bedandruffed, and overworked officers chewed us out good and proper, threatened us with a court-martial, and projected us via other administrators into the street. They had no room for us, so they said, and directed us, very vaguely, to a bastion situated somewhere in the outskirts.
From bistrot to bastion, from absinthe to café crème, the six of us wandered about, at the mercy of every misdirector, in search of this new refuge which seemed to specialize in the treatment of incompetent heroes like us.
Only one of us had even the most rudimentary personal property, and that fitted nicely into a little tin box marked “Pernot Biscuits,” a well-known brand at the time, though I never hear it mentioned anymore. In that box our comrade kept a few cigarettes and a toothbrush. Come to think of it, we used to kid him about the care he took of his teeth, which was most unusual at the time. “Homosexual” we used to call him!
Finally, in the middle of the night, we approached the outworks, swollen with darkness of the Bicêtre bastion. No. 43 it was called. That was the place.
It had just been renovated to serve as a home for elderly cripples. They hadn’t even finished laying out the garden.
When we got there, there wasn’t a living soul in the military section, only the concierge. The rain was coming down in buckets. The concierge was terrified when she heard us, but we made her laugh by touching her in the right place. “I thought it was the Germans,” she said. “They’re miles away,” we told her. “Where are you wounded?” she asked with concern.—“All over, but not in the cock!” said one of the artillerymen. That, I don’t mind telling you, was real wit, just the kind the concierge liked.
Later on some old men on welfare were lodged in that bastion with us. New buildings with miles and miles of window glass had been thrown up for them in a hurry, and there they were kept like insects until the end of the war. On the surrounding hills a rash of skimpy housing lots vied for possession of the seas of mud inadequately contained by rows of precarious shacks, in the shadow of which one would occasionally see a head of lettuce and three radishes, of which, it is hard to say why, the nauseated slugs were making the houseowner a present.
Our hospital was clean. You have to hurry to see that kind of thing, move in at the beginning, the first few weeks, because maintenance isn’t a French virtue, we have no taste for it, in fact, we’re downright disgusting in that respect. We flopped on six metal beds, at random and by moonlight, the building was so new the electricity hadn’t been put in yet.
Early next morning the doctor came and introduced himself, he seemed delighted to see us and exuded cordiality. He had reasons for being pleased, he’d just been promoted to major, and in addition he had the most beautiful eyes you ever saw, supernatural velvet, he made use of them to flutter the hearts of several volunteer nurses, who surrounded him with attentions and sympathetic mimicry and feasted on every word and move of their dear doctor. At the very first meeting he took our morale in hand and told us as much. Taking one of us by the shoulders and shaking him with paternal familiarity, he explained the regulations in a comforting tone and indicated the quickest and surest way of getting ourselves sent back to the front to be lambasted some more.
Wherever they
came from, no two ways about it, that was their only thought. It seemed to give them a kick. It was the new vice. “France, my friends,” he-proclaimed, “has put her trust in you. France is a woman. She is counting on your heroism! She has been a victim of the most cowardly, the most abominable aggression. She has a right to expect her sons to avenge her to the hilt! To restore, even at the cost of the extreme sacrifice, every square inch of her territory! All of us here in the hospital, my friends, will do our duty, and we expect you to do yours! Our science is at your disposal! It is yours! All its resources will be devoted to curing you! Help us with your good will! I know we can count on your good will! We hope, we trust, that each one of you will soon resume his place side by side with his dear comrades in the trenches! Your sacred place! Defending your beloved soil! Vive la France! Forward to battle!” He knew how to talk to soldiers.
We were all standing at attention at the foot of our beds. Behind him a brunette, one of his group of pretty nurses, was having a hard time controlling her feelings, which were made visible by three or four tears. The other nurses, her friends, tried to comfort her: “Don’t worry, sweetie, he’ll be back … I’m sure he will!”
Her cousin, a plumpish blonde, was consoling her the most. As she passed us, holding her up with both arms, the plump one told me this weakness had overcome her pretty cousin because her fiance had just gone off to the navy. Our impassioned medical authority tried to soothe the tragic and beautiful emotion aroused by his short, vibrant speech. He was embarrassed and grieved. The apprehension he had awakened in this profound and noble heart, all sensibility and tenderness, was too painful. “If we had only known, Doctor,” the blonde cousin whispered, “we’d have warned you … They love each other so dearly, you can’t imagine!” The group of nurses and the Master went their way. Chattering and swishing they receded down the corridor. They had finished with us.
I tried to recollect, and to fathom the meaning of, the speech the man with the beautiful eyes had just made, but far from depressing me, when I thought it over, his words struck me as just what was needed to disgust me with the whole idea of dying. My comrades were of the same opinion, but they did not, like me, see a kind of challenge or insult in them. They made no attempt to understand what was going on around us; all they saw, and that unclearly, was that the usual delirium of the world had so increased in the last few months that there was nothing stable left for a man to build his existence on.
Here in the hospital, just as in the Flanders night, death stalked us. Here, to be sure, it threatened from a distance, but just as implacably, once the Administration set it in pursuit of your trembling carcass.
Here, it was true, they didn’t bawl us out, in fact they spoke gently, and they never talked about death, but our death sentence showed up distinctly in the corner of every paper they asked us to sign and in all the precautions they surrounded us with … those tags around our necks and wrists … whenever they let us out for a few hours. And all the advice they gave us! … We felt counted, watched, serial-numbered, enrolled in the vast multitude that would soon be leaving for the front. So naturally all the civilian and medical personnel around us seemed more cheerful than we were. The nurses, the bitches, weren’t in the same boat, their only thought was to go on living, to live longer and longer, to live and love, to stroll in the park and to copulate thousands and thousands of times. Every one of those angelic creatures had a plan all worked out in her perineum, like a convict, a little plan for love later on, when all of us soldier boys should have perished in God knows what mud and God knows how!
Then they would sigh with a very special commemorative tenderness that would make them more attractive than ever; interspersed with heartbreaking silences, they would evoke the tragic days of the war, the ghosts … “Do you remember little Bardamu?” they would say in the gathering dusk, thinking of me, the lad who had coughed so much and given them such a time to make him stop … “Poor boy, his morale was way down … I wonder what became of him?”
A few poetic regrets, if adroitly placed, are as becoming to a woman as gossamer hair in the moonlight.
What I couldn’t help hearing under their spoken words and expressions of sympathy was this: “Nice little soldier boy, you’re going to die … You’re going to die … This is war … Everyone has his own life … his role … his death … We seem to share your distress … But no one can share anyone else’s death … A person sound in body and soul should take everything that happens as entertainment, neither more nor less, and we are wholesome young women, beautiful, respected, healthy, and well bred … For us the automatism of biology transforms the whole world into a joyous spectacle, into pure joy! Our health demands it! … We can’t afford the ugly dissipations of sorrow … We need stimulants and more stimulants … You’ll soon be forgotten, dear little soldier boys … Be nice, die quickly … and let’s hope the war will be over soon, so we can marry one of your charming officers … preferably one with dark hair … And long live the Patrie that Papa’s always talking about! … How wonderful love must be when Johnny comes marching home! … Our little husband will be decorated! … cited for bravery … You can shine his lovely boots on our happy wedding day if you like … if you’re still in existence, soldier boy … Won’t you be happy about our happiness, soldier boy? …”
Every morning we saw our doctor, time and again we saw him surrounded by his nurses. He was a scientific light, we were told. The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They’d go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant, worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men’s souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more, in destroying what little pleasure and life they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious!
As soon as it was settled that we soldiers were going to share the relative comfort of the bastion with those old men, they began to detest us in unison, but that didn’t stop them from begging for the crumbs of tobacco on our window sills and the bits of stale bread that had fallen under our benches. At mealtimes they pressed their parchment-skinned faces against the windows of our mess hall. Over their crinkled rheumy noses, they peered in at us like covetous rats. One of those invalids seemed smarter and wickeder than the rest, he’d come and entertain us with the songs of his day, Père Birouette* he was called. He’d do anything we asked provided we gave him tobacco, anything except walk past the hospital morgue, which incidentally was never idle. One of our jokes was to make him go that way, while supposedly taking him for a little stroll. “Won’t you come in?” we’d say when we got to the door. He’d run away, griping for all he was worth, so fast and so far we wouldn’t see him again for at least two days. Père Birouette had caught a glimpse of death.
Professor Bestombes, our medical major with the beautiful eyes, had installed a complicated assortment of gleaming electrical contraptions which periodically pumped us full of shocks. He claimed they had a tonic effect, and we had to put up with them on pain of banishment. It seems that Bestombes was very rich; he must have been to be able to buy all those expensive electrocution machines. He could afford to throw money around because his father-in-law, a political bigwig, had done some heavy finagling while purchasing land for the government.
Naturally the doctor exploited his advantages. Crime and punishment, it all adds up. We took him as he was, and we didn’t hate him. He examined our nervous systems with meticulous care and questioned us in a tone of polite familiarity. This sedulously cultivated good nature enchanted the nurses in his section, who all came of excellent families. Every morning these cuties looked forward to his displays of affability
, which were just so yummy. In short, we were all actors in a play—he, Bestombes, had chosen the role of a benevolent, profoundly human and humane scientist. We pulled together, that was the essential.
In this new hospital I shared a room with Sergeant Branledore,* a re-enlisted man. He was an old hospital hand. He’d been dragging his perforated intestines around for months and had been in four different hospitals.
He had learned in the process how to attract and to hold the active sympathy of the nurses. He vomited, pissed, and shat blood with astonishing frequency; he also had a lot of trouble breathing, but none of that would have sufficed to win him the special good graces of the nurses, who had seen worse. So between two choking fits, if a doctor or nurse was passing, Branledore would sing out: “Victory! Victory! Victory will be ours!” Or he’d murmur those same words with one corner or the whole of his lungs, as the circumstances required. Thus attuned to the ardently aggressive literature of the day by a well-calculated bit of histrionics, he enjoyed the highest moral standing. That man knew his stuff.
Since all the world was a stage, acting was the thing. Branledore knew what he was doing. And indeed nothing looks more idiotic, nothing is more irritating than a sluggish spectator who turns up on stage by mistake. When you’re up there, you’ve got to join in, come to life, act a part, take the plunge or clear out. Especially the women demanded a show, the bitches had no use at all for clumsy amateurs. Unquestionably war went straight to their ovaries, they demanded heroes, and if you weren’t a hero you had to pretend to be one or be prepared for the most ignominious fate.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 9