After a week in this new hospital we realized that we would absolutely have to change our image, and thanks to Branledore (a lace salesman in civilian life) the selfsame men, who on our arrival had been terror-stricken, shunning the light, haunted by disgraceful memories of slaughterhouses, metamorphosed ourselves into an incredible gang of swashbucklers, determined to conquer or die, and, take my word for it, armed with derring-do and the most outrageous language. Our speech had indeed become vigorous and so obscene that the ladies sometimes blushed, but they never complained because it is generally agreed that a soldier is as brave as he is wild and cruder than there is any need to be, so much so that his bravery can be measured by the crudeness of his language.
At first, though we copied Branledore to the best of our ability, our patriotic act wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t really convincing. It took a good week, two in fact, of intensive rehearsing before we had fully caught on.
As soon as that scientific luminary, our Professor Major Doctor Bestombes, noticed the striking improvement in our moral attitudes, he decided to encourage us by admitting a few visitors, our parents to begin with.
To judge by stories I had heard, certain soldiers, really gifted types, experienced a kind of intoxication, you might even speak of an exotic thrill, in combat. Whenever I tried to imagine this particular brand of pleasure, just trying laid me low for at least a week. I felt so incapable of killing anyone that I thought I might just as well give it up right away and abandon the whole idea. Not that I lacked experience, they’d done everything possible to inculcate a taste for killing, but I simply had no talent in that direction. Maybe my initiation should have been more gradual.
One day I decided to tell Professor Bestombes how hard I was finding it, body and soul, to become as brave as I should have liked to be and as the undoubtedly sublime circumstances required. I was uneasy, afraid he would think I was being insolent and talking out of turn. Not at all! The great man said he was delighted that I’d come to him and bared my troubled soul so fully and frankly.
“You’re better, friend Bardamu!” he concluded. “You’re better, that’s all there is to it! Yes, Bardamu, I regard your coming to me like this, absolutely of your own free will, as a most encouraging sign of a marked improvement in your mental state … Vandesquin,* that modest but infinitely wise observer of moral breakdown in the soldiers of the Empire, summed up his findings, back in 1802, in a memoir that is quite unjustly neglected by students of the present day, but must nevertheless be regarded as a classic. In it he describes, with remarkable insight and precision, the so-called ‘confessional crises’ met with in moral convalescents, and terms them the most encouraging of all symptoms … Almost a century later our great Dupre* established his now celebrated nomenclature of the same symptom and characterized the identical crisis as a ‘re-collection of memories’; according to the same author, this crisis, if the cure is properly administered, should soon be followed by a massive break-up of anxiety percepts and the definitive liberation of the area of consciousness, this being the second stage in the process of psychic recovery. Elsewhere, employing the bold terminology that was his special gift, Dupre devises the formula ‘disencumbering cogitative diarrhea’ for this crisis, which is accompanied by intense euphoria, a marked resumption of relational activity, a sudden and striking restoration, among other things, of sleep, which in some cases has been known to go on for days at a time, and lastly, at a more advanced stage, by conspicuous hyperactivity of the genital functions, amounting, sometimes in patients who were previously frigid, to a positive sexual frenzy: ‘The patient recovers not by easy stages, but at a gallop.’ Such was the magnificently descriptive metaphor by which another of our great French psychiatrists of the last century, Philibert Margeton,* characterized this recuperative triumph, this sudden resurgence of normal functions in a patient recovering from the fear syndrome … As for you, Bardamu, I already, at the present moment, regard you as a true convalescent … Would it interest you, Bardamu, since we have arrived at this gratifying conclusion, to know that I shall be reading a paper on the fundamental characteristics of the human mind at the Society for Military Psychology tomorrow? … It is not without its merits, I venture to believe.”
“Oh yes, Professor, I take a passionate interest in these questions …”
“Well then, Bardamu, to make a long story short, the thesis I put forward is that before the war man was an unknown quantity for the psychiatrist and the resources of his psyche an enigma …”
“That is also my humble opinion, Professor …”
“You see, Bardamu, the war, by providing us with such unprecedented means of trying men’s nervous systems, has been a miraculous revealer of the human mind … Recent pathological disclosures have given us matter for centuries of meditation and study … Let’s face it … Up until now we hardly suspected the richness of man’s emotional and spiritual resources! Today, thanks to the war, all that has changed! By a process of breaking and entering, painful to be sure, but decisive, nay providential for science, we have penetrated his innermost depths! Ever since the first revelations came to my attention, the duty of the modern psychologist and moralist has been clear to me, Bestombes, beyond any possible doubt! Our psychological conceptions are in need of total revision!”
I, Bardamu, was of exactly the same opinion.
“Yes indeed, Professor, I am convinced that …”
“Ah, you think so too, Bardamu … You say so yourself! In man, you see, there is a balance between good and evil, between egoism on the one hand and altruism on the other … In elite subjects more altruism than egoism. Am I right? Don’t you agree?”
“Exactly, Professor, you’ve hit the nail on the head …”
“And what, Bardamu, I ask you, what is the highest known concept, the concept best suited to arousing the altruism of the elite subject and compelling it to manifest itself unequivocally?”
“Patriotism, Professor!”
“Ah, you see? The word is yours, not mine. You understand, Bardamu!… Patriotism and glory, which is its corollary and proof!”
“How true!”
“Ah! our soldier boys … at their first baptism of fire they spontaneously cast off all sophisms and subsidiary concepts, in particular the sophism of self-preservation. Instinctively and immediately they merge with our true raison d’être, the Patrie. For the attainment of truth, Bardamu, intelligence is not only superfluous, it is in the way. Like all essential truths, the Patrie is a truth of the heart! The common people understand that … and that is where the inept scientist goes wrong …”
“It’s beautiful, Professor! Too beautiful! I am reminded of the Ancients!”
Bestombes pressed both my hands almost affectionately. And in a fatherly tone he added for my special benefit: “That, Bardamu, is how I mean to treat my patients, electricity for the body, and for the mind massive doses of patriotic ethics, injections as it were of invigorating morality!”
“I understand, Professor!”
I was indeed beginning to understand more and more.
On leaving him I joined my invigorated companions at Mass in the brand-new chapel, I caught sight of Branledore in a corner, demonstrating his moral vigor by giving the concierge’s little girl lessons in enthusiasm. He beckoned me to join him, and I did.
That afternoon some of our parents came from Paris for the first time since we’d been there, and from then on they came every week.
I had finally written to my mother. She was glad to see me again and whimpered like a bitch whose puppy has been given back to her. She thought she was doing me a lot of good by kissing me, but she was miles behind the bitch, because she believed what they said when they took me away from her. A dog only believes what it can smell. One afternoon my mother and I took a long walk through the streets around the hospital, dawdling down half-finished byways, with lampposts that hadn’t been painted yet, between long, oozing house fronts with their windows full of gaudy dangl
ing rags, the shirts of the poor … We listened to the crackling song of the frying pans, a tempest of rancid fat. In the great shapeless desert surrounding the city, the rot in which its false luxury ends, the city shows everyone who wants to look the garbage piles of its enormous posterior. There are factories one avoids when out for a stroll, which emit smells of all sorts, some of them hardly believable. The air roundabout couldn’t possibly stink any worse. Nearby a little street carnival molders between two chimneys of unequal height, the wooden horses cost too much for the rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers, who long for them and stand spellbound, sometimes for weeks on end, attracted and repelled by their forlorn rundown look and the music.
What efforts are made to keep the truth away from these places, but it comes back again and again, to grieve for everybody. Drinking is no help, red wine as thick as ink, nothing helps, the sky in those places never changes, it’s a vast lake of suburban smoke, shutting them in.
Under foot the mud drags you down with fatigue, and the sides of existence are also closed, shut off by hotels and more factories. Even the walls in that section are coffins. With Lola gone for good and Musyne too, I had nobody left. That’s why I finally wrote to my mother, just to see somebody. I was only twenty, and all I had was a past. The two of us together, my mother and I, walked through dozens of Sunday streets. She told me little things about her business, what the people around her were saying about the war, that it was sad, “horrible” in fact, but that with plenty of courage we’d all come through in the end, the ones that got killed were an accident, like in the races, if you kept your seat properly you wouldn’t fall. To her the war was just one more affliction, she tried not to think about it too much, because it frightened her in a way, it was full of terrifying things she didn’t understand. She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth, and that if things had been going so badly of late, the cumulative faults of the poor must have a good deal to do with it … They must have been very naughty, of course they hadn’t meant to be, but they were guilty all the same, and giving them a chance to expiate their transgressions by suffering was a great kindness … My mother was an “untouchable.”
That resigned, tragic optimism was her only faith and the foundation of her character.
The two of us, in the rain, went down streets of vacant lots. The sidewalks in that part of the world sink and evade your step, in winter the branches of the little ash trees at the edge hold the raindrops a long time, a tenuous fairyland trembling in the breeze. Our way back to the hospital led past a number of newly built hotels, some had names, others hadn’t even gone to that much trouble. “Rooms by the week” was all they had to say for themselves. The war had suddenly emptied them of all the workers and wage slaves who had lived there. They wouldn’t even come back to die. Dying is work, too, but they’d do it somewhere else.
My mother was tearful as she took me back to the hospital. She accepted the accident of my death, and not content to acquiesce, she wondered if I was as resigned to it as she was. She believed in fate as implicitly as she did in the beautiful standard meter at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, which she had always spoken of with respect, because she had learned in her youth that the one she used in her notions shop was a scrupulous copy of that superb official original.
Between the housing lots in that degraded countryside there were still a few fields and gardens here and there and, attached to those scraps of land, a few aged peasants wedged in between the new buildings. When there was time left before I had to be back, my mother and I went to watch them, those comical peasants obstinately poking iron into the earth, that soft grainy substance, where the dead are laid to rot but which gives us our bread all the same. “The ground must be terribly hard,” my mother said every time she saw them. She was puzzled. You see, she only understood miseries that resembled her own, city miseries, and she tried to figure out what the country kind could be like. That was the only curiosity I ever saw in my mother. It was all the diversion she needed for a Sunday, and she took it back to the city with her.
I never heard from Lola, or from Musyne either. Those sluts were on the good side of the situation, from which we, the flesh earmarked for sacrifice, were barred by smiling but implacable orders. Twice I’d been sent back to the places where the hostages were coralled. My future was all settled.
As I’ve told you, Branledore, my neighbor at the hospital, enjoyed permanent popularity with the nurses. He was swathed in bandages and dripping with optimism. All the other patients envied him and copied his manner. Once we’d become presentable and ceased to be moral lepers, we all began to get visits from socialites and political bigwigs. People started telling each other in the drawing rooms that Professor Bestombes’ Neuro-Medical Center had become a temple and home, as it were, of the most intense patriotic fervor. Our visiting days came to be patronized not only by bishops, but also by an Italian duchess, a big munitions magnate, and before long by the personnel of the Opéra and the Comédie Française. A beautiful young actress from the Comedie, who recited poetry like nobody’s business, came to my personal bedside and declaimed some superlatively heroic lines for my special benefit. As she spoke, her perverse red hair (she had the complexion that went with it) was tossed by extraordinary waves that sent vibrations straight to my perineum. When this divine creature questioned me about my feats of arms, I gave her so many poignant details that she began to devour me with her eyes. Deeply moved, she asked leave to have the most intense passages in my narrative framed in verse by a poet who happened to be one of her admirers. I consented without hesitation. Informed of this project, Professor Bestombes expressed his special approval. He even granted an interview on the subject to an “illustrated national weekly,” whose photographer took our picture all together on the hospital steps with the beautiful actress beside us. “In these tragic days,” cried Professor Bestombes, who never missed a trick, “it is the poet’s highest duty to revive our taste for the epic! This is no time for trivial artifice! Down with emasculated literature! A new soul has been born to us in the great and noble tumult of battle! The great patriotic renewal … The lofty summits to which our glory is destined! … We demand the sustaining grandeur of the epic! … For my part, I find it admirable that this sublime, creative, and never to be forgotten collaboration between a poet and one of our heroes should have taken place under our very eyes in this hospital which I direct!”
Branledore, my roommate, whose imagination had been rather outdistanced by mine and who didn’t figure in the photograph, was seized with a keen, tenacious jealousy. He became my embittered rival for the palms of heroism. He made up new stories, he surpassed himself, no one could stop him, his exploits verged on delirium.
It was difficult for me to get the jump on him, to improve on his extravagances, yet none of us at the hospital resigned himself to defeat; in a fever of emulation we all vied with one another in composing brilliant pages of military “history” in which to figure sublimely. In those heroic romances we wore the skins of phantasmagoric characters, but deep within them our ludicrous selves trembled body and soul! I’d like to have seen people’s faces if they had found out what we were really like. The war had been going on too long.
Our great friend Bestombes received the visits of innumerable foreign celebrities, neutrals, skeptics, and scientists of all persuasions. Spruce, besabered inspectors from the War Ministry passed through our wards, their military careers had been extended, they had been rejuvenated and revitalized with pay increases. So naturally they were generous with praise and citations. Everything was perfect. Bestombes and his wounded heroes were the pride of the medical profession.
My fair admirer from the Comédie came back and paid me a private visit, while her pet poet was completing the rhymed narrative of my exploits. One day I finally ran into this pale, anxious young man in one of the corridors. The doctors, he told me, had assured him that the fragilit
y of his heart strings was well-nigh miraculous. Consequently these same doctors, always concerned with the protection of the frail, had kept him out of the army. To make up for which our young bard had undertaken, at the risk of his health and last spiritual energies, to forge “The Moral Cannon of Our Victory.” A magnificent— and it goes without saying—unforgettable weapon. Practically everything was unforgettable in those days.
I wasn’t going to complain, since he had picked me from among so many undeniably brave men as his hero! And, I have to admit, they honored me royally. It was magnificent. The recitation was given at the Comédie Française itself, as part of a so-called poetic afternoon. The whole hospital was invited. When my vibrant redhead appeared on the stage, striding grandly, her figure draped in the for once voluptuous folds of the tricolor, the whole audience, flushed with desire, rose to its feet and gave her one of those ovations that never seem to end. Naturally I had known what to expect, but my amazement was real all the same. I could not conceal my stupefaction from my neighbors at hearing her, my magnificent friend, thrill and throb and sigh in such a way as to make the dramatic effect of the episode I had dreamed up for her more vivid and more moving. Her poet was miles beyond me for fantasy, he had monstrously magnified mine, enhanced it with flamboyant rhymes and high-sounding adjectives, which fell with a solemn reverberation on the breathless, admiring silence. Coming to the climax of a period, the most impassioned of the lot, the actress turned toward the box where Branledore and I and a few other wounded men were sitting, and held out her two magnificent arms as though offering herself to the most heroic among us. At that particular moment the poet was faithfully rendering a deed of awe-inspiring bravery that I had attributed to myself. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I’m sure it was something pretty good. Luckily, when it comes to heroism, people are willing to believe anything. The audience caught the meaning of her symbolic offering, turned in our direction, ecstatic, stamping, bellowing with joy, and clamored for the hero.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 10