The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

Everyone had stopped talking. With difficulty the mistress of the house brought the conversation round to the latest theatrical success. Captain de Glatigny had not opened his mouth again.

  After dinner a lieutenant sitting at the end of the table had come up to him and Claude had realized he was congratulating him. The lieutenant had been out in Indo-China.

  But Puysange had led the young woman into a corner of the drawing-room.

  “My dear Claude, you must curb the captain’s tongue; if we hadn’t been among friends, among people of the same social standing, the incident might have proved extremely serious and harmful to your husband’s career. He must get rid of those ideas of his. You can help there. He seems to have Communist sympathies . . .”

  “Jacques a Communist!”

  “I won’t go so far as that. Solid traditions, a sincere faith, and love of his profession would prevent him from sinking to that, my dear.”

  In the car, an old Mercedes they had brought back from Germany, Claude asked her husband with horror in her voice:

  “Is it true you’re a Communist?”

  “Puysange said so, I suppose. I shall never be able to understand how a man with such a noble, forthright appearance can be so low-minded or how, with all those decorations of his, he has never heard a shot fired in anger. Do you know what Communism is? No, of course not. And even the Communists in France don’t know either. Communism is a country in another planet. Now I don’t happen to have any inclination for space travel. Will you please ring up Jeanine Marindelle tomorrow and ask her to dinner with her husband.”

  “Ring up Jeanine after what she has done!”

  “That’s Yves Marindelle’s business, not ours. But I absolutely insist on having the lieutenant and his wife at our table tomorrow. You’d better ask that windbag Major Gernier as well. Like that everyone will hear about it, including that old fool Puysange.”

  Now he was referring to his superior officers as fools! This was what Communism meant—lowering one’s standards, denying the established order of things—and not that cock-and-bull story about space travel.

  During the dinner Claude had felt deeply offended, first of all by the presence of Jeanine, the adulterous wife, all sugar and spice, and by her beauty which was more startling than ever (as though sinning was good for the complexion) and, secondly, by the close relationship that existed between her husband and Marindelle. The lieutenant addressed Jacques by the familiar “tu” and talked to him as an equal, forgetting the difference of rank, age and, to put it bluntly, social background. After all, Captain de Glatigny had served as an aide-de-camp to several generals.

  And Jeanine, all smiles and gaiety—that little bitch with the looks of an angel who had given herself to that filthy ginger-headed beast, Pasfeuro!

  Jacques chattered and joked with her. Perhaps he was actually after her himself, now that he knew how easy she was to get.

  How Jacques had changed! Instead of getting up and shaving, there he was lying back in his arm-chair reading a paper. Since his return he lolled about in bed, spent hours playing with the children or else sat astride a chair in the kitchen, watching Marie peel the vegetables or prepare a stew. Sometimes he even helped her.

  The children were getting too familiar with their father, and Marie was inclined to be insubordinate. He no longer kept them at a proper distance, and the results of this were deplorable.

  It was a complete stranger who had shared her bed that first evening. He had behaved disgustingly, and she had felt as though she was committing adultery. He had treated her like any casual pick-up, panting and groaning on top of her, while she lay on her back looking up at the crucifix on the wall, at an outraged and reproachful Christ. Then he had thanked her with a clumsy sentimental kiss.

  In the indignation which this physical contact caused her, she had plucked up her courage and told him everything.

  “Jacques, I think you ought to know . . .”

  “Yes?”

  He wanted to feel his wife’s head nestling on his shoulder, to hold her tight in his arms and tell her how much he had thought about her and the children when he was out there, at Marianne II, and had expected to be killed.

  But she drew away, shrinking from the contact of his body.

  “Jacques, I decided to use the money you sent me for a rather different purpose than we agreed upon. I had the roof of the Château de Pressinges re-done. It was almost falling in.”

  Glatigny half sat up in bed.

  “You’re joking, I suppose . . .”

  “No, seriously. It was a little more expensive than I thought: two and a half million . . .”

  “You couldn’t have been as stupid as that!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I say—as stupid, idiotic and senseless as that. I thought we’d seen the last of that useless, worm-eaten old pile of stones . . .”

  “I was born there, and all my family before me, and two of our sons as well, Xavier and Yvon . . .”

  “For two months in the year you like to play the lady of the manor, to be solicitous and condescending over the kids of peasants ten times richer than we are, to queen it in your pew in church . . . you’re as vain as a pea-hen.”

  “I never realized you could be so common.”

  “That money was for the children and, a bit of it, for us. Seaside holidays, two bicycles for Xavier and Yvon, a little pocket money . . . a new car.”

  “The children will be all right at Pressinges . . .”

  “In that damp, icy old castle . . .”

  “At least it will make them conscious of their position.”

  “My dear Claude, all that nonsense is finished and done with.”

  Claude felt like crying as she thought how much she had loved Jacques when he was at Dien-Bien-Phu, and after that, in the P.O.W. camp; she had loved him so much she would have died for him, and this imitation Jacques had come back to her.

  But what had become of the original, the well-mannered, courteous and slightly disdainful Jacques de Glatigny who was proud of his name and made his senior officers feel that he was doing them a favour by obeying them? He used to win horse shows and played bridge perfectly.

  And now she had to be content with this vulgar, coarsened counterfeit in the arm-chair. No, it wasn’t possible.

  Jacques peered at his wife over the top of his newspaper. She still had those doe eyes which had so beguiled him, eyes that were something between yellow and red, in a shapely, finely chiselled face, and a slender equestrienne’s figure which childbirth had not thickened.

  Claude was small and well bred, indestructible and intransigent; she knew how to entertain, direct a conversation, bring up children, speak to servants; she could recite the Army List by heart and boasted almost as many generals in her family as there were in his. But she was difficult to get on with and not very intelligent.

  Their marriage had been celebrated with a great ball in the park of the already tumbledown Château de Pressinges. There had been several hundred guests, including a marshal of France, an archbishop, all the local nobility, and all the officers from the neighbouring garrisons provided they were sufficiently well born. What remained of the Pressinges fortune had been swallowed up in this final display. The bells which rang for their wedding, eight days later sounded the war alarm. Xavier, the eldest of their children, was now fifteen.

  Until then Jacques had managed to get along with his wife; he only used to see her long enough to give her a child. After going away in 1939, he was wounded and taken prisoner; then, having escaped, he had spent two years with the maquis in Savoie. Geneviève had been born in a little town in the Black Forest where Dr. Faust was said to have lived. That year of occupation in Germany, the only year the couple had been together, had been extremely pleasant: hunting, balls, regimental dinners and horse shows.

  Comtesse de Glatigny, th
e niece of a commander-in-chief and of a high commissioner of France, related to all the nobility, including the German nobility which was rising again from the ruins, rich for once, possessing a car and servants, fancied she had found the rank and position that were her due.

  She had reigned over that wild year and turned the heads of several lieutenants who had married into her family. Since she often entertained the Wehrmacht General Heinrich von Bulöckv, a cousin on her mother’s side, she was looked upon as a very great lady who could afford to overlook the prejudices of victor and vanquished. But she knew how to get the best out of victory just the same.

  One day von Bulöckv had said to the captain:

  “Claude takes pleasure in showing me off, my dear Jacques; I’m her scandal, but a good quality scandal; I plotted against Hitler and I never committed any so-called ‘war crimes.’ As though it were possible to make war without committing crimes! I come here and sing for my supper by describing my battle in France—I rather enjoy that—and my campaign in Russia—which is somewhat more painful. Sometimes I can’t help wondering if your wife isn’t a little monster . . . Give me another glass of that excellent brandy . . . I know of a wonderful horse that has managed to survive the war; it’s stabled just round the corner. You could requisition it . . . If it leaves Germany, at least it won’t be leaving the family.”

  According to the latest news, the former Panzer General von Bulöckv was in the process of building up one of the largest fortunes in Germany from prefabricated houses which he sold throughout the world.

  He had invited Xavier and Geneviève to spend Christmas with him on his country estate near Cologne. He would come over himself to fetch them and would stay in Paris for a day.

  Bulöckv had not had any of his old castles rebuilt; on the contrary, he had had what remained of them blown up with dynamite. Then he had built himself a villa equipped with every modern comfort on the banks of the Bodensee. To round everything off, he had just married a mannequin twenty-five years younger than himself.

  Over the ruined walls of Pressinges, Claude had had a new roof put on! While he was holding the grenade in his hand, when Marianne had been taken, while he was slogging along the tracks, listening to the Voice and carrying Esclavier on a stretcher, the little money he had earned by the sweat of his brow had been wasted on this vain and anachronistic impulse.

  Before his capture Glatigny had found his wife’s anxiety to restore the castle quite natural. Like all his family, he had a sense of possession which was very different from that of the middle or merchant classes. For him a castle was still a communal building. In the Middle Ages everyone could find refuge there, today everyone could visit it. The owner of the moment was responsible not only to his own dynasty but also to the nation.

  But his evolution which had begun at Camp One now led him to take an aversion to the world in which his wife continued to live and in which the castle stood. Yvon came and sat down on his father’s knee. Claude’s dry voice chided him:

  “Now then, you boys, I’ve forbidden you to come in here. Yvon, go back to your room.”

  “Wait a moment,” his father gently said. “Claude, look how pale he is. The seaside would have done him a lot of good.”

  Geneviève came in with Indo-China I and II: Muriel and Olivier, the girl and boy they had engendered on each home leave. The children clustered round him, hanging on his neck, pulling his hair, clutching at his pullover, jostling one another, laughing, screaming, fighting.

  “I give up,” said Claude. “Since you came back all the manners I’ve taught them have gone by the board. So it’s settled, is it, you’re going out to meet Esclavier?”

  “Let’s not go over that again. What’s more, I hope to bring him back here to dinner and also see Marindelle, if I can . . .”

  “I shan’t be here. If this goes on, we’ll have your N.C.O.s and privates invading this drawing-room.”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all if they did, but you see, my dear, they’re all dead.”

  • • •

  Jacques de Glatigny glanced round the drawing-room with its pictures, suits of armour, standards and coats of arms. On the shelves stood rows of miniature cannons, a complete little military museum.

  That stained and tattered old flag had come from Waterloo, and that large sword, which only a giant could wield, had belonged to the Constable. The large crystal chandelier had been looted in Italy, and the sumptuous carpets brought back by General Gardanne, whom Napoleon had sent into Persia to persuade the Shah to side with him against the British. In a glass case hung the starred cloak of a Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and on a pillar stood the dented breastplate of an officer of the Pontifical Zouaves.

  Yes, indeed, what would Bachelier and Bermanju, Moustier and Dupont, Merkilof and Javelle, have said if they had found themselves here, among all these remnants of history? And Cergona with his W.T. set which seemed to be devouring his back? But their bodies were now rotting in the Dien-Bien-Phu basin.

  He plucked the children off him as though they were bunches of grapes, and went off to dress. He was going to be late for his meeting with Esclavier. He felt extremely tired. He would have liked to be living alone in a wooden hut in the country, tramping through the forests in hobnailed boots, feeding on bread, wine, raw onions, sardines and eggs . . . in solitude . . . and in prayer . . . searching for the mysterious thread which he needed to guide him through this new existence in which he discovered that generals can be imbeciles and one’s own wife a stranger.

  Yet he was the first to arrive at the Brent Bar and he almost ordered a whisky, then changed his mind—that was a habit he would have to get rid of. With a captain’s pay, a wife with big ideas, five bouncing children and a flat like a military museum, whisky was a forbidden luxury.

  “A port, please, barman.”

  “You’re not going to drink that muck,” Esclavier exclaimed, rushing in. “Two whiskies, please, barman.”

  “Good morning, Captain,” said Edouard.

  The barman gave Philippe Esclavier a conspiratorial smile.

  This was the first time Philippe had seen his friend in civilian clothes: he was surprised. Although dressed with the utmost care, Glatigny looked shrunken, thinner and smaller than he really was, in his rather old-fashioned blue suit which smelt faintly of mothballs. He had put his roll-brim hat and gloves down beside him on the bar and sat astride his stool as though it was a saddle. His features were drawn, his smile melancholy. He had a smelly old pipe in his mouth.

  Esclavier put his hand on his shoulder, as he had done up there in the Méo highlands.

  “Well, Jacques?”

  “Well, Philippe?”

  “What was it like getting back?”

  “I found my children had grown a lot. I behave towards them like a doddering old papa, dripping with affection; I tremble for them, for they’ll be forced to live in the termite world which we once knew. My wife has got used to being alone; she has acquired self-reliance, a certain sense of independence. The great tragedy is that in the Vietminh camps we developed on our own, away from our families, our social class, our profession and country. So coming back isn’t so easy.”

  “With the Viets, the problem was over-simple. It boiled down to this: survival. Some of us went a little farther and tried to understand it.”

  “I’ve seen Marindelle again.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “He’s happy, he’s playing at being happy . . . but . . .”

  “Yes, he has a gift for theatricals.”

  “He’s being accused of turning Communist.”

  “Marindelle!”

  “I’ve had to stand up for him, consequently I’m now regarded as a fellow-traveller!”

  Esclavier reverted to his dry, scornful tone:

  “The army is the biggest collection of dirty dogs and idiots that I’ve ever come across.”
<
br />   “Well, why are you in it then?”

  “It’s also where you meet the most unselfish men and most loyal friends.”

  “Have you been home yet?”

  “No. I don’t know how to put it, but I can’t bear the idea. Two more whiskies, please, Edouard: make them doubles. It’s true, we’ve developed away from our homes . . . and for the first time I feel that we army people are ahead . . . for the first time in centuries. Only, there we are, it’s mere chance that has pushed us ahead; we weren’t prepared for it. Let’s go and eat; I need your help to get me in the proper frame of mind to go home to the Rue de l’Université.”

  By eight o’clock that evening Glatigny and Esclavier were drunk. They had run into Orsini wandering about the Champs-Élysées in search of a cinema. He never got up until two in the afternoon and spent his time playing poker all night with his fellow Corsicans. Up to now he had been winning.

  “They’re handing it to me on a plate,” he said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen them lose.”

  All three of them had gone back to the Brent Bar and a fascinated Edouard listened to them, forgetting his other clients.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said Glatigny, dipping his nose into his glass, “love boils down to a purely social function; religion to a number of senseless gestures; warfare to a form of technology more or less suited to the purpose. Do you realize, you two, why I fought at Dien-Bien-Phu, why I slogged through those muddy trenches with my hands tied behind my back, rotting with fever in the monsoon, do you realize why we waged that war in Indo-China? Just so that the Comtesse de Glatigny could put a new roof on a pile of old ruins.”

  “I’m fed up already,” said Orsini. “One ought to be able to spend one’s leave with a few friends . . . who, like me, have neither wife nor family . . . I’ve never been so thirsty as this evening. All the thirst I felt at Camp One is parching my throat. What do you say to ringing up Marindelle?”

  “Marindelle is living on love,” said Esclavier. “I think I’m now at last in a fit state to go home.”

  He left, with his beret planted firmly on his head and his lips set in a thin, grim line. Glatigny and Orsini went on drinking.