The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  With a throbbing head, Philippe staggered up to his room. He noticed the sheets had been changed and the bed clumsily remade. He recognized his sister’s hand in this; some suitcases had been hidden behind a curtain.

  All his personal belongings and books had disappeared; the cupboards and drawers were empty.

  He realized they had not expected to see him again and that someone else had been occupying the room for some time.

  • • •

  Glatigny got home at two in the morning, dead drunk. He stumbled on the stairs several times. He tried to remember the last time he had been as drunk as this. Yes, it was in 1945, at the time of the liberation of Alsace. The peasants had set up wine stalls in the streets; it was that year’s wine, which was still fermenting. Some girls had flung their arms round his neck.

  He was so drunk that he could no longer drive his Jeep and had been obliged to stop in a little pine forest. He had lain down on the moss and the cold had woken him up. Through the branches he could see little patches of sky scattered with stars. He did not know where he had come from, where he was going or who he was, and he had enjoyed that sensation of being no one and yet being alive. A rabbit had scampered past him in the moonlight, followed by its grotesque shadow.

  Glatigny had some difficulty in inserting his key in the lock; annoying hiccups kept rising in his throat.

  Claude was waiting for him in her dressing gown, her ash-blonde hair scraped back from her forehead, which made her look like an old woman. She held a rosary in her hand. Always that urge of hers to repeat the obvious!

  “You’re drunk . . . drunk and incapable. So drunk you can’t even keep on your feet. It would serve you right if I went and woke up the children so that they could see you.”

  “The drunken isle of the Spartans.”

  “What are you talking about? You make me sick. But what on earth did they do to you in Indo-China?”

  “Merde!”

  “We’re going to have this out at once. I absolutely insist.”

  “Oh, balls!”

  He barely had time to rush to the lavatory and be sick, and he hoped that, together with all the alcohol he had drunk, he would also get rid of his present life, his financial and domestic worries, the little countess and her roofing mania, so as to recover once more that sensation of being no one.

  From that night on Claude slept in a separate room and the captain was delighted. He could now read and meditate in peace.

  3

  THE MULES OF THE COL D’URQUIAGA

  Lieutenant-Colonel Raspéguy spent the first month of his ninety-day leave in his native village of les Aldudes, on the Raspéguy estate, near the Col d’Urquiaga. The first days were among the best in his life.

  Walking by the banks of the Nive, clambering about the mountains drenched in mist and rain, shooting in the Hayra or Irraty forest, he was reminded of the little shepherd boy he had once been—mysterious and solitary—and of the adolescent who had become an accomplished frontier-crosser and whose blood raced through his veins like a torrent. It was during the civil war and the Republicans paid a high price for arms and ammunition.

  One night Franco’s men had seized him and his father. They had beaten him to a jelly all night and had left him for dead out on the mountainside. A guardia civil had dragged the old man to the bottom of a ravine and finished him off with a musket bullet.

  The Raspéguys would have worked equally well for Franco as for the Republic; they were simply smugglers who seized every opportunity to make a little money. But from that day on Pierre-Noel Raspéguy had vowed an implacable, absolute hatred against the Galician dictator.

  A few days after his release from the Vietminh camps the colonel had ordered himself a car. It was waiting for him at Marseilles. It was a Régence with claret-coloured coachwork outlined in cream, masses of dazzling chromium and white-wall tires. It was equipped with a radio and with mirrors on both front fenders.

  It was in rather bad taste, somewhat reminiscent of a grocer who has made his little pile, but Raspéguy did not mind that. He knew it was bound to overawe his compatriots.

  The colonel had carefully calculated the time of his arrival so as to appear in front of the church just as the congregation was leaving. The men were coming down from the oak gallery by the outside staircases, their rosaries round their wrists, while the women in black mantillas emerged from the low vault, making the sign of the cross.

  In a brand-new uniform, his breast adorned with all his decorations, his pipe stuck at a jaunty angle in his mouth, his bamboo swagger-stick under his arm, his red beret pulled down on one side, he stood, shoulders squared, chest thrown out, muscles flexed, in the pose which every paper in the country had popularized.

  The men had hesitated an instant before recognizing him as “the great Basque condottiere.”

  Jean, the youngest of the Arréguy boys, was the first to cry out:

  “It’s Pierre Raspéguy of the Urquiaga estate, it’s the colonel from Indo-China, that’s him all right with an American car.”

  Then they had rushed towards him. Half the village was related to him on the male or the female side and they had all insisted on kissing him, so as to make it plain to the customs officials and the police that they were his kin.

  They told him that his mother and brother had come to the first Mass but had gone back to the mountains immediately afterwards as one of their animals was sick.

  The curé appeared—despite his age he still walked with huge strides, like a daddy-longlegs, and wore his beret pulled forward over his nose. He grasped Raspéguy by the shoulders and squeezed his brawny, root-hard arms:

  “So there you are, and of course you managed to arrive at the end of Mass so as to miss the service. You haven’t changed at all!”

  Raspéguy heard a small boy saying in his native tongue:

  “It’s true, he’s just as big and strong as in his pictures, and he’s not at all old.”

  Raspéguy threw out his chest and flexed his muscles for the boy’s benefit. This was the sort of praise which touched him most of all.

  The men dragged him along to the village inn.

  While the wine was being poured out, Escotéguy, who had been through the selection board with him, asked:

  “Come on now, Pierre, tell us all about it. What was it like out there?”

  What was it like out there! Explain all that to them, to these people who had scarcely ever left their valley; explain the Chinese and the Vietminh, the tall elephant grass of the Haute Région and the paddy-fields of the deltas, the mud and the dust, the fighting, the suffering, the dying, and what he and his kind were striving to find behind all that death!

  “It wasn’t exactly a holiday,” he replied in his rasping voice, “but it got under your skin.”

  He peered at them through half-closed eyes.

  The curé had sat down opposite him to observe him more closely. This was a Raspéguy all right, a member of that clan of shepherds who dabbled in sheep-thieving and smuggling but who never jettisoned their goods, preferring to fight and tip the customs men into a ravine, who went further than anyone else in good or in evil, who were by way of being sorcerers as well, acquainted with secrets over beasts and over men, and with a deep-rooted, violent passion for women, especially the women of others. And this one was the worst and the best of the lot, the most disconcerting, the most secretive and at the same time most garrulous, prouder and more pagan than anyone has any right to be.

  But one evening, towards the end of the war, when Pierre Raspéguy had come back on a short leave, the curé had found him on his knees in the middle of the choir of the church, motionless and upright, like a knight on the day of his dubbing. He had never seen a man so handsome praying with such fervour. Lieutenant Raspéguy had just learnt that his men were fighting without him. For the rest of the time he gave every indication that he did no
t believe in God and feasted with the devil.

  He would have to bury his roots in Basque soil, marry and settle down here. The curé had spoken to his mother and he was looking out for a wife for him. From Bayonne to Saint-Engrace, rich or poor, countess or scullery-maid, what woman would refuse to mingle her blood with that of the great colonel?

  Raspéguy leant back in his chair and, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling with its smoke-blackened wooden beams festooned with clusters of red peppers that had been hung up to dry, he seemed to be searching his memory for something to tell them.

  Memories he had a-plenty; they buzzed through his head like a cloud of flies over his glorious, sordid and generally gory past, that avid quest for medals and promotion, that exalting pursuit of life and of death; and it all ended with a little general fastening yet another decoration on to his breast. He loved medals; he enjoyed military pomp and splendour, but each time he felt frustrated. There was something else he wanted and he didn’t know what.

  What should he tell them, these peasants sitting here with their gnarled hands spread flat out on the knees of their black Sunday-best trousers? Stories about girls? They were prudish, the curé was present, and he himself found that sort of thing rather dull nowadays . . . His withdrawal through the Vietminh lines for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and then one day the appearance of the Raspéguy battalion which had been completely written off? Even then there had been certain rats who reproached him for having abandoned his wounded, the very rats who would have found it absolutely normal for him to surrender or get all his men killed.

  He knew what they were like, that headquarters rabble—bald, pot-bellied, fat-assed little men, incapable of marching half a dozen miles without melting away in their own dishwater-like sweat, with faces like Franco and the fawning manners of Spanish Jesuits.

  He had thought of all that and had found nothing to tell the men of les Aldudes. He was like a bull-fighter being asked by ignorant strangers, who did not number one genuine aficionado among them, to describe his fight just after it is over, when he has not yet got rid of his fear, when he still feels closer to the animal he has killed in the sunshine of the arena than to these people scrutinizing him with a strange gleam in their eyes as though he was a murderer.

  In any case there is no such thing as an aficionado of war; there are simply those who fight, and all the others.

  Raspéguy drained his glass of wine and rose to his feet.

  “I’ll tell you some other time. I’ve got to go up and see my mother. You know what she’s like: I may be a colonel but she’d still beat me over the head with a log if she discovered I was dawdling in the bar instead of climbing up to see her right away.”

  They all laughed. As though they didn’t know her—a Spanish woman from over the border, irascible, domineering, and rapacious as well: and she had to be the woman she was if she wanted to preserve even a semblance of order in the Raspéguy household.

  The colonel left his car outside the curé’s house, went into the grocer’s who also sold espadrilles and, sitting on a stone bench, donned a pair, surrounded by all the boys and adolescents of the village who drank him in with their eyes like hornets on a stormy day.

  No, he would not speak to the old men and those of his own age, but to these youngsters who were the only ones who would understand. As he tied the laces round his ankles, he watched them and he already knew which were the three or four among them who, without knowing it, had a sense of war and adventure and who would follow him.

  He could see Esclavier greeting them, with his hands in his pockets:

  “Well, you little bastards. What do you think you’re going to get by joining us? Something to overawe your pals and girl-friends; the red beret, the parachute badge, jumping boots? Do you know what you’re really in for? Toil, sweat, blood, probably death. Just get that into your heads, you nitwits. You’re here to die. So if there’s anyone who wants to change his mind, now’s the time.”

  Good old Esclavier, he knew how to pile it on! Not one of them had ever stepped out of the ranks and asked to leave.

  Boudin had once tried the same line, but he didn’t have what it takes—out of twelve only four had remained.

  That bastard Boudin—managing to go sick just at the time of Dien-Bien-Phu! He would make him pay for that. For a start, he had not given him any sign of life and had not answered one of his letters . . .

  The curé came up:

  “Pierre.”

  It was funny being called by his Christian name; it was a long time since that had happened. It forced him to remember that he had spent his childhood outside the army.

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You ought to go and see Colonel Mestreville. He keeps talking about you as though you belonged to him.”

  The curé was a little jealous of this.

  “Of course, I’ll go and see him.”

  “Another thing. Here, take it! Go on, I tell you, take it . . .”

  With a clumsy gesture, full of affection and brutality, he handed him his old stick, his maquila, with its blunted point and leather handle blackened by sweat. It was common knowledge that when he was younger, Abbot Oyamburu had gone off with the other Basque curés to fight against Franco and that his stick was the only weapon he had ever carried.

  “You’ll hang on to it, won’t you, Pierre Raspéguy. It will remind you of your homeland, should you ever forget it.”

  The curé was preparing the ground.

  Raspéguy slipped the leather thong round his wrist, took a firm grip on the cane before twirling it round his head, then, with his long, easy stride, started off along the path which led up into the mountains and the Hayra forest.

  Half way along the road he had come across his brother Fernand with his flock; they had embraced, or rather brushed their cheeks together and slapped each other on the back and shoulders, on the knotted muscles from which a man derives his strength.

  “Thanks to the money you sent,” Fernand told him, “we now have a hundred sheep, fine ones too. Do you want to come and count them? Mother says you could have done better and saved a little more instead of boozing and running after the girls, that the men who have gone to America send back much more money than you did, that it’s not worth being a colonel, and so on and so forth . . . Don’t listen to her, Pierre. She’s terribly proud of you . . . and so am I.”

  Their mother must have heard them. She had a sharp ear and the wind carried far that day. They found her outside the front door, short and swarthy, her scarf wound round her head, both fists on her hips. She only spoke Basque, never Spanish or French.

  “So there you are, you big good-for-nothing, and you’re not even a general after all the schooling and health I’ve given you!”

  Health she had certainly given him; he was full of life; it seethed through his body and clung to him like those malignant deep-rooted weeds that cut like knives.

  As for schooling, that was another matter. She had got him a job as a shepherd on another farm the day after he left school. It was lucky the owner happened to be Colonel Mestreville.

  He bent down to kiss his mother, but she squirmed in his arms as though she found it distasteful; her eyes were brimming with tears.

  Behind her appeared his three bashful nephews and niece with his sister-in-law: three stocky, thickset boys who were always ready for a fight, and his niece, much younger, with her big mysterious eyes; she was sucking her thumb and peering at him through her eyelashes.

  Maité was the one he lifted in his arms and held up towards the sky—a sky that was forever changing, never completely blue, never completely grey, hemmed in by the mountains and which seemed to be cast in his mould, with a nature as tormented as his own.

  After the meal, which they ate in silence, their noses buried in their plates, his mother said:

  “Better change those fine clothes of yours, you�
�ll only get them dirty.”

  She took his uniform and hung it up in a cupboard and he caught her delightedly fingering his decorations, one after another.

  In the afternoon, in a fine drizzle, he went out with his brother to see the sheep, but to his surprise he found no pleasure in this. He was dreaming of other flocks, the only ones that mattered to him now: men in camouflage uniform, agile and silent, who followed him in the dark. No matter their race or the colour of their skin, he would lead them, clean-limbed, youthful and upstanding, far from this rottenness, this feebleness, this cowardice, towards a sort of brutal paradise which was only open to fighters and the pure in heart and from which would be banished all cowards, cranks, women, guardias civiles and anyone who served that bastard Franco.

  A Spanish shepherd who had caught sight of them came down towards them; he was a friend of Fernand’s; they did a little smuggling together.

  Pointing with his finger, the shepherd inquired:

  “Who’s this big fellow?”

  “It’s my brother, Pierre-Noel Raspéguy, the colonel from Indo-China.”

  Thereupon the shepherd took off his boina and, holding it in his hand, gave a respectful bow. This was fine, this warmed the cockles of a man’s heart even more than a tot of brandy.

  In the evening Fernand left the house. He had to prepare a “crossing”; some mules being brought over from Spain. Pierre would have liked to go with him to see how it would make him feel now.

  Sitting in his father’s armchair, which was his own ever since the old man had died in the ravine, he dozed in front of the fire, with a porron of wine within easy reach. He was alone; the old woman and the children had gone to bed. Tall shadows flickered on the walls as the flames leaped in the hearth. Outside it was raining as heavily as during the last days of Dien-Bien-Phu; but here the rain was fine and icy cold.