The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  The solitude grew heavy, unbearable. He poked the fire and sparks flew into the room. He spoke to himself, as he often did when he wanted to reassure himself.

  “I’ve come a long way, all the same, since I won my first stripe. If there hadn’t been this war, what would I have become? I would have gone to America and herded sheep in Montana, where everyone from this valley goes. I had even written to a cousin of ours out there and he had agreed to pay my passage. There were dollars to be earned in Montana; one came home rich, but old, with nothing but a few memories of flocks of sheep caught in a storm or a snowdrift.”

  War alone was the great adventure, cruel, poignant and heartwarming, with the shadow of death hovering over one each time a comrade fell.

  “Yes, I’ve had to do some odd things in my time, especially at the beginning, but that was just to make a name for myself. It’s hard to achieve recognition when one still stinks of the flocks one has been herding . . .”

  He remembered the day clearly: the 17th December 1939, when, in a little village behind the lines, with a full company on parade, a cabinet minister had decorated him with the Military Medal and his first palm.

  It was extremely cold and the men’s breath formed a faint mist in front of them.

  “Read out the citation . . .”

  Never had the drums sounded so crisp; they shattered the icy air.

  “Sergeant Pierre Raspéguy, of the 152nd Infantry Regiment . . . A warrant-officer whose courage is already legendary. His platoon commander having been killed in the course of a patrol, he assumed command, carried out his mission behind the enemy lines and brought back three prisoners . . . In the name of the President of the Republic . . .”

  The drums rolled for Raspéguy, the soldiers presented arms for Sergeant Raspéguy. It was then he had felt some animal come to life within him, some little animal: his ambition, as yet no bigger than an insect but which started nibbling away at him at once . . .

  Yet the thought of that patrol! The most ghastly shambles in his whole career! The men hadn’t muffled their equipment properly and there was a hell of a clatter. The lieutenant had lost his way in the dark. He had actually switched on his electric torch to consult his map and compass.

  It was then they had run into a German patrol, just as bogged down as themselves and commanded by an Oberleutnant just as doltish as the French lieutenant. They had fired at each other at random; bullets flew in all directions. It may have been the Frenchmen who killed their own lieutenant, and the Germans their Oberleutnant.

  Eventually the six Germans that were left had raised their hands a split second before the five Frenchmen did likewise.

  He, Raspéguy, had waited until it was all over; he wanted to see what the hell was going on; he hadn’t fired. What was the point?

  Once they had got over their surprise, the Germans were unwilling to surrender and the Frenchmen were not too keen on forcing them to behave as prisoners all over again. That was when he had made his presence felt. He had taken a firm grip on the butt of his submachine-gun: one of the first in use. He had fired a short burst and two figures in feldgrau had toppled over into the mud. The others had not made any more fuss. They had then quietly made their way back to the French lines, in single file, the prisoners carrying the body of the lieutenant. The party which was to have covered their withdrawal had somehow managed to fire on them instead, with the result that there were one prisoner and one Frenchman less.

  Raspéguy had earned the reputation of being a killer and he hadn’t denied it; it was useful in an army where everyone sat trembling with fright behind barbed-wire entanglements.

  No, he did not enjoy killing; he even found it the least pleasant aspect of warfare. He would have liked to fight with cunning, simply by manœuvring, so that the boys caught in a trap should not make any fuss about surrendering—just a game, like something they played at school. But it always had to end like this: in killing.

  Raspéguy took a long pull at the wine and put another log on the fire. It was still raining outside.

  • • •

  There was a knock on the door downstairs; he opened a window, glad at being roused from his memories.

  “Who’s there?”

  The man was hammering with his fists; he was out of breath; it was the Spanish shepherd he had met a few hours before; his beret was streaming with rain.

  “They’ve been cornered near here with the mules; the carabineers have blocked the pass on one side and the customs men are climbing up from the other. We’re done for, me cago en Dios.”

  “You’ve managed to get through, though! Wait a moment, I’ll be with you.”

  He shook his head: “Amateurs again.”

  His mother and sister-in-law had got up; the children were bawling.

  “Don’t go,” cried his mother. “I forbid you. It’s not up to you.”

  He grabbed the curé’s stick and went down to join the shepherd.

  “Show me where they are.”

  “Señor Coronel . . .”

  “Coño, maldita sea la puta que te pario! Pronto!”

  The shepherd saw the stick twirling above his head and appreciated the force of the insult. He led the way.

  The smugglers and their mules were bunched up together in a ravine; the pebbles kept slipping under the animals’ hooves, the men kept beating them with branches.

  Raspéguy seized his brother by the shoulder and spun him round. Fernand had lost his head, it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  “What’s the position?” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Never mind that. What’s the position?”

  “We can’t cross over into Spain; there are a dozen carabineers holding the pass and a runner has just warned me that the customs men are coming up from les Aldudes in full strength . . .”

  “Where are your mules bound for?”

  “Spain.”

  “That’s funny,” the colonel thought, “in my day it was the otherway round, they always crossed over into France.”

  “Call two of your men, the youngest and most agile, and who’ve got a little guts. Jump to it.”

  Fernand dashed off into the dark and came back accompanied by two youths who had not yet been called up for military service.

  “Just follow me and do what I do,” the colonel briefly told them. “We’re going to have to run for it . . . and listen to the bullets as they whistle over our heads. Nothing more. All clear?”

  “All clear!”

  “You, Fernand, when I give you the signal, scramble over the border by the quickest route, yes by the path; there’ll be no one there to guard it.”

  “Pierre, if anything should happen to you . . .”

  “In twenty years nothing has ever happened to me.”

  Taking the two boys with him, he set off in the direction of the pass: a little training exercise for warrant-officers, no, not even that, for corporals. It would do him good.

  A hundred yards this side of the Spaniards, he found a gully which he had once used. The caribineers firing from the crest could not hit them there.

  “Watch me and do what I do,” he told the two boys.

  He picked up some stones, dislodged some small rocks and sent them tumbling down the slope.

  “Halto!” shouted one of the caribineers.

  They could hear the bolt of his rifle as he loaded.

  “Go on!” he told the boys.

  “P’aran se!”

  “Go on!”

  There was a shot and a bullet whistled past, well above their heads.

  “Now we’re going to make a dash for it down to the left. A fifty-yard sprint as far as the trees. There’s no danger. Off you go now. What’s your name?”

  “Manuel.”

  “You’re Spanish?”

  “B
asque Spanish.”

  “Off you go then, Manuel.”

  Manuel dashed off. There were a few more shots.

  “Your turn now. Who are you?”

  “Jean Arréguy; I’m a cousin of yours, Mister Colonel.”

  “Just call me ‘Colonel,’ my lad. Show them you’re a cousin of mine. As soon as you get there, start rolling stones down hill again. But stay there till I arrive.”

  The three of them drew the caribineers away in the direction of Ebañeta, which is also called Roncevaux, the place where a certain Count Roland had been soundly trounced by the Basques because he had overlooked the first rule of mountain warfare: namely, to hold the ridges when you hazard a column in a gulley. Raspéguy could never understand why they had made a legendary hero of such a bad officer.

  When they were some distance away from the pass, Raspéguy called Manuel over to him:

  “Can you run fast?”

  “Faster than a lizard.”

  “Go and tell my brother they can take the mules across now.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  Raspéguy gave him a gentle shove with his hand and the boy dashed off into the dark.

  With Jean Arréguy he went on rolling stones down the hillside and shifting his position, drawing a shot every now and then.

  “What would you like to do most of all in life?” he asked his cousin all of a sudden.

  “Drive a car; I’ve got my licence.”

  “Would you like to drive mine?”

  “That lovely brand-new red job, Colonel?”

  “Yes, and later on a Jeep. Wouldn’t you like to come to the wars with me?”

  “Would you take me with you? Manuel would also like to come, but he’s Spanish.”

  “That sort of thing can be arranged. Keep rolling those stones, for heaven’s sake. Come on, another sprint. You’re out of breath, you ought to be in better training . . . seriously, if you want to be a paratrooper.”

  Behind them the mules were scuttling over the pass; the battle had been won, but this time Colonel Raspéguy wasn’t given a medal but only a flea in his ear. It was enough to make one sick!

  • • •

  On the following day no one in the valley spoke of anything else but what had happened up on the Col d’Urquiaga and how the colonel from Indo-China had made a monkey of the carabineers. The story reached Saint-Étienne de Baigorry where Colonel Mestreville “who had been at Verdun” lived. He immediately let Raspéguy know that he was expecting him without fail on the following day “and not to crack a bottle of wine together but to do some real drinking.” He had made this quite clear to one of his shepherds whom he had sent up specially from les Aldudes to the Raspéguy marches.

  Raspéguy got into his car and drove off to Saint-Étienne. He stopped from time to time on the banks of the Nive to watch a trout disappear among the rocks; if the water had not been so cold he would have tried his hand at tickling. He advised Fernand to lay a net and some ground lines there one night.

  Colonel Mestreville lived on the other side of the customs post, between the Col d’Ispéguy and the old Saint-Étienne bridge.

  Separated from the Spaniards by a winding road over two miles long, the French customs men had an easy time of it in their barracks, more often that not in their slippers, while the carabineers froze and kicked their heels up in the mountains. When Raspéguy sounded his horn for them to lift the barrier, all the customs men came up and shook his hand; they had open merry faces and a conspiratorial manner. They, too, had heard all about it.

  Raspéguy felt his temper rise. He had never tolerated familiarity from excisemen or policemen.

  “I want to see your sergeant,” he demanded.

  “Here I am, Colonel.”

  The sergeant gave a clumsy salute, bringing his hand to his cap which he was wearing sideways on his head like a pumpkin.

  “Last night, on the Col d’Urquiaga, in French territory quite close to my house, some Spanish carabineers fired on me while I was taking a stroll.”

  “But . . .”

  “I was taking a stroll, I’m perfectly entitled to, aren’t I?”

  “Of course, Colonel.”

  “What were you chaps up to in the mean time, in your bed-socks, two miles away from the frontier? I’m going to have the customs post moved up to the pass.”

  He let the clutch in with a jerk. The customs men were no longer smiling.

  Colonel Mestreville had a voice which thundered like a waterfall, the strength of an oak-tree and the stubbornness of a donkey; he always wore leather leggings with his old riding breeches, a beret which was never off his head, and played at being the old-fashioned Basque, a staunch supporter of tradition. But he was only Basque on his mother’s side and was saddled with a name which betrayed his Île de France or Norman ancestry.

  “Come in,” he shouted to Raspéguy.

  He was sitting at his desk, a narrow little table less broad than himself.

  “Sit down there in front of me.”

  He glared furiously.

  “Lieutenant-Colonel Raspéguy, since you came back on leave you’ve been behaving like an imbecile. No, not a word, you’ll listen to me first. You don’t seem to realize your position—the youngest colonel in the French army, and soon the youngest general—and what did you get up to the very night you arrived? Smuggling. You helped to get a troop of mules over the border under the nose of the carabineers. The story has now spread as far as Bayonne. Clever, isn’t it? In the first place you might have come and reported to me in uniform. After all it’s to me you owe your present position, and I’m your senior. I waited for you on Sunday; you preferred to go out boozing with a gang of ruffians in the village inn. If you had been caught by those coños of carabineers or by the customs men, you realize what a scandal there would have been. Can you imagine yourself in handcuffs?”

  “You know I should never have let myself be caught . . .”

  “Of course I know, you bloody fool. No Raspéguy has ever been caught, unless he was dead. Like your father, like your uncle Victor. Proud, hot-headed fools with no respect for laws or frontiers. But you happen to be a French officer. Your rank, the name you bear, your army record oblige you to behave properly. You’ve been made a colonel—well, then, try and behave like a colonel; and above all I don’t want to hear about any woman trouble. If you ever feel that sort of urge, go and work it off in Bayonne. You ought to get married, but we’ll think about that later. Concha, you blockhead, bring us some Spanish pernod. By the way, tell your brother to get me five more bottles, I’m running out. Good, now that I’ve had it out with you, let’s get down to some drinking. First of all, let’s have a look at you. Holy Virgin! Slim as a young subaltern, yet a grand officer of the Légion d’Honneur. You’re only just thirty-nine, aren’t you?”

  “Thirty-nine last month.”

  “In my days it took longer, much longer, and was much harder too: and if one was commissioned from the ranks, the highest one could hope to get was captain or major . . . My God, it seems you led the carabineers a dance almost as far as Ibañeta. Your brother Fernand’s lost his hand at the game; every tradition is dying out in the Basque country, even smuggling, on account of all these bloody tourists. Money destroys everything.”

  With his hairy fist Colonel Mestreville slowly poured some water over the sugar, which began to drip into the absinthe and turn it cloudy. In the warmth of the room the smell was faint at first, then became more pungent, like a July morning in the Basque mountains.

  The two men drank in silence, the veteran of Verdun and the youngster of Dien-Bien-Phu.

  “What was it like out there?” Mestreville inquired. “Did you fight as you ought to have done? I don’t mean you, but the others, because, damn it all, to take such a drubbing from a handful of Annamites . . . ! I knew them myself during the first world war, they weren’t worth
a straw. We didn’t dare use them in the front line.”

  “That’s because they weren’t fighting on their own ground or for themselves; Communism has brought quite a lot of changes too, and your Annamite quaking with fear has become a damn good soldier, one of the best infantrymen in the world.”

  “Look, Pierre, I remember a certain dawn attack near Douaumont, three divisions almost shoulder to shoulder to dislodge the Boches from their front line. Not many of us reached our objective. Their machine-guns mowed us down like scythes, yes, just like scythes, and felled our ranks one after the other . . . They say thirty thousand soldiers were killed or wounded that day. Did you do as much at Dien-Bien-Phu?”

  Raspéguy rose to his feet. This sort of talk made him see red.

  “Sheer butchery.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Verdun! Butchery . . . useless, senseless butchery. You should have attacked in small groups, well dispersed—thirty yards between each man, lightly equipped, with hand-grenades. Figures bobbing up here and there so that there’s no time to take aim. The other dopes get jumpy and begin to lose their heads . . . At Dien-Bien-Phu we were in much the same position as you were at Verdun, with artillery and trenches. We let ourselves be pinned down whereas we should have kept on the move.”

  Mestreville brought his fist down on the table, knocking over the glasses.

  “We at least won our battles.”

  “When there are over a million dead, you can’t call it a victory. Those million men would have sired children and I should have had them to fight with me. War’s not like that any more, it’s not like that at all. The soldier has become something infinitely valuable; you don’t just throw him away. For our sort of war you need shrewd, cunning men who are capable of fighting far from the herd, who are full of initiative too—sort of civilians who can turn their hand to any trade, poachers, and missionaries too, who preach but keep one hand on the butt of their revolvers in case any one interrupts them . . . or happens to disagree.”