La Guerre:Yes Sir

by Roch Carrier

  The Anglais had got up politely as the villagers came in. Plates were broken on the floor, glasses too. Threats were shouted: “You won’t get our Corriveau! Go back to England, maudits Anglais de calice! There’s a train at noon tomorrow; take it and don’t come back!”

  A woman remarked, “He’s cute, the little one there. Too bad he’s an Anglais.”

  “A Christ of an Anglais,” her husband specified, kicking her in the ankle as punishment.

  “They aren’t even real Anglais. They came to Canada because the real Anglais in England wanted to get rid of them.”

  “You’re not taking our Corriveau!”

  “Our Corriveau belongs to us!”

  The villagers fought over the Anglais. Each of them wanted to catch one. When an Anglais was taken over by two or three villagers they shook him, pulled his moustache, flicked their fingers against his ears. The soldiers grimaced with disgust as they received right in their faces the alcoholic breath coming out of these French Canadians. They barely defended themselves. The villagers spun the soldiers around like tops. They staggered. The villagers pulled their neckties; shirt buttons went flying. The women amused themselves by groping at the Anglais’ trousers; each time they found what they were looking for they chortled, “He’s got one!”

  Then the sergeant cried, “Let’s go boys! Let’s kill ’em!”

  The soldiers obeyed, attacking men and women. The villagers redoubled their violence and their anger. The Anglais defended themselves with their fists or their boots, their big leather boots; they struck out at faces, at stomachs, at teeth; faces were bloody; they trampled over bodies stretched out on the floor, crushed fingers, and fought with plates and chairs.

  “You’re not getting our Corriveau!”

  “Let’s kill ’em! Let’s kill ’em!”

  Mouths were spitting blood.

  “Christ de calice de tabernacle!”

  “Maudit wagon de Christ à deux rangées de banes, deux Christs par banc!”

  “Saint-Chrême d’Anglais!”

  “We’re going to get our Corriveau!”

  Bérubé appeared in the stairway again, barefoot, bare-chested, in his trousers. The uproar and the shouting had wakened him. He looked over the situation. He understood that the soldiers were fighting against the villagers. He jumped over the stairs. He wanted to smash some Anglais jaws. He’d show these Anglais what a French Canadian had in his fist.

  “Attention!” shouted an English voice. Bérubé was paralysed by these words. The sergeant had given an order: Bérubé, simple soldier, was hypnotised.

  “Let’s kill’em!”

  These words brought Bérubé back to life. The soldier without rank obeyed as he knew how. He struck out at the villagers as though his life were in danger. He had to hit harder than the people from the village and harder than the Anglais if he wanted anyone to respect him.

  Little by little the villagers lost the battle. Bloody, burning with fever, humiliated, disgusted, swearing, they went after each other, and one after the other they came to, defeated, their heads in the snow.

  Outside, the villagers continued to threaten. “You’re not getting our Corriveau!”

  The sergeant ordered the Anglais and Bérubé to go out and end the brawl.

  Under the gray light of the moon, in the cold air that seemed to be bursting into pieces like a thin skin of ice, the little war refused to be extinguished. It calmed down, then all at once burst out again, on all sides. People were twisted with pain, groaning, swearing, weeping with impotence.

  Suddenly, a shot — dry, like the crack of a whip.

  Henri had run towards Anthyme’s house, pursued by Corriveau’s coffin which was following him through the night like a starving dog.

  A soldier appeared before him. He thought the soldier wanted to arrest him and take him back to the war.

  He fired.

  The scuffle was over. The Anglais picked up the wounded man, carried him into the house and laid him out on the kitchen table. The soldier was dead.

  The Anglais carried the table and the soldier into the living room, across from Corriveau’s coffin.

  “It’s very sad,” said Mother Corriveau; “I have no more candles.

  Everyone got down on their knees. The Anglais prayed in their language for their compatriot. The villagers prayed in French Canadian for their Corriveau. Bérubé didn’t know whether he should pray in English for the Anglais or in French Canadian for Corriveau. He started to recite the words of a prayer he had learned in school. “Au fond tu m’abimes, Seigneur, Seigneur…”

  He didn’t go on. The villagers were looking at him with hatred, the hatred they felt for a traitor. Because he had fought with the Anglais against the people of his village, Bérubé had become an Anglais to them. He didn’t have the right to pray for Corriveau: their hard looks told him that. So Bérubé decided to pray in English. “My Lord! Thou…”

  The Anglais turned towards him. In their eyes Bérubé read that they would not tolerate a French Canadian praying for an Anglais. Bérubé left.

  Several bottles of cider were abandoned on the floor, open. He grabbed one and drank it. The cider gurgled, poured down his cheeks onto his chest. Then he went up to the bedroom where Molly was sleeping, threw his clothes across the room, tore off the covers, and threw himself onto Molly, without even bothering to wake her up.

  “Ma ciboire d’Anglaise. I’ll show you what a French Canadian is.”

  She dreamed that a knife was tearing her stomach open. She started. Then, reassured, she pretended to be asleep.

  Bérubé grew agitated, frantic; he sweated, whimpered, kissed, embraced. He hated.

  “Those crucifix d’Anglais sleep all the time. No wonder they have such small families. And when the Anglais make a war they come and look for the French Canadians.”

  Bérubé had spoken out loud. Molly understood. She smiled. Slowly, she caressed his back. He shivered.

  “That ciboire will be the death of me…”

  Molly mocked him. “Are you asleep, darling?”

  Some of the villagers felt an urgent need for sleep. They lay down three or four to a bed, or on the braided rugs, or on the bare floor, or a fur coat. Several were sitting in chairs, another was on his knees before Corriveau and the Anglais. But most got through the night as though it had been daylight. The night passed quite peacefully. They chatted, exchanged memories, repeated the adventures that are always told on such occasions, counted the people who had disappeared, recalled Corriveau’s deeds and gestures, ate tourtières, drank cider, prayed, pinched a passing bottom, made up stories, choked with laughter, and went back to their prayers, the tears coming to their eyes: such injustice to die at Corriveau’s age while suffering old people were begging the Lord to call them to him. They blew their noses, wiped their foreheads, cursed the war, prayed God that the Germans would not come to destroy their village, asked Mother Corriveau for another piece of tourtière, reasurred Henri who was desperate at having killed a soldier. “It was a case of legitimate self-defence. Have a drink! War’s war.” The women were sad to see their dresses in such a pitiful state.

  The soldiers kneeling by their colleague dead at his duty were so attentive to their prayers that God himself seemed to be at their side.

  “Vieille pipe de Christ!” said Anthyme. “Those damn protestants know how to pray as well as the French Canadians!”

  Mother Corriveau announced that the time had come to form the cortege and go to mass and the burial of her son.

  Henri watched over the soldier he had struck down. The others followed Corriveau’s coffin, carried on the shoulders of the Anglais and of Bérubé, whose services had been requisitioned.

  Henri was afraid. He had deserted because he didn’t like the idea of death, and now he was obliged to keep company with a dead man, a dead man killed by Henri himself. He was not afraid of punishment. That was war. During a war you are not punished for killing. Henri was quite happy that the Anglais had not a
ttacked him in peacetime: then, Henri would have been punished.

  He saw his body swinging at the end of a rope, suspended from a scaffold planted in the snow that went on as far as the eye could see, and his body had become an icicle; if someone had touched it his body would have tinkled and broken into splinters. Henri was cold; the wind whistled as it moved a dry dust that came to brush against his body, oscillating at the end of its rope. Henri was cold; he buttoned the sweater he had borrowed from Arthur.

  It was the idea of being hung from a rope over the snow in the cold that made him tremble: it was a cold fear. He was afraid of this house where he had a dead man for company. He laid his shotgun across his knees. He did not want to pray for the Anglais. He kept quiet, waiting.

  The wind was trying to take off the roof. Nails were crackling, beams were twisting and whining. Like a child, Henri was afraid to be alone with this wintry music. He wished that there was someone with him. Then he would not have been afraid. In fact, he did have someone with him, but it was a dead man and that made Henri ten times more alone. With a live companion Henri could have talked, shared some tobacco. But a dead man doesn’t talk or smoke.

  Henri listened. “What does a dead man think about under his white sheets? Does he hate the person that killed him? A dead man, if he’s damned like this vierge of a protestant, does he burn inside before he’s buried? Dead men get mad at the living. It’s the dead who put the fires of hell into barns; you often see it: a house that bursts into flames all of a sudden, without reason, that’s hellfire. There are dead men who walk in the walls of houses too. We cheer ourselves up and say it’s winter that’s making the houses whine, but it’s dead men… As long as we haven’t prayed enough to rescue their souls from purgatory, the dead come back to earth begging for prayers, and if we don’t understand they spread trouble to make us think about them.”

  Was it Corriveau climbing around in the walls?

  Henri tightened his grip on the rifle. He wouldn’t fire at the soul of a French Canadian. He wasn’t afraid of Corriveau’s soul.

  But the Anglais… perhaps the Anglais would take advantage of his death to revenge himself for not succeeding in wiping out the French Canadians. Henri tightened his grip again: he was ready to shoot.

  “If he comes I’ll let him have a bullet right through the heart.”

  All the beams in the house were whining. Henri remembered an evening when he had been lost in the forest. Everything was so damp that it was impossible to light a fire. A soft, heavy wind had come up. Trees, big hundred-year-old spruce, waved their arms and sang like so many souls in distress. Afterwards, Henri did not know if it was trees he had heard or souls.

  Perhaps it would calm his imagination if he stared fixedly at the Anglais. When you see someone motionless in front of you you know he isn’t moving. A dead man doesn’t move.

  He was reassured. He was no longer afraid. The Anglais under his sheet was as well-behaved as a stick of wood. Even if all of a sudden the sheet moved, Henri was not afraid. He was not afraid because it was winter, and the wind could come in through a crack in the window, strong enough to make the sheet Mother Corriveau had thrown over the Anglais tremble.

  The sheet lifted, and some hair emerged. Henri fired.

  He was out of the house already, running in the snow.

  Henri had killed the Corriveau’s cat.

  The priest was talking. When he opened his mouth his tongue looked like a toad that did not dare to jump.

  “Veni, vidi, vici, Caesar wrote; Caesar, who like Corriveau, this boy of our parish, practised the most noble profession of arms — that most noble profession after the profession of holiness that is practised by your priests. It was of a military truth that he was speaking. If he had spoken of a human truth Caesar would have written veni, vidi, mortuus sum: I came, I saw, I died.

  “My brothers, never forget that we live to die and we die to live.

  “The short time of life on earth, this short time is far too long because we have enough time to damn ourselves several times over. Let us be careful that one day Christ does not get tired of wiping out, of washing our consciences; let us be careful that, seeing the deluge of our sins, he does not spill on your heads, my brothers, the fires of hell, just as he spilled on them, through the hand of his priest, the holy waters of baptism. Perhaps the war, at this moment, is a little like the fires of hell that God is pouring over the old countries which are known for their disbelief in the teachings of the Church.

  “Life on earth is far too long for many of the faithful who damn themselves for all eternity. Even some of my dear parishioners have been damned, are damning themselves and will walk for all eternity on the poisonous snakes of hell, on the scorpions of hell (they look like little lobsters, but there are big ones too, and they bite); their bodies will be filled with leprosy, the leprosy of sin as it can be seen in pagan countries; they will wander, these damned souls, through all eternity in flames that burn without consuming.

  “That is why we must bless God for having come among us to seek the soul of our young Corriveau who, since he is dead, will no longer offend God and the saints. Our son Corriveau, after a life that only God can judge — but God is a fair judge and pitiless, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good — our son Corriveau, dead in a holy way, fighting the war against the Germans.

  “My brothers, this black catafalque you see before you and under which our son Corriveau has been placed, you will all enter it one day as Corriveau has entered it today. For you as for him the six torches of the angels of the catafalque will be lit, symbolising the flames that purify the sinner, these flames to which you will submit because of your sinful voluptuous nature. You will submit to the flames of hell if you do not live like the angels who carry them. Do not lose sight, my brothers, of this holy symbol of the church.

  “Because you are men and women, because the flesh is weak, you are condemned to perish in the flames of hell, to perish without perishing unless God in his infinite goodness forgives your offences.

  “My brothers, every day of your lives, think, think several times a day, that this catafalque that you will all come to will be the gate of hell if you do not have a perfect contrition for your faults, even for your venial faults, for God, all-powerful and immensely perfect, could not tolerate even a venial imperfection.

  “If you were in Corriveau’s place this morning, Corriveau who died like a saint defending his religion against the devil disguised as Germans, would you be saved?

  “I, your priest, to whom God has given the privilege of knowing, through holy confession, the most intimate secrets of your consciences, I know, God permits me to know that there are several among you, blasphemers, immodest, fornicators, violators of God’s sixth commandment which forbids sins of the flesh, drunkards, and you, women, who refuse the children that God would give you, women who are not happy with the ten children God has entrusted to you, and who refuse to have others, women who threaten by your weakness the future of our Catholic faith on this continent; I know that without Christ, who dies every day on the altar when I celebrate the holy mass, I know that you would be damned.

  “Let us pray together for the conversion of our sheep who have strayed…”

  Mother Corriveau was weeping; it was true, then that her son was saved!

  Arsène was also the gravedigger. For him a death in the village was a gift from God, because he sold a pig to the stricken family and also dug a grave. For a long time now his son, Philibert, had been helping him with his work.

  As a child, Philibert used to follow his father with his little shovel on his shoulder as he went to the cemetery. Arsène was proud of the child. “I’ll make a good worker out of him.” At this time Philibert was so small he could not get out of the grave by himself. Arsène would hoist him up in his arms, laughing. At times he would amuse himself by leaving the boy alone in the grave, pretending to abandon him there. In the pit the child would cry, calling to his father until he seemed about to bur
st. Arsène would not answer: he was seeing to other tasks. When he came back Philibert would often be asleep. Arsène picked up a handful of wet earth and threw it in his face. The child woke up, bewildered.

  “So, lazybones, asleep on the job?”

  Arsène would bend over the grave, hold out his arms, lift up the child. He leaped to his father’s neck and kissed him, furiously. Arsène replied, “A real female, this little baptême; affectionate.”

  It was of such good times past that Arsène was thinking as Philibert declared, from the bottom of the grave, “This ground is frozen like Christ’s shit.”

  Hearing him, Arsène brandished his shovel and threatened him. “You little foulmouth, I’ll teach you to have some respect for holy things.”

  He stuck his shovel in the ground, came up to his son, and sunk his boot in the boy’s behind. The blow was painless because Philibert was used to it. He turned to his father calmly, “I’m not defending myself because you’re my father, but every time you kick me I think how I’m itching to dig your grave.”

  These words shook Arsène more than a blow from a fist. For a moment, he was stunned. Arsène was no longer the father of a child, but of a man. Philibert had become a man. Time had certainly passed quickly.

  “You’re right, son. The ground is as hard as frozen Saint-Chréme.”

  “The ground is as hard as a knot in the wood of the crucifix.”

  “It’s as hard as the Pope’s mattress.”

  At each oath father and son bent over with laughter in the grave they had almost finished digging. If they had not had the walls of the grave for support they would have collapsed, they were laughing so hard.

  “Son, listen to me. Now you’re a man. You know how to talk like a man. Listen to me. Because you’re a man I promise never to boot you up the ass again, except in special circumstances.”

  “Am I really a man?”

  “Don’t be so innocent — you think I haven’t noticed you’re like a little stallion in the spring?”