Adolphe heard the pronouncement on the parade ground with a thousand other soldiers. He joined in the spontaneous cheering, yelling louder than he thought physically possible. The shifting, confusing scene of reports and counterreports, the strain of waiting during the last two months, the anxiety over international events too large to ignore and not small enough to understand, now resolved, self-evident, into parade-ground euphoria. And for the first time since the May dance, Adolphe felt free of the irritating question that had never left him, the one put forward casually by that photographer on that lovely late day now lost forever except in the picture (Who had the photo? He should like to see it again): the Kaiser had built up the army—so simple now; if Adolphe had only been able to answer the fellow at the time—because he knew, with royal foresight, as early as that fine spring, that Germany would be called on to go to war and had to be ready.
The photographer’s question about the 800,000 troops had torn a hole in Adolphe without his even being aware of it. It had altered everything—the May dance, Alicia, the daily work on his father’s farm, the evening readings of Goethe and the Bible. Nothing remained intact after the photographer had poured in his ear the possibility that collective higher-ups were moving and plotting events outside Adolphe’s control and not necessarily in his best interest. The photographer’s suggestion—that the will of Germany might not, after all, be just a benevolent extension of Adolphe’s own hopes and wishes—was the wound that had left him open to infection from Peter. It alone, he felt sure, had led him into his recent foolishness.
And thinking of that foolishness there on the parade ground, Adolphe turned from joy to self-conscious shame. As soon as his fellow infantrymen took time out from their own exaltation, they were sure to notice him and wonder what sort of emissary for the German Will he’d make abroad. His battalion would not want to be represented by a rhymester and clown, holy or otherwise.
Adolphe at once stopped his wild jumping, tucked in his shirt, checked his nose for visible snot, and waited passively for an officer to come up and tell him that he, of course, could not go to the front, but would be shot or held in the brig for the war’s duration. Instead, several nearby soldiers began battering him with their shoulders, saying, “Germany.” The fellow immediately behind him jumped on his back and gave him a packhorse spur in the flanks, shouting, “Paris! Calais! London!” Another voice explained excitedly that the letters in the names Frederick Barbarossa and Kaiser Wilhelm summed to the same value using some complex numerological scheme.
Slowly, it occurred to Adolphe that he was being given another chance. Either by the wisdom of the authorities or by accident in the general uproar, he had been absolved; the great campaign restored him to a state of grace. Never again anything but blameless. He began to cry, and it only increased his joy to find that he could will the tears to stop.
Redemption was the order of the day. In England, another boy, Rupert Brooke, hurrahed in the harvest and welcomed the baptism of
. . . swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
The celebration of boys about to come into their heritage washed Adolphe cleaner than he had been since a child of six, when he had tried to stop the cook from slaughtering farm animals. He felt a forgotten wholeness, each part of his self in concord with every other. The solution to the photographer’s challenge had been at hand all along, and it only took his choice to see it. The answer was as simple and pleasant as relieving a full bladder: if the state’s will was not his, then his will had to do the bending. He had to dissolve the part into the whole, after months of insisting that the whole conform.
Everywhere across the parade ground, boys arrived at the same revelation. Soon the commanding officer reined in the celebration, which had become a shade too Gallic in effusion. He conducted the now-homogeneous lot of farmers in a rendition of “Now Thank We All Our God,” and the antique tune gave the impression that the confederation of petty principalities had dissolved into empire centuries instead of only years before.
Adolphe strained to hear the hymn’s cadence. The parade ground was so large, populated with so many singers that it took the tune—traveling about 1176 feet per second this 78-degree day—almost two full seconds to travel from the front of the reviewing stands to where Adolphe stood. Rather than forming a good, national unison, the hymn propagated through the mass of voices from its epicenter. Yet the lag did not trouble Adolphe; the important thing was that his clear tenor, so lately wasted on satirical broadsides, now joined the melody in a common urgency: a man should try to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
From his parade-ground awakening on, Adolphe carried a mental checklist with him at all times that imparted an air of gravity to even his smallest actions. People began to take him for a fellow with much schooling because of how long it took him to do even trivial things. He picked his teeth as if giving a refutation of Thomist philosophy. Yet his behavior, for all his deliberation, was in fact simpler than ever: before doing anything from cleaning his rifle to defecating, he merely asked himself how he could act to give an observing Frenchman the most shame at not being German.
So he rejoiced on hearing that the Schlieffen Plan did away with the reserve, calling for every corps to take up an active combat position. With this spirit he marched ponderously into Belgium in the wake of those horse cavalry and sabers intended to shame six Belgian divisions and gun emplacements off the map by sheer casual waste of troops. And with this spirit, waiting on a Flemish field—the same field as appeared in a thousand van Eycks, Memlings, and van der Weydens but, most recently, in one Bosch—he wrote the letter informing on his brother.
‘Dolphe reported his brother as a favor to Peter. Such peace had come to him since resolving his internal debate that he felt compelled to spread the feeling to the Belgians, the French, and most of all to his brothers Peter and Hubert. Peter had the old Jan Kinder insatiability, the old argument of state and self stamped on his face: the arched brow bone at odds with the equine nose. Adolphe could help Peter to a parade-ground reconciliation. Even Hubert, although not a Kinder, still confused on politics, could find great peace, and ‘Dolphe would help him to it when he got the boy’s forwarding address.
He wrote to his love, Alicia, all deceptions now forgiven, with a missionary’s zeal. He tried to use his fifth-grade vocabulary to describe how purgative was the serious responsibility of being inside a new country. For Adolphe, the son of Jan Kinder only in the congenital sense, had never traveled outside his farm’s district. Until this walking tour of the Belgian interior, his trip down the muddy road to the May Fair had held all the exotica of the conquest of Peru.
He struggled to write, against the dual barrier of illiteracy and marching formation, about how the war was a preventative, a final, natural ascent into a new world order, a simplification of borders, and an elimination of the old, violent ways of national states. As he saw it, both Germany and Belgium stood to gain from this mutual trade agreement. With grammar corrected and syntax smoothed, the same ideas made the rounds in every home-front newspaper.
At home, Alicia had at last caught up with her own fiction. Although only ten days late with her period, she knew that her body had finally fallen in step with her ruse. She read Adolphe’s first letter from a foreign country out loud, as if her fetus could find nothing more fascinating than its father’s theory of nations, his pallid prose description of 200,000 men in gray suits on a dirty road:
We wait for some men to repair a few gasoline engines in trucks that have stalled, blocking the column. Peter should be here. He says he can fix any auto in four and a half minutes. He lies, because our vehicles, at least, are very complicated and don’t like to run very long. They say the engines came from America, but I don’t see h
ow that could be, on account of the Atlantic Ocean. They say England won’t fight and the Turks are with us. And so, Dear Alicia. I remain your love, Adolphe. Go to my parents if you need them.
All was set for the first large engagement, the Battle of the Frontiers. The six Belgian divisions, although pushed aside, had badly upset the German timetable. Now the Germans faced seventy-four allied divisions—a million and a half men. To Adolphe and his equally uninformed comrades, the engagement stood for the whole war. Despite his careful adoption of the German General Will, Adolphe would not be involved in the battle. On August 15, a few days before the action that would be inconclusive in every respect except in taking 300,000 lives, a hidden command yanked Adolphe’s untrained section from the front and earmarked it as an occupation force.
For the invaders found the Germanifying of Belgium more than they bargained for. The inhabitants of this insignificant and annoying country resisted the acquisition of Kultur for some reason that the Germans neither anticipated nor understood. The resistance ranged from refusing to make dinner conversation with quartered officers to destroying supply dumps and communication lines. The Belgians even stooped to the criminal—shooting at German soldiers from hidden places. These actions the Germans found unforgivable. In each occupied town, the conquerors posted handbills declaring the actions wholly outlawed and punishable without trial. The obstinate Belgians ignored even these appeals to reason.
Initially, the German occupation force comprised mostly men in their forties and fifties, too old for the front but not without worth in the war effort. Fully mature, these men could serve as arbiters of taste and order, exemplars, living proof of the superiority of the new ways over the old. And naturally, a fellow could use guns against unarmed civilians well into a ripe old age.
But when the acts of terrorism continued, the aged caretakers met their match. Although it meant depleting the active combat arm, the German command had no recourse except to beef up the occupation force with units from the line. First went the July draftees, who proved insufficient. The following week the two-month trainees, including Adolphe, were pulled from the advance and sent back.
To be on a dusty road in one’s first foreign country, only a good day’s walk from one’s second; to spend every hour drunk on adrenaline; to hear bullets on three sides, and not know whose had the upper hand; to listen daily to how the precipitous campaign, the one that would end war for good, was about to begin; to stand among thousands of newborn; to dissolve one’s small self in the stink of dense squares of infantry; to go unwashed for days; to shit in hand buckets, feeling as if the body had never had so wonderful a purging; to have come so far since three months ago in May; to feel, in short, that all history led up to and would culminate in nothing short of a useful death, and then just as suddenly to be found wanting, guilty on the technicality of inexperience, and to be assigned to a post amounting to little more than a glorified police box is bitter. The combination inoculated Adolphe against his brief flirtation with history. Deprived of certain destiny, diverted into a man-made lagoon the instant before flowing into the cold ocean, Adolphe reached his trigger point and began the final change that would make him, despite his unusual end, a more than representative Face of Our Time.
Those at the front had only death to deal with. The interior lines, on the other hand, had to cope with What If. I might have been there; I should have been there; why wasn’t it me? To those who have at last touched tragedy—the bankrupt, the automobile victim, the fellow put to use by his nation—these, even if crippled or killed, have gone through the thing, replaced horror with experience. To these people, the dreaded trumps are played, the uncertainty removed, the little scene over. Public and private make their local compromise, and the sufferer can go on living, stripped of concern, in a postmortem world. But to read the daily casualty lists and honor rolls from the relative security of a small town behind lines holds more horror. One habituates to the worst of tragedies and expends it. But imagination goes on, varied, insatiable, offering no accommodation.
Adolphe’s sufferings exceeded any he might have sustained at the front because they grew unconfined in his imagination. The sketchy, elliptical rewrites in the day’s press, following the rigid German guidelines for battle reportage, left him enough room to maim himself many times over each hour. So Adolphe settled into occupation, with the front moving farther away daily. He might have survived a pitched battle of fact, but stood no chance against one of fabrication.
Staff assigned Adolphe’s section to a town called Petit Roi, population eight thousand, in Belgian Limburg. They stripped the group of trainees of potentially valuable officers for return to the front. Four older men remained to supervise the two hundred boys’ pacification of the village. The boys thus were on their own in converting the local populace.
The unit went to work at once issuing proclamations. Adolphe’s first job was to mix the cornstarch paste for sticking these orders, and amendments to orders, and amendments to amendments on every vacant square inch in Petit Roi. In one week, the town went from plaster to newsprint, a surrealist’s kingdom. Print everywhere—on buses and cars, inside and out; on lampposts, so that one had to walk a small orbit to read one line; on the sides of houses, shops, and churches; even on sidewalks and streets, for those who looked down when walking.
A citizen of Petit Roi—renamed, by proclamation, Königen—needed only to stand still for print to come into view. The gist of all these congressionally worded charters, manifestos, articles, and clauses was that the occupation force could do whatever it pleased without the benefit of proclamation. Natives gathered at the freshest issues—pasted on top of older handbills, building up a paleontologist’s dream—and shook their heads grimly.
—Jo. Says here that all business transactions must be conducted in German or Flemish.
—Now how in hell am I going to do that? It took me thirty years to get my cows to understand French.
‘Dolphe’s role in the war soon grew beyond that of paste mixer. With a blank check to rewrite local politics, the occupation force kept on as much of Town Hall as had the good sense to collaborate. They deposed the other officials, replacing them with their own number. Catching the spirit of politics, they created several new offices in the process, naming Adolphe Contraband Council. This meant he had to go door to door, systematically checking for proclaimedly illegal material.
He checked for food hoards, subversive literature, French literature, wireless equipment, and especially firearms, explosives, and homemade weapons. Adolphe wrote:
My Alicia chestnut, not only do they resist us but they even hate us. I cannot understand; we are fairer than fair to these folk. Yet reports keep coming in from villages like ours that civilians have actually fired on German soldiers, there only for keeping order! I cannot believe it.
BY “CANNOT BELIEVE,” he meant that anticipating was worse than taking a slug in the back.
On his rounds, Adolphe uncovered enough evidence to aid belief. He took the town’s manifest—supplied by the Council of Records and Information, another nineteen-year-old set up in Town Hall—and went house to house, a traveling salesman, checking off each visit. At almost every place, he found some device that could be construed as a weapon: antique fowling pieces, handmade powder-firing lead pipes, farm tools mounted on poles, even piles of sharpened sticks.
Adolphe was incredulous. No one could have serious hopes of using these against technological weapons. Even an untrained child with a carbine could hold off a whole Petit Roi with pointed sticks. Only then did he begin to understand the extent of the town’s hatred for their cultural saviors. The townspeople stockpiled weapons without hope of using them, out of the need for some mute demonstration.
One day he arrived to check the house of what the roster had as the Després family. Adolphe was nervous; he had learned to expect trouble in proportion to how French the surname sounded. But this family had gone out, all except a young daughter, perhaps sixteen. He aske
d her a few questions in his gentlest Contraband Council’s manner. She would not cooperate.
Adolphe was hurt. Normally he would have searched the place without stopping to ask questions. He had already wasted several minutes trying to appease her, and only because she was young and female. And even though he gave her this special attention, she insisted on being as obstinate as every other Belgian. But he had already committed himself; now he would not search the place until he had her as an accomplice. He slammed down his hand on the nearest solid piece of furniture.
—Enough nonsense. You’ve read the handbills? It says there that you have to cooperate with me.
—What is it that you want?
—I don’t want anything, only you have to be polite to me, as to another person, or this whole thing doesn’t make any sense.
—I can be polite, if that’s what you want.
—It’s not what I want, it’s what you have to be. And not because it says on the proclamations, but because you want to. One person to another.
—I can be polite, but I cannot want to be polite. Is there anything else you’d like of me?
—That’s a very French answer. The war is taking care of answers of that sort.
The girl stood still and said nothing.
—What’s your name?
—Comelia Després.
He checked the list. She was not lying. He looked at her. Docile, she was not perhaps as attractive as his Alicia, who had not written him in some time. He tried to think, to decide if taking this woman would be proper behavior for a representative of the German Will. On the one hand, it would be forceful, determined, and a victory of the dominant over the weak. On the other hand, it did have an element of crudity, of low behavior, and probably would not go very far to improve diplomatic relations in the village. The war was to clear the way for the New Man. This new fellow would take what he wanted, but at the same time would be above base desires. It was all too confusing, as confusing as his being consigned to this role behind lines.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 15