The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  Then he summoned Helen, and, saying nothing of what had passed, they offered the imperial envoys a banquet and beds for the night before they continued on their way. As soon as they vanished among the trees, Fabrician told Helen that the emperor’s, or rather Gandolphus’s, troops, were probably about to attack. Two or three weeks later the lookouts on the edge of the forest galloped up to report that detachments of armed men were moving in the direction of Balkh.

  Balkh owed its strength to its position at a point beyond which the forest became impenetrable. The site was of almost unbroken flatness, with just a few shallow depressions whose streams emptied into ponds or lakes. But the trees were already so thick that it was difficult for troops to move. Fabrician organized the defense of the city around the resources supplied by the forest. He had moats dug and lined with pikes and wolf traps, then covered with leaves and branches. Huge nets were spread among the trees in such a way that one man, releasing a spring, could enmesh a whole detachment. Oak trees were chopped so that they were only just left standing and the slightest touch would bring them crashing down. Ravening bears and wolves were shut in an enclosure ready to be loosed on the attackers. Palisades of the stoutest wood were put up all round the outskirts of Balkh to stave off the assault until reinforcements arrived. While taking all these precautions, Fabrician had also sent off a messenger with orders to find Roderick at all costs, as soon as the difficulties of the journey permitted, and to tell him of the dangers threatening Balkh, Helen, and Simeon.

  Gandolphus’s army was large and well equipped, but through Fabrician’s snares they lost at least a hundred men in a few days. Fabrician, surrounded by a handful of old men and youths, had brought Simeon with him almost into contact with the enemy. Simeon loved trickery and violence and had a passion for weapons, but Fabrician found him less apt and inclined for war—this war at any rate—than for pleasure and distraction. But, in fact, there was no major confrontation. The enemy’s superiority was so crushing that Fabrician did all he could to avoid a pitched battle. The ground kept giving way beneath the assailant, and the forest echoed with oaks crashing down on terrified groups of enemy soldiers. A week or so after the first skirmishes, scouts from Balkh were still finding parties of Gandolphus’s men half buried in the ground and hidden by the branches. Their companions had deserted them, and they lay there with broken limbs, covered in blood, and gnawed at by wild animals or ants. When the enemy finally reached the fortifications improvised around Balkh itself, where Helen and Fabrician had spared no effort to organize resistance and keep up the morale of the defenders, the attacking force had already lost a good deal of its strength and spirit. But for the besieged few the danger was still great, and there seemed to be little hope.

  Balkh resisted the invader for twenty-seven days and twenty-eight nights. The moon, which had been new at the beginning of the siege, shone brighter and brighter over nights filled with alarms and fighting, and then began to wane. It was fine May weather. The nights were still cool, but in the daytime the new buds basked in the sun. The whole forest was gay with rebirth; but lances and javelins flashed among the branches and the singing of the birds. Helen and Fabrician were everywhere at once, tending the wounded, encouraging the youngest and oldest, promising the imminent return of Roderick and his men. Though neither spoke of it, both were afraid lest the messenger had been killed or lost his way, or for some other reason had not been able to reach Roderick, who might, all unaware of the mounting danger at home, be pressing on deeper and deeper into the vast steppes of the Ossets and the Alans.

  The end of the day was not the end of anxiety. Every night Helen and Fabrician listened through the darkness for sounds threatening attack. After distributing supplies and inspecting the defenses, they would settle down again to wait. The enemy knew, too, that time was against it, and that it had to reduce the town before Roderick’s return. Each side could well imagine the hopes and plans of the other. What the besieged did not know was when the attack would begin, whether at dawn or dusk, by day or night. During the whole twenty-seven days of the siege Helen and Fabrician never slept. They waited.

  Trouble and adversity, which men fear and try to escape, unite them much more strongly than all the charms of indolence and ease. During those days and nights when they were alone, dependent just on their own resources and their own courage, a feeling of mutual trust and respect grew up between Helen and Fabrician. Fabrician, like everyone else, had always greatly admired Helen, but her unvarying nobility and simplicity now turned his admiration into a kind of devotion, so that even the thought of dying for her was not unattractive. This feeling, still hidden under a mask of detachment, eventually overcame Helen’s original dislike or even hostility toward the young priest. His constant cheerfulness, resolution, and loyalty first impressed and then moved her, and she began to fear for the life of one who took war so lightheartedly. Danger brought them together. Both, in their different ways, had always led a rigorous and often austere life, and the great peril they had faced together was for both a source of exaltation. One day Fabrician told Helen he enjoyed taking any kind of risk so long as it was for her. It was sweet to laugh at death, or to fear it only for the other. It was intoxicating to be in action. Tomorrow they would be either dead, enslaved, or victorious—there was no other alternative. The life being reborn all around them in the forest affected them too, filling them with a kind of joy in the midst of misfortune and transforming the siege into a test that had to be gone through, whether the issue were triumph or disaster. They vied with each other, and all the defenders of Balkh tried to show themselves worthy of their example. “It was an epidemic of courage,” wrote Justus Dion. “Valor and the will to resist spread like a beneficent plague sent by the gods.”

  Only Simeon stood aside. Some authors say, without very much proof, that he was on the side of Gandolphus and the attackers, who had gone to him after Fabrician rejected their proposals. Others see his attitude as a desire to avenge himself on both his father and his mother. Others again see him first and foremost as a victim. What is certain is that after a few incidents inside the besieged town—Simeon got into a fight with two soldiers, and, on another occasion, against the express orders of Helen and Fabrician, organized a sortie that was bound to fail—Simeon disappeared, and turned up again in the enemy camp. Here, again, there are various different interpretations. Some people say he was kidnapped, some that he voluntarily went over to the enemy. Legend relates that a messenger was sent to the princess saying the boy would be put to death if Balkh did not surrender. Helen’s reply is said to have been: “What does it matter? I am still young enough to have others.” This answer on the part of the mother may throw some light on the attitude of the son, in whom ingratitude and thirst for affection may have been interdependent.

  The whole incident is obscure. Later, Roderick, of course, tried to account for it in terms of deception and violence, but the theory of deliberate treachery on the part of Simeon has retained many supporters. It is perhaps not impossible that, jealous of both Helen and Fabrician, Simeon aimed at bringing together Roderick and Gandolphus against the defenders of Balkh. Simeon’s hypothetical plans and vague projects were long treated as adolescent dreams or the whims of a mischievous child, but recently they have given rise to a substantial body of serious work.[3] We must not omit to mention the explanations derived from psychoanalysis and depth psychology, which depict a child terrified of his father, separated by a lie from his mother, and among clever enemies who dangled before his eyes a picture of himself as a hero destined to save the family heritage for the general good, despite and in opposition to his parents.

  All the historians more or less favorable to Simeon and anxious to excuse him have insisted on what lay behind the horrors of war and the glory of the resistance in Balkh. If the siege went on, life went on also. What triumphed in the doomed city, exalted by its own valor and by the imminence of death, were not merely noble sentiments of mutual trust, but, rather, normal human natur
e and passion. It took a long time and much violence for anyone to admit the truth, especially Helen and Fabrician. Perhaps it was Simeon who first saw or guessed the powerful new bond between them that made them scorn danger and rise to such heights—perhaps he saw it even before they did so themselves. But what was the use of going on trying to deceive themselves or others? Full of joy and terror, Helen and Fabrician discovered they were in love. The war and the siege were now only an excuse for them not to part, and to enjoy at last, alone, away from everyone and everything, the glimpse of happiness paradoxically made possible for them by the encircling armies. Could that have been the secret reason that made Simeon go over to Gandolphus’s camp? Though one or two authors, like Prosper de Barante and J.-J. Ampère, continue to resist the evidence, the great majority of historians nowadays agree that Helen was passionately in love with the young priest. Their love, as often happens, was hidden at first under detachment and irony, then under mutual admiration and unspoken understanding; then danger and the nearness of death made it burst out into the light of day. He was about five or six years younger than she, but everything combined to make them feel they were made for each other. Neither had ever known much happiness. There is ample evidence of the affection and esteem they came to feel for each other. Their life was to end there, deep in the forests in which they were both foreigners. It was spring, and between them and death there still remained a few nights of courage and happiness. Before dying together they wished to live together. Danger, youth, even fear and anxiety gave them the right, and helped to throw them together.

  The encircled city presents a strange image of man’s dreams and man’s limitations, his greatness and his illusions. The title of Apollinaire’s short play, Balkh, or A Brief Happiness, summarizes the theme of a whole line of plays about the siege and the lovers of Balkh, from Lope de Vega to Hugo, and from Shakespeare to Maurice Barrès and André Suarès. For Dante and Montaigne, Helen and Fabrician were symbols of human dignity and weakness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century they became archetypes of the romantic hero. Chateaubriand drags them into his Genius of Christianity, with which, as Maurice Levaillant and André Maurois have wittily demonstrated, they have little to do. Byron eulogizes them; Stendhal obviously uses them as the basis of one of his most successful Italian Chronicles, in which Balkh is weirdly transmogrified into a Tuscan princedom; Lautréamont himself evokes them magnificently in the famous imaginary conversation between the forest lovers surrounded by wolves and bears. True, a few pages further on, thirsting as always after life’s contradictions, he praises in the same breath “viper-faced Simeon” and “his infernal need for cruelty and the infinite.” But fame, even posthumous fame, is always dearly bought. It was not long before reaction set in. In about 1918 or 1919, in Switzerland, anonymous and undated, there appeared one of the masterpieces of erotic literature. This little, oblong yellow book, recently reprinted,[4] definitely not for the general reader, is a skillful broadside against conformism in love and war. It has the charming title of Go F——Yourselves, Helician and Fabrine, and in it the exploits of the lovers of Balkh outrage respectability in a style altogether dazzling.[5] Such are the splendors of literature and history.

  But let us set aside these cumbersome chroniclers, and imagine, behind the inventions of legend and print, the spring nights around the besieged city. Nothing stirred in the forest. All seemed to sleep under the ancient oaks, changeless through seasons and through centuries, under the impassive moon. Nothing moved, but all trembled: the trees, the wind, the buds, the leaves, anxious wide-eyed does, birds on the branches, Gandolphus’s warriors tossing impatiently in their felt mantles as they lay at the mossy foot of oak or birch. They came from Onessa and Aquileus, from plain and desert. They knew nothing of either Helen or Fabrician. They were paid to kill, and that was what they would try to do. A bit of human history was being enacted in an almost virgin setting. The weather was fine. Roderick was galloping on the margin of steppe and forest. A young man rode after him to try to bring him back in time. Simeon had vague dreams, in one of Gandolphus’s tents, between two of Gandolphus’s men. Was he a prisoner? Guest of honor? Ally? He loved neither father nor mother, and would take his revenge on them by saving, for himself and despite them, all that they would have lost. Mysterious threads led far from the forest itself to Gandolphus and Thaumas, and to Basil, pondering in his habitual pose, chin in hand, on the destiny of the Empire. All were dreaming. Of their lives, their loves, what they would do with their money, their land, their future, or the world. Some did not dream—the dead, or the dying. A wolf had leapt at their throat and they had failed to fight him off with their javelins. Or traps had opened under them and their blood had slowly ebbed away. Or they were still imprisoned by a net or an oak tree that they did not see falling until it was too late—they were in a leafy cage which kept out the light of sun or moon. They had broken legs and hips. They did not even cry out. They shut their eyes and uttered the low groans that make it a little easier to die. Such is war. Such is life. As Simeon put it at the sight of three corpses mangled by traps and wolves, “Ah, well, to live is to die.”

  And in the besieged city itself? Inside Balkh, too, nothing moved. Nothing moved, but all was alert. Children of eight or nine stared into the night to see if it really slept. Old women who could not sleep crawled secretly up to the ramparts to take a drop of goat’s milk to their grandsons. Two soldiers who were homosexuals made love under the boughs. Two soldiers who were gamesters threw knucklebones into the air. Two soldiers who were tired slept for a while before dying. It was fine. Roderick galloped on the margin of steppe and forest. If only the messenger might find him and bring him back! If only the messenger might never find him and never bring him back! Helen and Fabrician thought only of loving and dying. By now they were defending Balkh only because they wanted to go on loving. They would have liked to live together, but would rather die than be separated by victory. They had defended Balkh for Roderick. They had defended Balkh for Simeon. They had defended Balkh for its own sake. And now they were defending it for themselves and their own happiness, against Simeon and probably against Roderick too. All they asked of life now, and they asked it passionately, was a little time in which to love. If only Roderick would suddenly appear in the midst of the forest! But their lips and hands, their bodies and souls had already answered—if only Roderick would go farther and farther away, into the steppe, far from the forest! And if only we might die! They listened for the sound of a familiar horn, desperately longed for and now, suddenly, desperately dreaded. But there was nothing. Nothing but silence in the forest, and men-at-arms asleep. Then, solaced by this silent proclamation of disaster, the raised heads were lowered again to the outstretched lips, to the soft thigh, to the already bared shoulder, and the anxious bodies yielded to, harmonized with, one another. Once more, perhaps for the last time, the kiss, the slow caresses, the still and sudden flame.

  The messenger had overtaken Roderick, who was already hastening back. He had left the steppes, and was deep once more in the gloomy forest where he felt at home. But the forest was vast, and it took a long time to ride as far as Balkh. It had taken sixteen days for the messenger to catch up with Roderick. To save time, Roderick and his men returned by shorter but more difficult ways. More than one exhausted steed died under them, but in eleven days they reached their point of departure. The outward journey across the steppe and the forest—interrupted, it is true, by fighting and various successful excursions—had taken over three months. Now it was no longer possible to ride. The trees and undergrowth were too dense. So the men had to dismount and lead their horses in single file through the luxuriant wastes. But what was impenetrable they crossed, from what was inextricable they emerged. Twenty-five days after the messenger’s departure the army suddenly found itself in familiar surroundings—it was approaching Balkh. Another two days’ riding and they would be in the city.

  On the twenty-third day of the siege Gandolphus’s men lost patienc
e and went over to the attack. It began with a hail of arrows loosed on the fortifications and their defenders. Fabrician recognized the tactics of the Scythian archers Gandolphus liked to use. As the enemy drew closer, arrows were followed by javelins. Twenty men were laid low behind the ramparts. But the most pressing danger came from the flaming torches fixed to the enemy’s spears and arrows. Balkh was built entirely of wood. The same readily available material had been used not only for the cottages of the soldiers and their families, but also for the dwellings of people like Roderick and Helen, for Fabrician’s house, and for the buildings where religious ceremonies were performed and ambassadors received. Stone was scarce around Balkh and oak cost nothing. Everything came from the woods and the forest—chariots, weapons, cisterns, even shoes. Only the chief warriors used swords or lances made entirely of bronze or sometimes iron. Ordinary soldiers used mostly wooden weapons, the most common types being clubs and cudgels. The wood-handled pike or ax was comparatively rare. Only princes and chieftains were allowed to use ivory. But in the hands of the warriors of Balkh and the surrounding forest, all weapons were formidable and wrought havoc.

  One can imagine the destruction caused in a few hours in that city of wood by the brands of Gandolphus’s men. From the age of eight or nine, the boys fought in the front line of the city’s defenders. The younger ones, and the girls, were the firefighters. Little girls of six or seven, helped by broken old men who could scarcely stand, might be seen dragging buckets of water that they could hardly lift to throw on the flames. By the evening of the first day of the assault, half of Balkh was already burning.