WE WERE MOVED BY train and truck, and a few days after leaving Champagne we found ourselves back in the mountains of Alsace.
They sent us straight to the front lines. Soldiers who had just attacked were already on alert on the fire-steps, having repulsed a surprise assault by the Germans that had greeted our arrival. For the poilus the war drags on relentlessly with its long hours of guard duty and sudden dangers. We know that there will be no let-up from now on, no end to the efforts we must make. The word is that high command is planning an offensive on this front, attacking the flank of the German armies. This time we cannot count on assault troops coming up from our rear at the last moment. This one will be for us, and we know how much victory will cost . . .
Above Saint-Amarin we are holding the ridges of the Sudel and the Hartmann overlooking the Rhine valley. But I haven’t yet explored our positions. When we took over the sector, our battalion was kept in reserve. And for the last couple of weeks I have been attached to the intelligence service in the colonel’s office, where Nègre – taking advantage of someone going on leave – had got me a post. He even imagines getting me promoted to corporal. I tell him this is a ridiculous idea after five years of army life. But he is serious:
‘If you don’t have a job to go to, you could take up a career as an NCO. Your war service counts double. You only need another five years to have the right to retire with a pension. Think about it! They’re going to need good people to rebuild a career army. With a bit of luck you could soon find yourself with an adjutant’s baton!’
‘You’re very kind! But what about you, old chap, why aren’t you signing up again?’
‘I’ve got better things to do. It’s time I pretended to be an honest man so I can end my days in prosperity.’
‘And how will you set about doing that?’
‘I am going to become the most jingoistic patriot you can imagine, the scourge of the Boche, the whole bloody shebang!’
‘That’s rather out of fashion these days.’
‘Foolish boy! How else are you going to recoup your losses and get a nice return on your outlay?’
‘Oh, come on, Nègre! We’re going to tell them a bit of the truth once we get home!’
‘You’re still young, my boy! Who’ll want to hear the truth? The people who’ve profited from the war, who’ve been lining their pockets from it all the way through? What do you want anyone to do with your truth? You’re a victim, you’re a victim, who’s going to care? Where have you seen anyone showing pity for idiots? Get it into your head once and for all: in a few years’ time, that’s what we’ll look like: idiots. It’s time to change sides!’
‘Perhaps you’re right as regards people in their fifties. But the new generation will listen to us.’
‘And to think I had hopes for you! . . . Listen, you soppy idealist, the new generation will say: “They’re either trying to shock us or just drivelling.” You’re about as perceptive as mothers who really think their words of warning will keep their lovesick young daughters out of trouble.’
‘So you’ll support a new war?’
‘I’ll support whatever they like!’
‘And you’ll participate?’
‘Next time round, rest assured your old pal Nègre will be crippled by rheumatism, unfit for service, will have found himself a nice, safe position. I’ll have got myself a little trade, maybe some kind of factory, whatever, and I will be shouting: “Go on lads, on to victory, fight to the finish!”’
‘And you think that’s decent?’
‘You really have wasted these last five years! Unfortunate young man, you make me tremble with fear for you! How will you survive life?’
‘Don’t you believe that a man can have opinions and stick to them?’
‘Men’s opinions are based on the size of their bank balance. To have or not to have, as Shakespeare would say.’
‘Before the war, sure, I agree. But things will have changed. Such exceptional events must surely result in something worthy, something noble.’
‘There’s no nobility except in the face of death. Only a man who has been tested to the very depths of his soul, who has faced being blown apart by the next shell can talk of nobility.’
‘You’re being unfair to some of our leaders . . .’
‘Oh, that’s great! Be gentle with them, say thank you, slave! You know as well as I do that the leaders are just pursuing their careers, playing poker. Their reputation is at stake. So what? If they win, their name liveth for evermore. If they lose, they retire on a fat pension and spend the rest of their lives justifying themselves in their memoirs. It’s all too easy to be sincere when you make sure you’re well out of harm’s way.’
‘But even so there have been some great figures, like Guynemer and Driant.’[42]
‘Obviously there have been men of conviction and others who’ve done an honest job. Guynemer, sure! But remember that he performed way up in the heavens, before a bloody great public: the whole earth. That makes you a man to remember! How do you compare him with the poor idiot who’s come out of the depths of Pomerania singing Deutschland über alles for the greater glory of old Kaiser William, and who has understood what’s going on far too late? And what’s he got in common with the poilu who’s looking forward to getting his face ignominiously smashed in the mud with no one to see it and no one to shout about it? He’s risking everything: he’s risking his skin. What does he get out of it? Drill and parades. Once he’s back on the streets, he’s going to have to find a job. The boss will find him smelly and uncouth . . . Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won’t be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier’s life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else. Are you getting the picture?’
‘So what’s left?’
‘Nothing! That’s the whole point, absolutely nothing! Can you believe in anything after what you’ve seen? Human stupidity is incurable. All the more reason to laugh at it. Why should we care? We don’t give a damn! So let’s get back in the game, accept the old lies that keep men going. Laugh at it, for god’s sake, just laugh!’
‘But if we tell . . .’
‘Tell what? . . . You want to starve to death later on?’
‘But can’t we tell the truth about the war without taking on all the institutions of power?’
‘My boy, all the institutions lead to war. It’s the crown of the whole social order, we’ve learnt that. And since it’s the powerful who decide to go to war, and the minorities who do the fighting . . .’
‘We’ll tell them . . .’
‘Oh, you’re too much . . . Enough. I’m off to see if the Prussians are ready to go home yet.’
I share a bright and comfortable little shelter with Nègre, with a good stove. We are in a camp tucked away among the pines on a mountain slope. While my friend is off on his rounds, I’m sweeping up and chopping wood. In the evenings we prepare reports on the day on a drawing table and compare our maps of the sector with aerial photos sent by the division.
We spend our free time in animated debates, which usually leave me confused given Nègre’s passion for argument and his tendency to push logic to the limit. But our debates make no difference to our friendship. That’s the main thing.
We can feel that the end of the war is near.
Our telegraphists have been intercepting radio messages. We now know that an armistice is under discussion and that the Germans have asked for peace terms from GCHQ. It is nearly over.
At around six o’clock one morning, an artillery spotter wakes us up.
‘That’s it. The armistice takes effect at eleven o’clock.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Armistice at eleven o’clock. Official.’
Nègre sits up and looks at his watch.
‘Another five hours of war!’
He puts on his helmet and takes his cane.
‘Where are you off to?’ I ask.
‘I’m going down to Saint-Amarin. I’m deserting. I’m going to get myself under cover and I advise you to spend the next five hours at the bottom of the deepest trench you can find and not go out. Return to the womb of our mother earth and wait for delivery. We are as yet but embryos on the threshold of the greatest birth ever seen. In five hours we will be born.’
‘But what are we risking?’
‘Everything! We’ve never risked so much, we risk catching the last shell. We’re still at the mercy of an artilleryman in a bad mood, a barbarian fanatic, a mad nationalist. You don’t by chance believe that the war has killed all the halfwits? They belong to a race that will never die out. I’m sure there was a halfwit in Noah’s Ark and he was the most prolific male on God’s blessed raft! Keep your head down, I tell you . . . Cheerio! We’ll see each other again in peacetime.’
He hurries off, vanishing into the morning mist.
‘At the end of the day, he’s right,’ said the spotter.
‘Then stay here with me. There’s not much danger here.’
He lay down on Nègre’s bunk. No sounds of war disturbed the morning. We lit cigarettes, and we waited.
Eleven o’clock.
Total silence. Total astonishment.
And then a murmur rose up from the valley, answered by another from the front. A great outburst of shouting, echoing through the naves of the forest. It seemed that the whole earth was exhaling one long sigh. And that an enormous weight was falling from our shoulders. We cast off the hair shirts of anguish that mortify our chests: we are finally saved.
It is a moment that brings us back to 1914. Life rises up again like the dawn. The future opens before us like a magnificent avenue. But it is an avenue bordered by tombs and cypresses. A bitter taste mars our joy, and our youth has greatly aged.
The only goal offered to us through all these years of war was the horizon, crowned with explosions. But we knew we could never reach that goal. Gorged on the living and the dead, the soft earth seemed accursed. Young men, from the land of Balzac and the land of Goethe, whether they were taken from universities, workshops or the fields, were provided with daggers, revolvers and bayonets, and were pitched against each other, to butcher and maim in the name of an ideal which we were promised would be used wisely and well by those at the rear.
At twenty we were on the bleak battlefields of modern warfare, a factory for the mass production of corpses, where all that is asked of the combatant is that he is a unit of the immense and obscure number who do their duty and take the shells and the bullets, a single unit in the multitude that they destroyed, patiently and pointlessly, at a rate of one ton of steel per pound of young flesh.
Through all these years, when they had broken our spirits, and though we no longer had any conviction to drive us on, they sought to make us into heroes. But we saw only too well that hero meant victim. Through all these years, they demanded from us, hour after hour, the total acquiescence that no moral strength could allow us to repeat continually. Certainly many had consented to die, once or ten times over, resolutely, to have done with it all. But every time that we kept our lives, having made a gift of them, we were pursued even harder than before.
Through all these years, they forced us to gaze on the rotting, dismembered corpses of those who had been our brothers, and we could not stop ourselves thinking that these were the images of what we would be the next day. Through all these years, while we were young, healthy, and full of hopes that tortured us by their tenacity, they kept us in a kind of final agony, like a death watch for our youth. Because for us, the ones still alive today, the survivors, the moment that precedes pain and death, more terrible than pain and death, has already lasted for years . . .
And peace comes suddenly – like a burst of gunfire. Like a stroke of good fortune for a poor, exhausted man. Peace: a bed, meals, quiet nights, plans that we have still not had the time to form . . . Peace: this silence that has fallen over the lines, and fills the sky, and spreads across the whole earth, the great silence of a funeral . . . I think of the others, those in Artois, and the Vosges, and the Aisne, and Champagne, of our age, whose names we have already forgotten . . .
‘It feels really funny, doesn’t it?’ says a soldier passing by.
Our new colonel has just been told that the Germans are abandoning their lines and coming to meet us. He answers: ‘Give the order that they must not be allowed to approach. Open fire if necessary!’ He seems furious. A secretary explains: ‘He was waiting to get his general’s stars.’ He must find our joy deeply offensive.
Then we decide that we too should go down to Saint-Amarin to celebrate the armistice. We will return this evening. We doubt that the intelligence section has any more intelligence to receive or to give. Since eleven o’clock we are no longer soldiers but civilians held against our will.
We stroll down the paths joking merrily.
Vououou . . . We throw ourselves to the ground, up against the tree trunks. But instead of an explosion, we hear a roar of laughter.
‘Bloody fool!’
The man who had imitated the whistle of a shell answers:
‘You’re not used to peace yet!’
It is true. We are not used to not being afraid.
Down in Saint-Amarin, everyone is drinking, shouting and singing. Women are smiling, and getting cheers and kisses.
I know the café where we will find Nègre, and we head straight for it. He is indeed there, and it’s evident that he’s already slightly drunk. He climbs up on the table, knocking over glasses and bottles, and, to welcome us, points to the crowd of soldiers with a grand gesture:
‘And on the 1,561st day of the fight-to-the-end era, they rose from the dead, covered in lice and glory!’
‘Bravo, Nègre!’
‘Soldiers, I congratulate you, you have attained your objective: Escape.’
‘Long live Escape!’
Nègre comes down from the table, warmly embraces us, finds us seats at his table and calls the landlord:
‘Hey there, good Alsatian, wine for these thirsty victors!’
I shout above all the noise:
‘Nègre, what does Poculotte think of the events?’
‘A good question! You know I saw him? At eleven o’clock on the dot I announced myself at his residence. I’ve waited five years for that moment. “Is there something you want, sergeant?” he says, arrogant as ever. But I soon sorted him out: “My dear general, I have come to inform you that as of now we are dispensing with your services and leaving it to Providence to take care of filling the cemeteries. We further inform you that during the rest of our lives we would never like to hear any more of you or your estimable colleagues. We wish to be left in fucking peace. Peace! General, you are dismissed!”’
Six months later our regiment is marching through the suburbs of Saarbrücken, where the poilus have been wreaking romantic havoc. They have naturally been exploiting their success with the last of their energy.
On the low balcony of a little house, a pregnant woman, whose appearance and complexion reveal her nationality, gives us a rather daft smile, points to her belly, and, with amicable shamelessness, calls out:
‘Bedit Franzose!’
‘Don’t you think,’ says a soldier, ‘that they’ve been feeding us a lot of nonsense with all that stuff about “race hatred”?’