1914 (6 page)

All this has been described a thousand times, so perhaps it's not worthwhile to linger any longer over that sordid, stinking opera. And perhaps there's not much point either in comparing the war to an opera, especially since no one cares a lot about opera, even if war is operatically grandiose, exaggerated, excessive, full of longueurs, makes a great deal of noise and is often, in the end, rather boring.

11

O
NE FOLLOWING MORNING
, much like the others, snow decided to fall along with the shells—at a different rhythm, naturally, for the shells had been less plentiful than usual, only three so far that day—whereas Padioleau decided to complain.

I'm hungry, Padioleau was moaning, I'm cold, I'm thirsty and also I'm tired. Well sure, said Arcenel, just like the rest of us. But I feel very low, too, continued Padioleau, plus I've got a stomachache. It'll pass, your stomachache, predicted Anthime, we've all got one, more or less. Yes but the worst part, insisted Padioleau, it's that I can't figure out if I feel low because of the stomachache (You're beginning to piss us off, observed Bossis) or if I've a stomachache because I feel low, if you see what I mean. Fuck off, announced Arcenel.

That's when the first three shells that had flown too far, exploding uselessly behind the lines, were followed by a fourth and more carefully aimed 105-millimeter percussion-fuse shell that produced better results in the trench: after blowing the captain's orderly into six pieces, it spun off a mess of shrapnel that decapitated a liaison officer, pinned Bossis through his solar plexus to a tunnel prop, hacked up various soldiers from various angles, and bisected the body of an infantry scout lengthwise. Stationed not far from the man, Anthime was for an instant able to see all the scout's organs— sliced in two from his brain to his pelvis, as in an anatomical drawing—before hunkering down automatically and half off balance to protect himself, deafened by the god-awful din, blinded by the torrent of rocks and dirt, the clouds of ash and fine debris, vomiting meanwhile from fear and revulsion all over his lower legs and onto his feet, sunk up to the ankles in mud.

After that everything seemed just about over. As the smoke and dust gradually cleared from the trench, a kind of quiet returned, even though other massive detonations still sounded solemnly all around but at a distance, as if in an echo. Those who'd been spared stood
up fairly spattered with bits of military flesh, dirt-crusted scraps rats were already snatching off them and fighting over among the bodily remains here and there: a head without its lower jaw, a hand wearing its wedding ring, a single foot in its boot, an eye.

So silence seemed intent on returning—when a tardy piece of shrapnel showed up, from who knows where and one wonders how, as clipped as a postscript: an iron fragment shaped like a polished Neolithic ax, smoking hot, the size of a man's hand, fully as sharp as a large shard of glass. Without even a glance at the others, as if it were settling a personal score, it sped directly toward Anthime as he was getting to his feet and, willy-nilly, lopped off his right arm clean as a whistle, just below the shoulder.

Five hours later, everybody at the field hospital congratulated Anthime, showing him how they envied him this “good wound,” one of the best there was: serious, of course, crippling, but not more than many others, really, and coveted by all as one of those that ship you away forever from the front. Such was the enthusiasm of his comrades propped up on their elbows at the edge of their cots, waving their kepis—at least those who
weren't too damaged to wave—that Anthime almost didn't dare complain or weep from pain, or lament the loss of his arm, the disappearance of which he was not actually fully aware. Not fully aware either, in truth, of the pain or the state of the world in general, no more than he could envisage—looking at the others without seeing them—never being
himself
able ever again to lean on his elbows except on one side. Out of his coma and then out of what served as a surgical unit, his eyes open but focused on nothing, it simply seemed to him— although he didn't really know why—that given the laughter, there must be some reason to be happy. Reason enough for him to feel almost ashamed of his condition, again without fully understanding why: so as if he were reacting automatically to the other patients' applause, to join in the merriment he gave a laugh that came out like a long spasm and sounded like braying, which shut everyone up instanter. A serious shot of morphine then returned him to the absence of all things.

And six months after that, the folded sleeve of his jacket affixed to his right side with a safety pin, another pin anchoring a new Croix de Guerre on the other side of his chest, Anthime was strolling along a quay by the
Loire. It was Sunday again and he'd passed his remaining arm through the right arm of Blanche, who, with her left hand, was pushing a carriage containing Juliette, asleep. Anthime was in black, Blanche in mourning as well, with everything around them blending rather well with that color in touches of gray, chestnut brown, hunter green, save for the tarnished gilding on the shops, which gleamed dully in the early June sunshine. Anthime and Blanche were not saying much, except to mention briefly the news in the papers. At least you've avoided Verdun,
¹¹
she had just said, but he had not thought it advisable to reply.

After almost two years of fighting, with increased recruitment a constant drain on the country, there were even fewer people in the streets, whether it was Sunday or not. And not even many women or children anymore, given the cost of living and the difficulties in shopping, because women received only the wartime allowance at best and in the absence of husbands and brothers, many had had to find work: posting bills, delivering mail, punching tickets, or driving locomotives, when they didn't wind up in factories, armaments plants in particular. No longer going to school, the children had
plenty to keep them busy too: much in demand from the age of eleven on, they replaced their elders in businesses as well as in the fields outside the city, where they worked horses, threshed grain, cared for livestock. That left mostly the elderly, the marginal, a few invalids like Anthime, and some dogs on leashes or on the loose.

One of those strays, in the excitement of its sexual arousal by another mutt across the street on the Quai de la Fosse, ran clumsily into a wheel of the baby carriage, which teetered threateningly for an instant until a swift kick from Blanche's high heel sent the culprit off squealing. After making sure that the young woman had the situation in hand and that his niece had not awakened, Anthime watched the woebegone animal—now tacking from one curb to the other, its erection maintained but useless now that its heart's desire had vanished during the carriage incident—until it disappeared at the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie.

12

A
NIMALS, WELL,
A
NTHIME HAD
seen a lot of them, of all sorts, during those five hundred days. Because although war prefers cities—besieging, invading, bombing, burning—it is waged in large part in the countryside as well, where beasts are simply a given.

First off, the useful animals: those one works or eats or both, currently abandoned by peasants fleeing their farms turned into combat zones, their buildings ablaze, their fields cratered by shells, their poultry and livestock left behind. In theory, the territorial soldiers were responsible for rounding up these creatures, but that was easier said than done with unclaimed cattle, soon eager to return to a wild state that quickly turned them touchy, especially the bulls, vindictive and impossible to catch. Nor was it a small job for the territorials, even
those with a rural background, to gather all the sheep gone roaming along roads in ruins, the wandering pigs, the ducks, chickens, and roosters left to their own devices, the rabbits without any fixed domicile.

These now itinerant species could at least serve, on occasion, to vary the monotonous diet of the troops. Wine was no longer a problem, since it was now widely distributed by the quartermaster corps along with brandy, for the high command was increasingly convinced that inebriating its soldiers helped bolster their courage and, above all, reduce their awareness of their condition. A chance encounter one fine day with a disoriented goose, on the other hand, made a small change from yesterday's bread, cold soup, and tinned beef, and every animal so recuperated thus became a potential feast. Sometimes, driven by hunger and professionally assisted by Padioleau, who enjoyed exercising his butchering skills, Arcenel and Bossis would even carve a few ribs out of a living ox, then leave him to manage on his own. Foragers went so far as to slaughter and devour without qualm idle, bewildered horses, now deprived of their purpose in life, in any case, and upset at
no longer having barges to haul along the canal of the Meuse River.

It wasn't just serviceable and edible animals that the men ran into now and then, however. They met up with more familiar ones as well, domestic and even decorative animals that were even more used to their creature comforts: cats and dogs left ownerless after the civilian exodus, without collars or the tiniest daily guaranteed saucer of food, gradually forgetting even the names they'd been given. There were caged birds as well, household pets such as turtledoves, even lawn ornaments like peacocks, for example, which no one ordinarily eats and anyway, given their lousy dispositions and hopeless narcissism, they had no chance whatsoever of pulling through on their own. In general, the military did not spontaneously come up with the idea of dining off that last category of animals, at least in the beginning. It might so happen, though, that soldiers would decide to keep one for company, sometimes for only a few days, and adopt a cat they found wandering in a communication trench as a company mascot.

On the other hand, cavorting around or burrowed
in outside the fixed, static, bogged-down ground plan of the trenches, there were wild animals too, and that was an entirely different business. Before the fields and forests had been razed and smashed to pieces by artillery fire—the fields turned to Martian deserts, the woods reduced to ragged stumps—they had harbored, at least for a little while longer, freelance animals never enslaved by men either in peacetime or in war, at liberty to live as they pleased, unfettered by any code of labor. Among these creatures a decent crop of edible bodies was still available: hares, deer, or wild boar—promptly shot even though hunting was strictly forbidden during wartime, polished off à la bayonet, chopped up with an ax or trench knife—that sometimes provided soldiers with a windfall of alimentary extras.

The same thing happened to birds or frogs, tracked and harvested during the soldiers' off-hours, and to every kind of trout, carp, tench, and pike they fished for with grenades whenever encamped beside running water, and to bees if by some miracle they found a hive not yet completely deserted. Last on the list came the marginal creatures, declared inedible by some vague interdict or other, such as foxes, crows, weasels, moles: as
for them, although they were for obscure reasons pronounced unfit for consumption, it seems the troops became less and less finicky in this regard and that every once in a while they managed, by means of a ragout, to make an exception for hedgehogs. Like the other animals, however, these would soon become scarce on the ground after the invention and swift application of poison gases throughout the theater of operations.

But there's more to life than eating. Because in the case of armed conflict, the animal kingdom provides some members that can be too useful as potential warriors to be eaten and these are recruited by force for their aptitude for service, such as militarized horses, dogs, or pigeons: some beasts are ridden by noncoms or set to pulling wagons, others are trained to attack, or haul machine guns, while in the bird department, squadrons of globe-trotting pigeons are promoted to the rank of courier.

Last of all and alas, above all, came innumerable creatures of the tiniest size and most redoubtable nature: all sorts of die-hard parasites that, not content with offering no nutritional value whatsoever, on the contrary themselves feed voraciously on the troops. First in line,
the insects: fleas, bedbugs, mosquitoes, gnats, and flies that settle in clouds on the eyes—those choice bits—of corpses. And let's not forget that parasitic arachnid, the tick. Still, the men could have coped with them all, but there was one adversary that quickly became a perpetual and utter scourge: the louse. A prolific champion, this insect in its fraternity of millions soon completely covered everybody. The other main enemy was the rat, no less gluttonous and just as omnipresent as the louse, equally expert at reproduction, but a specialist in fattening up, hell-bent on devouring the soldiers' provisions—including those hung preventively from a nail—or nibbling on leather straps, attacking even your shoes and your very body when you're asleep, and fighting with the flies for your eyeballs when you're dead.

Even if it were simply on account of those two, the louse and the rat, obstinate, meticulous, organized, as single-minded as monosyllables, both of them focused exclusively on tormenting your flesh or sucking your blood, on exterminating you each in its own style— and let's not forget the enemy across the way, devoted through other means to the same end—you often just wanted to get the fuck on out of camp.

Well, you don't get out of this war like that. It's simple: you're trapped. The enemy is in front of you, the rats and lice are with you, and behind you are the gendarmes. Since the only solution is to become an invalid, you're reduced to waiting for that “good wound”, the one you wind up longing for, your guaranteed ticket home (vide Anthime), but there's a problem: it doesn't depend on you. So that wonder-working wound, some men tried to acquire it on their own without attracting too much attention, by shooting themselves in the hand, for example, but they usually failed and were confronted with their misdeed, tried, and shot for treason. Mowed down by your own side rather than asphyxiated, burned to a crisp, or shredded by gas, flamethrowers, or shells—that could be a choice. But there was also blowing your own head off, with a toe on the trigger and the rifle barrel in your mouth, a way of getting out like any other—that could be a choice too.