Birth of Our Power (27 page)

“We're not so bad off,” they say. “Life isn't very rosy in an occupied country these days. Or in the trenches either! But we get along.”

Antoine is going to croak, by God. Out of the four hundred of us who are here, there aren't fifty who can count on getting enough to eat every day. Our group of revolutionaries really has to tighten its belt if we want to hold out. Antoine sells his bread ration (300 grams) in order to buy tobacco. His sole worldly good is a twopenny clay pipe, which has had a charmed life; it's amazing he's been able to keep it all these months. One day a rascally Pole stole it from him; the buccaneer Maerts, bearded to the eyes, hefty under his red wool jacket, drumming his huge strangler's fingers on his counter, had the author of the larceny summoned before him.

“Yanek. You swiped the old fleabag's pipe now. Well, you're gonna give it right back to him
on the double.”

“Yes, Mista Maerts,” says Yanek. “You can count on it.”

The old man was wandering around the courtyard with the eyes of a madman. Yanek bounded down the stairs, four at a time, caught up to him on the run and, without a word, stuffed the pipe between his teeth.

Maerts has his good qualities. He eats well. You should see him, in splendid isolation in his “establishment” seated before a hash of lard, potatoes, and green peas with a liter of “red,” masticating slowly, moving his whole face and his whole beard, with his two knotty fists square on the table holding the knife and fork as if they were weapons. While he gluts himself, his sly gaze surveys the whole room, follows the clouds through the window, floats around the crowned Virgin rising above the church: superfluous femininity—unsalable! He scrapes the
leftovers of his grub into a basin—gristle, bits of bones, potato eyes—and goes down into the yard. Old Antoine, who knows the time, is watching from his usual corner, from which nobody chases him, near the latrines. Three paces off, Maerts, bending slightly, turns over the basin, and the grub falls to the earth. Then he steps back and watches the old man, squatting, devouring these leftovers along with the soil which clings to the grease, like a dog.

“After all,” says Maerts charitably.

And, hands in his pockets, heavy, rugged, beefy, he turns around suddenly and walks away.

We are in Maerts's cabaret: Room II, on the right as you enter. The establishment makes a nice appearance—the smartest one in the camp. Five tables, benches with backs. The sign hanging up on the wall bears in big red letters garnished with flourishes:
A LA BONNE FORTUNE: Café à toute heure.
The
patrón's
corner is furnished with metal-strapped coffers. A handsome pine trunk which he made himself out of pieces of packing cases, solid, sealed by a huge padlock, is kept under his well-made bed for greater security. Some colored posters
—BRASSERIE DU
L
ION DES
F
LANDRES
, C
HICORÉE DES
T
RAPPISTES
—finish off creating the atmosphere of a Flemish
estaminet
in this barracks room corner. The huge tin kettle is singing, heated by an alcohol lamp, enthroned on the counter between two handwritten signs:
Credit is dead, Help yourself and Heaven will help you.
A mug of coffee, served with a tenth of a cube of sugar, costs ten sous (pink cardboard rectangle, oiled by the touch of many hands: C
AMP
T
RÉCY
: 10 centimes). We drink. Maerts, a pencil behind his ear, meditates over the figures in his ledger. Various assorted objects hang on nails, lie on shelves made out of planks suspended from hooks by a system of wires, or are stuffed under the bed in bundles. The entire room, forty beds, has a good appearance because of this establishment, illuminated in the evening by the only big oil lamp in the camp. People do business here, go on binges here, play cards here. Sometimes, after taps, we can hear the customers of the Bonne Fortune cabaret singing their heads off in the closed barracks.

Maerts operates a pawnshop. The hunting breeches he wears belong to the Baron in Room III. He got his beautiful, scarlet jacket, in the end, for seven francs from the grocer Pâtenôtre, after the latter's attempted escape … The big cavalry coat hanging in the corner with his other
things belonged to his friend Captain Vetsitch, in his debt for twelve francs. There are bundles containing red and white check handkerchiefs—on which the
patrón
lends four sous—foulards, linen. The trunk contains quality shoes, toilet kits, wallets, Russian books. The rings, watches, fountain pens, cigar holders fill a heavy metallic coffer inside the bed, under the pillow, following a custom that goes back to the Middle Ages or earlier. An accordion is lying in a Russian leather hatbox. Canes and umbrellas form a sheaf … A miniature—the portrait of a blond child—and a gold medallion containing a lock of hair have been seen in the
patrón's
hands. He will even give a loan, they say, on photographs of women. Not on those of men “because they don't take them back.” I wonder what clever devil, borrowing ten sous from him on the portrait of a gentleman, erased the last traces of naïveté from this pirate.

“The buccaneer,” I say, “has the soul of the founder of a financial dynasty. Can you see him, Sam, wearing an overcoat and a soft felt hat in the elevator of a skyscraper?”

Sam considers each of us obliquely:

“But perfectly. And why not? Close-shaven, blue-chinned. Nothing looks more like the desperadoes in the magazines than a businessman who has let his beard go … Sometimes it's the same man. Change the décor, add or subtract success. Nothing looks more like a hero than a scoundrel. Sometimes it's the same stuff. Change the décor …”

His Uncle Sam profile seems to have dried out; he is nothing but coldness, a twisted smile.

“A nice little piece of Europe,” he says, “authentic. Every man … a suspect. Free: admire how free we are, from reveille to taps and even later, free behind our barbed wire, under the muzzles of loaded rifles, like citizens of the best-organized republics. Free to live on garbage like Antoine or to get rich like Maerts. And all the nations mixed together, brewed up; equal before the daily slop pail, the lice, and the law. A collection of swine worthy of the greatest capitals, I assure you; and enough innocent victims to make a dozen novelists happy. They are all breathing in the healthy air of the rear … And us—incendiaries locked up, for safety's sake, in a powder magazine …”

“Sam, the basis of your metaphor is no good. No one gets killed here. It's an oasis!”

“Do you really think no one gets killed here? That would be most extraordinary …”

EACH BARRACKS ROOM HAS ITS OWN STAMP. THE ONE WHERE MAERTS REIGNS
, peopled by Belgians, is naked, cold. The beds of these poor wretches who have fallen into slavery under the
patrón
have only the thin furnishings supplied by the administration. Tramps' bundles hang on the walls. A cobbler is patching up some sandals. Someone swears in Flemish, another snores. The little room in the back is reserved for more serious types, dressed in city clothes, abundantly supplied by the canteen. Maerts greets them without any obsequiousness. After all, he's the one who is doing them a favor. A tall, washed-out young man, with drooping mustaches, who wears high collars and striped trousers but who neglects his appearance, flabby, with a four-days' growth of beard, trembles all over, his cheeks suddenly flushed; when the
patrón
gives him the sign:

“Tomorrow, at five o'clock, Monsieur Arthur.”

Monsieur Arthur withdraws three green five-franc cardboards from his watch pocket with a delicate, trembling hand. Later he can be seen laughing distractedly, playing a game of piquet, losing good-humoredly. He will go to bed early, in order to dream, turned toward the wall. At five o'clock tomorrow, Floquette, the home guard, his small Mongol's face freckled (a butt hanging on his lower lip), a café waiter in civilian life, on duty at the gate, will signal to him, as well as to fat Pâtenôtre, sweating under his bulky black woolen vest and wearing a weather-beaten, shiny bowler screwed down over his bloodshot face. The two men have ostensibly been summoned to the mailroom. They meet, full of contempt for each other. “That flabby fathead!” thinks Pâtenôtre. “That brute!” says Monsieur Arthur to himself. Floquette winks at them in passing (“… go to it, my children!”) followed by a dreadful clack of the tongue which reverberates through Monsieur Arthur's nerve ends, for a long while after, even down to the tips of his fingers. He is afraid he may stagger; his heart is pounding; he is all
red, this great lanky fellow (a licentiate in law on his visiting cards) like a bashful kid. The two men pass quickly through the gate, catching a glimpse of the administration courtyard—walls green with ivy, attractive window boxes filled with flowerpots—and turn left toward the outbuildings. Here they enter the reassuring semidarkness of a storehouse full of packing cases. Monsieur Arthur, inwardly overcoming a great weight, gets himself ready to say, “See here, Pâtenôtre, I think it's my turn today …” But just at that instant Pâtenôtre turns around, very red, his eyes slightly bloodshot, his huge nose like a leech, and brutally hisses into his face, “All right, I'm going in. Keep your eyes peeled, eh … ?” Like an animal diving into a thicket, he ponderously disappears into the shed in the corner. Monsieur Arthur is leaning in the doorway. Before him are three stretches of red-brick wall, one covered with ivy: at times Floquette's uniform cap slanting down over his grinning Chinese gargoyle's head comes into view ten paces off. Monsieur Arthur can hear stirrings from the shed in the corner, a cough, a hoarse gasp. His heart is beating wildly; a boundless disgust reduces him to a dishrag. He stares at his hands for a long while: his nails are gray. And then a long animal agony … “Hurry up,” mutters Pâtenôtre, who has finally reappeared, short of breath, buttoning his vest. Monsieur Arthur takes four steps, like a sleepwalker, toward the corner shed, bathed in soft shadows, where a blond girl, seated on some old sacks with her knees spread apart, rises as he enters. “Good day, Monsieur Arthur,” she says politely. “Good day, Louise,” be answers, without her hearing the trembling in his voice; and he takes hold of her breasts, which are flabby, for her flesh is lymphatic, milky, and tepid like a thing forsaken. At this moment, this dishrag of a man, worn out by empty days, suddenly feels erect from his heels to his neck, raised above himself, his teeth clenched, his chest expanded, like a caricature of some terrible ancestor, before his passive prey. The girl is as blond as the straw; her chignon smells of hay. This is the way she earns six extra francs every time she comes to bring supplies to the camp; for Floquette, who has already been paid one hundred sous by the customer, makes Louise give him another forty sous (and the rest when the mood strikes him). It is he who carries clandestine letters to the post office for the rich; he who supplies the forbidden booze; he who parleys with visitors. A thrifty man, he deposits fifty francs in the savings bank every Saturday: “The war is a gravy train …” It's a gravy train for Louise, too, who had never seen so much money before.

The girl's red-rimmed eyes will awaken Monsieur Arthur in the night, and his soul, crumpled by an awful terror, will be like a rag which has been soaked, wrung out, and flopped down on the flagstones.

In the evening, this barracks room resembles an inn of olden times, in an old port haunted by pirates.

Maerts emerges from time to time in the yellow flame of the lamp, wearing a felt hat which drowns his eyes in shadow—dressed, one might think, in a red doublet. The blue smoke of pipes and cigarettes winds about under the lampshade, like silky thread. Stein, with his blood-red harelip, has the huge wrinkled brow of a disfigured Socrates playing a game of
manille.
His crafty eyes carefully survey the parchment-skin hands of his ageless opponent: a face of thin old leather, crackling around the eyes, a pointed nose, an Adam's apple as big as a child's fist in the middle of a long neck (a knife-proof neck, witness a soft, pink scar like a long flourish) reduced to a bundle of tendons, nerves, and veins. This is Monsieur Oscar, the hatmaker; and the ex-Legionnaire would have won a hundred sous if he had nabbed him with the card in his sleeve and knocked him out amid overturned tables, with a butt in the stomach for a start and a good kick right in the mouth to finish him off (that's his usual manner). There is also the huge livid head, covered with bristles, of a financier in sorry straits; and the carefully trimmed salt and pepper mustache of the Baron who is losing, along with his last effects, the last bit of dignity to which he clings in life. The yellowed and darkened cards are soft to the touch, like greasy rags. Two nobodies, at the next table, are moving pawns across a checkerboard, pawns which are actually buttons off the uniforms of five armies. The rest of the room is little by little invaded by darkness. Interrupted snoring, whispered conferences between beds, quiet swearing; a hobo, tormented by hunger (that bloodsucker in the belly) has glued his forehead to the window and stares out into the night. Escape? No, this is not a harbor, there are the calm orchards; but to reach them it would be necessary to get over that fantastic zone of blinding whiteness under the searchlights, those barbed wires and those invisibly fatal areas, commanded by the muzzles of the rifles posted out there every fifty yards.