Journey to the End of the Night (12 page)

Then they would sigh with a very special commemorative tenderness that would make them more attractive than ever; interspersed with heartbreaking silences, they would evoke the tragic days of the war, the ghosts ... "Do you remember little Bardamu?" they would say in the gathering dusk, thinking of me, the lad who had coughed so much and given them such a time to make him stop ... "Poor boy, his morale was way down ... I wonder what became of him?"

A few poetic regrets, if adroitly placed, are as becoming to a woman as gossamer hair in the moonlight.

What I couldn't help hearing under their spoken words and expressions of sympathy was this: "Nice little soldier boy, you're going to die ... You're going to die ... This is war ... Everyone has his own life ... his role ... his death ... We seem to share your distress ... But no one can share anyone else's death ... A person sound in body and soul should take everything that happens as entertainment, neither more nor less, and we are wholesome young women, beautiful, respected, healthy, and well bred ... For us the automatism of biology transforms the whole world into a joyous spectacle, into pure joy! Our health demands it! ... We can't afford the ugly dissipations of sorrow ... We need stimulants and more stimulants ... You'll soon be forgotten, dear little soldier boys ... Be nice, die quickly ... and let's hope the war will be over soon, so we can marry one of your charming officers ... preferably one with dark hair ... And long live the Patrie that Papa's always talking about! ... How wonderful love must be when Johnny comes marching home! ... Our little husband will be decorated! ... cited for bravery ... You can shine his lovely boots on our happy wedding day if you like ... if you're still in existence, soldier boy ... Won't you be happy about our happiness, soldier boy? ..."

Every morning we saw our doctor, time and again we saw him surrounded by his nurses. He was a scientific light, we were told, The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant, worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more, in destroying what little pleasure and life they had left.

Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious!

As soon as it was settled that we soldiers were going to share the relative comfort of the bastion with those old men, they began to detest us in unison, but that didn't stop them from begging for the crumbs of tobacco on our window sills and the bits of stale bread that had fallen under our benches. At mealtimes they pressed their parchment-skinned faces against the windows of our mess hall. Over their crinkled rheumy noses, they peered in at us like covetous rats. One of those invalids seemed smarter and wickeder than the rest, he'd come and entertain us with the songs of his day, Pere Birouette[31] he was called. He'd do anything we asked provided we gave him tobacco, anything except walk past the hospital morgue, which incidentally was never idle. One of our jokes was to make him go that way, while supposedly taking him for a little stroll. "Won't you come in?" we'd say when we got to the door. He'd run away, griping for all he was worth, so fast and so far we wouldn't see him again for at least two days. Pere Birouette had caught a glimpse of death. Professor Bestombes, our medical major with the beautiful eyes, had installed a complicated assortment of gleaming electrical contraptions which periodically pumped us full of shocks. He claimed they had a tonic effect, and we had to put up with them on pain of banishment. It seems that Bestombes was very rich; he must have been to be able to buy all those expensive electrocution machines. He could afford to throw money around because his father-in-law, a political bigwig, had done some heavy finagling while purchasing land for the government.

Naturally the doctor exploited his advantages. Crime and punishment, it all adds up. We took him as he was, and we didn't hate him. He examined our nervous systems with meticulous care and questioned us in a tone of polite familiarity. This sedulously cultivated good nature enchanted the nurses in his section, who all came of excellent families. Every morning these cuties looked forward to his displays of affability, which were just so yummy. In short, we were all actors in a play?he, Bestombes, had chosen the role of a benevolent, profoundly human and humane scientist. We pulled together, that was the essential.

In this new hospital I shared a room with Sergeant Branledore,[32] a re-enlisted man. He was an old hospital hand. He'd been dragging his perforated intestines around for months and had been in four different hospitals.

He had learned in the process how to attract and to hold the active sympathy of the nurses. He vomited, pissed, and shat blood with astonishing frequency; he also had a lot of trouble breathing, but none of that would have sufficed to win him the special good graces of the nurses, who had seen worse. So between two choking fits, if a doctor or nurse was passing, Branledore would sing out: "Victory! Victory! Victory will be ours!" Or he'd murmur those same words with one corner or the whole of his lungs, as the circumstances required. Thus attuned to the ardently aggressive literature of the day by a well-calculated bit of histrionics, he enjoyed the highest moral standing. That man knew his stuff. Since all the world was a stage, acting was the thing. Branledore knew what he was doing. And indeed nothing looks more idiotic, nothing is more irritating than a sluggish spectator who turns up on stage by mistake. When you're up there, you've got to join in, come to life, act a part, take the plunge or clear out. Especially the women demanded a show, the bitches had no use at all for clumsy amateurs. Unquestionably war went straight to their ovaries, they demanded heroes, and if you weren't a hero you had to pretend to be one or be prepared for the most ignominious fate.

After a week in this new hospital we realized that we would absolutely have to change our image, and thanks to Branledore (a lace salesman in civilian life) the selfsame men, who on our arrival had been terror-stricken, shunning the light, haunted by disgraceful memories of slaughterhouses, metamorphosed ourselves into an incredible gang of swashbucklers, determined to conquer or die, and, take my word for it, armed with derringdo and the most outrageous language. Our speech had indeed become vigorous and so obscene that the ladies sometimes blushed, but they never complained because it is generally agreed that a soldier is as brave as he is wild and cruder than there is any need to be, so much so that his bravery can be measured by the crudeness of his language.

At first, though we copied Branledore to the best of our ability, our patriotic act wasn't quite right, it wasn't really convincing. It took a good week, two in fact, of intensive rehearsing before we had fully caught on.

As soon as that scientific luminary, our Professor Major Doctor Bestombes, noticed the striking improvement in our moral attitudes, he decided to encourage us by admitting a few visitors, our parents to begin with.

To judge by stories I had heard, certain soldiers, really gifted types, experienced a kind of intoxication, you might even speak of an exotic thrill, in combat. Whenever I tried to imagine this particular brand of pleasure, just trying laid me low for at least a week, I felt so incapable of killing anyone that I thought I might just as well give it up right away and abandon the whole idea. Not that I lacked experience, they'd done everything possible to inculcate a taste for killing, but I simply had no talent in that direction. Maybe my initiation should have been more gradual.

One day I decided to tell Professor Bestombes how hard I was finding it, body and soul, to become as brave as I should have liked to be and as the undoubtedly sublime circumstances required. I was uneasy, afraid he would think I was being insolent and talking out of turn. Not at all! The great man said he was delighted that I'd come to him and bared my troubled soul so fully and frankly,

"You're better, friend Bardamu!" he concluded. "You're better, that's all there is to it! Yes, Bardamu, I regard your coming to me like this, absolutely of your own free will, as a most encouraging sign of a marked improvement in your mental state ... Vandesquin,[33] that modest but infinitely wise observer of moral breakdown in the soldiers of the Empire, summed up his findings, back in 1802, in a memoir that is quite unjustly neglected by students of the present day, but must nevertheless be regarded as a classic. In it he describes, with remarkable insight and precision, the so-called 'confessional crises' met with in moral convalescents, and terms them the most encouraging of all symptoms ... Almost a century later our great Dupré[34] established his now celebrated nomenclature of the same symptom and characterized the identical crisis as a 're-collection of memories'; according to the same author, this crisis, if the cure is properly administered, should soon be followed by a massive break-up of anxiety percepts and the definitive liberation of the area of consciousness, this being the second stage in the process of psychic recovery. Elsewhere, employing the bold terminology that was his special gift, Dupré devises the formula

'disencumbering cogitative diarrhea' for this crisis, which is accompanied by intense euphoria, a marked resumption of relational activity, a sudden and striking restoration, among other things, of sleep, which in some cases has been known to go on for days at a time, and lastly, at a more advanced stage, by conspicuous hyperactivity of the genital functions, amounting, sometimes in patients who were previously frigid, to a positive sexual frenzy: 'The patient recovers not by easy stages, but at a gallop.' Such was the magnificently descriptive metaphor by which another of our great French psychiatrists of the last century, Philibert Margeton,[35] characterized this recuperative triumph, this sudden resurgence of normal functions in a patient recovering from the fear syndrome ... As for you, Bardamu, I already, at the present moment, regard you as a true convalescent ... Would it interest you, Bardamu, since we have arrived at this gratifying conclusion, to know that I shall be reading a paper on the fundamental characteristics of the human mind at the Society for Military Psychology tomorrow? ... It is not without its merits, I venture to believe."

"Oh yes, Professor, I take a passionate interest in these questions ..."

"Well then, Bardamu, to make a long story short, the thesis I put forward is that before the war man was an unknown

quantity for the psychiatrist and the resources of his psyche an enigma ..."

"That is also my humble opinion, Professor ..."

"You see, Bardamu, the war, by providing us with such unprecedented means of trying men's nervous systems, has been a miraculous revealer of the human mind ... Recent pathological disclosures have given us matter for centuries of meditation and study ... Let's face it ... Up until now we hardly suspected the richness of man's emotional and spiritual resources! Today, thanks to the war, all that has changed! By a process of breaking and entering, painful to be sure, but decisive, nay providential for science, we have penetrated his innermost depths'. Ever since the first revelations came to my attention, the duty of the modern psychologist and moralist has been clear to me, Bestombes, beyond any possible doubt! Our psychological conceptions are in need of total revision!" I, Bardamu, was of exactly the same opinion.

"Yes indeed, Professor, I am convinced that ..."

"Ah, you think so too, Bardamu ... You say so yourself! In man, you see, there is a balance between good and evil, between egoism on the one hand and altruism on the other ... In elite subjects more altruism than egoism. Am I right? Don't you agree?"

"Exactly, Professor, you've hit the nail on the head ..."

"And what, Bardamu, I ask you, what is the highest known concept, the concept best suited to arousing the altruism of the elite subject and compelling it to manifest itself unequivocally?"

"Patriotism, Professor!"

"Ah, you see? The word is yours, not mine. You understand, Bardamu!... Patriotism and glory, which is its corollary and proof!"

"How true!"

"Ah! our soldier boys ... at their first baptism of fire they spontaneously cast off all sophisms and subsidiary concepts, in particular the sophism of self-preservation. Instinctively and immediately they merge with our true raison d'etre, the Patrie. For the attainment of truth, Bardamu, intelligence is not only superfluous, it is in the way. Like all essential truths, the Patrie is a truth of the heart! The common people understand that ... and that is where the inept scientist goes wrong ..."

"It's beautiful, Professor! Too beautiful! I am reminded of the Ancients!" Bestombes pressed both my hands almost affectionately. And in a fatherly tone he added for my special benefit: "That, Bardamu, is how I mean to treat my patients, electricity for the body, and for the mind massive doses of patriotic ethics, injections as it were of invigorating morality!"

"I understand, Professor!"

I was indeed beginning to understand more and more.

On leaving him I joined my invigorated companions at Mass in the brand-new chapel, I caught sight of Branledore in a corner, demonstrating his moral vigor by giving the concierge's little girl lessons in enthusiasm. He beckoned me to join him, and I did. That afternoon some of our parents came from Paris for the first time since we'd been there, and from then on they came every week.

I had finally written to my mother. She was glad to see me again and whimpered like a bitch whose puppy has been given back to her. She thought she was doing me a lot of good by kissing me, but she was miles behind the bitch, because she believed what they said when they took me away from her. A dog only believes what it can smell. One afternoon my mother and I took a long walk through the streets around the hospital, dawdling down half-finished byways, with lampposts that hadn't been painted yet, between long, oozing house fronts with their windows full of gaudy dangling rags, the shirts of the poor ... We listened to the crackling song of the frying pans, a tempest of rancid fat. In the great shapeless desert surrounding the city, the rot in which its false luxury ends, the city shows everyone who wants to look the garbage piles of its enormous posterior. There are factories one avoids when out for a stroll, which emit smells of all sorts, some of them hardly believable. The air roundabout couldn't possibly stink any worse. Nearby a little street carnival molders between two chimneys of unequal height, the wooden horses cost too much for the rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers, who long for them and stand spellbound, sometimes for weeks on end, attracted and repelled by their forlorn rundown look and the music.