The Fires of Autumn (11 page)

Madame Jacquelain began to cry:

‘And here I thought I would make him so happy by taking him to the circus … So, you mean, he’s no longer my child, no longer my little boy?’

‘Well, that’s another matter. You’re being silly …’

‘No, no, it is the same thing,’ his stubborn mother said again. ‘It’s all the same thing. My child, my good little boy, so generous, so open, so affectionate, he’s gone. That’s all there is to it, he’s gone.’

They finally stopped talking and soon Monsieur Jacquelain’s snoring could be heard, mingling with the purring of the old cat in her basket. But Madame Jacquelain could not manage to fall asleep. She finally got out of bed; wearing her grey flannel bathrobe, with her thinning locks of hair falling down over her sunken cheeks, she silently crossed her bedroom and went into her son’s room. He was asleep, his face was pale and smooth. My God, would he come back? My God, if he did come back, would he be happy? What still lay in store for him? He was only twenty-two. To think that it wasn’t enough that she had to worry about the present, but, in spite of herself, the future frightened her as well. What if Bernard began leading a life of debauchery? Blessed Virgin Mary! This horrifying, awful, incomprehensible war. She vaguely sensed that the ‘fire’, as men called it, did not only burn the hearts and bodies of poor children, it also lit up strange, shadowy, confused ideas that once lay dormant, buried deep within them.

‘No, he’s a good lad. He has a good heart,’ she said once more.

She wanted to kiss him but didn’t dare. In the end, she simply pressed her lips softly against Bernard’s hand, just as she used to when he was asleep in his cradle. She went back to bed, thinking:

‘It will pass. ‘We’ll create such a good little life for him. He’ll want to go back to school again and he’ll love being at home. He’ll work hard. He’ll make up for lost time. He’ll get his degrees. He’ll be a good boy …’

A station, somewhere in France, one night in June. Bernard was going back to the front. Soldiers were swarming on to the platforms. Some were sleeping in the waiting rooms. Some walked by speaking loudly, laughing, and against the backdrop of the starry sky or the shadowy light of the station café, their silhouettes stood out: strong, thickset, heroic, already popularised a thousand and one times in films and photographs, the image of a soldier in the Great War, with his heavy shoes, his haversack on his back, a pipe in the corner of his mouth, his hard face, his laugh, his piercing eyes. It wasn’t a crowd, it was an army. The war held them together; war crucified man but held him upright as well. Did any of the leaders, more aware than the others, ever imagine the moment when peace would come, when the army would become a mass of people once more? That was the moment they should have been anticipating, preparing for in the midst of war, but it was difficult. Peace was being improvised just as war had been. That had been a success. So everything would be a success. The pride of the soldiers in themselves was immense. Bernard shared this sense of pride, just as he shared all the feelings of the other soldiers when he was with them. His own, unique soul, complex and
contradictory, had been replaced by a collective soul, one that was simple and strong. Like the others, he believed himself to be invincible; he thought he was amazing, and, like the others, he knew that he would hold his own until the very last day of the war, he wouldn’t give an inch, but afterwards … oh, afterwards!

He stretched out his legs, sighed, threw his head back and looked up at the distant sky, daydreaming vaguely of various things. What a long way he had come in the past four years! First, the enthusiasm, the joy of self-sacrifice, the desire to die for your country, for future generations, for future peace … Prepared to die, as long as death was heroic and had purpose, but soon the idea of death terrified him – oh, how he had hated death, how he had feared it, just as he had doubted God and blasphemed as he looked at the little blackish heaps lying between two trenches, dead bodies as numerous and insignificant as dead flies in the first cold snap of winter … And yet, even that moment held a rather tragic beauty. But that time too passed. He got used to the idea of death. He no longer feared it, he thought of such things coldly and with terrifying realism. He was nothing. He no longer believed in God, the immortal soul, the goodness of mankind. He needed to get as much pleasure as he could out of his short time on this earth, that was all there was to it …‘If someone like Raymond Détang comes looking for me again after I’ve done my duty …’ He thought about one of his friends who had enlisted at the age of eighteen like him, an amiable boy who had been killed two months before, a good, pious lad who used to say: ‘You never stop doing your duty.’ What a joke … He wouldn’t harm anyone, he thought, but they’d better stay the hell off my back. All around him, men walked with heavy steps, chatting cheerfully. They reeked of tobacco, cheap wine, filth and sweat.

What would he find when he got back to his sector, Bernard
wondered. They were expecting serious offensives. But the civilians thought and talked about that more than the soldiers. ‘Supremely confident,’ said the newspapers. ‘No, we’re simply numb with exhaustion,’ murmured Bernard. But still, perhaps the worst was over? Perhaps he would live to see them marching into the towns, the parade through the Arc de Triomphe? ‘Just think, the ones marching in that parade will be the shirkers like Détang, while I, I’ll be food for the rats. Hell, I don’t give a damn!’ he said once more, and as he waited for his train, he made himself as comfortable as possible on the sacks of oats that had just been unloaded, then fell peacefully asleep.

Trains went through the station at regular intervals, and when they did, the air filled with smoke and the sharp, shrill sound of the whistles. Bernard dreamed that he had been wounded, that two men carried him on a narrow stretcher along a bumpy path, that he was being pushed and jostled; then he noticed that they weren’t ordinary stretcher bearers marching alongside him but two angels with long floating hair and snow-white wings. In his dream, he could hear himself groaning and shouting: ‘You’re hurting me, let go of me! I don’t want to go with you!’ The angels smiled and shook their heads without replying, walking even faster. It was a winter dawn; the sky shone with the dazzling purity. The long hair of one of the angels brushed against his face. Bernard, in a trance, thought: ‘It’s over. Finally. We’re here.’ But the angel said:

‘You have not gone yet. You are only just about to leave, my poor soul. We’re leaving. We’re leaving.’

He woke up. One of his friends was punching him and saying over and over:

‘We’re leaving! Hey you daft thing, you ain’t staying here are ya?’

Yawning, sighing, amid the rattling of tin, the clanking of
metal, the appalling din of army boots clattering against the ground, the troop swarmed out of the station’s café, the waiting room and the refreshment stands on to the platform, and then stormed the train.

Meanwhile, that same night, Thérèse was on duty in the hospital; she was watching over a young soldier who had recently had an operation and was resting. Very pale and very quiet under his sheets, he was coming back from a faraway place. Thérèse gently wiped the large drops of icy sweat that flowed down his face like tears. Every now and again, she stood up and did her rounds, walking in between the beds, among the sleeping or groaning men. Then she would go back and sit down next to the young boy. He had caused her a lot of anguish. My God! So many had died! But a few had been spared, all the same, saved by her. The wives, mothers and fiancées of these soldiers were never happy with the care they received, they always seemed to think they could have done better, done more. And they were jealous as well. They resented the nurses for having taken their places at the bedside. ‘But at least we will send a few back to them,’ thought Thérèse, ‘and such hopeless cases!’

For some time now, whenever she saw these wives, these mistresses coming to the hospital and throwing themselves at the recovering soldiers, clutching them tightly, carrying them like prey, or so it seemed, far from the hospital, far from death, she felt abandoned, unjustly and cruelly abandoned. The short-lived affairs, the flings, the brief storybook romances between nurses and convalescents filled her with horror. But her heart needed love. She was a loyal, affectionate woman. She saw desolation and horror all around her. Everyone was saying that Europe, civilisation, the entire world was collapsing, that the century was destined to end in catastrophe, that everything would perish, drowned in blood. But she still hoped for a
husband, a home, children, and she instinctively felt that the destruction of everything was a mirage, a lie, while she, she lived the truth.

It was a time when certain men let themselves sink into despair, when certain women sank into debauchery, but Thérèse and many others cared for the wounded and dreamed with confidence of the future.

At the beginning of November, the first formal meeting of the forty-one states that made up the League of Nations took place in Geneva. In France, the financial and political set that Raymond Détang had worked his way into since his return from America considered this event from a perspective that was not quite the same as that of the ordinary man in the street – that is to say, they did not really wonder whether war was going to become impossible in future (the war was over, forgotten, dead and buried), but what the repercussions would be on the careers of those in line for ministerial posts and how to make the most of it, both financially and in terms of personal satisfaction. Like any new, unexplored opportunity, this one frightened many people; even in the Détangs’ circle, they couldn’t agree on how this League of Nations should be treated: with irony or fervour? As a universal panacea or a temporary fix? This troubled Renée Détang. She had decided to celebrate the opening of the sessions but she wondered how best to strike ‘the right chord’: a dinner where people could express serious opinions – which might become the basis for establishing the political circle she wished to preside over – or a reception where, in between cocktails, people would exchange witty pleasantries, gently mocking this recent event (and then she
would say, with that graceful little pout that so became her: ‘Oh, hush, now. I’m telling you that this is a great hope for the world!’). In addition, a reception would allow a good mix of people; given the Détangs’ social status, they weren’t yet in a position to choose their contacts. ‘Anyone and everyone to pad out the room’, as Madame Humbert always said. A lot of noise, a lot of champagne, a great crowd of people, a certain amount of inevitable waste, but perhaps, amid the swarm – like a prospector who discovers a few specks of gold buried in the sand – they too would find one or two or ten desirable recruits, influential people in Parliament or the Stock Market.

‘Raymond is on a first-name basis with everyone who really counts,’ Renée confided in her mother, ‘but that’s just the kind of familiarity you find in schools and prisons, part friendship, part complicity; it has to be transformed into
contacts
. And that is a completely different thing.’

At the beginning, the Détangs carefully prepared what they called their ‘war strategy’; they intended to climb the Parisian social ladder cautiously, one step at a time, taking one bastion after another, but at the end of a few months, they realised this technique was useless, embarrassing and outdated: anyone can get into high society by just walking straight in, or more precisely, there was no such thing as high society. There was an enormous fairground where anyone who wanted to could get in; it wasn’t even necessary to hide your background like in the good old days: they were living in a cynical world that glorified the sludge from which a man had risen. It was the era of the nouveau riche, a time when if people asked someone how he had earned ‘all that money’, he would smile and reply: ‘In the war, of course … like everyone else.’ Raymond Détang, however, was not cynical. In politics, cynicism is a clumsy tactic; voters wish to be treated as noble creatures. Raymond Détang was one of those men who could most skilfully manipulate key phrases: ‘Civilisation based on law
and logic … France, the path of enlightenment for all mankind … World peace … Science and Progress …’ He was not even cynical about himself, except for very rare moments when he felt depressed. He honestly considered himself an eminent statesman who exists solely for the good of the people. At the time, he was not yet a Member of Parliament; he was organising his electoral campaign with infinite care: it had to be a work of art. He was earning money. Money, at this point in time, had not yet become the wild, wayward beast it turned into between 1930 and 1939 when it could only be captured through dangerous close combat; now, it was a small, tame animal that was easy to catch. Détang played the Stock Market. And since his connections to certain political figures were well known, groups of foreigners entrusted him with what he called ‘setting up contacts’ – preliminary conversations that would facilitate economic or other kinds of deals.

He had created close ties to several important businessmen in the United States who had become valuable, influential friends. He had acted as intermediary in orders placed by the French Republic in America for the reconstruction of ravaged territories. However, as he put it, he had become too important for such work. There was an entire category of transactions that would be impossible for him to carry out once he was elected, ‘at least they would be impossible if carried out under your own name’, as Renée put it. The married couple got along well together; they supported one another. Every now and again, Raymond felt he was still in love with his wife. Renée was one of those Parisian women who seemed not to be made of flesh and bone but rather of a sort of malleable plastic that could be transformed to fit the changing fashion. When Raymond had first met her, she had a funny little face with a fringe that fell over her eyes; she had been petite, curvaceous and as soft as a cat. Now she was the very model of the woman of the post-war years. She had lost weight; she had long, strong muscles; she looked taller. Her skin, covered
in glossy golden make-up, looked darker and her blond hair was cut like a boy’s. All these features were fresh and new at the time.