The Fires of Autumn (7 page)

It was raining. The rain fell into the trenches, on to the fields pitted with craters, over the grey corpses, the pale blue horizon, the ruins. It transformed the earth into a foul-smelling marshland. It caused the few drains that were still intact finally to crack so that water flooded into the cellar. It gushed through the tiny window, splashed over the stretcher where they had just placed a man whose two legs had been blown to bits. The lights went out. At the very same moment, the staircase leading up to the house was flooded. Shouting and swearing, the soldiers who weren’t badly wounded rushed outside. It was night. Bombs were falling. Every now and then a rocket coming from the enemy lines would hover for a moment in the sky like a star, then fall and light up a bit of crumbling wall and the yellow eyes of a cat wandering among the stones. They had to evacuate the cellar. Before making the decision, the doctor stood motionless for a moment, his head leaning to one side and with a thoughtful expression on his face,
as if he were deciding whether to operate: circumstances had forced the ‘Ear, Nose and Throat’ specialist to metamorphose into a surgeon who dealt with urgent casualties. For a moment, he had the idea that they might be able to draw off the water using small bottles and canvas buckets, but the water kept on rising.

So he started evacuating the men; the able-bodied men supported the weaker; the stretcher bearers carried the stretchers. The man whose legs had been blown to bits was the first to be carried out of the cellar. They climbed the staircase knee-deep in water. They went through the house. There was one room that had remained intact, a beautiful bedroom containing a large mahogany bed with swan-neck carvings; the fine sheets had been torn from the bed and dragged on to the floor.

Outside, Martial managed to organise his group and the procession headed towards the nearest ambulance. The road was dangerous because of the gunfire and shells. Day was just breaking when they arrived; they could see a strip of fiery light above the devastated field: it was a November dawn; a bitter reddish morning sky filled with crows in flight.

Martial kept staring at the stretcher as he walked; this was the most seriously wounded man and Martial had wanted to save him; he still hoped he could. The injured man was a farmer, tall, stocky, solid and strong. He wasn’t speaking any more; he looked at Martial with a fierce expression so full of hope that it pained him, then he clenched his teeth and closed his eyes. He was still conscious. He didn’t even cry out when the water splashed over him. He let himself be carried out without so much as a moan. Now he was moving forward, rocking on a stretcher carried by two men. Martial had had time to give him a caffeine injection on the doorstep, just before they left.

When he reached the ambulance, he called for his men; the stretcher passed close to him and he leaned over and drew back the blanket that covered the wounded man’s face:

‘Good God! But that’s not him!’

It was someone else, a sly little fellow with sallow skin who started groaning in an unbearably loud, shrill voice as soon as anyone came near him. He had a broken femur.

‘But, good Lord, where’s the other man?’ Martial shouted.

The two stretcher bearers looked at each other horror-struck: they had got the wrong patient. The man whose legs had been blown to bits whom the doctor had given an injection and placed on the stretcher must have been left back at the first-aid post; he was surely dying in the abandoned house.

Martial was seething with fury. This was another new characteristic he had acquired, a result of army life, the kind of anger that so easily takes hold of your soul. So courteous, so shy in ordinary life, since he became a soldier, he gave way to bursts of rage which, once they had passed, left him feeling shame, remorse and a sense of pride, all at the same time. Even the gentlest of men is sometimes pleased to frighten his equals, and the two stretcher bearers trembled as they listened to him, watching him shake his fists, his frail fists at the end of those long, thin arms:

‘You morons! Idiots … You stupid sons of b …!’

He shouted all the swear words he knew in their faces and invented a few of his own:

‘Now we’re going to have to go and find him,’ he said at last.

‘Go and find him? Damn it,’ the soldiers protested, ‘but it’s daylight!’

Martial refused to listen: he insisted on having his wounded man. He remembered the look in his eyes, the look of a man who was placing his life in Martial’s hands, his own precious life. He was such a brave man! A man who had not moaned, or screamed or shown off, a man who had suffered with dignity, in silence … A real man! And he was the one who had been abandoned.

He started out with the two stretcher bearers. A shell exploded; Martial rolled to the ground. When he got up, he was safe, but
the soldiers had disappeared; the stretcher was left on the road and since there was no sign of the two men, Martial assumed they had made a run for it. Without thinking, he shook the dirt from his greatcoat and continued on his way, sometimes crawling on the ground, sometimes walking, his head and shoulders bent, as if fighting a violent storm. It was raining, of course. Through the din of the shells and whistling bullets, you could hear a nearby river roaring: swollen by the constant rain, it had overflowed and was flooding somewhere in the mist.

Finally, Martial saw the first few houses at the edge of the village, at least what was left of them. Amid the fog, a fountain seemed to float in a watery mist. A farm had collapsed, leaving only an open gate still standing, a kind of Arc de Triomphe leading to the ruins. Martial got his bearings. Here was the house; there was the silhouette of the mysterious woman carved into the stone; greyish water lapped all around her.

‘At least I’m lucky that those two stupid asses had time to get him out of the cellar,’ he thought. ‘The poor man. If he has to die, it’s better if he’s out of the water. But he won’t die. He seemed determined, strong.’

He went into the house. Almost immediately, he crashed into the mutilated man lying on the stretcher, his head thrown back, his cheeks drained of blood. But he was alive. He was looking at him. He was looking at him! Martial grabbed his hand:

‘What’s all this, my poor boy, have they just gone and ditched you here? But I’m here now, you haven’t been forgotten. Don’t worry, I’ll get you well again, come on …’ he muttered, and the wounded man smiled; at least, a slight movement of his lips made Martial understand that the man whose legs had been blown to bits was trying to smile.

‘The stretcher bearers will come and find us,’ the doctor thought. ‘My two lads must have got back by now and they’ll send someone.’

If the roads weren’t blocked, the stretcher bearers would come in daylight to take the wounded men to the ambulances. Otherwise, they had to wait until dark, but night fell early at this time of year. In this rain, soon there would be only darkness, the sound of lapping water in the night, a blind and deaf battle – but relative safety, in spite of everything.

‘We’ll get back, my boy, won’t we? We’ll both make it back.’

He talked to him almost tenderly; he felt almost fatherly towards this soldier, a kind of active, strong, masculine pity that no one had ever inspired in him until now. He changed the dressing on the wounds, gave him something to drink and waited.

But no one came.

‘If you weren’t so big, we would manage on our own, wouldn’t we? But I can’t carry you on my back … you can see that very well … the elephant and the flea,’ he joked. ‘What did you do before the war? Farmer? Wine grower? You look like a wine grower. We’d be happier back at your place sipping a nice white wine, wouldn’t we?’

He talked to him without expecting or wishing for any reply, he spoke for himself as much as for the wounded man, to forget, to make the time pass more quickly.

The bombardment was incessant. Every now and again, a veritable earthquake shook the ruins. For a long time now, not a single pane of glass had remained in the windows; the wind and rain flowed freely into the room. Soon, when night fell, he would go out and find help; he knew that these ruins, which appeared deserted, gave signs of life at dusk. Soldiers returning from the front lines, the wounded, stretcher bearers, they all emerged from behind the bricks and mortar.

He and the man were in the bedroom, near the bed with the swan-neck carvings; the walls were covered in yellow wallpaper dotted with little flowers; on the mantelpiece stood a lamp with a leafy pattern on its shade, some framed photos above and, in one
corner, a mahogany pedestal table with a bronze leg. In spite of everything, it was comforting to be surrounded by four walls with a roof over their heads. It was necessary to forget certain things, of course – the shattered windows, the ceiling that was crumbling in places, the plaster and rubble on the rug, the flooded cellar, the deep, muffled sound of explosions. But by making just a little mental effort, as he stared at the large bed – he lifted the sheets off the floor, smoothed them out, tucked them under the thick, soft mattress – he felt almost happy.

‘When the war is over, when I’m old, after I’ve retired, Thérèse and I …’

He never finished his thought; it was cut through as if stabbed by a blinding light: a 105mm Howitzer shell had exploded in the bedroom, killing Martial. One entire section of the floor smashed open, crashed down, crushed deep into the earth, carrying the dead body with it. But the wounded man on his stretcher was not hit. He was found a while later by a division that had just been relieved and had left the front lines to get some rest. He was taken to an ambulance where the remains of both his legs were amputated. He survived, and is still alive today.

Bernard was wounded. He was walking down a road, fleeing towards the rear, along the banks of the Aisne; the road was littered with dead bodies. Everything and everyone – columns of men, horses, trucks, cannon, long lines of refugees dragging carts full of furniture behind them, with women between the shafts, even a clump of bare trees, dead for four years, decapitated by shells or poisoned by gas that the autumn wind or a hail of bullets had violently bowed over in the direction of the retreat – everything and everyone seemed to be fleeing.

The First and Seventh German Divisions had attacked the Sixth Division of the French Army from north of the Aisne to the Montagne de Reims. The enemy managed to cross the Aisne, and get as far as the Vesle River. On the evening of the 28th May, everyone was saying that the defences of the Vesle had been breached, that the English were pulling back, that Soissons had fallen. Bernard knew none of this. He had been wounded at the beginning of the attack. Now, he and a group of men, all injured in the recent battle, were looking for the first-aid post. But it no longer existed, destroyed by artillery or overrun by the advancing waves of the enemy. Bernard was told they had to keep going. When he tried to climb into a truck, he was pushed out; there
were too many wounded. He kept on going, his eyes blinded by a kind of bloody mist; one shoulder was torn open and fragments of shell were lodged in his cheek.

Along both sides of the road, or rather the track that remained of the wrecked road, stretched a ravaged plain, hollowed out, dug up, turned upside down, a chaotic mass of loose stones, yellowish slimy mud, shell-craters, crosses (even those were broken and had tumbled on top of each other, riddled with bullet holes, torn out by artillery fire); there were empty tin cans, helmets, boots, clothing in tatters, bits of wood and metal debris. Every now and again, you could see a section of wall that was still standing, or three stone blocks, or a slight mound on the ground, a pile of rubble – and that was all that remained of a house, a village, a church. In other places, overturned tanks, partly sunk in mud, entirely covered in dust, seemed to be reaching steel shards towards the sky. It was the bedlam of the crucial days of war, a moving wave of vehicles from three armies. Munitions caissons, small flatbed trucks for repairing the railway lines, supply wagons, ambulances, lorries loaded with petrol, troops being shifted to the rear into new positions, everything sped past Bernard like a river of grey metal. Mines had blown up the road; bridges made of wooden beams had been thrown over the shell-craters.

Every so often, the entire procession stopped under fierce artillery fire because an overturned vehicle was blocking the road, causing a deadly bottleneck. Herds of animals would come out of nowhere, followed by fleeing villagers; confused, terrified, bellowing cows charged into the trucks or ran off into the fields.

It was burning hot, a stifling spring day. Men walked through the dust, breathing it in, spitting it out again; dust mingled with their blood and sweat.

‘My God,’ thought Barnard, as he marched on as if in a dream, sometimes climbing back up on to the road, sometimes falling
down on to the devastated stretch of land. ‘My God, please let me live through this, please let it end! Please let me rest …’

He was twenty-two years old. He was eighteen when war was declared, nineteen in the Argonne, twenty at a hospital in Marseille, not even twenty-one on the hills of Mort-Homme during the Battle of Verdun. He had aged without having had the time to grow up; he was like a piece of fruit picked too early: bite into it and all you will taste is its hard, bitter flesh. Four years! He was so tired.

‘I want to rest,’ he murmured with painful determination, talking to himself through the dust, ‘I want to rest, not just today but forever, forever. I don’t want to die, just close my eyes and not give a damn about anything. Whether we attack or run away, win or lose, I don’t give a damn any more, I don’t want to know any more. I just want to sleep.’

But sometimes, when he felt a little stronger, he would think:

‘No! I won’t rest forever. If only I can get out of here alive, I’ll enjoy everything I never had. I’ll have money, women, I’ll enjoy life, I will …’

He had never before felt that way. During the early years of the war, he had been serious, stern, with bursts of juvenile cheerfulness, but completely determined to become hardened and to win, thanks to a heroic act of will. Perhaps he had overestimated his strength? Physically, he was strong, resistant to pain and exhaustion; he had become a man with broad shoulders who stood tall and was energetic and alert. Mentally, though, he had been wounded in a way that nothing in future could ever heal, a wound that would grow deeper every day of his life: it was a kind of weariness, a chink in his armour, a lack of faith, pure exhaustion and a fierce hunger for life. ‘And I’ll live for me, and me alone,’ he thought. ‘I’ve given them four years,’ and what he meant by these words was a sense of an entire hostile world set against him – leaders, enemies, friends, civilians,
strangers, even his own family. Especially civilians! Those … It was the time when the home front thought they had sacrificed enough, shed too many tears over blood that had been spilled and could never be recovered, blood they could no longer stop from flowing. Profiteers, politicians, every kind of mercenary, workers spoiled by high wages, who all thought only of themselves and left the front lines twitching, bleeding and dying. ‘And why?’ thought Bernard. ‘It’s pointless: no one will win. Everyone is exhausted. Each country will end up back on its own borders, but drained, spent, dying. And in the meantime, the civilians are still alive. While we’re rotting away in the trenches,’ he continued thinking, ‘those nights in the trenches, long nights on sentry duty, or that instant just before the battle: ominous moments you could never forget.’