Fear (12 page)

And how am I?

I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I am suffering less than some of those around me and I have a whole berth to myself. I am ashamed but at the same time, while neither proud nor happy, I am satisfied with my fate. Despite everything egoism overwhelms the pity that I feel because I am not completely distracted by pain like all these unfortunates with terrible wounds. I am caught between two emotions: the discomfort of parading my good fortune in front of those who are suffering, and the somewhat insolent superiority of those whom destiny has favoured. My own body, turned towards hope, towards life, turns away from these other, smashed bodies; the animal in me, which wants to stay whole, tells me: ‘Rejoice, you are saved!’ But my mind keeps its solidarity with the poor men of the trenches, of whom I was one; it loves and pities them. We are united by the risks we have run together, the fear that has shaken us all. I am not yet detached from them and their cries find their echo in me. Is it just the sight of all these mutilations that could have been mine that moves me? Isn’t our pity really a contemplation of ourselves, via others? I do not know. What should excuse me in their eyes is that we were all exposed to the same shells and bullets, and that what hit them could have hit me. Yet, lying still beneath my blanket, eyes closed, I hide the injustice of my good fortune.

I also have my own reasons for concern. If I lie flat on my back the wound in my chest suffocates me. If I try to turn over it feels as if daggers are being thrust into me. It may be that the hand which weighs so heavily at the end of my arm will never regain its flexibility . . . If I wasn’t thinking of my comrades who are still out there in some ditch, up to their ankles in water, surrounded by corpses, their lives on the line at every moment, then no doubt I would be thinking that I have suffered a terrible misfortune. If something like this had happened to me outside of war I would surely have fainted away in shock. Whereas here I marched for three hours to find a first-aid post. The fact is that my fate has not been decided and I will only be reassured when the threat of amputation is lifted.

As evening falls, the cries and moans redouble, and delirium grips us. It is swelteringly hot, and the air is stifling, heavy with the sickly sweet smell of blood, of filthy dressings, and excrement. I am getting weaker, my head is spinning, and the cellar seems to be suffocating me, crushing down on my chest . . .

Fever claims me, makes me shudder, brings hallucinations. A parapet rises up before me, illuminated with flashes of light, a funeral pyre of flaming blue and grey men with the faces of grimacing corpses, with gumless jaws, like the death mask from Neuville-Saint-Vaast. They throw grenades at each other’s heads which crown them with explosions. The smoke clears and they fight on desperately, half-decapitated and dripping with blood. One has an eye hanging out. So as not to waste time he sticks his tongue out and swallows it down. Another, a big German, has the top of his head open; a flap of skin like a hinge holds his scalp which swings like a lid. When he runs out of ammunition he sticks his hand into his head and pulls out his brains which he throws into the face of a Frenchman, covering it with a foul porridge. The Frenchman wipes this off in fury and then opens his coat. From inside he unrolls his intestines and makes them into a noose. This he throws, like a lasso, round the German’s neck and then, pushing his foot against his enemy’s chest, leaning back with his whole weight, he strangles him with his guts. The German’s tongue comes out. The Frenchman cuts it off with his knife and then attaches it to his coat with a safety pin, like a medal. Then comes a woman suckling her baby. She removes the infant from her breast and places him on the top of the parapet where he starts to fry. The woman moves off sadly, moaning to herself: ‘Oh, dear God, how has it come to this?’ Then some officers’ batmen arrive. On to a tin plate they place the baby, now grilled
à point
like a suckling pig, and fill buckets up with blood, then take all this to the field marshal, who is drinking an aperitif off in the distance while observing the battlefield through binoculars and yawning, because he’s hungry. The parapet crumbles away and there are no victims or victors, because there’s nothing left but corpses.

Now here I am at the front line, in a little machine-gun post. All of a sudden a black butterfly, streaked with red, flutters up above the barbed wire. I have been ordered to kill this butterfly. Finger on the trigger, I look for it through the machine-gun sight. Then I realise something terrible: the butterfly is my heart. Panic-stricken I call the sergeant and explain. ‘It’s an order! Shoot it or you’ll be shot!’ So I shut my eyes and fire off belt after belt to kill my heart . . . and the butterfly is still fluttering . . . The general arrives, in a fury: ‘Where do you find these bloody useless conscripts? I’ll get it myself with the first shot!’ From a holster made of human skin he pulls out a golden revolver. He takes aim and kills my heart . . . I am crying . . . I will crawl out tonight and go and look for the poor little black butterfly . . .

And now I am alone, lying on a stretcher, between the trenches. Night is falling. The armies are leaving and abandoning me. I hear a bugle call, orders being shouted and down on the road I can see troops presenting arms. A colonel climbs out of a car with a flag on the bonnet. Despite the distance, I recognise him: he’s the one who made me go through the test on the parade ground at training camp . . . He squats down, strikes a match and lights something close to the ground. Then he gets back in his car and drives off quickly. Once again soldiers present arms, once again there are bugle calls. The troops form up in lines of four and march off without looking back. I want to call out but something is blocking my throat. I’m alone again and cold. I think of all the rats swarming over the plain that might attack me. How could I protect myself? I’ve no strength and I’m strapped to the stretcher. I look for help in this bleak, freezing expanse . . . I can see a little speck of light that at first I take for a glow worm. But it is coming in my direction, wiggling along the ground. I thought it was miles away but it is only the fact that it is tiny that gives the impression of distance. Actually it is close and still advancing. What can it be? Suddenly, all is clear! My hair stands on end, I break into a terrified sweat. Yes, that colonel became my enemy after I had saluted him with my left hand by mistake. The light is the flame at the end of a fuse that he has lit, a fuse which runs from the road to me, which runs round my throat and stops me shouting. And my chest, my stomach, are stuffed with explosives, I am sure of it . . .

The hospital train has been travelling for an hour, taking us away from the front. In the cattle truck fitted with bunks there are a dozen of us, wounded and feverish, exhausted from having already had to wait for some days on stretchers, moving from one first-aid post to another. Some have serious injuries and are in great pain.

Struck by a sudden revelation, a man with a shrapnel wound in his hip forgot his pain for a moment, and announced the dawning of a new era:

‘Hey, you lot, listen! We can’t hear the guns any more!’

‘For us,’ someone answered, ‘the war is over!’

That was a good month ago. I believed it too. Now I’m not nearly so sure.

6. THE HOSPITAL

‘He [Jesus Christ] has revealed to the world this truth, that one’s country is not everything, and that the man is before, and higher than, the citizen.’

Ernest Renan,
La Vie de Jésus

I AM LYING IN A HOSPITAL BED
and covered in dressings. A sheet is attached to the head of the bed on which is sketched a human body, front and back. A dozen marks in red ink indicate the wounds on this body: my body. On the left wrist, the throat, the legs, the right foot. ‘Nothing in the chest or guts, jolly good!’ the little doctor had told me down in the cellar at La Targette where I’d had to wait after the assault from the parapet. Next to the sketch is a temperature chart, at the foot of which can be read: ‘Admitted: 7 October 1915. Operated: 20 October. Discharged . . .’ I am hoping that this bit stays blank for as long as possible.

On my bedside table there are books, cigarettes, lozenges, writing materials; in the drawer, my wallet, some letters, my knife, my pen, my identity tag which is now useless, and my little aluminium mug which I found in a haversack that had stayed with me. Jolly good, indeed! I’m all right. I’ve escaped the winter offensive, and the war will surely finish. I’m happy. I’ve saved my skin . . .

The grenade had peppered me with shrapnel. Fortunately it was a tin grenade, blasted into such tiny pieces by the explosion that the shrapnel didn’t hit me with much force. Almost all the wounds were skin deep and even now, after a few weeks, if I press hard on the spots that appear in the middle of my body, I squeeze out very sharp bits of metal. There must be quite a few left since when I change position I can feel sudden pricks like you get if you sit on a drawing-pin. For some time I was afraid that these little bits of shrapnel might cause abscesses. But the embarrassment of showing my buttocks to the nurses always stopped me mentioning it. (For me, buttocks are linked to the image of women and seem contrary to virility. And also, perhaps, there is some remnant of military prejudice, absurd today: a soldier should not be wounded in the back.) I carry out my own examination, groping under the bedclothes. When I’ve found a little hard spot, I twist myself around to investigate it with my mirror. Then I try to clean it out with the aid of my nail or a pin. This keeps me busy during moments when I’m tired of reading or smoking, and my neighbours find it entirely natural, as they busy themselves with similar activities. In any case, we have nothing to hide about our bodies, or their functions, and we look away from those who have to uncover themselves so as not to embarrass them. The only way we discomfort each other is with smell, however hard we try to be discreet.

I have pulled a lot of shrapnel out of my legs, along the tibias, using the point of my knife. I reckon I’ve found about forty pieces. However my body only has eleven serious wounds, none of them grave. The annoying thing is that the injuries are spread all over the place so that I have had to be almost entirely swathed in bandages. As the pus sticks to the gauze the bandages adhere to the wounds so that with the least movement I feel them tearing away. And because there is a little delay in transmission from one to the other my wincing is multiplied by a series of painful twinges. So I keep as still as I can. But because of lying permanently on my back, I get bed sores and so every day I have to spend a few hours on my side. Occasionally I manage to sit up. This is a movement that I prepare carefully so as to avoid any pain sharp enough to make me fall back down rapidly. Anyway, I have plenty of time. I even manage to get up briefly, while they are making my bed.

I ‘went under the knife’ and it wasn’t so bad. The doctor in an ambulance at the front had probed my wounds and without any anaesthetic – or my consent – had pulled out the biggest pieces of shrapnel. One remained in my right foot and one in my left wrist which had lodged – without penetrating them – between the tendons which controlled the two middle fingers of my hand. To extract them they decided to put me to sleep. I was only afraid of being awake, of getting the same treatment as I had received at the front. After a day without food I was taken to the operating theatre around six o’clock, a stark, white room harshly lit by an arc lamp which gave a sharp blue shine to all the steel. I was laid out, naked, in the centre of this white space, offering myself up soft and shivering to all the instruments, as if in a torture chamber, and the nurses in their smocks seemed like the executioners of some grim inquisition. As they bent over me with the wad of cotton wool, the doctor said: ‘Don’t be afraid. Open your mouth wide and breathe deeply.’ Which I did willingly, having no wish to witness the tortures they were going to inflict on my body.

The anaesthetic gave me the distinct impression of dying and since then I’ve thought that death, the crossing over, cannot be such a difficult moment as people believe, so long as it is not accompanied by the agonies that come with illness. One must overcome anxiety, resolve to vanish into nothingness. Under chloroform you quickly lose all sensation of your body; it stops existing. All life flows back into the humming brain. Mine, up to the moment when it vanished in its turn, did not lose its lucidity. Freed of the burden of the flesh, I was nothing more than a mind, and I had the fleeting idea of being pure spirit, an angel, a little dancing flame of joy. I told myself: ‘You are dying!’ and ‘You are not really dying’, and yet: ‘All the same . . .’ I offered no resistance to this advancing extinction. And then my thoughts, like a distant beacon, threw nothing but a dim light within me flickering over the chiaroscuro of my being and I slipped down into the darkness, into death, without being aware of it.

My mind came back first. Accompanied by a burning pain in my arm. And I could hear voices, make out what they were saying but as if they were in an antechamber of my self, for I was still wrapped in a thick web of sleep. The voices were saying: ‘He’s still out. Couldn’t wake him down there.’ I only had to open my eyelids, like shutters in the morning, to show them that my living soul was still inside. It was such a huge effort that I took some time deciding. At last I was gazing at faces leaning over me, I saw them light up, and closed my eyes again. All that remained of the chloroform was a nauseating taste that I exhaled through my lips in sickly bubbles. And fever wrapped me in its burning arms, shook me with its icy shivers and struck my temples with its hammer-blows.

After a fortnight, my temperature is back to normal, and there are no more reasons for concern about the consequences of my wounds. Only a few scars will remain, proof that I have indeed been through the great adventure of war, so that later, sated with pleasure, grateful and half-dreaming, women will feel pity and say ‘Oh, how you must have suffered, my darling!’ and their soft hands will gently caress those places once pierced by metal. Or so I imagine . . .