The Fires of Autumn Read online

  Now she turned to Madame Jacquelain. ‘Don’t forget about business here in Paris. Businesses have to thrive. Women are starting to think about their clothing again, thank goodness. I’ve designed a gorgeous new style of hat. It’s inspired by the times: it’s a policeman’s hat. Very elegant looking and all the rage. It has an embroidered insignia, a piece of braid and a gold tassel, or even feathers and a rosette; no one will wear anything else this winter.’

  Amid the hum of the conversations, the little clock on the mantelpiece, with its silvery tones, very quickly, shyly, struck three times. It was time for everyone to go. Martial stood up, trembling. Since he was leaving the next day, he wouldn’t be seeing his family and friends again. The kisses and handshakes began; Madame Jacquelain quietly begged Martial: ‘If my son is sent to the front lines, you’ll look after him, won’t you?’ (She imagined the front was a kind of lycée where the older boys could defend and protect the younger ones against the unfair attacks of the Germans.) Monsieur Jacquelain spoke in his deep, hoarse voice: ‘You’ll think of me …’, for during dinner, he had made sure to get some medical advice from Martial and made him promise to prepare a diet for his stomach troubles ‘as soon as he had a free moment’.

  Martial nodded and nervously pulled at his beard, where a few grey hairs were already beginning to show. Thérèse had stood up with him.

  ‘I don’t often have any free time over there,’ he pointed out gently.

  But Monsieur Jacquelain refused to believe it:

  ‘There are surely quiet moments; you can’t be operating all the time. It would be impossible for anyone to do that. In the newspapers, they report there are very few sick people and that the wounded heal very quickly, thanks to their good morale. Is that true?’

  ‘Umm … morale … of course …’

  But Adolphe Brun had pulled his nephew towards him and was hugging him; then he let him go and looked at him, his wide, bright eyes full of tears. He wanted to say something, make a joke … tell some funny story that Martial could tell the other soldiers that would make them say:

  ‘Those old blokes from Paris, I mean … they’re really something. They still know how to laugh.’

  But he couldn’t think of anything. He just slapped the doctor on the shoulder, on his thin, yielding shoulder beneath the thick material of his uniform:

  ‘Off you go, my boy …,’ he muttered, ‘you’re a good, brave lad.’

  * * *

  * The final lines of ‘Sophocles’ Song at Salamis’ by Victor Hugo, from La Légende des Siècles, 1877.

  5

  The first-aid post was set up in the cellar; the house, solidly built and very old, had good foundations. It was a comfortable house in French Flanders, three kilometres from the German trenches. It had once looked squat, resilient, reassuring, its solid pillars framing the low door with its large rusty nails. A part of the house remained standing, the part where the silhouette of a tall, slim, mysterious woman wearing a turban had been sculpted above the casement window. The village had passed from one side to the other during the fighting that autumn in 1914. For the moment, the French occupied it. In this never-ending war that had started a few months before, people battled fiercely over a fountain, a forest, a cemetery, a bit of crumbling wall. The sudden advances of the enemy were no longer to be feared, but the bombardments grew more terrifying with every passing day; rubble piled up over the ruins. On sunny days, what had once been a pretty little French village (every gate was decorated with roses in bloom) now resembled a demolition site. Sunny days were rare. In the rain, obscured by the fog, it looked like a cemetery for houses, a heartbreaking sight. But the first-aid post stood firm.

  ‘Even if the house crumbles, the cellar won’t be affected,’ Martial had said. ‘So of course it will hold up.’

  He was very proud of his cellar; it gave him pleasure to look at the thick walls, the vaulted stone ceiling above his head and the small alcoves that were dug out of the rock; one of them was his operating room; the other was where he slept; the third was a luxurious bedroom reserved for high-ranking officers who had been wounded. In his cellar, Martial could give free rein to his desire to be a home-owner, a feeling that circumstances had never before allowed him: orphaned when he was eight years old, he had moved from a school dormitory to a barrack room by way of furnished student accommodation. Everywhere, even in his dingy lodgings on the Rue Saint-Jacques as a first-year medical student, he had tried to ‘make it into a home for himself’, as he used to say with emotion. He had patched up the curtains that hung in ribbons, washed the skirting boards, polished the rickety night tables and arranged his books and family photos on the bookcase. He had spent so many hours imagining his future apartment on the Rue Monge: the living room with a yellow sofa, a leafy plant on the piano … his bedroom (the large bed and wardrobe with a mirror on the door), his consulting room. All of that had been taken away from him and replaced by a cellar in a strange house up north. Unfortunately, water was coming through the floor in certain places: the canal was nearby and, damaged in several places by the bombs, threatened to cave in at any moment and flood everything. The climate wasn’t exactly ideal; the entire region was soaked with rain and covered in mud. Everyone slept in a thick, whitish sludge that continuously shifted and sloshed about; they ate the rainwater that fell into their soup – more rainwater than soup – they fought, fell, died in mud.

  A well-situated, enormous staircase led up from the cellar; the men lay on its rough, uneven, wide steps. Their wounds had just been dressed; they were waiting to be evacuated to ambulances. Some of them slept on their haversacks, others on the bare stone; a smell of idoform, blood and damp seeped from the walls. Sickly, sweet clouds of chloroform hung in the air. From the tiny room where he worked, the doctor could see the wounded men newly arrived from the most recent battles. First their shapeless shoes weighed down with clods of yellowish mud that they banged, in vain, against the floor to loosen the clinging earth, the entrails of the gutted land they carried with them; then their drenched, torn, stained greatcoats, stiff with encrusted mud, then the hollow faces almost hidden by their full beards. Some of them had boots, helmets and faces so covered in mud that they looked like shapeless masses of silt on the move; others had every single strand of hair in their moustache caked in mud. It was a war zone where you could no longer tell which bodies were yours and which were the enemy’s – the mud covered them with the same shroud.

  The stretchers came down; trembling, panting, bleeding bodies were placed on the wooden trestles used as operating tables; if there was no more room on the trestles, they were laid on the ground. One corner of the cellar had been closed off with an improvised partition – a piece of canvas thrown over two metal rakes they had found in the garden and stuck into the ground: this was the morgue.

  At the beginning, what wore the doctor out most was the incessant movement around him, all the strange faces that went by, reappeared, disappeared, a crowd, a crush of French soldiers and German prisoners, blonds, dark-haired men, the haggard features of the dying, the pale, astonished faces of children wounded for the first time who make an effort to show off, to put on a brave face, to smile, farmers who say ‘Out you come, out you come!’ and groan and seem to want to rip the pain from their bodies as if they were pulling out a plough that had got stuck in the mud – the weak men who cried like women, the silent ones, the courageous, the cowards and the ones who didn’t hold back: ‘Just my luck!’ they would say, ‘I’m done for’ when their injury was ‘really nasty’, and even those who – just like in the newspapers intended to feed the patriotism of the masses – murmured as they turned pale from the pain: ‘Oh, it’s really nothing! I’m sure they can patch me up.’

  He had seen so many of them! Even his brief moments of sleep were peopled with enormous crowds. He would fall asleep and dream that he was being crushed on all sides by strangers who prevented him from moving, who grabbed his hands, breathed on his face with the smell of tobacco and rough
wine, stretching out their bloody stumps to him, calling him with tears in their eyes. He would gently push them away, but they would clutch at his clothes, trying to pull him towards them. They grabbed him from behind and made him stumble and fall. Then they would stamp on him with their heavy shoes, as if he were caught in a charge. They would cry out, and the heart-rending, shrill sound of their voices would wake the doctor up. Then he would find himself surrounded by groaning wounded men once more and he would get back to work.

  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 n
ice 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.