The Fires of Autumn Read online

  6

  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.’

  He thought all of this as he walked along the road, among the other soldiers moving fast like him, suffering like him. No one could help him. No one could make his cross any lighter to bear.

  ‘It’s so heavy,’ sighed Bernard in a kind of delirium, tottering beneath the weight of the military kit he was still carrying over his bloody shoulder. Those poor guys! How could they possibly help me? Some of them are worse off than me. Me, me … But I’m nothing. Whether I live or die means nothing. All the civilians with their lies: “Heroes, Honour … giving your life for your country …” To tell the truth, they don’t even really need me. Modern warfare requires machines. An entire battalion of heroes would be better off replaced by a perfect armoured tank that, without patriotism, without faith or courage, would annihilate as many of the enemy as possible. And the civilians can sense that. They keep on saying that they love us, admire us, but it’s just what they’re expected to say; all of them are thinking that we’re nothing and they know that even an inanimate machine is more valuable than we are. That’s what is so serious. We used to be real men … But since we can’t turn ourselves into machines, since we’re no longer really men, we feel degraded, as if we were beasts. What is it they say? “Don’t try to understand. Don’t think.” Become mindless! We have to be like that dead horse,’ he said, staring at it.

  They were scattered everywhere along the road, cadavers with long teeth, wounded horses, worn-out horses, some disembowelled by an exploding shell, all that remained of an English regiment in retreat. Such a confusion of races, of blood, of languages surrounded Bernard! He saw Scotsmen, Hindus, Africans, German prisoners. All these different faces had the same expression: a kind of exhausted grimace that gave their young faces the look of death. Of hell … And a few kilometres from there, in Paris …‘No! Paris has been bombed. They are suffering there too … But further away, in the cities … in Cannes … Or the cool, beautiful houses in Geneva … in Madrid … in the United States, where the young men are well out of it, young men who can swim in the sea or drink chilled punch … Oh, just to eat some ice cream … The sun on an open wound is torture! And the sun on a helmet … My brain is being boiled. What did Papa say during my last leave? “They won’t be very demanding, the ones who make it back. It will take very little to make them happy!”
He was so wrong! But everything they say is stupid,’ he thought bitterly. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid …’

  He stumbled, felt as if he were losing his footing: blood was seeping through the dressing that a nurse had hastily applied during the battle; warm blood ran down his arm, and he no longer knew whether the sickly stench of butchery came from the dead horses or from his own body. He fell down. ‘No one will carry me, will they?’ he said to himself. ‘Well, then keep on walking or die, boy.’ With superhuman effort, he stood up, kept going. A small group of wounded men were behind him, each man gritting his teeth, each one dragging his weary legs. Then came a stretcher with a wounded man on it, followed by another carrying a corpse. Then some African soldiers rolling their wide, terrified eyes to the heavens. Then grey soldiers in long greatcoats. Then a Hindu riding a small black horse. Then more trucks, tanks, cannon. And Bernard, who kept on walking …

  7

  The war dragged on; a long-range cannon fired on Paris; the Allies were preparing themselves for ‘three, ten, twenty years of war, if necessary’, but everyone, even the Germans, knew that peace would come eventually. No one could imagine how it would come, whether it would arrive with the sly, soft footsteps of the diplomats or the arrogant strides of the conquering warriors. What would it be called? A truce with no winner, a victory, a defeat? But there were subtle signs of its approach. ‘There’s no reason why it should end,’ people said out of habit. ‘It will only be over when we’re all dead.’ But every now and then, a timid little voice would suggest: ‘Still, it can’t go on forever. Force of circumstances will put a stop to it. It will end because everything ends.’ The young retorted harshly: ‘It will end because everyone’s had enough.’ There was an outcry: ‘Coward! Defeatist! You’re not a true patriot.’ But these were merely empty words: the truth was they had had enough. They were dazed by the thundering weapons, they’d had their fill of blood and glory.

  Madame Pain came back from the greengrocer’s, emptied her bag full of vegetables on to the kitchen table and announced:

  ‘It won’t go on for much longer now. All we have to do is wait!’

  ‘Well she can tell herself to be patient,’ thought Madame Jacquelain, her heart breaking with anguish. ‘She doesn’t have anyone over there.’

  It was over: the holy alliance of the early days, the time when each person suffered on behalf of everyone, when glory and mourning were shared equally among all the French. Four years later, everyone had his own personal destiny, and it had nothing to do with the fate of France. Martial was dead. They all talked about him; his picture had place of honour in the dining room: a framed photograph decorated with a red, white and blue rosette and black mourning crepe. He was in his uniform; he looked taller, more imposing than he had in reality; he had straightened his neck for the camera lens rather than shrinking it as he normally did when he tugged at his beard or rubbed his tired eyes … He looked straight ahead of him with an expression that was strange, wise, attentive, kind, yet with a barely perceptible hint of coldness, a kind of detachment, as if, from that moment on, in the village behind the lines where he had been photographed a week before he died, he was saying goodbye to everyone, forever. Thérèse placed fresh flowers in front of his picture every day.

  Madame Jacquelain was pale, emaciated, her face distorted by nervous tics. She couldn’t sleep any more, barely ate. Lying in her bedroom, she thought about Bernard sleeping in the mud of the Somme or in the sand of Flanders; when she was eating, she imagined him going hungry; when she rested, that he was tired. When she read the list of the dead, she told herself: ‘Tomorrow it could be him.’ When the son of one of her friends was killed, she cried because she could see her own son’s face beneath the features of the young victim. But whenever she heard that a soldier had been saved, found shelter, was safe, she bitterly reproached God that her own son was still in danger – and for how much longer?

  Bernard was fighting in the Aisne region.

  Raymond Détang had married Mademoiselle Humbert, and had managed to organise things so that he remained in Paris.

  The Bruns had nothing to live on apart from Thérèse’s money, ‘but I’m not worried about the Russian stocks,’ Monsieur Brun said, ever the optimist. ‘The Russians will pay up in the end. They are true friends and even though I miss the Tsar, who was a good man, in spite of everything, I’m not angry that the people are now a Republic: their system of government was behind the times. So I’m not worried at all: they will pay their debts. But in the meantime, in the meantime, it’s difficult …’

  And it was difficult; they lived as they had before, but they looked like people who had set out on a journey one beautiful fine day in a gentle breeze, with parasols and straw hats and who suddenly see the weather change, a storm brewing and the rain drenching the ruffles on their muslin skirts.

  Everything seemed strange, distorted, out of joint. This war no longer resembled the one that began in 1914: with its tanks, planes and armoured vehicles, with its soldiers in gas masks, this was nothing more than war on an industrial scale, an enormous company that traded in serial massacres, death on a production line. This Paris where all the languages in the world could be heard, these cafés where the French no longer felt at home, this echo that reached the scandalised but curious Frenchmen, the echo of ever increasing numbers: ‘He made a million on war supplies, a million … Two, ten, twenty million … There are people making millions while our sons … They aren’t decent Frenchmen … They aren’t patriots, but … money …’ What they didn’t say was: ‘Pleasure …’ They would not have dared. And besides, that word would have sounded almost offensive to the lower middle classes. They didn’t take to pleasure easily, they didn’t enjoy themselves in ‘good’ society, among ‘the right kind’ of people. No! No one would have dared speak of pleasure and yet, whispered rumours spread from one person to another that in Paris itself, even while it was being bombed, in certain areas, in clubs open only to members, soldiers on leave, women, foreigners danced the tango and other dances as well, frenzied, obscene dances that had daring names; every night, drunken Americans smashed the windows at Café Weber; pilots, the war’s ‘flying aces’, behind the wheels of cars, speeding along at a hundred miles an hour, swerved on to the pavement and killed women. These rumours were strange, almost incomprehensible, sinister in a way, or so thought Adolphe Brun. There was something about all this that frightened him: he no longer recognised the French. Its people spoke a new language that was no longer the light-hearted slang of 1900; it was teeming with Anglo-Saxon expressions. There were new customs and, most importantly, certain words no longer elicited the same reaction from him as in the past. The most sacred words – ‘Frugality … Marital fidelity … Virginity …’ – had gradually become old-fashioned, almost laughable. There was a painful contrast between what you read in the newspapers and what you heard in the street, on the metro, in the shops, it was like a nightmare where you see a great crowd of men in top hats who are otherwise stark naked; you wonder: ‘Can they see what they look like? Who do they think they are fooling?’

  On the other hand, however, the persistent bombardments did not concern Monsieur Brun. He would stand at the window in his nightshirt when the sirens began to wail. He felt a sort of pride during the air raids. This was history, something that had happened before, experienced by an entire race of people through him, a noble kind of danger.

  Thérèse was a nurse, along with Renée Détang. The two women worked in the same hospital. Renée often went out in the company of young American soldiers and laughed scornfully when Thérèse refused to go along.

  ‘You’re so middle class, such a homebody, my poor girl! And yet, you’re free. As for me …’

  She took a small mirror from her handbag and looked at her exquisite cat-like face with its tiny nose and wide green eyes; small curls of a harsh, metallic gold colour escaped from her nurse’s cap:

  ‘Well I think that life is short and you have to make the most of it. I’m not
doing anything wrong.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  Whenever Thérèse made fun of someone, her eyes sparkled and her round face with its turned-up nose took on a bold, frank expression.

  ‘I’m just having a good time,’ said Renée.

  ‘That’s what I thought. You’re appalling.’

  ‘Do you think a life like yours is fun? The hospital, then back home to clean the floors with steel wool? Polishing the saucepans? For what? You’re not married any more. Making yourself a pretty collar on Sundays to put on your uniform? Why? You don’t have a lover. Aren’t you ever tempted at all, Thérèse?’

  ‘No,’ Thérèse said quietly. ‘No, never.’

  And yet, temptation wafted all around a woman in the words she heard spoken, in the very air she breathed. A tall, handsome lad in uniform smiles at you in the street and you think: ‘Tomorrow he’ll be gone. No one will know. Why not?’ Jewellery, perfume, clothes from a boutique on the Rue de la Paix when your hair reeks of idoform and blood, when you are wearing a starched uniform and a nurse’s cap that covers your forehead, when you have hardly any money. When you have become a soldier’s pen friend, when you have chosen a farmer who writes to you at Christmas: ‘Thank you so much, my dear benefactress, for the new sweater and the pipes. I told my wife how spoiled I am …’ and then you watch your friend going out with Americans … Temptation, and the most dangerous thing of all … missing being loved when your husband is dead … But that was nobody’s business.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I’m always busy and I’m never bored. Cleaning the floors? Well, I like doing that! I like a wardrobe that’s been polished and shines, the smell of stew that’s been slowly cooking, a new hat made out of two flowers and a ribbon.’