Journey to the End of the Night Read online

  I’d gladly have fed Major Pinçon to the sharks and his M.P. with him, to teach them how to live; my horse too while I was at it, so he wouldn’t have to suffer anymore; the poor fellow didn’t have any back left it was so sore, only two plaques of raw flesh under the saddle, as big as my two hands, oozing rivers of pus that ran from the edges of his blanket down to his hocks. I had to ride him all the same, trot trot … That trot trot made him wriggle and writhe. But horses are even more patient than people. His trot was an undulation. I had to leave him out in the open. In a barn the smell of his open wounds would have been asphyxiating. When I mounted him, his back hurt him so badly that he arched it, oh, very politely, and his belly hung down to his knees. It felt like mounting a donkey. It was easier that way, I have to admit. We were plenty tired ourselves with all the steel we had to carry on our heads and shoulders.

  General des Entrayes was waiting for his dinner in his specially requisitioned house. The table had been set, the lamp was in its place.

  “Beat it, Christ Almighty, the whole lot of you!” Pinçon yelled at us one more time, shaking his lantern under our noses. “We’re sitting down to table! I’m telling you for the last time! Are those swine ever going to go!” he screamed. The passion of sending us to our death put a little color into his diaphanous cheeks.

  Sometimes the general’s cook would slip us a bite before we left. The general had too much to eat, seeing the regulations allowed him forty rations all for himself! He wasn’t a young man anymore. In fact he must have, been close to retirement age. His knees buckled when he walked and I’m pretty sure he dyed his mustache.

  The veins in his temples, we could see in the lamplight as we were leaving, described meanders like the Seine on its way out of Paris. He had grown-up daughters, so it was said, unmarried and like himself not rich. Maybe those were the thoughts that made him so crotchety cranky, like an old dog disturbed in his habits, who goes looking for his quilted basket whenever anyone opens the door for him.

  He loved beautiful gardens and rosebushes. Wherever we went, he never passed up a rose garden. When it comes to loving roses, generals haven’t their equal. It’s a known fact.

  Anyway we finally set out. It was hard to get the plugs started. They were afraid to move because of their wounds, but in addition they were afraid of us and the darkness, afraid of everything, to tell the truth. So were we! A dozen times we went back to ask the major for directions! A dozen times he cursed us for goldbricks and goof-offs. Finally, with the help of our spurs, we’d pass the last outpost, give the sentries the password, and plunge into our murky adventure, into the darkness of this no man’s land.

  After wandering a while from side to side of the darkness, we finally got part of our bearings, or so at least we thought … Whenever one cloud seemed lighter than another, we were convinced that we’d seen something … But up ahead of us there was nothing we could be sure of but the echo that came and went, the echo of our horses’ hoof beats, a horrendous sound you wanted so bad not to hear that it stopped your breath. Those horses seemed to be trotting to high heaven, to be calling everybody on earth to come and massacre us. And they could have done it with one hand, just steady a rifle against a tree and wait for us. I kept thinking that the first light we’d see would be the flash of the shot that would end it all.

  In the four weeks the war had been going on, we’d grown so tired, so miserable, that tiredness had taken away some of my fear. In the end the torture of being harassed night and day by those monsters, the noncoms, especially the low-ranking ones, who were even stupider, pettier, and more hateful than usual, made even the most obstinate among us doubt the advisability of going on living.

  Oh, how you long to get away! To sleep! That’s the main thing! When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord. Seeing we were still alive, we’d just have to look as if we were looking for our regiment.

  Before a thought can start up in the brain of a jughead, a lot of cruel things must happen to him. The man who had made me think for the first time in my life, really think, practical thoughts that were really my own, was undoubtedly Major Pinçon, that torture master. I therefore thought of him as hard as I could as I clanked along, crushed by the weight of my armor, an extra in this incredible international extravaganza, into which, I have to admit, I had leapt with enthusiasm.

  Every yard of darkness ahead of us was a promise of death and destruction. But how would it come? The only element of uncertainty was the uniform of the killer. Would he be one of us? Or of them?

  I hadn’t done anything to Pinçon! No more than I had to the Germans … With his face like a rotten peach, his four bands that glittered all over him from his head to his belly button, his scraggly mustache and his bony knees, with the field glasses dangling from his neck like a cowbell and his 1/1000 map. I kept wondering why he was so intent on sending other people to their death. Other people who had no maps.

  We four horsemen on the road were making as much noise as a battalion. They must have heard us coming ten miles away, or else they didn’t want to hear us. That was always a possibility. Maybe the Germans were afraid of us? Why not?

  A month of sleepiness on every eyelid, that’s what we were carrying, and as much again in the backs of our heads, plus all those pounds of tin.

  The men in my party didn’t express themselves very well. Actually they hardly spoke at all. They’d come from the ends of Brittany, and what they knew they hadn’t learned at school but in the army. That night I tried to make a little conversation about the village of Barbigny with the one next to me … his name was Kersuzon.

  “Kersuzon,” I say. “We’re in the Ardennes now … Do you see anything in the distance? I don’t see a damn thing …”

  “It’s as black as an asshole,” Kersuzon says. That was enough …

  “But,” I suggest, “haven’t you heard anyone mention Barbigny in the course of the day? Give you an idea where it is?”

  “No.”

  That was that.

  We never did find Barbigny. We went around in circles until morning and ended up in another village, where the man with the field glasses was waiting for us. The general was taking his black coffee in the arbor outside the mayor’s house when we got there.

  “Ah, Pinçon!” he says in a loud voice to his chief of staff as he sees us pass, “Youth is so wonderful!” After that he went out for a leak and then, stooped over, his hands behind his back, he took a little stroll. The general was very tired that morning, the orderly confided to me, he’d slept badly, some trouble with his bladder, so it seemed.

  Kersuzon always gave me the same answer when I questioned him at night, as if I’d pressed a button, it kind of tickled me. Two or three times more he said the same thing about the asshole darkness and a while after that he was killed, on his way out of some village we’d mistaken for some other village by some French soldiers who’d mistaken us for somebody else.

  It was a few days, I remember now, after Kersuzon was killed that we dreamed up a little trick that suited us fine to keep from getting lost in the darkness.

  So they were throwing us out of the billet. All right all right. We don’t say a word. No griping, no come-back. “Clear out!” old wax face yelled as usual.

  “Yes sir, very good sir.”

  And off we’d go in the direction of the gunfire, we didn’t wait to be asked twice, all five of us. You’d have thought we were going to pick cherries. It was rolling country around there, the Meuse with its vine-covered hills, grapes that weren’t ripe yet, and autumn, wooden villages well dried by three months of summer, highly inflammable.

  We’d noticed that one night when we couldn’t figure out where to go. There was always a village burning in the direction of the gunfire. We didn’t go too close, we gave that village a wide berth and just watched, like an audience, so to speak, from maybe seven or eight miles away. And every night from then on all kinds of
villages would burst into a blaze on the horizon, one after another, we’d be surrounded by them, dozens of burning villages in a circle, up ahead and on both sides, like a crazy carnival, sending up flames that licked the clouds.

  We’d watch the flames as they swallowed up everything, churches and barns, one after another. The haystacks burned higher and livelier than anything else, the beams reared up in the darkness, throwing off sparks, before crashing into a sea of light.

  Even from ten or fifteen miles away you get a good view of a burning village. It was a merry sight. A tiny hamlet that you wouldn’t even notice in the daytime, with ugly, uninteresting country around it, you can’t imagine how impressive it can be when it’s on fire at night! You’d think it was Notre-Dame! A village, even a small one, takes at least all night to burn, in the end it looks like an enormous flower, then there’s only a bud, and after that nothing.

  Smoke rises, and then it’s morning.

  We’d leave the horses saddled in a field close by, and they wouldn’t move. We’d go and saw wood in the grass, all but one, naturally, who’d take his turn on guard. But when you’ve got fires to watch, the night passes a lot more pleasantly, it’s not a hardship anymore, you’re not alone.

  Unfortunately, the villages didn’t last … After a month’s time there wasn’t a village left in that neck of the woods. The forests were shelled too. They didn’t last a week. Forests make nice enough fires, but they don’t last.

  After that the roads were all clogged with artillery columns going in one direction and civilians running away in the other.

  So naturally we couldn’t go either way, we could only stay where we were.

  We’d line up for the privilege of getting killed. Even the general couldn’t find any billets with no soldiers in them. In the end we were sleeping in the fields, general or no general. Those who still had a bit of spirit lost it. That was when they started shooting men to bolster their morale, whole squadrons, and when our M.P. got a citation for the way in which he was carrying on his little private war, the real honest-to-goodness war.

  They gave us a short rest, and a few weeks later we climbed back up on our horses and started north. The cold came with us. The gunfire was never far away. But we never came across any Germans except by accident, a hussar or a squad of riflemen here and there, in yellow and green, pretty colors. We seemed to be looking for them, but we beat it the moment we laid eyes on them. At every encounter two or three horsemen bit the dust, sometimes theirs, sometimes ours. And from far in the distance their riderless horses, with loose clanking stirrups, would come galloping toward us, we’d see their saddles with the peculiar cantles and all their leather as fresh and shiny as pocketbooks on New Year’s Day. They were coming to see our horses, they made friends in no time. They were lucky. We couldn’t have done that.

  One morning when they rode in from a reconnaissance patrol, Lieutenant de Sainte-Engence* swore to the other officers that he hadn’t made it up. “I carved ’em I tell you. Two of them!” he insisted, showing everybody his saber, and true enough, the little groove was full of caked blood, that’s what it’s made for.

  Captain Ortolan backed him up. “He was splendid! Bravo, Sainte-Engence! … Ah, messieurs, if you’d only seen him! What a charge!”

  Ortolan was in command of the squadron.

  “I saw every bit of it! I wasn’t far away! A thrust to the right … Zing! The first one drops! … A thrust full in the chest! … Left! Cross! Championship style! … Bravo again, Sainte-Engence! Two lancers! Less than a mile from here! Still lying there! In a plowed field! The war’s over for them, eh, Sainte-Engence? … A double thrust! Beautiful! I bet they spilled their guts like rabbits!”

  Lieutenant de Sainte-Engence, whose horse had galloped a long way, received his comrades’ compliments with modesty. Now that Ortolan had authenticated his exploit, his mind was at rest, so he rode off some distance and cooled off his mare by circling slowly around the assembled squadron as if he were just coming in from a steeplechase.

  “We must send another patrol over there!” cried Captain Ortolan. “Immediately!” He was terribly excited. “Those two poor devils must have been lost to come this way, but there must be more behind them … Ah, Corporal Bardamu. Go take a look, you and your four men!”

  The captain was talking to me.

  “And when they fire at you, try to make a note of their position and come right back and tell me where they are! They must be Brandenburgers! …”

  The regular army men told me that in peacetime this Captain Ortolan hardly ever showed up for duty. Now that a war was on, he made up for it. He was indefatigable. His vigor and verve, even among all those other lunatics, were getting more unbelievable from day to day. It was rumored that he sniffed cocaine. Pale, rings under his eyes, always dashing around on his fragile legs … Whenever he set foot on the ground, he’d stagger at first but then he’d get hold of himself and stride angrily over the furrowed fields in search of some new feat of daring. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sent us to get a light from the muzzles of the enemy’s guns. He was in cahoots with death. I’d have sworn they had a contract, death and Captain Ortolan.

  He’d spent the first part of his life (I had made it my business to find out) breaking his ribs in horse shows several times a year. And his legs, because of also being broken and not being used for walking, had lost their calves. When he walked, it was with nervous, pigeon-toed steps, as though walking on eggs. Seeing him in his enormous greatcoat, stooped over in the rain, you’d have taken him for the phantom hindquarters of a race horse.

  It needs to be said, though, that at the start of that monstrous enterprise, during the month of August and through September, certain hours, whole days now and then, certain stretches of road and parts of forest were still propitious to the doomed … In those places you could toy with the illusion that you were more or less safe, you could finish eating your bread and bully beef without being too much plagued by the foreboding that this was the last time. But from October on there were no more of these little lulls, the hail fell thicker and sharper and faster, spiced with shot and shell. Soon we’d be at the heart of the storm, and the very thing we were trying not to see, our death, would be so close to our noses that we couldn’t see anything else.

  The night, which had terrified us at first, seemed almost pleasant by comparison. In the end we longed for the night and waited for it. It was harder for them to shoot at us then than in the daytime. That was the only difference that counted.

  It’s hard to face the facts, even in connection with war the imagination holds its own for a long time.

  Cats who’ve been threatened by fire for too long end up by jumping in the water.

  During the night we’d cadge a few minutes here and there that came pretty close to the blessed days of peace, those days that now seem too good to be true, when everything was benign, when nothing really mattered, when we did so many things that had come to seem so marvelously, superlatively delightful. Days of peace, days of living velvet …

  But soon the nights as well were a merciless torment. Almost every night we’d have to keep our weary bones at work, put up with a little extra torture, just so as to eat or catch a little nap in the darkness. The food convoys moved up to the front lines at, a disgraceful crawl, long limping lines of shaky wagons, bursting with meat, prisoners, wounded, oats, rice, and M.P.’s, and don’t forget the wine in big jiggling pot-bellied jugs that reminded us of high old times:

  Behind the rolling forge and the bread wagon men came dragging themselves on foot, prisoners in handcuffs, some of theirs and some of ours, condemned to this or that, lashed by the wrists to the M.P.s’ stirrups, some due to be shot the next day and no downer in the mouth than the others. It didn’t spoil their appetites either, they ate their ration of that tuna fish that’s so indigestible (they wouldn’t have time to digest it) while waiting by the side of the road for the convoy to shove off—and they ate their
last chunk of bread, too, with a civilian chained to them, who was said to be a spy but he didn’t know it. Neither did we.

  The military torture continued in its nocturnal aspect … Groping our way through the hump-backed streets of a village without light or face, bent under sacks that weighed more than a man, from one unknown barn to another, threatened and yelled at, haggard, with no better prospect than to end in a sea of liquid manure, sickened at the thought that we’d been tortured, duped to the entrails by a gang of vicious lunatics, who had suddenly become incapable of doing anything else than killing and spilling their guts without knowing why.

  We’d flop down between two manure piles, but the noncoms would soon kick and bellow us to our feet, and send us to a different part of the convoy, to load or unload something else.

  The village darkness was gorged with food and soldiers, bloated with fat, apples, oats, sugar, that we had to haul around and distribute to this squad and that squad. That convoy had brought everything except a ticket home.

  Our detail was dead tired, we’d drop right next to our cart, and the sergeant-major would come around and shine his lantern on the corpses. He was an ape with a double chin. Regardless of the chaos, he had to find a watering place for the horses! Oh yes, the horses had to drink! But I’ve seen four men, ass and all, drop with fatigue, and fall fast asleep with the water up to their necks.

  After the watering we had to find the alley we’d come by and get back to the farm, where we thought we’d left the rest of our squad. If we didn’t find it, we could always pass out at the foot of some wall and sleep for an hour, if there was an hour left. In this business of getting killed, it’s no use being picky and choosy … You’ve got to act as if life were going on, and that lie is the hardest part of it.