Journey to the End of the Night Read online

  The wagons started back to the rear. In flight from the dawn, they hit the road again. Squeaking in every crooked wheel, off they drove, and with them went my prayer that they’d be ambushed, cut to pieces, burned that same day, the way you see in war pictures, supply column wiped out for ever and ever, with its escort of M.P. gorillas, horse soldiers, and lantern-swinging noncoms, with its work details, its sacks of lentils and flour that would never be cooked and never be seen, again. Because there are many different ways of kicking in, of exhaustion or something else, but the worst is to do it while hauling enough sacks to fill the night with.

  The day when those motherfucking wagons would be shattered to the axles, they’d leave us alone, I thought, and even if only for one night, we’d be able to sleep with body and soul.

  This food supply business was just one more nightmare, a nasty little monster on top of the big one, the war. Brutes to the right of us, brutes to the left of us, they were all over the place. Condemned to a deferred death, the only thing that really mattered was an enormous longing for sleep, all the rest was torture, even the time and effort it took to eat. A bend in the brook, a familiar-looking wall … But mostly it was the smells helped us find our farm, we’d reverted to dogs in the wartime night of the deserted villages. The smell of shit was the best guide of all.

  The quartermaster top kick was the guardian of the regiment’s hatreds, he, until further notice, was master of the world. Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it’s the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms. There in the wartime village night the top kick was corraling human cattle for the big slaughterhouses that had just opened. The top sergeant was king. King of Death! Sergeant Cretelle! Absolutely! Nobody more powerful! And nobody as powerful, except one of their top sergeants on the opposite side.

  Nothing was left of the village, no living thing except terrified cats. First the furniture went, smashed up for firewood, chairs, tables, sideboards, from the lightest to the heaviest. And anything that the boys could carry, they made off with. Combs, lamps, cups, silly little things, even bridal wreaths, everything went. As if we’d had years of life ahead of us. They looted to take their minds off their troubles, to make it look as if they had years before them. Everybody likes that feeling.

  As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That’s why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don’t really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they’d go on picking up old shoes that “might come in handy.” The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don’t die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.

  I wasn’t very bright myself, but at least I had sense enough to opt for cowardice once and for all. I imagine that’s why people thought I was so uncommonly calm. Be that as it may, I inspired a paradoxical confidence in our Captain Ortolan, who decided that night to entrust me with a delicate mission. It consisted, he told me in confidence, of trotting before daylight to Noirceur-sur-la-Lys,* a city of weavers, situated some ten miles from the village where we’d camped. My job was to find out at firsthand whether the enemy was there or not. All that day patrols had been contradicting one another, and General des Entrayes was good and sick of it. For that reconnaissance mission I was allowed to pick one of the less purulent horses in the platoon. I hadn’t gone out alone in a long time. It made me feel as if I were starting on a trip. But my feeling of deliverance was illusory.

  I was so tired when I set out that hard as I tried I couldn’t properly visualize my own murder, I couldn’t fill in the details. I moved from tree to tree, accompanied by the clanking of my hardware. All by itself my pretty saber made as much noise as a piano. I don’t know if I was deserving of sympathy, but for sure I was certainly grotesque.

  What could General des Entrayes have been thinking, sending me out alone into that silence, all clothed in cymbals?

  The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disemboweled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you’re in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs’ contempt for other people’s bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above-mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.

  The one tiny bit of hope I had left was of being taken prisoner. It didn’t amount to much, a shred. A shred in the night, because the circumstances weren’t conducive to polite preliminaries, far from it. The foe would shoot first and introduce himself afterward. Besides, what would I say to this soldier, hostile by definition, who’d come from the other end of Europe for the express purpose of murdering me? … Suppose he hesitated for one second (that was all I’d need), what would I say to him? … And come to think of it, what would he be? A salesclerk? … A professional soldier? … A gravedigger? … In civilian life … A cook? … Horses are lucky, they’re stuck with the war same as us, but nobody expects them to be in favor of it, to pretend to believe in it. Unfortunate, yes, but free! Enthusiasm, the stinker, was reserved for us!

  I could see the road clearly just then and, plunked down on the mud beside it, big squares and cubes of houses, their walls whitened by the moonlight, like big unequal blocks of ice, pale and silent. Would this be the end of it all? How much time would I spend in this desolation after they’d done for me? Before it was all over? In what ditch? Beside which one of these walls? Would they come and finish me off? With a knife? Sometimes they gouged out your eyes, cut off your hands, and so on … There were all sorts of rumors on the subject, and they were no joke! A hoofbeat … Another … would be enough! … This beast makes a noise like two men with iron boots fastened together, running with a jerky, uneven step …

  My heart, a rabbit, warm in its little rib cage, fearful, cowering, bewildered …

  You must feel pretty much the same way when you jump off the top of the Eiffel Tower. You’d like to stop yourself in mid-air.

  That village kept its menace secret, but not entirely. In the center of a square a tiny fountain gurgled just for me.

  That night I had everything to myself. I was the owner of the moon, the village, and of an enormous fear. I was about to break into a trot with a good hour’s ride ahead of me to Noirceur-sur-la-Lys, when I caught sight of a well-veiled light over a door. I headed straight for that light, surprised to detect inside myself a kind of daring, a deserter’s daring to be sure, but more than I’d ever suspected. The light disappeared the next second, but I’d seen it all right. I knocked, I kept at it, I knocked again, I called out in a loud voice, half in German, half in French to be on the safe side, to those strangers locked in the darkness.

  The door finally opened by just a crack.

  A voice asked: “Who are you?” I was saved.

  “A dragoon …”

  “French?” A woman speaking. I could see her now …

  “Yes, French …”

  “Some German dragoons were here this afternoon … They spoke French too …”

  “Yes, but I’m really French …”

  “I see!”

  She seemed to have her doubts.

  “Where are they now?” I asked.

  “They left at about eight o’clock, heading for Noirceur …” She pointed north.

  A young girl, shawl and white apron, emerged from the shadow.

  “What did the Germans do to you?” I asked.

  “They burned a house next to the town hall, and they killed my little brother, ran a lance through his belly … He was playing on the Red Bridge, watching them go by … Look!” She showed me. “There he is.”

  She didn’t cry. She relit the candle, that was the light I had seen. At the back of the room I saw—it was tr
ue—the little corpse lying on a mattress; it was dressed in a sailor suit with a big square collar, the face and throat were as livid as the candlelight. The child’s arms and legs and back were bent, he was all doubled up. The lance had passed, like an axis for death, through the middle of his belly. His mother was on her knees beside him, crying her heart out. So was the father. Then they all started moaning at once. But my trouble was thirst.

  “You wouldn’t have a bottle of wine to sell me?” I asked. “You’ll have to ask my mother … She may know if there’s any left … The Germans took a lot just now …”

  The two women talked it over in an undertone.

  The daughter came back and announced: “There’s none left … the Germans took it all … We’d given them plenty without being asked, but even so …”

  “Oh yes, they drank and they drank,” said the mother, who’d suddenly stopped crying. “They’re crazy about it …”

  “Must have been more than a hundred bottles,” said the father, still on his knees.

  “And there’s not a single one left?” I kept at it, still hoping, because of my terrible thirst, especially for white wine with a good bitter tang that wakes you up a little. “I don’t mind paying …”

  “There’s nothing left but the best!” the mother conceded. “It costs five francs a bottle.”

  “That’s fine!” I said, taking a big five-franc piece out of my pocket.

  “Go and get one!” she said to the sister in a whisper.

  The sister took the candle and a moment later brought up a bottle from the hiding place.

  I had what I wanted, there was nothing more to stay for.

  “Will they come back?” I asked, anxious again.

  “Maybe!” they all said together. “If they do, they’ll burn everything in sight … They promised they would when they left …”

  “I’ll just go and see what they’re up to!”

  “You’re very brave … It’s that way,” said the father, pointing in the direction of Noirceur-sur-la-Lys … He even stepped out on the road to see me on my way. The girl and her mother stayed behind, fearful, watching over the little corpse.

  “Come back in!” they called out to him. “Joseph, come in. You’ve no business out there on the road …”

  “You’re very brave!” the father said to me again, shaking me by the hand.

  I started off again, northward, at a trot.

  “At least don’t tell them we’re still here!” The girl was shouting. She’d come out just for that.

  “They’ll see for themselves tomorrow whether you’re here or not,” I called back. I wasn’t happy about giving them my five francs. There was five francs between us. Five francs is reason enough to hate people and make you want them dead … There won’t be any love to spare in this world as long as there’s five francs.

  “Tomorrow!” they repeated, fearing the worst …

  Tomorrow, for them too, was far away, there wasn’t much sense in that kind of tomorrow. The one thing any of us really cared about was living for one more hour, one more hour is a big deal in a world where everything has reduced itself to murder.

  I didn’t have far to go after that. I trotted from tree to tree, expecting to be challenged or shot from one minute to the next. Nothing happened.

  It must have been about two in the morning, not much more, when I got to the top of a little hill, at a walk. Suddenly, looking down from there, I saw rows and rows of burning gas jets, and then in the foreground a station all lit up with its cars and its buffet, but not a sound came up to me … Nothing. Streets, avenues, street lamps, and more lights in parallel lines, whole neighborhoods, and everything else a black voracious void, with this city plunked down as if it had been lost, lying there all lit up in the heart and center of the darkness. I got down off my horse, made myself comfortable on a little hummock, and sat there looking at that city for quite some time.

  That didn’t tell me if the Germans had moved into Noirceur, but since I knew that in a case like that they usually set fire, I figured if they’d moved in and hadn’t set fire to the place right away, they must have something very unusual up their sleeve.

  No gunfire either. All very suspicious.

  My horse wanted to lie down too. He tugged at his bridle and that made me turn around. When I turned back to the city, something about the look of the hummock in front of me had changed, not much, but enough to make me sing out: “Hey! Who goes there?” That change in the layout of the darkness had taken place a few steps away … Must be somebody there …

  “Don’t shout too loud!” came a deep, hoarse voice, very French. “You lost too?” he asked me. Now I could see him, a foot slogger, the peak of his cap was cracked in “goodbye to the army” style. After all these years I remember that moment, his silhouette emerging from the grass the way targets used to in shooting galleries, soldier targets.

  We came closer. I was holding my revolver, for two beans I’d have fired, don’t ask why.

  “Hey,” he asks. “You seen them?”

  “No, but I’ve come here to see them.”

  “You from the 145th Dragoons?”

  “That’s right. You?”

  “I’m a reservist …”

  “Oh!” I said. That amazed me. He was the first reservist I’d met in the war. We’d always been in with the Regular Army men. I couldn’t see his face, but his voice was different from ours, sadder, which made him sound nicer. Because of that, I couldn’t help trusting him a little. Which was something.

  “I’m fed up,” he said. “I’m going to get myself captured by the Boches …”

  He wasn’t keeping any secrets.

  “How are you going about it?”

  All of a sudden his plan interested me more than anything else. How was he fixing to get taken prisoner?

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “How’d you manage to get away? … It’s not easy to get taken prisoner.”

  “To hell with that! I’ll just surrender.”

  “What’s wrong? You scared?”

  “I’m scared, and besides, the war is stupid. I don’t give a damn about the Germans, they never did anything to me …”

  My feeling was that I should be polite to the Germans. I’d have liked this reservist to explain, while he was about it, why I had no stomach either to make, war like everybody else … But he didn’t explain a thing, he just kept saying he was fed up.

  Then he told me how his regiment had been dispersed at dawn the day before because some of our sharpshooters had fired on his company by mistake. They hadn’t been expected just then, they’d arrived three hours ahead of schedule. So these sharpshooters, tired and taken by surprise, had fired across the fields and riddled them with bullets. I knew the story. I’d been through it myself.

  “Never fear,” he went on. “I saw my chance, and I took it. Robinson, I says to myself—Robinson’s my name, Léon Robinson—it’s now or never, I say to myself. This is the time to get going … Right? So I started through a little clump of woods and pretty soon, what do you think, I run into our captain … he’s leaning against a tree, in very bad shape! … Dying! … He was holding his pants in both hands and vomiting … Bleeding all over and rolling his eyes … There was nobody with him. He was through … ‘Mama! Mama!’ he was sniveling, all the while dying and pissing blood …

  “ ‘Shut up! I tell him. Mama! Mama! Fuck your mama!’

  … Just like that, on my way past, out of the corner of my mouth! … I bet that made him feel good, the bastard! … What do you think of that! … It’s not every day you can tell the captain what you think … Too good to miss … A rare opportunity! … To get out of there faster I chucked my pack and gun … dropped ’em in a duck pond … You see, I don’t take to killing people, I never learned to … even in peacetime, I never cared for fights … I’d walk away … See what I mean? … In civilian life I tried to go to the factory regularly … I was kind of an en
graver, but I didn’t like it because of the arguments, I was happier selling the evening papers in a quiet neighborhood where I was known, around the Bank of France … Place des Victoires, if you want to know … Rue des Petits-Champs … that was my territory … I never went beyond the Rue du Louvre and the Palais-Royal on one side, get the idea? … In the morning I’d run errands for shopkeepers … sometimes a delivery in the afternoon, odd jobs, see? … kind of unskilled … But one thing I don’t want is weapons … If the Germans see you with a weapon, you’re cooked … But if you’re dressed free and easy like I am now … Nothing in your hands … nothing in your pockets … they get the idea that it won’t be hard to take you prisoner, see? They know who they’re dealing with … If you go up to the Germans mother naked, that would be even better … Like a horse! They wouldn’t know what army you belong to …”

  “That’s a fact!”

  I caught on that being older is good for the mind. It puts sense into you.

  “So you say they’re down there?” We figured, we estimated our chances and looked for our future in the great luminous expanse of the silent city as though consulting the cards …

  “Let’s get started!”

  First we’d have to cross the railroad tracks. If there were sentries, they’d see us. Or maybe they wouldn’t. We’d soon find out. Maybe there’d be an overpass, or maybe we’d take the tunnel.

  “We’ll have to hurry,” said Robinson … “Gotta do these things at night, people aren’t friendly in the daytime, everybody plays to the gallery in the daytime, even in the war, the daytime is a circus … You taking your horse?”

  I took the horse. A precaution … to get away quicker if the reception was bad. We got to the grade crossing, the big red and white arms were up. I’d never seen that kind of gate before. They weren’t like that around Paris.

  “Think they’ve moved in already?”

  “Positive!” he says. “Anyway, keep going.”