“It’s going all right, I knew it was, my watch has never stopped yet.”
His voice showed no emotion. The sentry stood there without a word; his face was screwed up and withdrawn, hard and tormented.
“Oh, shut up,” said Willi, although the sentry hadn’t said anything. “Why must you always be so childish? Two hours are two hours, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
The sentry stood there like a pillar of salt. Ten minutes! he kept thinking, and this single thought pounded away in his brain. Ten minutes, twelve times ten minutes, a hundred and twenty times one minute!
“Look,” Willi went on in a complacent tone, “I always think of home, that passes the time for me. One day the war will be over, then we’ll go back, take off our tunics, kiss our wives, and go off to work. We’ve done our duty, see? And we …”
“Shut up!”
The two men looked at each other with hostility, although all they could see of each other was a pale, blurred disc under the black shadow of the steel helmet. Yet each saw the other’s face quite plainly, forming it from the sound of the voice and the tension in the air. Willi saw a thin, dark, bitter face with lacklustre eyes, shadowed by grief: the sentry’s face. He in turn saw that good-natured, rather cunning, smug face, a bit surprised yet watchful; Willi’s face.
“Give me a cigarette,” the sentry croaked.
“Hey, listen, you already owe me three. Tell you what, let’s make that deal with the watch. For God’s sake, a broken watch, what good is it to you! I’ll give you twenty-five for it, ten now, that makes thirteen, and the rest the day after tomorrow when the canteen opens—I needn’t tell you …”
“Shut up, just hand them over!”
Willi hesitated for a moment, then put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
“Here—but where …”
The sentry snatched the packet from Willi, opened it, and instantly struck a match. Suddenly the two faces were harshly lit up and looked frighteningly similar: pale, unspeakably weary, slack-mouthed.
“Are you crazy, man?” exclaimed Willi, “and then …”
“Oh, shut up.” The sentry’s voice now sounded more conciliatory. “They can lick my …”
At that he turned on his heel but swung round again and asked: “What time is it now?”
Again Willi carefully rolled up his tunic, groped for his watch in the little pocket in his waistband, and held it up to his eyes: “Eighteen minutes past—don’t forget the watch!”
The sentry strolled down the street as far as the second house and leaned against the door of Madame Sevry’s café. He drew deeply and voluptuously on his cigarette, and an extraordinary happiness filled his entire being. The poison radiated a gentle, pleasant vertigo. He closed his eyes. Ten cigarettes, he thought. Now he actually began to feel time slipping between his fingers; that heavy, black, inert, remorseless lump was melting away. It was as if a floodgate had opened and the current was bearing him away.
On either side the road led off into the abyss of darkness; now the silence was released, it too was flowing. For eighteen endless minutes the silence had been like a brake holding back time. Now the silence ran parallel with time, so close to it that the two seemed to be one.
Knowing just where the château was on the right and the school on the left, he imagined he could see them. But the avenue leading from the road to the château—that he really could see. It was like a high, perforated wall, darker than the night and studded with the dim clarity of the sky.
When he carefully tucked away the stub of his cigarette in his pocket, he knew that no more than seven minutes had passed. So it must be twenty-five past two. He decided to take a walk through the factory, that would take care of twelve minutes, and after that to smoke a cigarette. If he then returned slowly to Madame Sevry’s door, smoked another cigarette, and walked to the school, it would have to be three o’clock.
Moving away from the door he walked down the gentle slope to the château gates, then slowly on almost to the corner of the church square—sixty-seven paces—where he turned left towards the abandoned gatehouse. From the archway he glanced into the little house from which all the timberwork had been stolen. As he hurried on he suddenly realized he was scared. Yes, without rhyme or reason, he was scared. Who could possibly be looking for anything in this completely looted factory at two thirty in the morning? But he was scared. His footsteps resounded hollowly on the concrete floor, and through the damaged roof he could see scraps of blue-black sky. It seemed to him as if the bare, black room were soaking up the threats of silence through the holes in the roof. The factory had been so radically gutted that it was no longer possible to make out what it had been used for: a big, bare hall where the concrete bases of the machines seemed glued stubbornly to the floor; meaningless iron structures, dirt, torn paper: indescribably cold and dreary.
Rigid with fear, the sentry walked slowly to the end of the great hall where an open doorway led outside. In the blackness of the wall, the open doorway looked like a rectangular piece of dark grey-blue cloth. He headed straight for it, walking softly, for the sound of his footsteps frightened him. Suddenly he stumbled over the rails leading outside, caught himself as he staggered against the wall, and stood with a pounding heart in the doorway. Although here, too, he could see scarcely twenty paces ahead, he believed he must be looking at the wide, open field, for he knew it was there and he could smell it: the sharp sweetness of spring nights above the meadows and fields.
Suddenly his fear flared up and landed right in the middle of his heart. Trembling, he turned round and walked with hesitant steps into the soundless menace, and the farther he went the more he realized that it—his fear—was empty, hollow, and he began to feel almost lighthearted. He even smiled a little as he stepped through the narrow doorway in the black wall into the grounds of the château.
It was like a dream! This round he had made seemed to have taken so long, an entire lifetime, as he mounted the stone stairs again, stepped across the captain’s puddle, and stationed himself in the entrance. It was an eerie feeling: time seemed to have passed with ghostly speed yet insane sluggishness, time was disembodied, intangible, contradictory. How terrible to be at its mercy—it was a dream!
The only realities were the puddle, the cold, and the damp. He decided against walking round the château and proceeded to light a cigarette. His calculations became confused, he had merely a dim notion: one cigarette here and one in Madame Sevry’s doorway, then off to Willi, and it would have to be three o’clock. So one hour would have passed. He knew he was deceiving himself, yet, while aware of that, he believed in the deception.
How am I going to tell Willi that I don’t even have the watch any more, he thought in desperation, that two evenings ago I drank it away at Madame Sevry’s! I have to hold him off till the day after tomorrow and then return the cigarettes to him out of my canteen rations. Franz will have to get twelve, Willi thirteen, so all I’ll have left will be seven cigarettes and the tobacco.
And the money he had borrowed! Credit is the worst of all traps for a poor man, he thought bitterly. It was always the same: whenever Marianne’s parcels arrived with the money she sent, he would blow it all, it would run through his fingers; after that he would drag himself along over the perilous, seductive bridge of credit, swaying between the abysses of despair and stupor.
And the war stood still! That monster was marking time. Horror without end. Day and night the uniform, and the futility of routine duty, the arrogant, strident bad temper of the officers and the yelling of the NCOs. They had been driven into the war like a hopeless, vast, grey herd of desperate men. Sometimes the memory of the front, where the monster really had been bare-fanged and bloody, seemed to him easier to endure than the perpetual waiting in this country that vacillated between spiteful muteness and a kindly, gentle irony. Again and again, on the monotonous carousel of the so-called deployment plan, they were shoved for a short time into the dug-outs and the
n back into this lousy dump, where they knew every single child, every chair and every bar. And the wine was getting worse and worse, the schnapps ever more dubious, cigarettes and rations ever scarcer; it was a cruel game. He tucked the second butt into his little watch pocket, stepped unconcernedly into the captain’s puddle, and walked rapidly down the avenue, towards the street, straight to the school.
Good as his word, Willi was standing by the entrance to the building, apparently gently dozing.
“What time is it?” asked the sentry in a hectoring tone. He waited impatiently while Willi completed his fumbling manoeuvre with the watch.
“Quarter to,” Willi answered. “Did you bring it along?”
“Bring what along?”
“The watch. You could’ve just gone to your room to pick it up, couldn’t you? I want to send home a parcel tomorrow morning, you see, and …”
“I left it with the watchmaker in Bechencourt—didn’t I tell you? It’ll be Monday before I can give it to you.”
“Oh, you might’ve told me. So I s’pose I’ll have to pay for the repair, won’t I?”
The sentry laughed. “Of course, then you’ll have a good watch for twenty-five cigarettes and a few francs—cheap, eh?”
“But we made a deal, and—and are you sure, Monday? Or d’you think …?”
“No, Monday for sure.”
The sentry was obsessed with the single thought that it was only a quarter to three. Not even an hour, not even half the time, had gone by! A profound bitterness welled up in him, hatred and rage, a dark fear and, at the same time, despair. All this seemed to choke him, his throat felt bitter and hot and horribly dry, as if from violently suppressed tears.
“Be seeing you,” he said in a forced voice as he turned away. He was about to ask the time again, but it was so pointless, it couldn’t possibly be more than ten minutes to three.
The street, which he walked along so often during the day and again in the evening to fetch rations—during the day this little bit of street seemed absurdly short and pitiful; now at night it had acquired a mysterious length and breadth. Even the dirty, shabby houses opposite the château grounds were more impressive in the dark. But all he could feel was that desperate bitterness that was almost strangling him. Not even the thought of the cigarettes in his pocket was any comfort, nor was the knowledge that the awkward business of the watch had been postponed for at least two days. He was miserably cold and hungry—a naked, nagging hunger. He put his hands in his pockets, but they were so hopelessly numb that even in there they refused to come to life. His steel helmet suddenly weighed on him like a lump of lead, and at that moment he felt convinced that everything, everything, hatred and torment and despair, was contained in that steel helmet, in that heavy lump on his forehead. He took it off, then stepped into Monsieur Dubuc’s gateway, just opposite the entrance to the château.
Now that he was rid of the pressure of the helmet he felt almost light-headed, and unconsciously he was smiling, a gentle, benign smile. He thought: now it must be three o’clock! And once the first half had gone by, time passed more quickly: the half-way mark was the ridge that had to be climbed, after that it was downhill all the way. He pictured Marianne’s face while closing his eyes, making it appear so close and vivid that he could smell her hair. There would be some mail from her again, he would see her handwriting …
Time flowed, flowed, he could sense it, at breakneck speed it was approaching four o’clock. To sleep, to sleep and dream till six! The thought of tomorrow’s duty checked him for a moment like a horse at a hurdle, but then, suddenly, for the first time that night, he heard the striking of the village clock: four strokes and three strokes, relentlessly. Three o’clock! Only three o’clock!
The shock made him duck like a beaten animal; he cringed as if from a cruel blow, gave a groan of animal despair, tried without conviction to kid himself that he’d miscounted. His bare head suddenly felt ice-cold and painful. He jammed on his steel helmet, lit a cigarette, and in feverish haste, inhaling deeply, smoked two cigarettes, one after another, slavering with hatred, rage and despair.
He even forgot to save up the two butts, flicking them brusquely into the street …
After that, when he walked across to Willi it was eight minutes past three; the next time—it seemed like an eternity of inner torment—it was eleven minutes past three. Those three minutes had been an eternity! Yes, he was done for, that was it; it was all futile. It would never be four o’clock, he would never reach the fourth hour alive, he would be crushed by the hideous millstones of naked time. All comfort and hope had sunk out of sight; not even memory could conjure them up now. There remained nothing but the naked torture of time and the prospect of going on four hours’ duty the next day, suffering from hunger and lack of sleep, with the hung-over lieutenant. Rifle drill, about-turn, rifle drill, about-turn, field training, rifle drill, target practice, singing, singing, singing! Four hours: an endless chain of murderous seconds. Four hours! And these two were not even over yet. Time was a cheat, that was it! It cheated him, it destroyed every hope. Two hours! Four hours! Parade-ground duty and sentry duty, hopelessly clamped in this vice! Singing! Singing! Singing songs to satisfy the hung-over lieutenant’s sentimental nature.
From the knotted tangle of rage, despair and hatred, hatred now emerged isolated and pure. He embraced that hatred and nursed it; he nurtured it with spiteful phrases about the lieutenant, the pissing captain, and the NCOs. With a ghastly smile he lit his fifth cigarette, standing once again in Madame Sevry’s doorway, and looked along the street.
Now he could release that hatred, he no longer needed to nurse and nurture it; it was strong enough to work away independently inside him.
From the sea came a faint wind, damp and cool, that prompted unusual sounds: the groaning of fresh-leaved trees, the creaking of rotting roof-timbers, and the rattle of old, warped doors.
And all at once he knew that time really had passed swiftly; he was not surprised to hear the clock strike a quarter to four.
He hurried back through the avenue and entered the guard-room to rouse his relief. Waking a man is an art, he thought, a soldier’s sleep is something sacred, which is why it is kicked around by everyone: hardly anyone knows how to rouse a soldier from his sleep, the sleep, that costs nothing but is so indescribably precious.
He groped his way across the room and cautiously woke the sentry, not too tentatively and not too brutally—in such a way that the man was immediately awake yet not torn ruthlessly from the profound bliss of sleep. He shook the sentry a few times gently but firmly, and a resigned voice mumbled, “All right, I’m coming.”
Pity overwhelmed him; they were all, all of them, clamped into this senseless, cruel system. He waited outside at the entrance to the avenue; he no longer felt cold or hungry, hardly even tired, now that he was sure of his bed.
But suddenly he heard footsteps coming from the church square, strange footsteps, groans, and little yelps of suppressed lust. The staggering was so palpable in the darkness that he could picture the lieutenant, weaving from side to side, sometimes walking briskly, then lurching again. Yvette must have regaled him nicely with her phony liqueurs! Now he was turning into the village street … For ten paces the lieutenant walked almost normally, humming to himself, then staggered again; and then—then the sentry saw the glowing tip of his cigarette.
Shoot him, shoot him! he thought, and scarcely had the words entered his mind than he released the safety catch of his rifle and aimed it, leaning his left hand on the gatepost and pushing the barrel across it. He was ice-cold and alert, tense with the glorious game of aiming at the lieutenant. And after taking precise aim at the glowing cigarette, he called, keeping his voice down: “Password—who goes there?” He followed the approaching figure with his rifle, and when the voice called back “Vive la France!” he was transfixed by a terrible, savage emotion known only to gamblers who suddenly and compulsively bet everything on a single card: he pressed the trigger. A
nd in the billionth of a second between pressure and discharge, everything within him that was still human, all of it, longed for the bullet to miss, but a sickening, brief, gurgling sound told him otherwise. He was standing there rigid and motionless when the relief sentry grabbed his arm and asked in a scared voice, “What happened?”
“Vive la France,” he merely replied and, with chalk-white face and trembling hands, leaned his rifle against the gatepost.
THE CASUALTY
At the point where, half an hour earlier, the dust cloud of the attackers had been, there was now the dust cloud of fleeing men. The dusty haze was drifting over the shimmering steppe towards the military police, confusing them and increasing their fury. Raising their machine pistols they roared: “Stop, you bastards—stop—back to your positions!”
The air was filled with the screams of wounded men left lying on the ground, the shouts of the Russians—a hoarse, frightened barking, and the cries of fleeing men: like a herd of wild horses scenting an obstruction, they halted when confronted by the barrels of the machine pistols, then turned in weary submission and went back.
From behind me I could hear the shouts of the officers as they grouped their men for a new thrust. I could hear the rumbling of tanks, the howling of shells, and still the screams of the badly wounded. Slowly and with a feeling of extraordinary happiness I walked towards the line of military police. They couldn’t touch me, I’d been wounded, although there was nothing to show for it in front.
“Stop!” they shouted. “Get back there, you bastard!”
“I’ve been wounded!” I yelled at them. With suspicious looks they let me approach. I went up to a tense, infuriated lieutenant, turned round and showed him my back. It must have been a pretty big hole, I’d run my hand over it once: damp, sticky blood and shreds of cloth. But I could feel nothing, it was a superb wound, a wound made to order, they couldn’t touch me. Actually it must have looked worse than it was. The lieutenant growled something, then said more calmly: “There’s a doctor over there.”