11
The division was waiting for the relief team. They had set up camp on a small hill, above a few ruined houses, on the site of what had formerly been a village. Only the church remained standing. Pierre could see shadows moving through the darkness: abandoned, starving cats hunted in packs amid the rubble. They weren’t the only ones still there: a few old people, a few children remained, hidden from view in basements. Pierre heard the two-tone toll of the bells, announcing a gas attack. His ears were still not used to these mournful, mysterious sounds. He couldn’t hear them without feeling a pang in his heart. His eyes had seen so many horrific scenes of war that no sight, however horrible, however hideous, managed to affect him, at least not in an intense, lasting way. But he couldn’t get used to certain sounds. He believed that even when peace came – if it ever came – he would hear them every night in his dreams: the harsh burst of barrage fire, the whiplash of the 88s, the 75s cutting the air like scythes, the whizzing of bullets and the heavy gunfire whose rumble can be sensed coming closer, slowly, ever so slowly, until it strikes, ripping open the ground. ‘Mustn’t give up hope,’ he thought, mocking himself. ‘Another ten years or so and it will all be over.’
He found his gas mask, smelled the faint sickly odour of rubber close to his face and felt the weight of the helmet on his head. Then he went out. As always, when he was in danger but not actually in battle, he thought of Agnès. He was pleased that he had never tried to hide certain things about the war from her. All around him the other men, in their letters, or when they were on leave, kept the truth from their wives and the elderly (‘What’s the point? They wouldn’t understand,’ they told themselves). Their sense of decency was partly sincere, partly pretence. They scoffed at the mock-heroic speeches of the rearguard who believed they were punishing the civilians by not sharing details of the soldiers’ daily life with them. The sensitive ones felt compassion. Pierre remembered a poor lad who had been killed two days before; half an hour before he died he’d said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we’re suffering?’
‘Naturally, I’d never talk about it to my mother or father,’ thought Pierre, ‘but Agnès, well, that’s different. She has to know everything I’m feeling, just as I know everything she feels.’
Whenever he was home, he made sure there were none of the misunderstandings, the painful things that poisoned other men’s leaves. She never asked stupid questions. She didn’t say, ‘But what are you all doing? You’re not getting anywhere.’ She didn’t ask, like his father, whether their offensive campaign would finally bring victory next spring, nor what the Allied generals thought (‘Shall I tell you what I think? We lack furia francese,’ Charles would mutter). Agnès knew everything that affected the men, the ordinary things about the division, their daily lives. And if she didn’t talk to him about the war, it wasn’t out of ignorance, or indifference, but out of profound and confident wisdom. He remembered their last night together. How far away it seemed, yet only two months had passed. He had held her in his arms, taking in her light nightdress, the fine sheets, the flowers next to their bed; he had looked at the shimmering heavy curtains lit up by the lamp and said softly, ‘We still have all this, thank goodness s’
He said nothing more: he was at a loss for words. But he was thinking, ‘All this, in spite of what you might think, is what is truly important. The war will end, we will all disappear, but these humble and innocent gifts will remain: the cool air, the sun, a red apple, a fire in winter, a woman, children, the life we lead each day … The crash and din of war all fade away. The rest endures … But will it endure for me, or for others?’
Yes. ‘For me, or for others?’ That should have been the most serious question, the only real question. Yet it wasn’t. After three years at war, the instinct for individual survival, while not disappearing entirely, had grown weaker within him. At times he almost forgot who he was, his name, what he liked and what he didn’t. He marched, suffered, hoped with so many others, who felt the same exhaustion, the same pain, the same hope, so that his individuality disappeared: he was no longer Pierre Hardelot. He became anonymous, to some extent, lost, just as he might be tomorrow and for ever, amid the dust and remains of so many others. On days when he was depressed, he found this feeling a bitter but inspiring consolation. ‘In the end,’ he mused, continuing his train of thought, ‘it doesn’t matter if everything remains the same for me or for anyone else. The essential thing is that it exists in and for itself. Agnès …’ Agnès asleep, in a long pink nightdress of light material with a bit of lace round the collar and sleeves. The child sleeping beside her. ‘Poor Agnès. Her life can’t be easy,’ he thought. Very little money, looking after the house, the squabbling mothers, so many difficult chores to do … What with taking care of the child, who had been the most terrible bone of contention between the two grandmothers, she couldn’t be a nurse, couldn’t volunteer for any charity work. He didn’t mind about that. Despite having moments when he lost a sense of who he was, he retained the jealous, possessive instinct innate to middle-class husbands. In his mind Agnès should take care of him alone, and of other men only through him. He would write to her about a comrade who wanted some books, another who needed a warm sweater, someone else who hadn’t had any news of his family in the occupied territories; he gave her instructions about what she should do. He loved her just as she was, willing and pure. Especially pure, as refreshing as a cool stream. He closed his eyes and thought, ‘She quenches my thirst.’
He could see some lights shining in the village streets below. Mass was being celebrated in the church, amid the ruins. He had attended the evening before. The army chaplain and all the worshippers were wearing gas masks, like him; the sound of the cannon fire, the screeching of the shells merged strangely with the responses … He went down to the church. The local people were already there, and nothing looked more bizarre than the parishioners, wearing that strange headgear designed to protect them from a gas attack, with their rosaries in their hands.
When everyone had left he went up to the altar. He had noticed it was heaped with various surprising objects. Day was breaking; he could see more clearly now. He stood astonished. Photographs, wedding tiaras, candlesticks, ornate clocks were laid out like a sad, dusty bric-à-brac sale. At the beginning of the war the village had been occupied by the Germans, then they’d gone. The fleeing villagers had taken their most precious possessions to the church before leaving, hoping they would be safe there. Now the village had been destroyed. ‘Another bombing like the one the other day,’ thought Pierre, ‘and you won’t even be able to tell where it once stood.’ But the photographs and clocks remained. Pierre walked out of the church at the very moment when a distant explosion made the old stone walls vibrate and shudder. The stained-glass windows had been shattered long ago. The soft, rosy light of an exquisite dawn spread through the church.
Pierre remembered the gas that was heading in their direction. It caused the most horrific of deaths.
Then he saw one of his men coming towards him. ‘It’s passed us by,’ he said.
12
Charles Hardelot was on his way to church. For a month now, since the German attacks to the north of the Chemin des Dames on 8 February, there had been no word from Pierre. For six days, long-range cannons had been bombarding Paris. Agnès, pale, dry-eyed, shut herself away with her child. Madame Hardelot, sick with grief, stayed in her room, and Madame Florent went back and forth between the two women. Charles Hardelot was fulfilling his duties as a Christian. Dressed in black, carrying his umbrella, he made his way through the streets of Paris as if he were marching into battle, listening closely to see if he could hear the rumbling of the cannons. He was not a belligerent soul. In 1914 the taubes, those planes that resembled birds, had awakened a profound sense of anguish in him (though he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone) and he shuddered whenever he thought of the luminous trail of the zeppelins as they moved through the sky. He always insisted on going down into the cellars as soon as the f
irst warning of the siren was heard.
‘My poor darling,’ Marthe sighed. ‘We’re surely more likely to get killed down there than up here with the bombs.’
‘It isn’t out of cowardice that we should take shelter, Marthe,’ he replied, ‘but to obey official orders. The strength of the army depends on discipline. I would go so far as to say that, in times of war, civilians make up an enormous army. Soldiers at the front are watching us; they are watching us closely. They expect us to set an example. The best example we can give is strict obedience. The government has not ordered us to evacuate Paris: I stay. The government has ordered us to take shelter: I rush down to the cellars. This is how I understand and practise civic discipline, Marthe, since it is the primary virtue of every citizen.’
Nevertheless, in the four years since violent death had reigned, even Charles Hardelot had begun to come to terms with the idea of it, telling himself that since the entire current generation was probably destined to be struck down sooner or later, he had better try to get used to it.
Everyone tried to think like this. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you die in your bed or somewhere else,’ people would say. But each of them was really thinking, ‘It will happen to someone else.’
Today, however, everything was calm. As he got closer to the church, Charles Hardelot walked more slowly. He was forty-five minutes early. A man excessively concerned with being on time, he would arrive at the train station with all his luggage long before his train had even been coupled. Or he would get to church while the previous Mass was still being celebrated. Invited to a formal dinner in Saint-Elme, he never failed to appear at the moment when the lady of the house, a dressing gown thrown over her frock, was in the pantry, overseeing the scooping out of ice cream for dessert while the servants finished setting the table.
Looking at his watch again, he thought, ‘That’s funny, my watch must be fast’ and he climbed slowly, solemnly, up the steps of the church. It was not from old Julien Hardelot that he had inherited his religious devotion. Julien Hardelot had never gone so far as to proclaim himself an atheist; though he wasn’t himself observant, he thought religion a good idea for his wife and children. His personal beliefs could be summed up like this: ‘God may be God, but I’m Julien Hardelot.’ God had a well-defined place in the spiritual realm but, where anything earthly was concerned, Julien Hardelot was his own master. He didn’t like priests; it upset his son to remember how, sometimes, he even made jokes about religion. Once, when Charles was a child, he told his father that the priest had included the following holy text in his sermon: ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.’
‘They didn’t have strong coffers in Judaea …’ Julien Hardelot had murmured.
In the mind of Julien Hardelot, the teachings of Jesus didn’t apply to his century, the nineteenth century, a world of three-per-cent returns, railway bonds and Russian securities.
Charles’s pious zeal left him cold, and Charles sometimes thought that it would have been better for his father’s soul if he had despised God, rather than merely being coldly indifferent to Him. Charles’s faith was humble, precise and scrupulous, occasionally mixed with a few worldly thoughts: he felt himself more refined, more ‘bourgeois’ than his father; practising Catholicism was part of his duty. And yet, more and more often during this cruel war, in church, or at his evening prayers, Charles Hardelot felt himself becoming detached from himself, a bit like Pierre in his trench. It seemed to him that when he undressed, removing his pince-nez, his dark clothes (or red-piped nightshirt), shaving his black moustache, he was at the same time removing part of his soul, so that all that remained of his soul was its core, the purest flame, burning at the foot of his Creator. This never happened right away. He would go inside the church. He would put his overcoat on a chair – properly folded, inside out – with his hat and umbrella. He would carefully kneel down, pulling his trouser legs up a bit so as not to ruin the folds. He would whisper a prayer, but couldn’t put his usual worries out of his mind and they mingled with the sacred words. Then, little by little, he ceased to be Charles Hardelot, the good bourgeois husband and father. He found himself face to face with Christ, and God was listening to him.
It was Good Friday, in the Saint-Gervais church. The early evening service was about to begin. There was no pomp, no incense, very little light. As night fell, some of the candles were put out.
Charles knelt in his pew, beneath the covered statues of Saint Mark and Saint Luke, on his face the same look of submissive, zealous dutifulness that he used to have as a child, when he would show his father his school marks for the week; his father would be so annoyed by his expression that he would slap his face before even opening the notebook to see that, once again, Charles had come first in his class. He clasped his gloved hands and leaned them on the hymnal shelf. He asked God, without indignation, but with tender and pious distress, where his only son was, where was his Pierre. Was he still in that strange, vague, frightening place the imagination could not even conceive, the place that was called ‘the front’, ‘the army’, ‘the battleground’? Was he a prisoner of war? Was he finally resting in the bosom of the Lord after the terrible exhaustion of battle? Pierre had never complained about being tired, but his father could feel it in his very bones, understood it instinctively, he who had no idea what it was like to fight. He covered his face with his hands.
‘My poor child …’ he whispered.
Then he thought of his own father. What had happened to him? Was he dead or alive? When, oh my God, when would this war end? When and how? Most importantly, how? Because it was worth suffering if France could emerge victorious. But what if it were all in vain? If all the sacrifices were pointless? ‘I know, my Lord, that you desire total commitment, complete surrender to Your divine will, but I beg You to consider that this child is all I have in the world, and if no one comes out alive, if our best young men disappear, what will become of France? Already France’s purest blood has been shed. The best, the strongest men are gone. Who will be left? Only fatherless, maybe homeless children, the weak and the cowardly. Please let Pierre come home. Take my life, but let Pierre come home. Lord Jesus, yes, I know; Pierre too has a son and this son will grow up, but there are so many years between him and me. It is Pierre whom I want, Pierre whom I understand, Pierre who is the best, truly, God, the best of our line. I am weak, fearful, selfish, cowardly, this is my sin, my greatest sin. Sometimes my own father (forgive me, Lord) is greedy and harsh. Pierre is better than we are. Please understand: it is not just a father who is begging You; Marthe would remind You that she brought him into the world, that she suffered for him, that he was such a beautiful little boy, my God … But I know that You did not spare Your own mother that pain. It is not just for us that I pray. It is in the name of France herself. Take pity on France. Give her back what remains of her young men. As for me, I am old and useless. I have lived long enough. I understand nothing of the kind of world that lies ahead. Pierre said that this will not be the last war, as we had believed, but the first in a long series of relentless wars, more cruel still. Wars and revolutions. Blood and more blood. Make it stop. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve had enough.’ He whispered all this and truly felt that he, Charles, with his umbrella and his gloves and his black boots, was being dragged along by a dark current, pulled towards unknown shores.
The reading of the Psalms had finished. The choir of Saint-Gervais started to sing the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Charles Hardelot raised his eyes towards the large figure of Christ hidden beneath a purple cloth. He could picture the nails in his feet, his drooping body, his face full of compassion and pain. At that very moment the sky seemed to fall. A shell had struck the wall on the left-hand side of the sanctuary. It first hit one of the building’s buttresses, shattering a support. As a result, one of the
lateral pillars set between the spans collapsed. Then a section of the vault and the keystone itself, representing the crown of the Virgin, crashed down on to the faithful, burying them. Beneath the stone, beneath the beams, beneath the thick white dust lay the bloody, crushed remains of Charles.
13
It was over. The war was over. Pierre was alive. Seriously wounded, taken prisoner, he was in a hospital in Germany. News was coming through from the occupied areas. Saint-Elme had passed from one side to the other several times. The town had been destroyed. The château, the Hardelots’ house, the church, the factory had all been machine-gunned and bombed, leaving nothing but charred bricks, ashes, ruins, crumbling walls where grass was already beginning to grow. There had been a battle in the cemetery. Later on, soldiers had camped in the square where the market was held, washed their clothing in the river. The dead were buried in the Coudre Woods. But old Hardelot had survived. Taken hostage, then released, sent to Douai, then to Arras, he finally got back to Saint-Elme while it was under German occupation. He had obtained permission to live in the country house he owned not far from Saint-Elme. Now, more than ever, he was master, king and oracle. He had ‘suffered under the Germans’. The inhabitants saw him as a symbol of their indestructible land. The mayor, whom he had always hated, was gone, had been killed. Julien Hardelot made all the decisions, supervised everything. Saint-Elme would be rebuilt according to his instructions; everything would be the same as before. They would rebuild the same houses in the same places. The police station would once again have its Second Empire columns, the school its enormous cold corridors. At the factory, Julien Hardelot would reign supreme. Beneath him, under his command, occupying a position even more inferior than Charles, Pierre would be allowed to return.