1914 (2 page)

Of medium height with an ordinary face, rarely smiling, sporting a mustache like just about all the men of his generation, twenty-three years old, wearing his new uniform with no more panache than he had in his everyday clothes, Anthime had intended to go speak to Charles: twenty-seven, no less poker-faced and mustached but more dashing, taller, more slender, turning his composed and icy gaze upon the world, apparently
more bent than ever on remaining cool and distant, refusing to acknowledge anyone at all of lesser status, and doubtless Anthime in particular. Who therefore decided to forget it and rejoined his companions, if only to calm down Bossis, who was grumbling about his pants. Turning anyway to look back at Charles, Anthime saw him extract a cigar from a case he seemed about to slip back into his pocket but instead, pausing, he selected another cigar and offered it discreetly to the closest officer. Then Anthime watched him photograph that officer the way he had been photographing, for months now, everything he could get his hands on, perfecting his skills in that department to the point of having recently seen some of his pictures published in magazines like
Le Miroir
and
L'Illustration
, which accepted material from amateurs.

In the days that followed, everything moved fairly swiftly at the barracks. After the arrival of the last reservists, the territorials came in, nonprofessional soldiers organized on a local basis for home defense, old fellows between thirty-four and forty-nine years of age who were immediately called upon to stand drinks all around, and indeed, from Monday to Thursday those
rounds came one after the other at a fast clip: by the end of the evening, everyone was somewhat the worse for wear. Then matters took a more serious turn when the squadrons were made up: Anthime found himself assigned to the 11th Squadron of the 10th Company, going up the chain to the 93rd Infantry Regiment, the 42nd Infantry Brigade, the 21st Infantry Division, and the 11th Army Corps of the 5th Army. Serial number 4221. The ammunition was distributed with the iron rations
³
—the emergency food supplies—and that evening, everyone again hit the bottle pretty hard. The next day was when they began to feel like soldiers: in the morning, the regiment drilled in formation for the first time, then passed in review before the colonel on the barracks square and paraded through the town that afternoon, since it was not yet time for them to leave on the troop train.

It was rather fun, that parade, with each man trying to walk tall in his uniform and look straight ahead. The 93rd marched along the avenue and then the main streets, lined by townspeople who weren't stingy with their tossed flowers, cheers, and shouts of encouragement. Charles had of course wangled himself a spot in
the front line of the procession; Anthime was in the middle of the regiment, grouped with Bossis, still ill at ease in his trousers, along with Arcenel, complaining constantly about his rear end, and Padioleau, whose mother had had time to take in the greatcoat at the shoulders and shorten the sleeves. As Anthime marched along trading muttered jokes with his pals, trying all the while to keep stepping out smartly, he thought he noticed Blanche on the left sidewalk of the avenue. At first he took her for a lookalike but then, no, it was she, Blanche, all dressed up in a lightweight pink skirt and summery mauve blouse. To protect herself from the sun she was sheltering under a big black umbrella while the troop was sweating along in cadence in their new kepis, quite tight at the temples, plus the knapsack strapped on according to regulations and which, that first day, did not weigh too heavily yet on the collarbones.

As he'd expected, Anthime had first seen Blanche smile proudly at Charles's martial bearing and then, as he drew abreast of her in turn, he was not a little surprised when she gave him a different kind of smile, more serious and even, he felt, a trifle more emotional, pronounced, sustained, well who knows, exactly. He
had neither seen nor tried to see how Charles—with his back to him, in any case—had reacted to her smile but he, Anthime, had responded only with a look, the shortest and longest one possible, forcing himself to invest it with the least amount of expression while at the same time suggesting the maximum: a novel approach, doubly paradoxical this time and which, as he strove to keep in step, was no small undertaking. After they'd filed past Blanche, Anthime preferred not to look at any more people.

At the station early the next morning, Blanche was there again, on the platform among the crowd waving little flags, as some boys chalked
ON TO BERLIN
on the flanks of the locomotive and a four- or five-man brass band did its best with the national anthem. Hats, scarves, bouquets, hankies, waved every which way as baskets of provisions passed through the train's windows, hugs enveloped children and old folks, couples embraced, and tears fell on the railcar steps—as one can see today in Paris in Albert Herter's vast mural in the Hall Alsace of the Gare de l'Est.
⁴
On the whole, however, people smiled confidently because it would all be over quickly, apparently, so everyone would be back
soon—and from a distance, as Charles held Blanche in his arms, Anthime saw her gaze over his shoulder and once again direct that same look at him. Then it was time to get on the train and barely a week after his little bicycle excursion, after heading northeast from Nantes at six o'clock on Saturday morning, Anthime arrived up in the Ardennes on Monday in the late afternoon.

3

O
N
S
UNDAY MORNING
, Blanche awoke in her bedroom on the second floor of an imposing residence of the kind belonging to notaries, deputies, public officials, or plant managers: the Borne family runs the Borne-Sèze factory, and Blanche is their only daughter.

A strangely discordant atmosphere reigns in this albeit peaceful and orderly room. Framed local scenes— barges on the Loire, fishermen's lives on the island of Noirmoutier—adorn the slightly off-center flowered wallpaper, and the furniture bespeaks an effort toward woodlands diversity worthy of an arboretum: a mirrored walnut
bonnetière
,
⁵
a writing desk of oak, a mahogany chest of drawers with fruitwood veneer, while the bed is of wild cherry, the armoire of yellow pine. So, an unusual ambience, and one ponders whether it
arises from the mismatched edges—unexpected in what should be a meticulously appointed bourgeois house— of this faded wallpaper in which the bouquets are wilting as well, or from the astonishing variety of furniture woods: one wonders at first how so many different materials can get along together. And then one quickly senses that they do not get along at all, they cannot even stand one another, which probably explains the strange ambience: that must be it.

Until Blanche gets up, this furniture waits patiently to play its role. The night table—of beech—bears a lamp resting atop a few books, including Marc Elder's
The People of the Sea
, a volume Blanche dips into occasionally, not so much for its stalwart capture of the previous year's Goncourt Prize from a field including Marcel Proust as for her family's friendship with the author, a local man whose real name is Marcel Tendron, and because this work reminds her of past Sunday excursions into the countryside to see the fishermen of Noirmoutier or barges moored for the estuary fishing of eels, lampreys, and elvers at Trentemoult, a village of fishermen and sailors on the left bank of the Loire.

Once out of bed the first thing Blanche did was
decide what she would wear, selecting from the
bonnetière
a light short-sleeved blouse of batiste, from the armoire a suit of gray tweed, then stockings and undergarments from the drawer of the chest, on which a couple of perfume bottles sit forgotten. Hesitating between two pairs of shoes—lower or higher heels?—but not over her hat, a rice-straw affair trimmed with black velvet. After a scant hour in the bathroom, freshly bathed and dressed, she consulted the mirror on the
bonnetière
with a critical eye, smoothing a lock of hair, adjusting a pleat. As she left her bedroom she passed the writing desk, which had played no part in this morning's activity; the desk is used to this, serving simply as a repository for the letters Charles and Anthime each regularly sends separately to Blanche and which lie bound by ribbons of contrasting colors in two different drawers.

Ready now, Blanche went quietly downstairs and on her way through the hall to the front door, made a detour to avoid the dining room. There—harsh grating of the bread knife against crust, clinking of teaspoons amid the aroma of chicory—her parents were finishing their breakfast: little audible conversation between Eugène and Maryvonne Borne; rumbling ingestion
from the factory owner, melancholy sighs from the factory owner's wife. Pausing at the front door by the wicker umbrella stand lined with waterproof canvas, Blanche chose a parasol of checked cretonne.

Once outside, she went toward the street entrance to the garden, the main walk of which—white gravel, carefully raked—branches out into lesser paths leading past the shrubberies, pond, arbors, and ornamental trees, including a worn-out palm that has been holding on for too long in this climate. Blanche has also avoided, but with fewer precautions, the hunched figure of the lame gardener—who is as deaf as the palm tree and busy watering the grass borders and flower beds—by simply walking more softly on the crunching gravel until reaching the cast-iron front gates.

Outside, the sounds of Sunday: everything is quieter than on weekdays, the way it is on any Sunday but it's not just that, not the same silence as usual, it's as if a residual echo has remained of the clamor and fanfares and ovations of recent days. Early this morning the oldest municipal employees still left in town finished sweeping up the last bedraggled bouquets, rumpled rosettes, tattered banners, and dried-out tear-stained
handkerchiefs before hosing down the pavements. A few errant items have been placed in the lost-and-found department: a cane, two torn scarves, and three dented hats, tossed in the air with patriotic fervor and whose legitimate wearers have not yet appeared but are awaited in due course.

The atmosphere is also calmer because there are fewer people in the streets, and fewer young men in particular, or only ones so young that, convinced along with everyone else that this conflict will be brief, they're ignoring it and don't let it bother them. The few boys of her age Blanche encounters, who all seem more or less unwell, have been declared unfit for military service, at least temporarily; this might change in the future but they're not concerned about that either. The nearsighted, for example, currently exempt and protected by their glasses, never dream for an instant that they might be traveling with them one day on a train to the east, with a spare pair of spectacles, if possible. Likewise for the deaf, the flat-footed, those with nervous complaints. As for malingerers or men who, confident of their connections and officially “unfit”, don't even bother to pretend, they prefer not to show themselves too much for
the moment. The brasseries are deserted, their waiters have disappeared: it's up to the bosses to sweep their terraces and doorsteps themselves. The dimensions of this town drained almost empty of its men thus seem to have expanded: other than women, Blanche sees only old fellows and kids, whose footsteps sound hollow on a stage too large for them.

4

H
ADN'T REALLY BEEN THAT
bad either, in the train, just uncomfortable. Sitting on the floor they had devoured their provisions, sung every possible song, and booed Kaiser Willy, drinking right along. In the twenty or so stations where the convoy had stopped, they hadn't been allowed off the train to take a look at the towns but—through windows open to air that was too hot, speckled with sparks, almost solid with a heat coming from who knew where anymore, August or the locomotive and probably both, piling up—at least they'd seen a few airplanes. Some of these, in flight, were crossing a perfectly smooth sky at various altitudes, following or encountering and passing by one another bound on some unimaginable mission; others were sitting around
higgledy-piggledy, surrounded by men in leather helmets, on requisitioned fields lying next to the tracks.

The men had heard about them, looked at photos in the newspaper, but no one had yet actually seen any of them, these seemingly fragile airplanes, except Charles no doubt—always au courant with everything, he had even climbed inside or rather onto a few, since there were no cabins yet—but Anthime had looked for him in vain among his fellow passengers. The landscape having about exhausted its attractions, Anthime turned aside to find some other way to kill time: cards, at that point, seemed just the thing, and along with Bossis and Padioleau—Arcenel being still too disabled by his derrière to join them—Anthime managed to claim a corner to launch a game of manille
⁶
beneath the soon-empty canteens swinging by their straps from hooks.

Then, since three-handed manille was a tricky business, and with Padioleau falling asleep as Bossis grew drowsy as well, Anthime shut down the game to go exploring in the neighboring cars, looking vaguely for Charles without really wanting to see him, assuming he was off by himself, contemptuous as always of his fellow men but surrounded by them of necessity. Well, not
at all: Anthime eventually spotted him comfortably installed by a window in a car with seats, taking pictures of the landscape in the company of a clutch of noncommissioned officers whose photos he was also taking, along with their addresses so he could send them their portraits later on. Anthime wandered off.

In the Ardennes, they'd hardly gotten off the train, hardly had the time to get used to this new landscape of dense forests and rolling hills, hadn't even learned the name of this village where their first camp was or how long they'd be there—when some sergeants lined the men up and the captain made a speech at the foot of the cross on the main square. They were a little tired, didn't feel much like muttering jokes to one another anymore but they listened to it, this speech, standing at attention looking at trees of a kind they'd never seen before, as the birds in these trees began to tune up, getting ready to play taps in the twilight.